Sherman Evilizing General Sherman

"Total War" and "Hard War" are two different things, often deliberately confused to demonize Sherman.

"Total War" is a phrase coined in 1935 by a German general named of Erich Ludendorff in his book, Der Totale Krieg ("The Total War").

Actually by Douhet in the previous decade.

Ludendorff's "Total War" including the mass killing of civilians, while Sherman's "Hard War" was focused on the destruction of infrastructure and on psychologically demoralizing the enemy.

"From the vantage point of the 21st century, Sherman’s way of war seems a dramatic departure from earlier methods and has prompted some historians to characterize his March to the Sea as the birth of modern total war. But “hard war” was not total war. While the march destroyed property and infrastructure and visited suffering and fear on the civilian population, it lacked the wholesale destruction of human life that characterized World War II.

Sherman’s primary targets — foodstuffs and industrial, government and military property — were carefully chosen to create the desired effect, and never included mass killing of civilians, especially those law-abiding noncombatants who did not resist what Sherman described as the national authority. Indeed, Sherman always claimed that his war on property was more humane than traditional methods of conflict between armies. He even told one South Carolina woman that he was ransacking her plantation so that her soldier husband would come home and Grant would not have to kill him in the trenches at Petersburg. He was fighting to bring rebels back into the Union, not to annihilate them."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/rethinking-shermans-march/?_r=0

Yes. Sherman practiced hard war, not total war.
 
o War of Annihilation means the Willingness ot annihilate as a final measure not the complete application thereof.

You're confusing the term. Annihilation in this regard doesn't mean just killing. It means removing the military force. One doesn't have to kill every soldier to do that.

The Union used a strategy of annihilation during the Civil War, because the situation required it. They had to annihilate the military forces of the confederacy. They had to annihilate the resistance to national authority. One does that by either killing them or forcing them to surrender. Union strategy was to defeat the confederate forces and take their armies off the field. Grant was the only general to take an entire army off the field, and he did so three times: Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Appomattox.
 
you left out this part of the quote
Rightly or wrongly, Sherman did what he deemed militarily necessary within the rules laid down by his government to win the conflict and save his country. Rather than an aberration, his “hard hand of war” fits well within the American military tradition. Like the total war tactics of his 20th century successors and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed more recently, the March to the Sea reveals the moral ambiguity of war and the extent to which Americans are willing to go when our national existence is at stake."

It seems to me more than a little bit ironic that there is a indignant thread on here about Sherman's demonization but none in reference to the common Confederate soldier and the Southern Civilian as equating to Nazis,that's become an omnipresent theme among t many liberal and academics . Now here is a shocker when you do that you get an equal amount of vituperation in return, and the easiest targets are Sherman and Lincoln.
The closest thing we have had to the Third Reich is not the Civil War for either side but Sheridan Sherman et all during the plains Indian wars. If you do not think remarks like leaving "nothing but their eyes to cry" does not move you, I can only say your Triumphalism outstrips your humanity.
Mr Halls blogger colleagues are full of condescension,contempt, references to the Flaggers and Confederate Heritage and Trailer Parks ,how stupid they are ( read between the lines Crackers,white trash,Hillbilly's, rednecks). I wonder if Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner II knew his Dad was equivalent to a Nazi( when he was killed at Okinawa),or Gen Nathan Bedford Forrest III killed in a bombing run over Germany. my Dad could have saved a lot of pain and suffering at Anzio if he knew he was fighting against his own kind. I can still hear him shouting the south will rise agin when grandmas bisuits came olut of the oven adn we all would laugh like hill. Wes should ahve said Sieg Heil I guess. Don't be throwing no rocks from that Waterford Crystal Condo, and that goes for blue honks or Grey.

Comparisons with the Nazis are verboten in this forum.
 
The thing was, if people went hungry from Sherman's passing through, it usually wasn't for very long. One account of a burned out plantation said they were reduced to eating dried corn kernels they found between the floorboards of some outbuilding - until relations came to take them away four days later. The people who may well have starved were slaves who didn't have a family to come to the rescue. But even among the very poor and destitute, it seemed starvation was very, very limited. The land was fairly bountiful even where Sherman went. McPherson claims the death total for the war should be increased to include civilians who died from disease or starvation, and he's probably right on that. Sherman did avoid as best he could visiting destruction on plain folks in their cabins and scraggly one mule farmers, but nothing works perfectly and it's a big ruckus when an army simply passes by let alone does anything. Some of them may well have had a very hard time of it.
 
I should add I resist mightily any insinuation that Union Soldiers were war criminal as well,a few individuals were murderers and thieves as were some Confederates but as individuals only.`
 
you left out this part of the quote
Rightly or wrongly, Sherman did what he deemed militarily necessary within the rules laid down by his government to win the conflict and save his country. Rather than an aberration, his “hard hand of war” fits well within the American military tradition. Like the total war tactics of his 20th century successors and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed more recently, the March to the Sea reveals the moral ambiguity of war and the extent to which Americans are willing to go when our national existence is at stake."

