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Some excellent posts here but, I think GM has gone overboard on his descriptions...like Sherman was daily walking around killing people...as if....if it had been true there would have been reams of information still around (Afterall, it really wasn't THAT long ago) to prove his case. They don't exist.
Were there atrocities? Sure, war is hell. The South brought it on for economic reasons (king cotton comes to mind) and their way of life....fact....not fiction....shouldn't come as a surprise that when it was being wrapped up, there may have been a few angry types in the union that went overboard....
About as much as the guards at Andersonville...interesting place to visit, not much of a camp left but, it was quite small to house THAT many. If anything, Sherman showed considerable restraint. Think of what he COULD have done with 60,000 well armed troops moving through the South. Any Army on the move is going to destroy the enemies ability to fight. Civil War was no different.
Want to get angry GM? Focus on Lee's blunders. While everyone would like to think he was the second coming, think again. Lee acted stupidly at Gettysburg. Pickets charge comes to mind...talk about a suicide mission....all my fault...all my fault....got that right Lee....ego was too big for his britches....the equivalent of the Union's Cold Harbor...He attacks with 6,000 across a mile wide open field with 20-30 pieces of union artillery facing him....in an open field....yikes! Run Forest run!!!
Keep the sashes and romance out of it. Longstreet was right, Lee was wrong. Period. As far as describing his feats early in the war, keep in mind, the Union repeatedly attacked fixed positions on the South. Bad move...ergo the heavy losses early on....fast forward 4 years and look what happened to southern troops when THEY had to attack fixed positions...similar results.....Pickets "charge" was a perfect example...Little Round top is another....not so easy when one faces superior defenses...is it?
We all get pissed when our heroes are found human. Don't blame the union, blame Lee in the end. Romance and greatness aside, he was not perfect. Nor was Stonewall Jackson...just committed....right up there with Custer in 1876...Johnston showed better poise in the final hours.
Get pissed at Jackson and his less-than-graceful exit from power....get mad at the folks in Savannah that courted Sherman's good graces and why the city was spared and is now the most historic town in America....
Sherman destroyed the South's ability to fight. Atlanta residents burned a number of factories/foundries near Means Street as the Union advance to thwart the use of their material. His movement was gutsy until he passed Atlanta....
Your oral history is at best, confused and exaggerated. Let's start out with the fact that Sherman's March occurred during the Civil War and NOT after it. Furthermore, one of the most notable aspects of the Civil War, including Sherman's March, was actually the absence of wide-spread rape by either side despite the fact that large armies marched through undefended territory all through the war. It happened, but it wasn't a common thing which you are implying. Rape during the Civil War was much more likely to be perpetrated by bushwackers (partisans) or by deserters rather than by regular soldiers.
As for shooting boys, at the Battle of Oconee River Bridge, in November, 1864, schoolboys from the Georgia Military Academy took part in the battle along with the First Kentucky Brigade, and some of the boys were wounded and killed. Cadets from the Arsenal Academy and the South Carolina Military Academy (now The Citadel) fought at the Battle of Tulifinny during the Savannah campaign. Sherman didn't burn the Georgia Military Institute or the SC Military Academy but the Arsenal Academy, in Columbia, SC, went up in flames with the rest of the city. That's the only school that was burned during Sherman's March.
The lack of schools in the South after the Civil War was certainly not caused by Union troops burning them during the war since the South didn't have that many schools before the war. In fact, the first public schools in much of the South were established during the period of Congressional Reconstruction.
The burning and looting of civilian wealth was a strategy intended to force the South to surrender by limiting the ability of the Confederates to supply their armies and by demoralizing Confederate soldiers into deserting. Sheridan cleaned out the Shenandoah Valley in October, 1864, and Sherman made "Georgia howl" in November/December of 1864. Within six months, Lee surrendered in Virginia and a couple of weeks later, Johnston did the same in North Carolina, so I guess it worked. As I said in my first post in this thread, the South brought that economic disaster down on themselves. Nobody forced the South to secede.
Finally, there were areas of the South where there was literally a civil war within the formal Civil War. These areas included western Virginia (including the newly minted state of West Virginia), East Tennessee, western North Carolina, northern Arkansas, and much of Missouri. In these areas, the presence of large numbers of pro-union or pro-confederate residents resulted in considerable violence by partisans on both sides. Some of these groups just used the war as an excuse for murder, plunder and terrorism, most notably William Clarke Quantrill and his raiders along the Kansas Missouri border.
