Billy Sherman wasn't content just to beat the Confederate Army of Tennessee. He wasn't content just to burn the mill, or the city of Atlanta.
Why they still hate him down in these parts is that he packed women and children onto cattle cars and shipped them to a concentration camp in Ohio. Funny, I wasn't ever taught that in history class growing up.
People who say that the United States has never lost a war need to come visit Roswell some time.
32 comments:
As I remember only one or two? ever returned.
From 2007
THE STORY OF THE ROSWELL MILL WORKERS DEPORTATION
http://www.namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=128&highlight=roswell
From last year.
The 400 Roswell missing women of 1864
http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2011/08/400-roswell-missing-women-of-1864.html#comments
And y'all wonder why the South is STILL pissed???
What is taught in history classes is propaganda. The civil war was not a war to end slavery, it was a war to subjugate the south.
What replaced a Union of semi-autonomous states was the world ruling empire that we have today. We are all less free as a result.
Jefferson Davis Quotes
http://www.namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=2978&highlight=jefferson+davis+quotes
Truth crushed to the earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.
---Jefferson Davis (1808 - 1889)
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“A question settled by violence or in disregard of law must remain unsettled forever.”
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"The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered upon a new and enlarged arena.
---Address to the Mississippi legislature - 16 years after the wars end.
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"The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form."
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"When certain sovereign and independent states form a union with limited powers for some general purpose, and any one or more of them, in the progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive grievances for which there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such withdrawal an insurrection? If so, then of what advantage is a compact of union to states? Within the Union are oppressions and grievances; the attempt to go out brings war and subjugation. The ambitious and aggressive states obtain possession of the central authority which, having grown strong in the lapse of time, asserts its entire sovereignty over the states.
Whichever of them denies it and seeks to retire is declared to be guilty of insurrection, its citizens are stigmatized as "rebels", as if they revolted against a master, and a war of subjugation is begun. If this action is once tolerated, where will it end? Where is constitutional liberty? What strength is there in bills of rights-in limitation of power? What new hope for mankind is to be found in written constitutions, what remedy which did not exist under kings of emperors? If the doctrines thus announced by the government of the United States are conceded, then look through either end of the political telescope, and one sees only an empire, and the once famous Declaration of Independence trodden in the dust of as a "glittering generality," and the compact of the union denounced as a "flaunting lie".
Those who submit to such consequence without resistance are not worthy the liberties and rights to which they were born, and deserve to be made slaves. Such must be the verdict of mankind."
--- President Jefferson Davis
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Farewell Speech
Jefferson Davis
January 21, 1861
Speech on the Floor of the United States Senate
http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=491
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"I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination."
-- President Jefferson Davis, CSA
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Here in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley you can still find people who will curse the name Phil Sheridan.
"Billy Sherman wasn't content just to beat the Confederate Army of Tennessee. He wasn't content just to burn the mill, or the city of Atlanta."
Sherman understood that the only way to truly win a war is to crush your enemy's will to fight. Experience since then has only proven that he was right.
Why were the people of Roswell sent north en masse like this? Why only Roswell? Sherman certainly didn't do that to every town he encountered on the March to the Sea.
Whatever you think of the reasons behind the Civil War, it's useful to remember that the South fired the first shots. Lincoln didn't call for volunteers to fight the Confederacy until the Confederacy started seizing United States military bases, and killing and imprisoning United States military forces.
Incidentally, I've heard/read a lot about the horrors of Union prison camps. What about Confederate prison camps?
It's also useful to consider that whatever your feelings on federalism, the South could have had anything it wanted, even a continuation of its strong-states-rights position, if it had only agreed to a gradual end to slavery. Remember, in the antebellum US, virtually no one believed blacks were, or should be, equal to whites. The majority would probably have favored emancipation followed by mass exodus of the black population. Keep in mind that the nation of Liberia was founded as a new homeland for emancipated blacks.
Wolfwalker,
Sherman doesn't get a pass from this particular incident because he didn't order others, or because he didn't start the war, or because Andersonville was a hell hole.