It seems to me more than a little bit ironic that there is a indignant thread on here about Sherman's demonization but none in reference to the common Confederate soldier and the Southern Civilian as equating to Nazis,that's become an omnipresent theme among t many liberal and academics . Now here is a shocker when you do that you get an equal amount of vituperation in return, and the easiest targets are Sherman and Lincoln.
The closest thing we have had to the Third Reich is not the Civil War for either side but Sheridan Sherman et all during the plains Indian wars. If you do not think remarks like leaving "nothing but their eyes to cry" does not move you, I can only say your Triumphalism outstrips your humanity.
Mr Halls blogger colleagues are full of condescension,contempt, references to the Flaggers and Confederate Heritage and Trailer Parks ,how stupid they are ( read between the lines Crackers,white trash,Hillbilly's, rednecks). I wonder if Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner II knew his Dad was equivalent to a Nazi( when he was killed at Okinawa),or Gen Nathan Bedford Forrest III killed in a bombing run over Germany. my Dad could have saved a lot of pain and suffering at Anzio if he knew he was fighting against his own kind. I can still hear him shouting the south will rise agin when grandmas bisuits came olut of the oven adn we all would laugh like hill. Wes should ahve said Sieg Heil I guess. Don't be throwing no rocks from that Waterford Crystal Condo, and that goes for blue honks or Grey.
As Cash pointed out, no one else has gone there because it's against the rules of the forum, and you probably should not go there either.

However, I would point out that just because your father was funny and fought at Anzio doesn't mean the South never committed atrocities. The two things are not related. At most, it says something about what your father believed about the Civil War, and he wasn't there, any more than any of us were there. If anyone here has suggested that descendants of Confederates can't be great American soldiers and good people, I haven't seen it - again, if for no other reason, because suggesting that would be against the forum rules.
 
Comparisons with the Nazis are verboten in this forum.
As Cash pointed out, no one else has gone there because it's against the rules of the forum, and you probably should not go there either.
.
@sonofboth and other new members:

Listen to the nice folks who are trying to steer you away from the wrath of the moderators. As you're fairly new, you'll get one break (as in I won't delete your post above and I won't zap you or report you)....but one is my limit.

New members, please read the rules and terms of membership you agreed to when you joined. If there is ever a question about something being appropriate, feel free to PM a moderator and ask before posting, to save heartburn. It's too late once you've been reported by 20 or so members and gotten into a cyber shouting match with another member or two. Can't help you at that point.

And a heads up--once you're on our radar....well, you're on it for a loooooooong time.

Posted in Capacity as Moderator
 
The thing was, if people went hungry from Sherman's passing through, it usually wasn't for very long. One account of a burned out plantation said they were reduced to eating dried corn kernels they found between the floorboards of some outbuilding - until relations came to take them away four days later. The people who may well have starved were slaves who didn't have a family to come to the rescue. But even among the very poor and destitute, it seemed starvation was very, very limited. The land was fairly bountiful even where Sherman went. McPherson claims the death total for the war should be increased to include civilians who died from disease or starvation, and he's probably right on that. Sherman did avoid as best he could visiting destruction on plain folks in their cabins and scraggly one mule farmers, but nothing works perfectly and it's a big ruckus when an army simply passes by let alone does anything. Some of them may well have had a very hard time of it.

If people were hungry for longer periods, it likely was due to the same bad drought that kept the Comanches from raiding more extensively into Texas during the war and which dried up some Southern rivers and created havoc for forces on both sides.
 
You're confusing the term. Annihilation in this regard doesn't mean just killing. It means removing the military force. One doesn't have to kill every soldier to do that.

The Union used a strategy of annihilation during the Civil War, because the situation required it. They had to annihilate the military forces of the confederacy. They had to annihilate the resistance to national authority. One does that by either killing them or forcing them to surrender. Union strategy was to defeat the confederate forces and take their armies off the field. Grant was the only general to take an entire army off the field, and he did so three times: Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Appomattox.

Sherman certainly had the opportunity to annihilate the AOT before Bennett Place by confronting the Army, especially when commanded by Hood, as an alternative to the March to the Sea. Sherman was more hesitant to sacrifice the men of his Army than Grant. I suspect that is a source of part of his popularity among his men. It was preferable to bring the war to the civilian population relatively unopposed than face a standing army. As far as demonizing Sherman or any other controversial figure 150 years later, moral judgement should be left between he and his maker.
 
