One hundred and fifty years ago today, General Sherman began the “March to the Sea” that put an end to the War of Southern Aggression and stomped the crap out of the worst people in American history, the southern slaveowning aristocracy. Some people still have a problem with it, largely due to slaver propaganda like “Gone With The Wind” which has tried to re-write history to portray Sherman as some sort of monster. These same folks would, if they were honest, have a problem with Patton driving tanks into Germany.
The March was conducted under Shermans Special Field Orders Number 120, which stated in part:
IV. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or whatever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten day’s provisions for the command and three days’ forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables, and to drive in stock of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be instructed the gathering of provisions and forage at any distance from the road traveled.
V. To army corps commanders alone is intrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.
VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or bridges. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance.
Compare those rules to, say, the Confederate laws regarding the enslaved. Compare these orders to the modern rules of engagement that have hamstrung American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some people, then and now, had a problem with Sherman conducting what we today would see as a perfectly normal sort of war: tearing up the enemies war infrastructure. But the simple fact is, if the locals didn’t want Sherman tearing up their railways, why didn’t they turn their guns on the slaveowners? Had the Japanese citizens taken out Tojo and Hirohito, or if the German people had taken down the Nazis, they could have spared themselves a whole lot of trouble. The vast majority of the South was non-slave owning, so all these people really needed to do was bundle up the aristocrats onto boats and sell them to Arab slave traders, and the South could have been spared a *lot* of trouble. Everybody would have been happy then… the blacks would have been freed, the non-slaveowning whites would have been able to modernize their medieval economy, and the slaveowners would have been able to remain in slave-owning households. Everybody wins!