Your quick to give Grant credit for Everything that positively happened on his Watch. Regardless of how little he had to do with it. Sherman was complicit by losing control of his Troops at the very least. Sherman’s attitudes were displayed in his writings prior to his Campaign. Yankee Troops used pillage and fire as tools against Southern Civilians from Burnsides first incursion on the NC Coast. Sherman’s Troops bragged about it afterwards.
Some rich Citizens got a better deal. Sometimes had guards placed at their homes for protection. The lower classes and Slaves got the brunt of it. They are the ones who came in direct contact Sherman’s Bummers and the bulk of his Army.
It was not generally true, however, that the solid yeomen and numerous poor people of South Carolina were spared much of what was visited on aristocrats, Sherman's men burner far more that they passed over. Afterwards , several spoke quite openly about this new threshold of violence over which they had crossed. Hames Greenalch, a Michigan private, told his wife, Fidelia, after the march, " it was a general understanding throughout the entire army when it left Savannah that [South Carolina would be made an example of and I can say it has carried out to the letter. "Some felt bad that ordinary folk had been swept into the firestorm along with the rich. but rationalized it as a necessary if unfortunate outcome of the war against the aristocrats. Wrote one corporal, "I commiserate [with] the destitution of the poor, but I can shed no tears for the rich. Great distress must prevail where we have been." This avenging army had been a force of nature guided by a shared mission. Another Michigan soldier confirmed to his uncle, "in South Carolina, there was no restraint whatever in pillaging and foraging. Men were allowed to do as they liked, burn and destroy."
Withdrawing disapprobation and sharing malice with their troops united commander, officers, and men against the people of South Carolina in the most violent and prolonged anticivilian campaign of the war. Colonel Oscar Jackson entered in his diary that, "We have given South Carolina a terrible scourging." Mercy and forbearance had been the exception, Jackson believed. We have destroyed all factories, cotton mills, gins, presses and cotton, burnt one city, the capital, and most of the villages on our route, as well as most of the barns, outbuildings and dwelling houses, and every house that escaped fire has been pillaged. General Alpheus S. Williams, a division commander, replicated Jackson's images in a letter to his daughter about Sherman's campaign through the innermost heart of Dixie. "Our people, impressed with the idea that every South Carolinian was an arrant rebel, spared nothing but the old men, women and children. All materials, all vacant houses, factories, cotton gins and presses, everything that makes the wealth of a people, everything edible and wearable, was swept away." Williams claimed he did not personally order such destruction, but that neither could he nor would he have limited it. "The soldiers quietly took matters into their own hands. Orders to respect houses and private property not necessary for substance for the army were not greatly heeded. . .indeed no heeded at all. Our 'Bummers.' the dare-devils and reckless of the army put the flames to "everything," concluded Williams with awe and something approaching admiration. "We marched with thousands of columns of smoke marking the lines of each corps. The sights at times, as seen from elevated grounds, were often terribly sublime." Williams confessed, however, that the same sights that had appealed to his romantic sensibility were "often intensely painful [judging] form the distressed and frightened condition of the old men and women and children left behind." pp224-225 Fellman Citizen Sherman.
Fellman has several pages of first hand accounts of Sherman's march. General Williams is a good witness. From the Private to the General, Sherman's army got the message. This stuff happened all over the South. Sherman did the same thing in MS. Have to Question your Analysis. Why the NEED to protect Sherman after 160 years is puzzling. Lost Cause on Steriods!