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The Atlanta History Center has obtained Civil War field orders handwritten by Union General William T. Sherman. The history center got the field orders in a deal that was clinched with the offer of a bundle of Confederate currency that was donated to the center. Of the documents, 50 are field orders written by Sherman and two are orders written by his aides. They join another 12 orders the Atlanta History Center already had. "Sherman surrendered," said history center president Jim Bruns, who likes the idea of Sherman's orders returning to the city the general ordered burned down. The orders...

December 22, 2005, 8:57 a.m. Can You Hear the Bells? Christmas 1864. In the winter of 1864, an unexpected sense of optimism and good cheer settled on the northern states. The Civil War continued, but the news from the fronts was promising, and hope flourished that with spring the end would come and peace would return. New Yorkers in particular were in a festive frame of mind, of a like unseen since the before the war began. People skated in Central Park, and rode sleighs through the snowy fields. They stopped at shops for warm cider, confections, nuts and dried...

Free Republic: Art Appreciation/Education “class” #10: Postmodernism Now it is time to truly finish these mini-lectures on the development of modern art with this final lecture of Postmodernism. Andy Warhol and other Pop artists may have made the first forays into Postmodernism, and some textbooks begin their postmodern sections with Pop Art. But I like to save Postmodernism for the 1980’s and thereafter. One question to consider is whether postmodernism (or at least its validity) might have come to a screeching halt on 9/11, (when thinking people realized that there were indeed evil people in the world and that the...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. .................................................................. .................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should...

ESCONDIDO, Calif. (AP) - TV and film art director Sherman Loudermilk, who was once a children's show host known as "Cowboy Slim," has died, his family said. He was 92. Loudermilk died Saturday of complications related to Alzheimer's disease at a convalescent home in Escondido. Loudermilk served as art director for such shows as "The Dating Game," "The A-Team," and "Battlestar Galactica." But he got his first taste of fame as the host of a Western children's show in 1948 on the then fledgling KTLA-TV. A native of Leon, Texas, Loudermilk began his work in Hollywood building sets for early...

Q: After having read many accounts of the Civil War, I still don’t understand why South Carolina fired on Ft. Sumter, galvanizing the North into war.  What do you think might have happened had the South continued to let these coastal forts be manned by the Union for a longer time? Hanson: I think conflict was inevitable, because the South had little appreciation of Northern industrial power nor of the competence of a number of formerly nondescript Union officers. The best officers of the Mexican War had joined the Confederacy and there was an erroneous general impression that all superior...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. .................................................................. .................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should...

Probably the second best known of the Union Generals, William Tecumseh Sherman earned a reputation as an eccentric but tough fighter and ruthless leader in the prosecution of total warfare as practiced in the latter stages of the war. Having been born in Ohio, Sherman graduated from West Point with the class of 1840. He served in California during the Mexican War but resigned as a captain in 1853 because of the low pay and poor prospects for promotion endemic in United States Army service at that time. His business enterprises not being entirely successful, Southern secession found him in...

During the Battle of Fredricksburg, Robert E. Lee, surveying the battlefield covered with thousands of the dead and wounded, remarked to his staff that "It is a good thing war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it." William Tecumseh Sherman, having been criticized for the widespread destruction his army caused in the Shenandoah and Georgia, responded "War is hell." What if war were not hell, but conducted as a sterile, antiseptic, non-invasive procedure to eliminate the "bad guys" without causing harm to "innocent civilians" and property? The hazards of this type of warfare are manifold and introduce...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

When the Civil War broke out between the Union and the Confederacy and raged on for the next four years, the state of North Carolina managed to escape any real ravages of war. As the bloodiest battles went on in its neighbors to the north and the south, Fayetteville waited for some resolution to the conflict and prayed that the war would not come to the city. One Union general would not allow the peace to last. "I will destroy the [Fayetteville] arsenal utterly," proclaimed General William Sherman in a letter written from Fayetteville on March 12, 1865 to his...

