“[F]rom the military policies of Sherman and Sheridan there lies but an
easy step to the total war of the Nazis, the greatest affront to Western
civilization since its founding.”
–Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M.
Weaver, pp. 168-169.
Having lied about secession, states’ rights, the origins of the
Constitution, Lincoln, and just about everything having to do with the
American “Civil War” for many generations, the Lincoln cult is now hard at
work on its biggest lie of all: that General William Tecumseh Sherman’s
famous “march to the sea” did not negatively affect Southern civilians or
their property.
In a November 14 New York Times article one Alan Blinder wrote of
“an expanding body of more forgiving scholarship about the general’s
behavior.” In its ten thousandth attempt (at least) to mentally
“reconstruct” Southerners, the government-funded Georgia Historical Society,
in cahoots with the Jimmy Carter Presidential Museum, recently paced a marker
in Atlanta “near the picnic tables at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
and Museum” that is supposedly “a reassessment of Sherman” that has been
“decades in the making” by the Lincoln cult.
Sherman was not “gratuitously destructive,” says the marker. He only
targeted “military infrastructure.” Of course, in reality Sherman
considered every Southern person, every acre of Southern land, every house,
every barn, every blade of grass, every farm animal, and even every family
pet as part of the Confederacy’s “military infrastructure.” Honest
historians have documented this in spades for the past 150 years.
It is also documented beyond all doubt by the U.S. government’s own Official
Records of the war.
Nevertheless, the Lincoln cultists now dismiss the extraordinarily
well-documented history of Sherman’s army’s pillaging, plundering, raping,
and murdering of Southern civilians as “fables” and mere “family accounts of
cruelty.” One source of such talk is John F. Marszalek, the executive
director of the “Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association.” (A
Grant museum in Mississippi is not unlike having a pro-Hitler Museum in
Auschwitz, Poland). “The facts are coming out,” Marszalek ludicrously
proclaimed to the Times. Sherman’s behavior “hastened . . . the
reunification of the union,” the marker at the Jimmy Carter shrine absurdly
announces. Yes, just as the German blitzkrieg “united” Germany with
Poland and France during World War II, or how Soviet tanks “united” Eastern
and Central Europe during the Cold War.
It is child’s play to prove what a pack of liars this new generation of
Holocaust deniers are. It does require a little effort, however, which
is probably what the Deniers are depending on when they spread their lies in
places like the picnic area at the Jimmy Carter shrine. For example,
consider just a few of the facts taken from the U.S. War Department
publication, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records
of the Union and Confederate Armies, as discussed in Walter Brian Cisco’s
outstanding work of scholarship, War
Crimes Against Southern Civilians.
From the Official Records, a Colonel Adin Underwood of
Massachusetts described Sherman’s gratuitous bombing and burning of Atlanta after
the Confederate Army had left the city as having burned to the ground “37
percent of the city” according to Sherman’s military engineers. This
included many private homes and even churches.
An Ohio infantryman is quoted as describing “an ocean of fire” all
throughout Atlanta. Eventually, at least “two-thirds of Atlanta lay in
ashes” according to the Official Records. A Major Nichols was
told that “the holocaust devoured no fewer than five thousand buildings.”
When Sherman’s chief military engineer, Captain O.M Poe, voiced dismay
over seeing so many corpses of women and children in the streets of Atlanta,
and informed Sherman that the day-and-night bombardment of the city was of no
military significance, Sherman coldly called the corpses “a beautiful sight”
that would quicken the ending of the war (Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman,
p. 184). There were approximately 4,000 private homes in
Atlanta before Sherman’s bombing, with only around 400 left standing.
Sherman left a paper trail that was obviously intended to cover his
murderous tracks, but at times he issued direct orders to murder
civilians. Bothered by his inability to apprehend Confederate snipers
who had been shooting at his railroad trains, he sent the following order to
a General Louis D. Watkins: “Cannot you send over about Fairmount and
Adairsville, burn ten or twelve houses of known secessionists, kill a few at
random, and let them know it will be repeated every time a train is fired on
. . ?” (John Walters, Merchant
of Terror: General Sherman and Total War, p. 137). In
order to carry out such war crimes, Sherman biographer Lee Kennett writes of
how “the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and
foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World.” It took a special
kind of “soldier” to carry out Sherman’s war crimes. (Lee Kennett, Marching
Through Georgia, p. 279).