He personally ordered this deportation of women and children, some of them seem to have died, and he did nothing to ensure that they were fed, housed, and returned after the end of hostilities.
Quite frankly, if we did this in some Afghan village today, the general who ordered this would be in Leavenworth faster than you can say "Nuremberg".
General Sherman's antics in Georgia haven't ever struck me as exemplary, nor have I seen any particular effort to praise him for them.
The one lesson I'm going to point out as applicable to today's political environment is that "working outside the system" didn't work out so well for the South.
Neither side was without blame in this war, but that's the way all wars are.
I was born in the South, educated here, and I didn't know about this until today. It's true, he winning side gets to write the history, and it's doubly true in this case.
However, for those Southerners who think the war was not about slavery, I invite you to go read your state's Declaration of Secession. Just about all of them are about slavery. Yes, I know that wasn't the only issue, but it was a big part of it.
It's been 150 years. Maybe in another 50 we will find some way to reconcile. I doubt I will live to see it.
wubble.
FYH they did get over it, for the most part with the war that reunited America it was called the Spanish American war. A water shed event in bringing the South and the North together in a common cause against a foreign enemy.
Also there hasn't been an army anywhere at any time that hasn't committed terrible and horrible deeds against civilians, it's what armies do. Wellington during the Peninsular war had to flog his men into behaving themselves with the locals (they had sacked a town and looted it).
There is no excusing what Sherman did but he wasn't the first and he certainly wasn't the last.
Saying that the civil war was about slavery is as true as saying that the Revolutionary war was about the stamp act.
Yes, slavery was the straw that broke the camel's back, but the underlying issue here was that the secessionist states did not want to be told what to do.
Remember that under the constitution, the Ninth and Tenth amendments prohibited the Union from interfering in state matters.
Much like today, the Union wanted to grab more power than the Constitution granted.
Sure, the southern army fired first, but that was because the Union troops were camped out on their land.
What would we do today if the Mexican Army built a fort in Texas?
" Sherman doesn't get a pass from this particular incident because he didn't order others, or because he didn't start the war, or because Andersonville was a hell hole."
I never said he should.
"some of them seem to have died, and he did nothing to ensure that they were fed, housed, and returned after the end of hostilities."
Why is any of that his responsibility? Once they were sent off, they were out of his jurisdiction. Sherman was a line commander of combat troops, not a rear-echelon administrator dealing with P.O.W. issues.
Now, if you say that the soldiers who allegedly raped some of the woman prisoners should have been hanged, and their unit CO alongside them, that I won't argue. In fact, I'd pull the lever on 'em myself.
"Quite frankly, if we did this in some Afghan village today, the general who ordered this would be in Leavenworth faster than you can say 'Nuremberg'."
That's today. 1864 was a different era and a different culture. Such acts were simply not considered as bad then as they are now.
I still haven't heard an answer to why Sherman did this to Roswell. As best I can tell, it appears that Roswell was a center of clothing manufacturing, and Sherman, being Sherman, considered clothing war materiel just as much as ammunition or firearms were.
I grew up in the state that was born from that war but currently reside in GA. It has been proven without doubt that the only way to truely win a war is by destroying your enemy's will to fight. And that can only be accomplished by horrific loses of civilian life. Men will fight to defend their honor and their families and their nation. But destroy all that and you destroy their reason for fighting. But because it is so horrific that's why America has not won a war since the age of television. Once the burned and mutilated body of a young child is on the evening news the war is over. The best it can be fought to is a stalemate. We hurt them as much as we hurt them. War is hell.
@wolfwalker, those actions were *more* outrageous against the commonly accepted rules of war back then than they would be now. Atlanta was declared an open city, but was burned anyway. Making war against civilians excited revulsion in Europe, which had yet to come back to the idea that the State should be the final arbiter of the alleged morality of the State's own actions. Lincoln and the corrupt Northern Whigs (read: Republicans) started the war over tariffs that hurt the economy of the Southern States and protected manufacturers in the North from foreign competition. As far as firing on Ft Sumter, as was pointed out above, it was a military base (which was there to collect those tariffs) of a foreign nation, once independence had been declared (secession).