"Maj. Gen. JFC Fuller in his classic Decisive Battles of the Western World describes Sherman as the first of the modern totalitarian generals. Sherman universalize the war, waged on his enemies people and not only on Army, and made terrorism the linchpin of his strategy." Russell F Wigley as aptly characterized his strategy is one of annihilation. It transcended protracted conventional warfare. It not only aim to destroy Confederate armies, but also affected the destruction of transportation links, factories, agricultural crops and entire cities. Sherman's war of annihilation created an animosity towards the north that lingers in the south to the state. His strategy became the American way of war. It would reach its apogee with the strategic bombing of World War II." I the Book Unintended Consequences by British Military Historians Kenneth Hagan and Ian Bickertonthye say this
"What Sherman had in mind when he first announced that war is hell, he wasn't merely describing the awfulness of the experience, nor was he denying the possibility of moral judgment. He made such judgments freely, and he surely thought of himself as a righteous soldier. His maxim sums up, with admirable brevity, a whole way of thinking about war a one-sided and partial way of thinking, I shall argue, a powerful nonetheless. In his view, war is entirely and singularly the crime of those who begin it, and soldiers resisting aggression or rebellion can never be blamed for anything they do that brings victory closer. The sentence war is hell is doctrine not description: it is a moral argument an attempt at self-justification. Sherman was claiming to be innocent of all those actions(though they were his own actions) for which she was severely attacked. Sherman wants to judge war only at its outermost boundaries. But there is a great deal to be said about its interior regions, as he himself admits. Even in hell, it is possible to be more or less humane, the fight with or without restraint. Sherman's view is war is cruelty and you cannot refine it and therefore the one on those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and malediction is a people can pour out. But he himself deserves no curses at all" I know I had no hand in making this war". He is only fighting it, not by choice but because he has to. He has then been forced to use force in the burning of Atlanta is simply one more example of that use, one of his entailment support. It is cruel, no doubt but the cruelty isn't his own, it belong so to speak to the man of the Confederacy" you who in the midst of peace and prosperity have b plunged us into war.
another example of this kind of thinking comes from Phil Sheridan Sheridan, on leave from Indian-fighting on the western frontier, had attached himself as an observer to the victorious Prussian army, where he established a personal friendship with Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification. Asked by Bismarck how he thought the Germans should respond to costly French guerrilla attacks, Sheridan unhesitatingly replied: "The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with after the war." He advised that the insurgents be hanged, their villages burned and their lands laid waste until they begged for peace. While some Germans found this advice unacceptably cruel, Bismarck took it to heart. There should be "no laziness in killing," he ordered.
General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Department of the Missouri, issued orders for the Washita River expedition, including the following: "…to destroy [Indian] villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and to bring back all woman and children [survivors]."[62] The purpose of this "total war" strategy,[63] envisioned by Sheridan, was to make "all segments of Indian society experience the horrors of war as fully as the warriors"." We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to their extermination,men, women and children.
General William Tecumseh Sherman" If this is not evil what is? Sherman admitted in his memoirs that he was taught at West Point that he could have been prosecuted and possibly hanged as a war criminal for doing the things he did. My concern is not what he did that was 150 years ago it is the ramifications it had on military theory. The authors I quoted are all British and have no whining Confederate apologia going.
It should probably be pointed out that you start with Sherman and end with Sheridan...two very different critters imho...definitely in regards to their actions against the tribes (a look at things often reveals that Sherman was hardly the nastiest thing we put up against them...exhibit A should probably be Sheridan there). And it was perhaps misfortunate that it was Sheridan was the one speaking to Bismarck in light of later developments.

And perhaps not a soothing statement, but one's health is better than nothing at all -- and the only way people find out about that is if they've actually had the worst happen to them :wink:
 
Those who would demonize Sherman and his US soldiers say we can't compare Sherman and his men to the Mongols or Romans... are we allowed to compare them to British troops in India or China w/in two decades of the ACW? Lots of crickets going on when those who claim Sherman and his men were the anti-christ are confronted with historical context. Sherman and his men were absolute angels when compared to armies on either side of the ACW. Is the issue that they damaged white southerners instead of non whites? Had Sherman and his men did what they were accused of doing to black folks instead of white southerners everything would have been all white as far as the slaveocracy/Lost Cause and their modern proponents are concerned.

Those who would demonize Sherman, during the his infamous march, could hardly compare his action to those of the US soldiers’ action at the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado during the same period.
 
Sherman certainly had the opportunity to annihilate the AOT before Bennett Place by confronting the Army, especially when commanded by Hood, as an alternative to the March to the Sea.

They were running away from him. He could fruitlessly chase them or he could do something positive by destroying infrastructure such as rail lines. He chose to do something positive.


