Posted on 12/19/2019 8:38:38 AM PST by robowombat
Death is Mercy to Secessionists
By Bernard Thuersam on Mar 21, 2016
William T. Sherman viewed Southerners as he later viewed American Indians, to be exterminated or banished to reservations as punishment for having resisted government power. They were subjects and merely temporary occupants of land belonging to his government whom they served. The revealing excerpts below are taken from “Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama,” published in 1872:
Headquarters, Department of Tennessee, Vicksburg, January 1, 1863.
[To] Major R. M. Sawyer, AAG Army of Tennessee, Huntsville:
“Dear Sawyer — In my former letter I have answered all your questions save one, and that relates to the treatment of inhabitants known, or suspected to be, hostile or “secesh.” The war which prevails in our land is essentially a war of races. The Southern people entered into a clear compact of government, but still maintained a species of separate interests, history and prejudices. These latter became stronger and stronger, till they have led to war, which has developed the fruits of the bitterest kind.
We of the North are, beyond all question, right in our lawful cause, but we are not bound to ignore the fact that the people of the South have prejudices that form part of their nature, and which they cannot throw off without an effort of reason or the slower process of natural change.
Now, the question arises, should we treat as absolute enemies all in the South who differ with us in opinions or prejudices . . . [and] kill or banish them? Or should we give them time to think and gradually change their conduct so as to conform to the new order of things which is slowly and gradually creeping into their country?
When men take arms to resist our rightful authority, we are compelled to use force because all reason and argument ceases when arms are resorted to.
If the people, or any of them, keep up a correspondence with parties in hostility, they are spies, and can be punished with death or minor punishment. These are well established principles of war, and the people of the South having appealed to war, are barred from appealing to our Constitution, which they have practically and publicly defied. They have appealed to war and must abide its rules and laws.
The United States, as a belligerent party claiming right in the soil as the ultimate sovereign, have a right to change the population, and it may be and it, both politic and best, that we should do so in certain districts. When the inhabitants persist too long in hostility, it may be both politic and right that we should banish them and appropriate their lands to a more loyal and useful population.
No man would deny that the United States would be benefited by dispossessing a single prejudiced, hard-headed and disloyal planter and substitute in his place a dozen or more patient, industrious, good families, even if they be of foreign birth.
It is all idle nonsense for these Southern planters to say that they made the South, that they own it, and that they can do as they please — even to break up our government, and to shut up the natural avenues of trade, intercourse and commerce.
We know, and they know if they are intelligent beings, that, as compared with the whole world they are but as five millions are to one thousand millions — that they did not create the land — that their only title to its use and enjoyment is the deed of the United States, and if they appeal to war they hold their all by a very insecure tenure.
For my part, I believe that this war is the result of false political doctrine, for which we are all as a people responsible, viz: That any and every people has a right to self-government . . . In this belief, while I assert for our Government the highest military prerogatives, I am willing to bear in patience that political nonsense of . . . State Rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of press, and other such trash as have deluded the Southern people into war, anarchy, bloodshed, and the foulest crimes that have disgraced any time or any people.
I would advise the commanding officers at Huntsville and such other towns as are occupied by our troops, to assemble the inhabitants and explain to them these plain, self-evident propositions, and tell them that it is for them now to say whether they and their children shall inherit their share.
The Government of the United States has in North-Alabama any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war — to take their lives, their homes, their lands, their everything . . . and war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact. If they want eternal warfare, well and good; we will accept the issue and dispossess them, and put our friends in possession. Many, many people, with less pertinacity than the South, have been wiped out of national existence.
To those who submit to the rightful law and authority, all gentleness and forbearance; but to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. Satan and the rebellious saints of heaven were allowed a continuance of existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment.”
W.T. Sherman, Major General Commanding
(Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, William Garrett, Plantation Printing Company’s Press, 1872, pp. 486-488)
> Sherman was speaking from his convictions, not his war experience. <
If that were true, Sherman would have imposed crushing conditions on the Confederates who surrendered to him. But he didn’t. Sherman actually got into trouble for offering conditions that were too lenient!