Sherman was a psychopath of the first order, the perfect personality type to conduct the murderous rampage that the filthy S.O.B. Lincoln needed to subjugate the formerly free people of the several southern states who rightly and legally chose to leave the so-called "Union".
This political entity that fools still refer to as a "nation" is nothing but a forced marriage held together by both the use of and constant threat of extreme violence against any and all who have or wish to either follow true constitutional and common law precepts and/or take active measures to dissolve the horrid and blood-drenched empire which it has become.
Truthfully, an honest and moral people and an honest and moral government would recognize the errors of its past and destroy the Lincoln Memorial. It is a stone-carved testament to the single worse man who was ever elected president. The bastard was so unpopular by 1864 that during the 1864 election cycle in the North the name of the Republican Party was dumped from the ticket. Electoral fraud was rampant and the poll watchers were uniformed Yankee troops.
It is indeed unfortunate that he wasn't shot in 1861 rather than 1865, for perhaps we as a people would have been spared the deaths of over 600,000 of our own, the loss of true Republican government rather than having "Democracy" stuffed in as a "Mob Rule" replacement.
Sherman and Lincoln both reside in the lowest reaches of Dante's hell, where the over setting is always on broil. To hell with each and every one like them - past, present and future.
Sherman was a fantastic general. He broke the will of the South while killing far fewer people than the other Northern generals. Grant was nothing but a butcher by comparison.
It was a war. Sherman had the stomach to do what it took to win with the fewest casualties on each side. I admire him, and I think of him as one of history's greatest military leaders.
Borepatch said:
"Quite frankly, if we did this in some Afghan village today, the general who ordered this would be in Leavenworth faster than you can say 'Nuremberg.'"
That's part of our problem. If you want to win a war, you should let your generals do what it takes to win a war. We spend billions needlessly and let countless of our own troops die because the policy elites are squeamish.
Interesting view, Anon (10:37). So if he had burned children at the stake and piled mountains of skulls like Tamerlane, that would be OK if it reduced overall military casualties?
"So if he had burned children at the stake and piled mountains of skulls like Tamerlane, that would be OK if it reduced overall military casualties?"
He didn't do that, though. He didn't kill very many civilians at all, unless you count the ones who starved as a result of his property destruction. He broke the South by wrecking the means of production, both agricultural and industrial, rather than by killing. And it worked.
I find his own words in response to the plea of the Atlanta City Council shortly before evacuating and burning the city quite compelling:
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. . . . I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success. But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.
If you are going to reside in my hometown, Borepatch, you need to start learning to pronounce his name as "That Bastard Sherman".
:)
Tam, I'm trying to lose my uncivilized yankee habits and practice southern manners.
Of course, maybe that's your point. ;-)
War is a travesty. It was Sherman himself that said war is hell. We can argue who was more morally at fault, the Union or the Confederacy until our faces are blue, but it doesn't change the end result. Moreover who is a greater war crimminal?
The man who wages violent brutal war against the enemy population in hopes to end the war as quickly as possible?
Or
The man who extends the war many years longer than necessary because he stayed his hand?
The same question can asked when discussion our decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki versus a blockade and possible invasion.
Which action is better, the action that causes a lot of suffering but is short? Or the action that tries to minimize suffering but extends it out for a long time?
Chris:
"Atlanta was declared an open city, but was burned anyway."
Sherman ordered the war industries burned, but not the whole city.
"Making war against civilians excited revulsion in Europe,"
What makes you think Europe was paying any attention to the United States at that time? Europe had troubles of its own.
"Lincoln and the corrupt Northern Whigs (read: Republicans) started the war over tariffs that hurt the economy of the Southern States and protected manufacturers in the North from foreign competition."
That doesn't make any sense. According to the history I learned, the South started the war over many things, of which slavery was one and the tariffs you refer to were another.
"As far as firing on Ft Sumter, as was pointed out above, it was a military base (which was there to collect those tariffs) of a foreign nation, once independence had been declared (secession)."
