I see that you can't tell the difference between wholesale plundering/destruction and living off the land. I'm sure the Federal troops needed those books, coffee mills, pottery, etc., that they took. Certainly they needed to burn down houses to keep warm. </sarcasm>
If Lee had done the equivalent on the way to Gettysburg then where were all the Northern burned farms, ravaged countrysides, and roadsides strewn with dead "horses, cows, sheep, hogs, chicken, corn, wheat, cotton, books, paper, broken vessels, coffee mills, and fragments of nearly every species of property"? We in the South would never heard the end of it if such had happened.
I've quoted to you before a comment by a Union resident of Pennsylvania of the time that "no wanton destruction of private property was made [during Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania]. This is freely admitted."
The southron myth machine has badly overstated the damage.
I've quoted to you before a comment by a Union resident of Pennsylvania of the time that "no wanton destruction of private property was made [during Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania]. This is freely admitted."
"Our men did very bad in MD and Penn. They robed every house about such battle field not only of edibles but of everything they could lay their hands on. They tore up dresses to bits and broke all the furniture." - North Carolina private.