Replies

Lee's Army spent almost a month in south central Pennsylvania before the fateful approach to Gettysburg from the north and west. The only atrocities recorded against the civilian population was one incident of the southern army near York capturing a group of 40 African American men whom they thought to be runaway slaves (but were mostly free men) and sending them south to slavery. There was another incident of Southern soldiers snatching headgear off the heads of townspeople in exchange for their battered headgear. Lee promptly issued an order that all such exchanges going forward were to be voluntary or paid in cash. While the presence of a large hostile army was obviously intimidation, compare and contrast Lee's Army comparative gentle treatment of the Pennsylvania population to Sherman's treatment of the Georgia population one year later. Sherman's army paid the civilians for nothing, took everything which they deemed useful and wantonly burned and destroyed everything else, including civilian homes with the inhabitants still inside.

It must have really s*cked to be one of those 40 guys. But even assuming you're right about the scale of the damage. Lee's army was in Pennsylvania for less than two weeks. Northern armies had been in the South for periods of that length without doing any serious damage. If Lee had been in Pennsylvania longer, if there had been more fighting over a longer period of time, who knows whether Southern troops would have been able to maintain discipline.

They went out of their way to slaughter, pillage and destroy everything in their path from Atlanta to the sea, a scale of destruction unmatched since the Thirty Year's War, some two centuries earlier.

Sure, if you want to overlook the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The Spanish and Russian campaigns and the war of Frenchman against Frenchman were quite destructive. Even our Indian wars were disastrous for those involved.