Please see the link in my post #40.
The man was quite simply a war criminal who would have been right at home in a Nazi or Communist uniform.
He made similar quotes about his genocidal views toward Native Americans.
He also hated Blacks, Mexicans and especially Jews. His influence was key in getting his friend Grant to issue his infamous general order #11 calling for Jews to be ethnically cleansed from 3 states.
Now let’s count on some PC Revisionist apologists to come along and try to make excuses for this war criminal....
His thinking of annihilation of the “secesh” is in full accord with the pubic expressions of rabid northern abolitionists. Shelby Steele has cited various contemporary published examples of such enraged cries for blood, blood, and more blood in the north. Unfortunately I can't cite volume, chapter, and verse at the moment as my no tech paper bookmarks are no longer there.
It’s not. The Abbeville Institute is meticulous in its research and citing of sources. You’ve probably not heard quotes like this because they are inconvenient for PC Revisionists in Academia. So they try to sweep them under the rug.......
Having just traveled from Ft Griffin to Ft Richardson (Texas y'all) and not seeing any Indians, he got the report of the Warren Wagontrain Massacare on the road his party had just traveled.
If you feel that's ignorant, so be it. I've read that letter of Sherman's before. His autobiography has some shockingly blunt and uncomfortable comments in it as well. I don't agree at all with his view of the Federal Government as akin to a Feudal lord with God given authority. Like everyone he was a man of his times and circumstances. The curious fact is that it's today's Marxist Democrats who echo the view he expressed about Federal authority and the need to "eliminate" anyone who resists. N'est-ce pas?
A man after my own heart.
That is the whole point. In a war of cultures there will be only victors and the destroyed, In an existential conflict there are no rules other than those that enable the enemy to be killed in larger numbers faster. The muzzards can never be at real peace with the kuffars but when they work themselves up into a jihad they have to be killed in such large numbers that they desist for a good while. They want to literally destroy us in the way the Saxons did to the Guallo-Romans.
Back when the paliwogs were busy intafadaing an elderly Jew was heard to remark at tv coverage of paliwogs rioting on the Temple Mount. “Ah, where is Himmler when is truly needed.” Same thing we need a number of Shermans and Sheridans and Halseys today.
Your absolutely right. And every single southern state had Soldiers fight for the Union, not so the northern states.
hahahahah!!! The Abbeville institute is meticulous in its research and citing of sources? LOL Oh wait, you were being serious?
As I said, it was clear the PC Revisionists would be along any minute with their usual BS.
King George hated secessionists as well.
Banastre Tarleton was the Sherman of that previous generation.
Benedict Arnold gave his royal master good service also as witnessed by the visit of his merry men to Groton, CN and the younger Butler showed real aptitude for border raiding in New York province.
I agree with Sherman’s assessment of war in general. However, I disagree with his assessment of the necessity of that war in particular. The Civil War was a violation of the 1st Amendment and the human right of freedom of association. The North should have let the South go in peace. It’s not like the South was an anarchic regime - they had a constitution and ruling bodies
Unionists could not believe people in the South were serious about wanting to leave the USA. The WBTS then followed a common trend of a cycle of escalating violence that produced a truly giant conflict. Do Unionists actually believe that the cost of 600 to 750 K soldiers dead of wounds or disease, another couple hundred thousand civilians (heavily blacks) dead from disease and the usual train of chaos of war and most of the South from Tennessee to the Gulf and west from Mississippi to Virginia destroyed so thoroughly that from which it to this day has not fully recovered and confirmation at gunpoint of a new centralized ‘consolidated’ nation which has eventually given birth to the current federal behemoth state was worth it?
I didn’t know about that Groton Heights, Ft Griswold Massacre. An ugly business.
Ugly yes but less terrible than the generalized burning of homes and civilian property that Arnold virtually encouraged just as he did on the subsequent Virginia/James River raid.
A sad ending to someone who began as a hero of the Revolution. And who may well have saved the Continental Army from destruction at Saratoga.
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