Sherman should have been a confederate general, then, like Wheeler, bad things done by troops under his command would be blamed on some Union general.
"By the end of the campaign Wheeler's cavalry was regarded by most Georgians who had made its acquaintance as more rapacious and destructive than the Yankees." [Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers & Civilians During Sherman's Campaign, p. 278]
"At least Madison's residents did not have to deal with Wheeler's men, a privilege denied those farther south. Writing to Jefferson Davis about a month after the events took place, a Griffin resident named P. A. Lawson explained, 'When General Sherman left Atlanta Wheeler's cavalry commenced their retreat before him, and but a handful of Sherman's men ran W[heeler's] whole command down to Griffin, and while S[herman's] army was marching through Fayette, Clayton, Henry, and Butts [counties], Wheeler's cavalry was burning up all the corn and fodder, driving off all the stock of the farmers for ten miles on each side of the railroad, all of from ten to twenty-five miles to the right and rear of Sherman's forces. Worse than all, the stock of mules and horses which General Wheeler's forces carried off, nine out of ten they have appropriated to their own use.' " [Noah Andre Trudeau, Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea, pp. 112-113] At the town of Jackson, Georgia, "The first Federals to enter the town found the courthouse already smoldering, courtesy of Wheeler's departing cavalry." [Ibid., p. 115]
"Nurtured by this mythology, legends of Sherman's marches have spread like kudzu in the South. For fourteen years, University of Georgia folklorist Elissa R. Henken collected, analyzed, and categorized such legends from throughout the state. Aware that Sherman was considered a fiend incarnate whose army razed not only Georgia and the Carolinas but much of the South as well, Henken was surprised to find that legends detailing destruction were paradoxically outnumbered by 'stories about the places that Sherman did not destroy.' The tales revealed several motifs. Towns were reportedly spared because Sherman had a girlfriend living there during his antebellum stay in the South, or because of a Masonic tie between the general and a resident (despite the fact that Sherman was not a Mason), or because he found the place simply too beautiful to destroy. Many of the legends thrive in towns that Sherman never passed through. Henken considers them expressions of Lost Cause pride in which the ogre Sherman is tamed by the influence of southern civilization, most often by genteel but tough and wily women. In addition to preservation legends regarding towns, Henken recorded family legends about the saving of a single house or property. These tales also generally feature women, determined and fierce 'steel magnolias' who outwit, tame, or defeat Sherman and his men through cunning, defiance, or violence. Candid Southerners have acknowledged the unreliability of these legends. The inhabitants of Screven County, Georgia (through which the 154th New York passed), believed so strongly that the Yankees ransacked and burned every house, historian Dixon Hollingsworth wrote, 'that each family seemed to be compelled in later years to devise some explanation as to why its home was spared.' But Sherman's men did not wantonly burn houses, Hollingsworth observed, and usually left enough provisions on a farm to support a family for a few days. 'In fact they marched by hundreds of Screven County homes without even infringing on the privacy of the families.' " [Mark H. Dunkelman,Marching With Sherman: Through Georgia and the Carolinas with the 154th New York, pp. 11-12]
"Although three of Sherman's four corps crossed Screven County, residents reported that the resulting destruction was slight. … A Confederate colonel who was home on leave reported that only four or five houses were burned in all of Screven County. The Yankees had targeted certain homeowners–a man who hunted escaped union prisoners with bloodhounds, another who barricaded roads in the army's advance, and a foolhardy fellow who shot the first soldiers to approach his house. Sherman's men left the county's inhabitants with enough provisions to tide them over, the colonel maintained, had they not subsequently been overrun by Joseph Wheeler's Confederate cavalry. Wheeler lacked a supply system of his own and, like Sherman, depended on the land for sustenance. To the rebel colonel, Wheeler's men were worse than the Yankees; they 'filled the whole country with terror.' An unidentified refugee in Screven County commented on the depredations of Wheeler's cavalry in a letter to the Countryman. Widely reputed to be 'the greatest horse thieves in the country,' Wheeler's men 'never acted worse than they have recently.' While the Yankees were burning and destroying property in one part of the county, the writer alleged, Wheeler's troopers were stealing horses and mules in another. Remarking on this letter, Joseph Turner wrote, 'The whole land mourns, on account of Wheeler's cavalry. Here in middle Georgia, they are dreaded fully as much, if not more, than the yankees [sic].' " [Ibid., pp. 81-82]
"I am pretty sure Sherman should not be considered the 'bete noire' of Southern history, much less saluted as 'the Attila of the West,' the title H.L. Mencken accorded him. Much of Sherman's violence was verbal. He habitually used language that was vivid, emphatic and that tended toward exaggeration. Even E. Merton Coulter, the dean of Georgia historians a half-century ago, conceded that the general made many threats he did not carry out.
"Thus he told his subordinates in North Georgia that the way to keep trains from being blown up was to fill the cars wil local civilians and Confederate prisoners and then pull them 'by means of a long rope' across places where explosive charges were suspected. 'Of course the enemy can not complain of his own traps,' he reasoned. But my research produced no evidence that the scheme was ever carried out. Nor did he deport Southern hotheads and die-hards who fell into his hands to places like Honduras and Madagascar, a proposal actually approved by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
In fact, Sherman fought the war in Georgia pretty much by the book.
According to the British legal authority J.M. Spaight, he violated the rules of war only once in the Atlanta campaign: when he failed to give a 24-hour warning before bombarding the city on July 20, 1864."
[Lee Kennett, "General Sherman burned by history? Man that South loves to hate may not have been so bad," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 31, 2001]
"There is a persistent tradition that Sherman's troops burned vast numbers of rural homes--'thousands' was the word used by Chaplain Bradley--and in the decades after the war any chimneys standing alone about the Georgia countryside got the lugubrious name 'Sherman's sentinels.' But what evidence there is indicates that only a minority of the houses along the army's path were fired by the Northern soldiers--probably a smaller proportion than during the evacuation of North Georgia. That is the impression to be gained from reading the more meticulous diarists; a house in the countryside going up in flames was noted. Henry Hitchcock was constantly on watch for them but did not note very many. Later studies of the areas the army passed through likewise show that the majority of the houses survived the holocaust of 1864. Using detailed maps prepared by one of Sherman's topographical engineers for the sixty-odd-mile stretch between Covington and Milledgeville, a geographer at the University of Georgia went back over the route in 1955 and discovered that many of the structures had survived not only Sherman's passage, but also accidental fires and termites, and were peacefully succumbing to dry rot. As for Milledgeville and the surrounding area, the author of another study found that 'the actual destruction of private dwellings ... was rare indeed, either in the town or along the route of march.'" [Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers & Civilians During Sherman's Campaign, pp. 275-276]
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