"In his memoirs Sherman wrote that when he met with Lincoln after his March to the Sea was completed, Lincoln was eager to hear the stories of how thousands of Southern civilians, mostly women, children, and old men, were plundered, sometimes murdered, and rendered homeless. Lincoln, according to Sherman, laughed almost uncontrollably at the stories. Even Sherman biographer Lee Kennett, who writes very favorably of the general, concluded that had the Confederates won the war, they would have been 'justified in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.'" ~ Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo Quotes by Sherman:
"There is a class of people [in the South], men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order." "Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully too, and another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. 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 secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. "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 continuous existence in hell merely to swell their punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equal would not be unjustified." "The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers." "Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of it's roads, houses, and PEOPLE will cripple their military resources….I can make the march, and make Georgia howl."
"I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go South and the rest North.”
"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, because they cannot deny that war does exist there, and war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact."
Enemies must be killed or transported to some other country.
"The United States has the right, and ... the ... power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain…. We will remove and destroy every obstacle - if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper."
Writing to his wife in 1862, Sherman said, "We are in our enemy's country, and I act accordingly...the war will soon assume a turn to extermination not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people."
"I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go South and the rest North.”
Writing to his wife in 1862, Sherman said, "We are in our enemy's country, and I act accordingly...the war will soon assume a turn to extermination not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people."
On August 4, 1863, W. T. Sherman in Camp on Big Black River, Mississippi, wrote to Grant at Vicksburg, "The amount of burning, stealing and plundering done by our army makes me ashamed of it. I would rather quit the service if I could, because I fear that we are drifting to the worst sort of vandalism....You and I and every commander must go through the war, justly charged with crimes at which we blush." Federal Official Records ( O.R.) vol. XXIV, pt. III 574 Below are the first two paragraphs of a letter written by Gen. Sherman to Major Sawyer dated January 31, 1864, in which Sherman writes from Vicksburg to the AAG Army of the Tenn., Huntsville, Alabama. Major Sawyer is with Sherman until the close of the war, by which time he has the rank of Colonel. Dear Sawyer, In my former letters I have answered all your questions save one, and that relates to the treatment of inhabitants known or suspected to be hostile or "Secesh." This is in truth the most difficult business of our Army as it advances & occupies the Southern Country. It is almost impossible to lay down Rules and I invariably leave this whole subject to the local commander, but am willing to give them the benefit of my acquired Knowledge and experience. In Europe whence we derive our principles of war Wars are between Kings or Rulers through hired Armies and not between Peoples. These remain as it were neutral and sell their produce to whatever Army is in possession. Napoleon when at War with Prussia, Austria and Russia bought forage & provisions of the Inhabitants and consequently had an interest to protect the farms and factories which ministered to his wants. In lake manner the Allied Armies in France could buy of the French Habitants, whatever they needed, the produce of the soil or manufactures of the Country. Therefore the General Rule was & is that War is confined to the Armies engaged, and should not visit the houses of families or private interests. But in other examples a different Rule obtained the Sanction of Historical Authority. I will only instance one when in the reign of William and Mary the English Army occupied Ireland then in a state of revolt. The inhabitants were actually driven into foreign lands and were dispossessed of their property and a new population introduced. To this day a large part of the North of Ireland is held by the descendants of the Scotch emigrants sent thereby by Williams order & an Act of Parliament.
The War which now prevails in our land is essentially a war of Races. The Southern People entered into a clear Compact of Government with us of the North, but still maintained through State organizations a species of separate existence with separate interests, history and prejudices. These latter became stronger and stronger till at last they have led to war, and have developed the fruits of the bitterest kind. We of the North are beyond all question right in our cause but we are not bound to ignore the fact that the people of the South have prejudices which form a part of their nature, and which they cannon throw off without an effort of reason, or by the slower process of natural change. The question then arises Should we treat as absolute enemies all in the South who differ from us in opinion or prejudice, 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 & gradually creeping into their country?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lady Val
Excellent post, just what we are looking for. Thank you!!!
I think even if the South would have won the war, the North would have strung up Lincoln before we got our hands on him!!! I read that for the first couple of years Lincoln wasn't very well like. I think his rating started to rise after Gettysburg.
Lincoln has one of the lowest approval ratings by modern standards than any President in history. I almost chuckle to myself watching how modern day writers and now Presidents honor him for so many things, yet they do not mention the fact that Lincoln wanted to “repatriate” all or as many former slaves as he could back to Africa or Central America, saying "They could never assimilate in a civilized society” His SEC NAV had plans to ship as many back as they could and started the move as we all know how the country of Liberia came to be. And yes there many Northerners and Southerners who wanted to string him up at their first opportunity, after all it was Lincolns War .
