He sent a famous telegram to Abraham Lincoln:
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
They still hate his guts here in Georgia. Burning a whole bunch of folks out of their homes might have something to do with it.
4 comments:
So Sherman committed a war crime by stealing 25,000 bales of cotton.
Obama's Lincoln obsession troubles me. One could envision just such a letter from Janet Napolitano..."I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Phoenix, with with Joe Arpaio's head on a pike"
There was a guy at work whose hobby was a re-enactor (War of Northern Aggression version). He actually defended Sherman's actions in Georgia. He thought Lincoln was a "Great Man", too. I managed to neither barf nor attack him. Barely.
There are two ways to win a war.
1. Destroy your enemies spirits. Take everything you can, and destroy everything that you cannot take. Make your enemy fear you at such a level that the very though of resisting you makes them weak in the knees. They fear for themselves, and their family. Resistance is just too expensive because they have to much to lose, and know you will take or destroy it.
2. Destroy your enemies ability to make war. A man with no food doesn't fight well, a man with no blankets will freeze, and a man with no boots cannot march.
Sherman knew a thing or two about war, and believed in both #1 and #2. Doing what he did against a civilian population, especially one in America is a difficult thing to come to grips with, but how many of you call for the exact same thing in the middle east?
Have you ever uttered the phrase "We need to turn that sand into glass"?
War is hell folks, and total war is total hell.
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