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Certainly that was my impression as I read one heart-rending account after the other of sacking and burning, of brutality and wanton destruction, of enfilading crowds of Sunday worshippers, and of desecrating tombs and churches.
If Ft. Pillow has gained such notoriety with the Confederate massacre of black US troops, you'd think this would be news also, yet I can't remember reading anything about it until today. "...enfilading crowds of Sunday worshippers"? I am supposed to take this as the truth because Henry Allen wrote it, and David C. Edmonds edited it? Where are the other accounts of these atrocities - of "desecrating tombs and churches?"
What are the dates that these events occurred on?
Surely, enfilading crowds of Sunday church-goers and tearing up tombstones and church(es) would be more publicized. I don't believe it happened, Battalion. Still not convinced.
And your 5:49 post shows me signing off with "regards,Wm42".
I never sign off that way.
Terry
__________________ "In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one." Abraham Lincoln - August 18, 1864 Speech to the 164th Ohio Regiment
Fine. Now, let's see the Union sources that corroborate the charges of poisoning.
Regards,
Cash
Cash... in 2000+ diaries & letters the only reference to poisoning water supplies or anything else I have read was in relation to Braggs retreat from KY. That, as deplorable as it was, was a valid tactic to keep potable water out of the hands of pursuing US troops.
Western troops, both US & CS knew the value of water and were not likely to foul it.
Poisoning people was considered the height of cowardice; at least one CS officer was killed by his own men because he murdered a rival via poison (yellow JasmineIIRC) his men didn't wait for the trial.
Battalion has found a vaguely legit source for sliming the US. Coming from Allen... I give it the same weight I give Al Jaziera.
__________________ Few take the trouble to understand or to view the American scene with perspective. And we Americans love to find ourselves guilty of something. However, it is never I who am guilty, but those other Americans, the past or present government or the other political party. Americans almost never find other countries guilty. It is always ourselves or our fancied influence in other countries. Louis L'amour
It should be considered, of course, but if the only evidence is the word of a traitorous, embittered short-term governor, I'll not put much faith in it.
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
"During the summer of 1864, Congress eliminated funds for the medical care of contrabands from the military budget. Eaton's* medical director used a freedmen's fund, raised by taxing employed contrabands' wages, to continue the hospital at Memphis. Records do not reveal what other hospitals did. Aroused by the problem, Adjutant General Thomas immediately began negotiating with the surgeon general and Treasury Secretary William P. Fessenden to find alternative funding. The surgeon general agreed to supply the hospitals with medicines from government laboratories at cost, and Fessenden consented to cover the expenses as part of his administration of abandoned Southern farms (the lessees usually hired contraband laborers). Stanton, however, disliked the scheme and revoked it. The hospitals did not receive federal funding again until the fall of 1865."
John Cimprich, Slavery's End In Tennessee, p.58.
*Chaplain John Eaton, 27th Ohio Infantry, assigned by Grant as a superintendent of contraband camps.
~
In the contraband camps were the wives and families of the men serving in the USCT.
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
And there are those who think you have no sense of humor!
Now, trying not to remember that it is your long-established custom to only cut and paste parts of historical documents, leaving out the parts you think may be adverse to your own point-of-view, perhaps you could answer a question on your above snippet.
1. Why did Stanton dislike the scheme of giving supplies at cost and of placing such funding under the administration of abandoned Southern farms?
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
The Conduct of Federal Troops in Louisiana, p.115-
"In the latter part of the month of June [1863], General Richard Taylor, in command of the small Confederate force of the District, took, by coup-de-main, the opposite bank of Berwick's Bay. This victory not only gave him command of its waters, but threw open to his occupation the country watered by the Lafourche. The planters immediately repaired to the captured district in search of their lost property. Many, following the Confederate army, crossed the Bay with it and thus had an opportunity to witness the actual condition of the slaves the moment they passed from the Federal hands.
Seven mile[s] from the town of Brashear, on the banks of the Bayou Ramos, they found--as we have described--the graves of the dead. The condition of the living, as they found them, we will attempt to describe:
Skirting the bayou, in a thicket of undergrowth and briars, were encamped--without shelter--a wretched, death-stricken crowd of human beings, who but a few short weeks before, had been driven from their homes full of the vigor of health and overflowing with the exuberance of life; now, they were dying in squalid filth, or living in abject misery.
The adjacent thicket was filled with the decomposing bodies of those, who, dragging themselves thither and falling from exhaustion, had died; and spread over the camp was a nauseous stench, which threatened death to the survivors."
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