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To: antidisestablishment
The South had every right to reciprocate, but Lee wouldn't consider it. Sometimes the price of victory is too great.

What about one of the few times the Southern forces got into a Northern town of any size, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and burned it just as thoroughly as Columbia was enflamed?

29 posted on 06/21/2002 9:20:51 AM PDT by curmudgeonII
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To: curmudgeonII
What about one of the few times the Southern forces got into a Northern town of any size, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and burned it just as thoroughly as Columbia was enflamed?

Chambersburg was in retaliation for Union General Hunter's burning of the Shenandoah Valley a month before. General Sheridan had ordered the Shenandoah Valley be made a desert and a barren waste, and Hunter complied. Destruction of civilian property and harassment of women and children seems to be a common theme of Federal troops led by Sheridan, Hunter, Sherman, and Butler.

See: Shenandoah to Chambersburg. The letter to General Hunter quoted on this web site was published in Southern newspapers of the time. You can find it in The Daily Picayune of New Orleans.

59 posted on 06/21/2002 7:45:14 PM PDT by rustbucket
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