United Nations - CIA-Iraq chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, whose report cast doubt on Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, was blocked from reaching that same conclusion in 1999-2000 by the Clinton White House. Before officially joining the CIA weapons hunt earlier this year, Duelfer spent more than 8 years hunting WMD at the United Nations, first for the noted Swede Rolf Ekeus, than the flamboyant Aussie Richard Butler. Butler, known for his repeated clashes with Iraq officials, was eventually forced out of his U.N. job by the French and Russian ambassadors in June...

Many Helped Iraq Evade U.N. Sanctions On Weapons By Craig Whitlock and Glenn Frankel Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, October 8, 2004; Page A01 BERLIN, Oct. 7 -- As part of its stealth effort to evade U.N. sanctions and rebuild its military, the Iraqi government under President Saddam Hussein found that it had no shortage of people around the world who were willing to help. Among them: a French arms dealer known only as "Mr. Claude," who made a surreptitious visit to Iraq four years ago to provide technical expertise and training. Mr. Claude worked for Lura, a French company...

ITHACA--According to the Ithaca Journal, "Four antiwar protesters have successfully appealed their criminal trespass convictions and been granted an unconditional discharge by Judge John Sherman."The paper reports that "Marie DeMott Grady, 18, Oona Grady DeFlaun, 18, Ana Grady Flores, 17, and Anna Ritter, 17, were sentenced in December to serve four weekends in jail for their role in a Dec. 21, 2002 "die-in" at the military recruiter's office in the Cayuga Mall," but now "Sherman ruled Tuesday that the case lacked sufficient evidence to convict the four teenagers of criminal trespass." Instead, the paper reports, Sherman dropped the charges down...

War creates its own ethical imperativesUnited States Civil War General William Tecumsah Sherman, who cut a swath across [U.S.] Georgia that devastated everything in his path, later reflected that "war is hell." He was not speaking in a regretful mode. On the contrary, he meant that war is a process of delivering hell to one"s enemies. His position was that to exercise restraint is to prolong the war and increase the number of casualties. From 1931 until 1944, along with many other countries, the United States condemned the bombing of civilian populations. We condemned the Japanese militarists for bombing the...

“… much of Sherman's thinking is currently inherent in American military doctrine of the last two decades: despite our power, our forces usually react to the aggression of others, target enemy command and control and the property of the government and elite, and seek—in Iraq, Panama, and Afghanistan—to liberate residents from an oppressive regime. Yet often such attack, however precise, makes life miserable for an enemy citizenry and therefore prompts them to act against the authors of their calamity. The Afghanis, like the citizens of Georgia in their animus shown the plantationists, will come to blame the Taliban for...

Constitution of the Confederate States of America Preamble We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity -- invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God -- do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America. Article I. - The Legislative Branch Section 1 - The Legislature 1. All legislative powers herein delegated shall be vested in a Congress of the Confederate States, which shall consist...

In his article "A Class War" Victor Davis Hanson paints the picture that General William T. Sherman and his army were fighting a war of equality. He seems to think average "agrarian" men of the northern states, were so inspired they would lay down their tools, leave their families and join the Union army to invade the Southern States on a campaign of social equality. Hanson states Sherman's objective was "freeing the unfree and humiliating the arrogant." This is a nicely packaged version of history that reads well, though historically inaccurate.The Draft - Yankees RiotSupport for invading the South was...

General William Tecumseh Sherman--a quirky, difficult, and much misunderstood man--deserves a place on the roll call of great liberators in human history. More than any other person, he destroyed the institution of American slavery and the Southern aristocracy that was interwoven with it. In the late fall of 1864 he marched an army of over 60,000 rural, voting Americans--mostly farmers from the Midwest--into the heart of the Confederacy, a patrician society based on bound labor. Sherman’s agrarian citizen-soldiers upended that world of slaves and masters, instantly liberated tens of thousands, and helped therein to destroy forever the idea of privileged...

One hundred and forty years ago this month, 100,000 Union soldiers marched into Georgia. Less than eight months later, the Yankees captured Savannah. Along the way, they fought more than 20 major battles, crushed Confederate resistance, destroyed at least $100 million worth of railroads, warehouses, plantations and factories, and left Atlanta in smoking ruins. It remains one of the most famous military campaigns in American history: Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's March through Georgia. It's still taught to cadets at West Point as an example of how to break an enemy's will to fight. And without the trauma of Yankees plowing...