The Official Records also record how federal soldiers extorted
money from Southern civilians by demanding “insurance” payments to avoid
having their homes ransacked and burned down. A Major James Austin
Connolly is quoted in the following way in response to reports that
Southerners were hiding their valuables from thieving U.S. Army soldiers:
“Let them do it if they dare. We’ll burn every house, barn, church,
and everything else we come to; we’ll leave their families homeless without
food; their towns will all be destroyed and nothing but the most complete
desolation will be found in our track. “
The Official Records also write of how Northern reporters associated with
Republican Party newspapers often accompanied Sherman’s “bummers” as they
were called, and then entertained the folks up North with tales of their
raping, pillaging, plundering, burning, and murdering. One Northern
reporter is quoted as saying of Sherman’s rampaging looters:
“If the spoil were ample, the depradators were satisfied, and went off in
peace; if not, everything was destroyed . . . . Hogs were bayoneted to
bleed; chickens, geese, and turkeys knocked over and hung in garlands . . .
cows and calves . . . are shot . . . . the furniture [of private homes]
is smashed to pieces, music is pounded out of . . . pianos with the ends of
muskets.”
Another federal soldier is quoted as saying “I rather feel sorry for some
of the women who cried and begged so piteously for the soldiers to leave them
a little,” but nevertheless, “extermination [of the civilian population] is
our only means now.”
When Sherman reached Hardeeville, South Carolina, one of his bummers is
quoted in the Official Records as saying that “In a few hours a town of half
century’s growth is thus leveled to the ground.” This even included a
church where “First the pulpit and the seats were torn out . . . . Many
axes were at work.” This is undoubtedly an example of what the Lincoln
cult means when they refer to “military infrastructure.”
One of Sherman’s degradations was known as his “war on dogs.” A U.S.
Army Colonel is quoted in the Official Records as saying, “We were determined
that no dogs should escape . . . we exterminate all. The dogs were
easily killed. All we had to do was to bayonet them.”
By the time Sherman was done with South Carolina, one of his officers
boasted in the Official Records that “We have . . . burnt one city, the
capital, and most of the villages on our route as well as most barns,
outbuildings and dwelling houses, and every house that escaped fire has been
pillaged.” This was no “family myth,” as the Lincoln cult shamelessly
claims, but the words of a senior officer in Sherman’s army.
Sherman’s “march to the sea” was nothing new: he had been waging total war
on the civilian population of the South for years. In 1862 he ordered
the complete destruction through fire of the town of Randolph, Tennessee,
near Memphis. Around that time, Sherman wrote a letter to his wife
saying that “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of
the trouble, but the people” in general, was his intention. (Cited in
John Walters, Merchant
of Terror, p. 61).
In 1863 Sherman ordered the systematic bombardment of Jackson, Mississippi
every five minutes, day and night. The city was sacked, looted, and
destroyed, after which Sherman boasted in a letter to Grant that “the
[civilian] inhabitants are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The
land is devastated for 30 miles around.” (Cited in Walters, Merchant
of Terror, p. 101). He also boasted of the complete
destruction of Meridian, Mississippi: “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, and I have no hesitation in
pronouncing the work well done. Meridian . . . no longer exists.”
(Walters, Merchant
of Terror, p. 116). This, too, took place after the Confederate
Army was long gone from the area.
James McPherson estimated that some 50,000 Southern civilians perished
during the War to Prevent Southern Independence, but the true figure is
probably much higher. Sherman himself boasted of how his “bummers”
destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of private property and
walked off with hundreds of millions of dollars more. There are
thousands of pictures of the burned out Southern landscape in the wake
of Sherman’s “march” in addition to all the Official Records that record his
war crimes.
But of course in war, the victors are never prosecuted. This
probably explains why Sherman – and all the other Union Army top command, including
Lincoln himself, became more and more murderous when it came to Southern
civilians in the latter years of the war. They all understood that if
the South was victorious, it would have been well within its rights to hang
all of them as war criminals.
In the past, before the Lincoln cult commenced its current campaign to
whitewash Sherman’s reputation, some cultists admitted this. Sherman
biographer Lee Kennett wrote 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
violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”
(Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 286). This proves
that the Lincoln cultists know these facts but are once again doing
everything they can to confuse and misinform the American public about their
own country’s history. As such, it is not an exaggeration to label them
as the new generation of holocaust deniers.
The Best of
Thomas DiLorenzo