In the border states, the civil war sometimes started before the rest of the war. The war in Missouri was fought between groups of homegrown factions who were willing to steal, torture and kill, on both sides. When the Union Army moved into this state, they instituted the infamous Order 11. This was intended to end these activities whichever 'side' they were on. If there was activity in a county, it was cleared of civilians. They could take a wagon and horse, their clothes and food. They had to leave their stock and crop, which was confiscated. The farm and structures were burned down. No differenciations were made between those with sympathy for the south and those to the north. My gggrandfather had a farm in the first county to be cleared by Order 11. They moved on to Illinious for the duration of the war and nobody in the immediate family served for either side.
Order 11 was not intended to favor any faction, but to end all of them and impose order in what had been a civil war with plenty of the kind of violence discussed in this thread before the war even began. Many displaced favoring both sides ended up simply leaving to Illinious and sitting out the war. Five counties of Missouri were cleared with this order.
In any war there will be excesses and its a chance for those who don't care much for anyone's rules to have their day. Missouri and Kansas had already descended into near anarchy before the war started and the reaction to it established the official policy.
This doesn't mean that offical policy was always followed or that deserters, criminals and those with nothing did not take advantage of those who still had something left. War is won or lost by armies and generally just lost by civilians however it works out for their own 'side'.
Union troops, primarily black, returned to Mississippi and other former Confederate States in 1866/1867 when Congress took over Reconstruction. The last Union troops left the South in 1877.
The South brought that on itself by rejecting the 14th Amendment. Had they cut their losses and accepted it, they could have been readmitted without even having to give Blacks the vote. They then compounded their mistake by boycotting the polls (only a minority of whites were disfranchised) so that the resulting legislatures were a lot more radical than they would have been has Southerners resisted the temptation to sulk.
In any case, the mere fact that Black troops were employed hardly constitutes a war crime. The main reason for it was that Blacks only started being recruited about halfway through the war, so that more black than white enlistments were still unexpired in 1865. By the 1870s, though, the vast majority of them also were back in civilian life, and the US Army was down to less than 30,000, of whom only about 3,000 were in the South. Given that there were over a million Confederate veterans, most of them owning guns, this was hardly enough to impose a reign of terror in the region.
The South brought that on itself by rejecting the 14th Amendment. Had they cut their losses and accepted it, they could have been readmitted without even having to give Blacks the vote. They then compounded their mistake by boycotting the polls (only a minority of whites were disfranchised) so that the resulting legislatures were a lot more radical than they would have been has Southerners resisted the temptation to sulk.
In any case, the mere fact that Black troops were employed hardly constitutes a war crime. The main reason for it was that Blacks only started being recruited about halfway through the war, so that more black than white enlistments were still unexpired in 1865. By the 1870s, though, the vast majority of them also were back in civilian life, and the US Army was down to less than 30,000, of whom only about 3,000 were in the South. Given that there were over a million Confederate veterans, most of them owning guns, this was hardly enough to impose a reign of terror in the region.
I totally agree that the South brought the problems it faced for the century plus after 1860 down on itself. I was just clarifying that Union troops were returned to Mississippi after another poster said they were removed in 1865.
I wonder how things could have been different if the Union Army had worked to reintegrate the south back into the union instead of mass murder and other things they did. Their burning of cities, homes, and schools during the war hurt education for generations. I believe it was these things that helped to make the south a firm Democratic Party stronghold for more than a century out of resentment towards the party of the president in office during the Civil war.
Actually, the North tried to build public schools. The South (sound familiar?) resisted on "States' Rights" which was really a cover to prevent taxes from funding black schools. The destruction of much of the South is sad and unfortunate, but they had the tools and assistance to fix things, and it was only through Southern obstinance and racism that they remained behind the rest of the world for so long. It was their own ideology.
EDIT: I forgot to add that it was Southern resistance to economic reforms that really killed any momentum at integrating blacks as functional economic members of society. So their poverty was the South's own fault, too.
In any case, the mere fact that Black troops were employed hardly constitutes a war crime. The main reason for it was that Blacks only started being recruited about halfway through the war, so that more black than white enlistments were still unexpired in 1865....
Nonsense. "Total enlistments in the Federal forces are officially put at 2,778,304, including, in the Army, 2,489,836 whites, 178,975 Negroes, 3530 Indians, and 105,963 in the Navy and Marines."
May1, 1865 the Union Army totaled 1,000,516 men. If ALL of the blacks who served were still alive and serving it would only be 18% of the total.
The Union generals, being military people, did not win gracefully. What the Union Army did to black soldiers would be tantamount to the US Army sending a battalion of Jews to war against the Germans. I can only imagine how a black Union POW would have suffered.
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