Sherman was more hesitant to sacrifice the men of his Army than Grant. I suspect that is a source of part of his popularity among his men. It was preferable to bring the war to the civilian population relatively unopposed than face a standing army. As far as demonizing Sherman or any other controversial figure 150 years later, moral judgement should be left between he and his maker.

He showed the confederacy couldn't protect its civilian population without killing civilians.
 
When one asks how many civilians died as a result of Sherman's march one again gets crickets. Was it the duty of the US to feed & shelter an enemy populace or was it the duty of the CS? The CS failed and failed badly to protect its populace from the hand of War. It could be argued w/ some validity that the CS didn't much care about the populace that was hurt worst by the effects of the war. No serious attempt was made to stop Sherman in Georgia or SC. Frankly, there was no attempt to retake New Orleans from that "Beast" Butler.

What Sherman did was foist a load of refugees upon the CS, refugees the CS did very little to care for and what it proved to the world as well as the average CS citizen was that by late 1864 the CS was nothing but a hollow shell. Perhaps that is the true reason Sherman and his men were hated by the likes of Davis and his supporters today.

The majority of destrution caused by Sherman and his men was to infrastructure, very few CS civilians were injured or killed by Sherman and his men, the majority of private property destroyed was that of the wealthier class. Barns full of fodder, cotton or tobacco were legitimate targets. The CS had proven hey would confiscate some or all to finance and feed their war effort. Destroying such things hurt the CS war effort and were and still are legitimate military targets.

Sherman and his men destroyed mills, barns, bridges, govt infrastructure and freed tens of thousands of slaves (that being the real rub that chafes his detractors IMO) his men killed and lost a minimum of troops. And civilian casualties were marginal, the charge that his men raped their way across Georgia & the Carolinas is so much hype IMO, were there rapes? Absolutely, were they systematic or epidemic of Shermans men... no.

For the Lost Cause to have any credibility they have to paint the US soldier as something he was not and they do so fraudulantly. The US soldier was a man of flesh and blood with an iron conviction who by and large did his duty and then went home to get on with his life.
 
Those who would demonize Sherman, during the his infamous march, could hardly compare his action to those of the US soldiers’ action at the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado during the same period.
Why not? Can we not compare them to the British soldier against the Sepoy or the CS soldier against the black US soldier? Sand Creek was murder. Ft Pillow was murder, Saltville was murder & as far as I've ever seen you are ok with the last two. It is only when a US soldier is involved that you suddenly have a conscience.

Shermans men did nothing like Sand Creek to any CS population, his men did nothing like Ft Pillow or Saltville either and you well know it.
 
They were running away from him. He could fruitlessly chase them or he could do something positive by destroying infrastructure such as rail lines. He chose to do something positive.
I would not consider engaging an enemy army in war fruitless. That is the ultimate goal to win the war.
 
When one asks how many civilians died as a result of Sherman's march one again gets crickets. Was it the duty of the US to feed & shelter an enemy populace or was it the duty of the CS? The CS failed and failed badly to protect its populace from the hand of War. It could be argued w/ some validity that the CS didn't much care about the populace that was hurt worst by the effects of the war. No serious attempt was made to stop Sherman in Georgia or SC. Frankly, there was no attempt to retake New Orleans from that "Beast" Butler.

What Sherman did was foist a load of refugees upon the CS, refugees the CS did very little to care for and what it proved to the world as well as the average CS citizen was that by late 1864 the CS was nothing but a hollow shell. Perhaps that is the true reason Sherman and his men were hated by the likes of Davis and his supporters today.

The majority of destrution caused by Sherman and his men was to infrastructure, very few CS civilians were injured or killed by Sherman and his men, the majority of private property destroyed was that of the wealthier class. Barns full of fodder, cotton or tobacco were legitimate targets. The CS had proven hey would confiscate some or all to finance and feed their war effort. Destroying such things hurt the CS war effort and were and still are legitimate military targets.

Sherman and his men destroyed mills, barns, bridges, govt infrastructure and freed tens of thousands of slaves (that being the real rub that chafes his detractors IMO) his men killed and lost a minimum of troops. And civilian casualties were marginal, the charge that his men raped their way across Georgia & the Carolinas is so much hype IMO, were there rapes? Absolutely, were they systematic or epidemic of Shermans men... no.

For the Lost Cause to have any credibility they have to paint the US soldier as something he was not and they do so fraudulantly. The US soldier was a man of flesh and blood with an iron conviction who by and large did his duty and then went home to get on with his life.
Interesting, is it the fault of the US Government that it did not protect Chambersburg or Lawrence?
 
I guess that's why he was the general. Chasing after an organized force who is running away from you and refusing to give battle is fruitless.
He did send an Army after Hood. It could have been destroyed in greater detail quicker than Bennett Place. It was more appealing to wage war on the civilian and military infrastructure relatively unopposed.
 
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