Fort Sumter was no threat to Charleston. It was designed and built after the War of 1812 as part of the defenses for Charleston harbor against attacks by foreign warships. Most of its guns pointed out to sea, not in toward the town. One of the many cruel ironies of the Civil War is that the garrison would have surrendered in a couple of weeks for lack of food, and there would have been no casus belli; the South could have shipped them off back to northern land and then claimed the fort for its own. Lincoln probably would not have objected, because he was doing everything possible to avert war. But the Rebels in Charleston wanted war, so they attacked the fort. In 1861, armed assault on a military post was grounds for war in anybody's book.
Wow, fascinatin'. And tell me, where in Gerogia do they have a memorial to the thousands upon thousands of folks those women and kids and their families declared subhuman, and treated far worse than they themselves were by Sherman?
And that's why us Yankees know you folk, for what you are.
Brock Townsend, like many apologists for the South -- the Civil War beig one of the few of the past few centuries which had, at least by the end, a clear "wrong" side, which fortunately lost -- tries to say the Southerners were not fighting for slavery. Nice try, but the legislatures of many of the Southern states in voting to secede, stated exactly the opposite explicitly.
Anon (7:14), interesting comment. As to your "you folk" comment, could you please clarify?
Just FYI, I was born in Columbus Ohio to yankee parents (a great - something - grandfather marched with Sherman) and grew up in Maine. Lived in the Washington DC suburbs until I was 40. I'd be fascinated to know what you mean by "you folk".
Oh, and the fact that slavery was a stain upon the land doesn't change the fact that Sherman was a war criminal.
it's useful to remember that the South fired the first shots. Lincoln didn't call for volunteers to fight the Confederacy until the Confederacy started seizing United States military bases
After Lincoln started an embargo which is an act of war.
Also:
Lincoln Instigated The Firing On Ft. Sumter - Quotes
http://www.namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=98&highlight=ft+sumper
"You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Ft Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result. "
Lincoln, Letter To Gustavus Fox on 1 May, 1861
"He (Lincoln) himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without an attempt to reinforce giving notice of the fact to Gov Pickins of S.C. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could."
Senator Orville Hickman Browning's diary dated July 3, 1861
(Lincoln's personal and political friend)
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the legislatures of many of the Southern states in voting to secede, stated exactly the opposite explicitly.
As one of the Causes. Many also didn't. The Cherokee Nation did though.
Lincoln was a master liar and manipulator. Everything he did politically was aimed at forcing the war and violating all the laws of war to win.
And for all those claiming it was the fastest way to end the war: Why did the north let the south starve after burning down all their farms? If the north was being moral by ending the war fast why didn't they feed the hungry, care for the sick, and make right what they destroyed?
Lincoln was the devil made flesh and most American's live in fear to go out after dark in major cities because of the criminal class Lincoln freed to prey upon civilized folk. You can't send your kids to school because the black savages he released make such schools war zones. Detroit is Lincoln's true legacy. People can't let their kids play outside in my own home town because of the black savages Lincoln freed now roam in gangs attacking non blacks at will. That's legacy of Lincoln.
This planet needs more WT Shermans.
@Marvin, the history of the 20th Century would suggest that you might be wrong. "Bomber" Harris and the dead of Dresden could not be reached for comment
"Lincoln and the corrupt Northern Whigs (read: Republicans) started the war over tariffs that hurt the economy of the Southern States and protected manufacturers in the North from foreign competition."
Utter nonsense. The tariff was low when the Confederates started bugging out. The Morrill Tariff was high, but the South could have kept it bottled up in the Senate if they hadn't called their senators home.
The war was about whether some Americans could keep other Americans as property, and the bad guys lost. They lost big. They deserved to lose. They deserved more. Bad shit happened, but it was all on the heads of the slavers, so far as I'm concerned. In the end, four million Americans were freed from bondage. That's a good thing, maybe the only good thing about the whole mess.
I'm sorry for what happened to the ladies of Roswell, I'm sorry for the suffering of the men at Andersonville, and Fort Douglas, and the Wilderness. And on, and on, and on . . .
But in the end, those who thought people were property started the damned war. It's on them, all of it.
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