CrossRiver
Sergeant
- Joined
- Dec 11, 2013
Actually, relatively speaking, after Sherman and company got finished with dutifully "beautifying" parts of the South leaving naked chimney's in his wake anything would be a paradise compared to that.
An editorial printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer cheered on Sherman's plan to wage war against defenseless noncombatants, rejoicing at "the fate of that accursed hotbed of treason." General Sherman himself regarded secessionists as traitors and wrote that the state "deserves all that seems in store for her."
In a letter to Major R.M. Sawyer dated January 31,1864, the general declared his belief that the war was the result of a "false political doctrine," namely, "that any and every people have a right to self-government." In the same letter (published in The Rebellion Record in 1865), Sherman contended that the Federal government could rightfully take the property, and even the life, of anyone who did not submit to its authority, and he complained that it was the "political nonsense of slave rights, State rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of press, and other such trash" that had "deluded the Southern people into war."
In January 1865, Sherman's forces gathered at Beaufort, South Carolina, and during that month a few of his brigades moved a little farther inland. By the first of February, the main advance was underway. Divided into two wings, one under the command of General Oliver 0. Howard, the army began to cut a wide path of destruction across South Carolina from the coast to the North Carolina border, burning farms, plantations and towns (including the capital city of Columbia); demolishing railroad lines; destroying or confiscating crops and livestock; and plundering and abusing civilians, reducing them to hopelessness and destitution. One of Shermans aides, Captain George W. Pepper, recorded his memories of the march through South Carolina in his memoir, published in 1866:
[H]ouses were burned as they were found. Whenever a view could be had from high ground, black columns of smoke were seen rising here and there within a circuit of twenty or thirty miles.
Solid built chimneys were the only relics of plantation houses after the fearful blast had swept by. The destruction of houses, barns, mills, &c., was almost universal. Families who remained at home, occasionally kept the roof over their heads.
Sherman's armies met with little in the way of military opposition from the relatively small number of Confederate forces in the state, who were compelled to withdraw and burn bridges behind them as a force of more than sixty thousand Union troops relentlessly moved inland.
In 1865, Major George W. Nichols, an aide-de-camp to General Sherman, published a book about the campaign in Georgia and South Carolina, revealing his contempt for the people of South Carolina, whom he dehumanized as "the scum, the lower dregs of civilization. They are not Americans; they are merely South Carolinians." Nichols thought that the thievery committed against civilians (usually women and old men) by his soldiers was amusing. After describing how the soldiers would search out valuables that had been hidden away by civilians, he added, "These searches made one of the pleasant excitements of our march."
The soldiers sent out as foragers, usually in advance of the main army, were some of the worst offenders in terms of pillaging and other wrongdoing. These men were called "bummers." In his book Merchant of Terror; author John B. Walters described them as "brigands and desperadoes" who operated virtually free of any military discipline or restraint.
Of Sherman's accomplishments in South Carolina, Major Nichols went on proudly:
History will in vain be searched for a parallel to the scathing and destructive effect of the invasion of the Carolinas. Aside from the destruction of military things, there were destructions overwhelming, overleaping the present generation... agriculture, commerce, cannot be revived in our day. Day by day our legions of armed men surged over the land, over a region forty miles wide, burning everything we could not take away. On every side, the head, center and rear of our columns might be traced by columns of smoke by day and the glare of flames by night. The burning hand of war pressed on these people, blasting, withering.
Another Federal officer, Major James A. Connolly, wrote home to his wife that halfway through the march in South Carolina, he was "perfectly sickened by the frightful devastation our army was spreading on every hand." He described the army's actions as "absolutely terrible" and reported how most houses were first plundered and then burned, and women, children and old men were turned out into the "mud and rain." He told his wife that he knew the campaign against South Carolina would be a terrible one before it began, but he had no idea "how frightful the reality would be."
John J. Hight, a chaplain of the Fifty-eighth Indiana Infantry Regiment, wrote in his diary, "Sometimes the world seemed on fire. We were almost stifled by smoke and flames." On March 7,1865, Sherman's second in command, General O.O. Howard, wrote to another officer that "General Blair reports that every house on his line of march today was pillaged, trunks broken open, jewelry, silver &c, taken."
Historian Joseph T. Glatthaar, author of an award-winning book on Sherman's campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas, stated that the Federal army burned the capital city of Columbia (just as it had also torched a number of towns on its way to it) and that most of Sherman's soldiers admitted that they would do it. The Columbia correspondent for the New York Herald newspaper reported in an article submitted on June 21, 1865, "There can be but little doubt that the destruction of Columbia was the work of our army."
...
In his travels with Sherman's army, reporter David P Conyngham had seen much destruction in Georgia, but when he gave his general impression of the operations in South Carolina, he stressed how much worse was than Georgia:
We marched, on the whole, four hundred and fifty miles, our wings extending some thirty-five or forty miles. This would give an area of over fifteen thousand square miles which we operated over, all the time supporting men and animals on the country. Indeed, the loss we inflicted on the enemy is incalculable, and all at a trifling sacrifice of life...
As for the wholesale burning, pillage, devastation, committed in South Carolina, magnify all I have said of Georgia fifty fold, and then throw in an occasional murder, "just to bring an old, hard-fisted cuss to his senses," and you have a pretty good idea of the whole thing.
-- Stokes, Karen. South Carolina Civilians in Sherman's Path, Introduction, pp 9-14,17.
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