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I have no interest in getting involved with this debate, but I just had to say that that both of these comments had me laughing my butt off. Good stuff. Made it worth reading this thread.

The main reason that the South didn't do similar things is because the war was fought almost entirely in the South.

damn yankee sympathizers......

I think some folks have one out in the woodshed and it makes them feel inferior.

Are you saying the North did not "codone" the same???

he don't know what he's sayin by now.....

I just wish we had won. That is all carry on.

Oh and by the way, I DO NOT hold Abe Lincoln in high regards.
To put it mildly.

Back then when you stole a family's crops, burned their house, and killed their mule the result was the same for the women and children as if you had shot them.
Sherman was a banker before the Cival War.

I would think any damn fool would know better than try to defend Sherman's atrocities, but I guess I'm wrong. I understand that the rules of engagement are different today than they were back then, but he shocked and horrified his own people with his actions, and saying "some folks just need killin'" doesn't justify it to me, and I doubt it made his family feel much better then.

He was a butcher and a murderer against people in his own country, who had not attacked nor provoked him. He did what he did because he wanted to and could. History has always been written by the victors.

War is hell.

Abe Lincoln was a Republican.
Democrats were the strongest supporters of slavery.
Not much has changed in the last 150 years, Democrats are still the slave masters.

Sherman was given an order to destroy and annihilate the enemy, There wasnt any nice about it. He did his job and he did it so well that we are a United country today.

Women & children were his enemy? Excuse me while I puke.........................

I'm about to be sick over this dribble.

for those of you who want to enlighten themselves on lincoln's position on slavery and the fundamental causes of the civil war, start here - the corwin amendment - passed by congress on march 2, 1861 and endorsed by lincoln in his first inagural address

Awesome. Thanks for setting aldeer straight. Your .02 cents (over and over) is a shining light for us all.

I never even remotely said anything of the sort.



I know exactly what I'm saying so let me spell it out for you and shutter.

You two are full of S-H-I-T. I spelled it slowly so y'all can grasp that.

Neither of you can provide proof of shot babies, legs being broken or women sodomized beyond counting.
The only remote fantasy you can tie to is that they salted the fields. Which through the marvels of mathematics we can deduce is bullshit.

As humans are prone to, he had flaws. He was a Good General. Graduated West Point near the top of his class. Studied by Rommel, Patton and others.

"He was a Good General"

Now you've stretched it too far. He was a failure at warfare except killing & torturing women and children in the Civil War and in the Plains Indian War.

And even as Skinny said, scorched earth was not his idea.

He was also a fringe lunatic with suicidal tendencies and admitted so. But we are full of it??

"In a January 1865 letter to General Grant, Sherman once again explained his philosophy of mass murder: "We are not fighting against enemy armies but against an enemy people; both young and old, rich and poor must feel the iron hand of war . . ."

Europeans, meanwhile, were comparing Sherman to the Marquis de Sade and predicting that future wars outside of America would likely be waged against innocent civilians, once Sherman's "success" was understood. They also considered Sherman's war crimes to be the mark of an unsuccessful military man. He did not establish any particularly stellar record as a military commander under fire; his "forte" was the mass murder of civilians and acts of terrorism reigned upon Southern cities with weapons of mass destruction."

Studied by Patton, Bradley and others at West Point and the War College.
Longest serving Commanding General of Army means he did something right.
Considered a good general by scholars with lots of stuff after their name like Ph.D, professor emeritus, senior fellow etc.

vs.

Considered poor soldier by Shuter.

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.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the author of, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War.

Some of you say he was a good General. Well, if Sherman was great then by your on words William Quantrill and Bill Anderson must also be held in high regard.
Sounds like double standards don't it? Ya, the union won so they can write history however they want but Quantrill and Anderson didn't do anything revered General William Tecumseh Sherman and his cronies hadn't also done. The difference is one side won and the other didn't. Sherman=hero, Quantrill Anderson=villain