“General Sherman was personally responsible for the pillaging, plundering and burning of countless defenseless cities, towns and homes. He and his barbaric Union troops brought wrought total destruction on farms, livestock and civilian food supplies. They turned thousands of women and children out into the winter cold, leaving them to fend for themselves with no food and no shelter. He and his troops hauled thousands of wagon loads of stolen Southern goods back to the North. They gang raped both black and white women and slaughtered thousands of innocent Americans, including old men, women, and children of all races.”
Sherman got the job done. Hope we have more like him ON OUR SIDE the next time we need them. And as far I’ve researched, I’ve never seen any evidence that Sherman raped anyone.
“Sherman got the job done. Hope we have more like him ON OUR SIDE the next time we need them.”
Not for me, thanks. I don’t follow psychotics who kill civilians. Good luck with that, though.
Of Sherman's forces the most chilling remarks are addressed on pages 417-418 and focus on the burning of Columbia:
“For obvious reasons Union commentators gave little attention to the stories of black women being raped, but the facts are plain. While officers complained they could do little in practice to prevent the violence. Widespread black illiteracy meant few black women would record their experiences; others were probably too frightened to witness against their Yankee assailants. Enough accounts survive, however, to confirm the ways in which some white soldiers viewed slave women as ‘the legitimate prey of lust”
One white woman privy to the violence described Union soldiers who stripped black women and then ravished them ‘They violated all the women servants publicly and left them almost dead, unable to move”. Other accounts describe similar outrages. On the morning of February 18, 1865 , black women’s naked bodies lay on the streets of Columbia “bearing the marks of detestable sex crimes”. One older slave was raped by seven Yankees with orders to ‘finish the bitch’ she was drowned in a nearby drainage ditch..
Stout comments on the commanders responsibility for these events by noting “”Sherman never issued any direct orders to destroy private property and plunder civilians, let alone to rape slave women. But any efforts at restraint were ineffectual; in any case , it was well known that if Sherman expected excesses anyplace it was Columbia. That expectation amounted to de facto permission in the minds of many. For that Sherman as the commander of Union forces on the scene must take the moral responsibility.”
(Another recent work based on manuscript sources that reports in detail behavior that can only be described as violent and criminal towards literally defenseless civilians is Jacqueline Glass Campbell,’When Sherman Marched North From the Sea’ University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
In Louisiana, where I now live, there are abundant anecdotal accounts of such behavior of similar behavior on the part of personnel in bank's army during the Red River Campaign. The mixed race Creole plantation community in the Cane River country came in for a particular amount of arson, plunder and rapine as the women in the ‘big houses’ were clearly mixed race and considered to be as sexually available to bank's cotton stealer's as the servants and the women in the slave quarters.
Too many Americans including quite a few here seem to believe actions by US military forces are always justified and that our opponents are always satanic demons. As someone whose family was on the receiving end of the casual violence and destructiveness of the Union army I can only say this is one of those comforting illusions that many utilize to excuse the inexcusable.