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Shane, good stuff. I've often wondered if my own ancestor from Wilkes Couny, North Carolina on the east side of the mountains might have been influenced by the Home Guard in his decision to join the 10th TN US as a blacksmith. This man had four children and a wife at home when the war broke out. His brother served with the CSA. There weren't many yanks in Wilkes County, so I suspect there was more action with these idiots in the back woods.
You have good reason to suspect that "home guard" and provost details might well be the reason your ancestor joined a US unit. For one, he would get paid. For two, being on the ground, which side to fight against must have been fairly clear.
I believe you've mentioned before the dates of his service. Do they jive with the suspicion?
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
Ole, kind of hard to say on that count. My great grandfather was born 7 Jan 1864, so we know gg granpa or a stand-in was home around March of 1863. Obviously there was time for a Home Guard encounter between the beginning of the war and his 8 Nov 1863 enlistment date.
Another factor not usually mentioned is that the Union forces (already more than willing to punish South Carolina for what they saw as causing secession and the war) had come through a number of POW camps on their march and particularly "Camp Sorgham" immediately before reaching Columbia.
"Camp Sorgham" had initially been built to house 500 POWs and had swollen to over 13,000. Sherman's men had seen it up close and personal immediately before reaching the city. They had seen the cemetery, the deadlines, the conditions. They had talked with the survivors, heard the tales of abuse and starvation, the stories of escaped men hunted down by packs of dogs, seen the results of a lack of food. They knew first hand from their march that plenty of food existed throughout GA and SC; that somehow the POWs had not been fed amidst what they saw as abundance.
I don't know what specific effect that had on their attitudes, but I doubt very much they were thinking kindly about Southerners as they marched into Columbia.
Another factor was that the Confederate cavalry had shelled the Union camp the night before they crossed the river at Columbia. While that seems like it might be expected to me, reading some Union accounts leads to a belief the troops found this outrageous. Go figure.
Perhaps the title of this thread should be changed to the "Great White-Washing of Sherman" thread.
Let's take a look at his post-war career-
The Feds versus the Indians by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
....In July 1865, barely three months after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, General William Tecumseh Sherman was put in charge of the Military Division of the Missouri, which included everything west of the Mississippi. Many historians have sugarcoated Sherman's actions during this period by writing that his assignment was to help the U.S. achieve its long sought-after "Manifest Destiny."
In reality, Sherman's assignment was to provide a segment of the railroad industry, which heavily bankrolled the Republican party, with veiled corporate welfare in the form of eradicating the Indians of the West. In Sherman's own words: "We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads.... I regard the railroad as the most important element now in progress to facilitate the military interests of our Frontier."
"We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux," Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant (commanding general of the federal army) in 1866, "even to their extermination, men, women and children." The Sioux must "feel the superior power of the Government." Sherman vowed to remain in the West "till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched."
"During an assault," he instructed his troops, "the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age." He chillingly referred to this policy in an 1867 letter to Grant as "the final solution to the Indian problem," a phrase Hitler invoked some 70 years later.
Sherman viewed the Indians, writes biographer John F. Marszalek, "as he viewed recalcitrant Southerners during the war and newly freed people after: resisters to the legitimate forces of an ordered society." Many other Union officers "such as Philip Sheridan, George Armstrong Custer, John Pope, Benjamin Grierson, and others" helped Sherman achieve his "final solution" by the late 1880s.
The great triumvirate of the Civil War," biographer Michael Fellman writes, referring to Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, "applied their shared ruthlessness, born of their Civil War experiences, against a people all three despised."
Marszalek writes that in the Fall of 1868 Sherman instructed Sheridan to "act with all the vigor he had shown in the Shenandoah Valley during the final months of the Civil War," and he did. The two men popularized the phrase "a good Indian is a dead Indian," and Sherman promised to lead interference with the press if there was any talk of "atrocities."