Seems like the article i read was comparing Bush to Lincoln and said something to the effect that Lincoln's lowest rating came in the darkest days of the war. I assume that meant when Lee had enough men to spank any Union army at will.
Sherman personalized American civilians in the South as his enemy — he branded their acts of self-defense as “cowardly” and deserving of swift retaliation — in effect denying that the South had the right to resist an invasion of its own country. While Sherman’s mental health is held in question by many, he was in truth only carrying out the orders of his master, Lincoln.
“Article 44 [of US Army General Orders No. 100] . . . specified that “All wanton violence committed against persons in the invaded country, all destruction of property not commanded by the authorized officer, all robbery, all pillage or sacking, even after taking a place by main force, all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under penalty of death, or other such severe punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offense.”
Paradoxically, it was . . . Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, [who] gradually evolved his own personal philosophy of war along line which were clearly at variance with the official pronouncements, and in his practical application of that philosophy became one of the first of the modern generals to revert to the idea of the use of force against the civilian population of the enemy.
On the eve of the Civil War, Sherman could look back upon a career of dependence, frustrations, and failures. “I am doomed to be a vagabond, and shall no longer struggle against my fate,” he wrote his wife from Kansas in 1859. As he travelled northward in late February, 1861, to face once more the prospect of renewed dependence upon his father-in-law, his brooding over the ghosts of his own failures became mingled with gloomy forebodings concerning the future of the nation itself.
Passing from the South, where it seemed to him that the people showed a unanimity of purpose and a fierce, earnest determination in their hurried organization for action, into Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, where he found no apparent signs of preparation . . . he began to develop the deep conviction that he was one of the few people who understood the real state of affairs. It was only a short step from there to resentment against those who seemed unwilling to heed his warning or advice.
Convinced that Washington’s failure to act promptly on his requests [as a brigadier in Kentucky] was due either to indifference to the situation or to a willingness to sacrifice him, he developed a state of nervous tension in which his irritability and his unreasonable treatment of those about him antagonized the newspaper correspondents and led some . . . to publish stories questioning his sanity.
[He was relieved of command and] It was during this period of inactivity that the full import of these charges of insanity began to bear in upon him and to create in his mind an agonizing sense of humiliation. [He wrote his brother John] “that I do think I should have committed suicide were it not for my children. I do not think I can ever again be entrusted with a command.”
Two months later . . . he wrote to his brother that the civilian population of the South would have to be reckoned with in the months of war ahead . . . “the country is full of Secessionists, and it takes all [of a Northern] command to watch them.” Having become convinced that [telegraph] destruction was being accomplished by civilians rather than military personnel, he found it easy to judge the whole South on the basis of what he saw . . . Here was a manifestation of his tendency to arrive at generalizations by leaping over wide gaps of fact and reason and to proceed on the basis of his inspirations and convictions with the utmost faith in the soundness of his conclusions.
In this case his generalization led him to visualize the people themselves as a significant factor in the conduct of the war and to think in terms of a campaign against them as well as against their armies. [Writing to the Secretary of the Treasury], “When one nation is at war with another,” he said, “all the people of the one are enemies of the other: then the rules are plain and easy of understanding.”
[He continued]: “The Government of the United States may now safely proceed on the proper rule that all in the South are enemies of all in the North; and not only are they unfriendly, but all who can procure arms now bear them as organized regiments or as guerrillas.”
Sherman’s disposition to consider all resistance as treacherous acts of the civilian population prepared the way for the next steps in the development of his attitude on the conduct of the war.”
(General William T. Sherman and Total War, John Bennett Walters, Journal of Southern History, Volume XIV, No. 4, November, 1948, pp. 448-450, 454-455, 457-460,
Eliza Dowling--- Dixie, Sweet Land Of Dixie · "SHERMANS WAR CRIMES" As early as the first major battle of the war, the Battle of First Manassas in July of 1861, federal soldiers were plundering and burning private homes in the Northern Virginia countryside. Such behavior quickly became so pervasive that on June 20, 1862 – one year into the war – General George McClellan, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, wrote Lincoln a letter imploring him to see to it that the war was conducted according to “the highest principles known to Christian civilization” and to avoid targeting the civilian population to the extent that that was possible. Lincoln replaced McClellan a few months later and ignored his letter. Most Americans are familiar with General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “march to the sea” in which his army pillaged, plundered, raped, and murdered civilians as it marched through Georgia in the face of scant military opposition. But such atrocities had been occurring for the duration of the war; Sherman’s March was nothing new. In 1862 Sherman was having difficulty subduing Confederate sharpshooters who were harassing federal gunboats on the Mississippi River near Memphis. He then adopted the theory of “collective responsibility” to “justify” attacking innocent civilians in retaliation for such attacks. He burned the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, to the ground. He also began taking civilian hostages and either trading them for federal prisoners of war or executing them.
Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, were also burned to the ground by Sherman’s troops even though there was no Confederate army there to oppose them. After the burnings his soldiers sacked the town, stealing anything of value and destroying the rest. As Sherman biographer John Marzalek writes, his soldiers “entered residences, appropriating whatever appeared to be of value . . . those articles which they could not carry they broke.”
After the destruction of Meridian Sherman boasted that “for five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire…. Meridian no longer exists.” In The Hard Hand of War historian Mark Grimsley argues that Sherman has been unfairly criticized as the “father” of waging war on civilians because he “pursued a policy quite in keeping with that of other Union commanders from Missouri to Virginia.” Fair enough. Why blame just Sherman when such practices were an essential part of Lincoln’s entire war plan and were routinely practiced by all federal commanders? Sherman was just the most zealous of all federal commanders in targeting Southern civilians, which is apparently why he became one of Lincoln’s favorite generals.
In his First Inaugural Address Jefferson said that any secessionists should be allowed to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” But by 1864 Sherman would announce that “to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy.” In 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people” of the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish was for “a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.”
The Geneva Convention of 1863 condemned the bombardment of cities occupied by civilians, but Lincoln ignored all such restrictions on his behavior. The bombardment of Atlanta destroyed 90 percent of the city, after which the remaining civilian residents were forced to depopulate the city just as winter was approaching and the Georgia countryside had been stripped of food by the federal army. In his memoirs Sherman boasted that his army destroyed more than $100 million in private property and carried home $20 million more during his “march to the sea.”
Sherman was not above randomly executing innocent civilians as part of his (and Lincoln’s) terror campaign. In October of 1864 he ordered a subordinate, General Louis Watkins, to go to Fairmount, Georgia, “burn ten or twelve houses” and “kill a few at random,” and “let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon.”
Another Sherman biographer, Lee Kennett, found that in Sherman’s army “the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World.” Although it is rarely mentioned by “mainstream” historians, many acts of rape were committed by these federal soldiers. The University of South Carolina’s library contains a large collection of thousands diaries and letters of Southern women that mention these unspeakable atrocities.
Shermans’ band of criminal looters (known as “bummers”) sacked the slave cabins as well as the plantation houses. As Grimsley describes it, “With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked.” A routine procedure would be to hang a slave by his neck until he told federal soldiers where the plantation owners’ valuables were hidden.
General Philip Sheridan is another celebrated “war hero” who followed in Sherman’s footsteps in attacking defenseless civilians. After the Confederate army had finally evacuated the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864 Sheridan’s 35,000 infantry troops essentially burned the entire valley to the ground. As Sheridan described it in a letter to General Grant, in the first few days he “destroyed over 2200 barns . . . over 70 mills . . . have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed . . . not less than 3000 sheep. . . . Tomorrow I will continue the destruction.” In letters home Sheridan’s troops described themselves as “barn burners” and “destroyers of homes.” One soldier wrote home that he had personally set 60 private homes on fire and opined that “it was a hard looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” A Sergeant William T. Patterson wrote that “the whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof . . . such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy [by defenseless women]… I never saw or want to see again.” As horrific as the burning of the Shenandoah Valley was, Grimsley concluded that it was actually “one of the more controlled acts of destruction during the war’s final year.” After it was all over Lincoln personally conveyed to Sheridan “the thanks of the Nation.”
Sherman biographer Lee Kennett is among the historians who bend over backwards to downplay the horrors of how Lincoln waged war on civilians. Just recently, he published an article in the Atlanta Constitution arguing that Sherman wasn’t such a bad guy after all and should not be reviled by Georgians as much as he is. But even Kennett admitted in his biography of Sherman that: Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified…in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violations of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.
Sherman himself admitted after the war that he was taught at West Point that he could be hanged for the things he did. But in war the victors always write the history and are never punished for war crimes, no matter how heinous. Only the defeated suffer that fate. That is why very few Americans are aware of the fact that the unspeakable atrocities of war committed against civilians, from the firebombing of Dresden, the rape of Nanking, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the World Trade Center bombings, had their origins in Lincoln’s war. This is yet another reason why Americans will continue their fascination with the War for Southern Independence.
