I remembered something about Mr. Neely's previous asininities. In another book I seem to remember him saying that Sherman "waged war the same way most Victorian gentlemen did", or something like that. I'd put Mr. Neely in the same category as those nutters that say the holocaust didn't happen, or that if it did, it was a Jewish conspiracy and Hitler was actually trying to save the Jews. The guy's apologetics are so childish that even a child can see through them.
There seems to be no limit to the extent to which historians will go to maintain the Lincoln Myth. In the book On the Road to Total War, edited by Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, Mark Neely, the curator of the Lincoln Museum in Illinois, states that the concept of total war "breaks down the distinction between soldiers and civilians" but denies that Lincoln waged total war. Sherman and other federal generals "waged war the same way most Victorian gentlemen did," writes Neely, and "other Victorian gentlemen in the world knew it." Total war, according to Neely, was just not Sherman’s cup of tea. The editors of the book in which Neely’s essay appears couldn’t help but comment that Neely seemed to be writing about a different war than the other thirty-one authors in the volume.
Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 51.
This also appears in the book The Real Lincoln, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, 2002, page 198.
Which book was that?