Such talk would certainly have been appropriate, for the "final solution" was accomplished by hundreds of sneak attacks on Indian villages filled with women and children, which were wiped out by massive artillery and rifle fire. These "campaigns" were especially frequent in the winter months, when Indian families would be together.
It was also official government policy to slaughter as many buffalo as possible as a means of eventually starving out the Indians. It was not just the "tragedy of the commons" that was responsible for the near extinction of the American buffalo; it was official U.S. government policy.
Ironically, ex-slaves were recruited into the federal army to ethnically cleanse the American West. Movies have been made and books have been written in recent years celebrating these black "buffalo soldiers" by people who are apparently unaware (one hopes) that the black soldiers were taking part in genocide.
Sherman's ultimate objective "which he did not quite achieve" was murder of the entire Indian population. Just before his death in 1891 he bitterly complained in a letter to his son that if it were not for "civilian interference" by various government officials, he and his armies would have "gotten rid of them all." http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control=99
I am shocked. Shocked! That DiLorenzo would author such an article.
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
I am shocked. Shocked! That DiLorenzo would author such an article.
Ole
He couldn't research his way out of a cardboard box w/out inventing facts or purposefully skewing data. The man has no credibility and very little integrity.
__________________ 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
...January 23rd, fell on a Sunday back in 1870. At first light, in numbing cold, 200 dismounted U.S. cavalrymen lay spread out in ambush positions along snowy bluffs overlooking the Marias River in Montana and the large winter campsite of the Piegan leader Heavy Runner. The camp was surrounded, its warriors were away hunting, and the edgy troopers awaited the command to fire. Then the old chief came out of his lodge and walked toward the bluffs, waving a safe-conduct paper. An Army scout, Joe Kipp, shouted that this was the wrong camp; he was threatened into silence. Another scout, Joe Cobell, fired the first shot, dropping Heavy Runner in his tracks. What followed, according to Lt. Gus Doane who commanded F Company in the attack, was "the greatest slaughter of Indians ever made by U.S. troops."
Some 200 Piegans, most of them either elderly or women and children, were killed by the relentless firing of the Army's Springfield rifles. The .50-70 shells, half an inch thick, riddled the lodges, collapsing some onto smoking firepits and suffocating the half-awake, terrified victims. Some of the big bullets killed children under the protecting bodies of mothers and grandmothers. Those who ran to the sheltering cutbanks of the river were rounded up later; a total of 140 captives was turned loose without adequate food and clothing - some of them froze to death trying to walk to Fort Benton, ninety miles away....
There was a brief storm of outraged protest in Congress and in the big Eastern papers, but General of the Army William Sherman deflected a public inquiry by silencing the protests of General Alfred Sully (the BIA superintendent of Montana Indians) and Lieutenant William Pease, the Piegan Indian Agent (who had reported the da mning body-count). Sherman blandly issued a press release denying any military guilt, based on the fact that he "preferred to believe" what he was told by his officers, viz., most of the dead Piegans were warriors in Mountain Chief's camp, that "firing ceased the moment resistance was at an end ... quarter was given to all who asked for it ... a hundred women and children were allowed to go free." This was the same Sherman who, before the Was hita butchery, reassured Phil Sheridan: "I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot.... You may now go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority, and stand between you and any efforts that may be attempted in your rear to restrain your purpose or check your troops."
__________________ 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
Actually .50-70 is a correct caliber for Springfield trap doors M1866's IIRC, the first Springfield Trap doors were CW arms sleeved down to .50 w/ a trapdoor breach though I'm not certain any US Cav were still caryying those in 1870... don't know off hand and not going to bother to look. There were a lot of M1863 Sharps Carbines converted to .50-70.
Battalion, just out of curiosity do you think Sherman was there or planned the SNAFU that ensued? I believe only the originator of the thread claimed Sherman a hero... You just seem to be trying to crucify any man who ever wore the blue.
As a side stop bypassing the swear filter, let it do it's job... one of your brethern is why that particular word is on the list... ironically in a complaint about my use of the word.
__________________ 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
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