JWB and Company and Atrocities Against Southern Citizens

[LincolnToddFan]

In James McPherson's "Battle Cry" Sherman is quoted as saying something to the effect that since Georgia, and South Carolina in particular, had been the seat of the "accursed rebellion" they would be made to pay the severest price in terms of revenge. Federal troops were encouraged to vent their rage even upon civilians, and they made no distinction between White and Black. There is a particular soul destroying story about troops in South Carolina encountering a group of slave women, most of whom were able to escape into the woods except for one little eight year old girl who was raped. One of the Union soldiers wrote home that he felt sickened and ashamed to be a part of his regiment.

In our more recent past we can read about this same type of cruelty inflicted by American troops upon North Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam War.

Still, I am not prepared to believe that rebel soldiers would have behaved much better if they been unleashed victorious upon Philadelphia, Chicago and New York especially after absorbing four years of unspeakable trauma and deprivation. The unnecessary savagery inflicted by Confederates upon Union prisoners of war and upon Black Union soldiers who attempted to surrender to them strikes me as no less egregious than many of the atrocities committed by Union soldiers. Four years of deprivation, trauma, death and mayhem would have desensitized them to the same extent it did their Northern counterparts as each side blamed the other for their suffering.

I read somewhere-was it Shelby Foote? that the Civil War was the "last war fought between gentlemen".

The hell it was!