This is likely to be controversial, but appears to be a presentation of the facts as they are known. The last paragraph is an expression of the writer's opinion, but it is also food for thought. The link where this discussion took place was
www.americancivilwarforum.com and the discussion related to Stonewall Jackson.
"On 24 April 1863, under Lincoln's signature, the army promulgated to its officers General Order no. 100, which came to be known as the Lieber Code and eventually received acclaim throughout the military in the Western world. Halleck was a close friend of its author, Professor Francis Lieber of Columbia University. A month after this order was given to the officers in the Union army, Professor Lieber wrote to the top commander, General Halleck:
I know by letters...that the wanton destruction of property by our men is alarming. It does incalculable injury. It demoralizes our troops, it annihilates wealth irrevocably and makes a return to a state of peace and peaceful minds more and more difficult. Your order [to the officers]...with reference to the Code, and point out the disastrous consequences of reckless devastation, in a manner that it might not furnish our reckless enemy with new arguments for his savagery.
Halleck remained general in chief until Lincoln fired hm in 1864 and appointed Grant as top commander. It was under Grant that the Lieber Code, now in the hands of all leading officers, was disregarded, and pillage and plunder became the general order of the final year of the war. Sherman and Sheridan could not possibly have undertaken their devastation of the South if they had followed this new military code on the laws of war. They also turned away from their education at West Point and the laws of war they had learned there under Halleck.
Years after the war Sherman wrote a letter to a friend in which he acknowledged that he knew better--that at West Point he had been taught that the pillage he brought to the South was a crime, punishable by death:"I know that in the beginning I, too, had the old West Point notion that pillage was a capital crime, and punished it by shooting."7 (Letter to J.B. Fry, 3 SEP 1884 in
Hard Hand of War, 193.)
American generals were fully aware that Napoleon was punished and banished from Europe for engaging in aggressive wars over a twenty-year period. The law of warfare was being enforced for the first time against a loser. But winners need not worry, then or now, as war crimes, by and large, are only committed by defeated leaders. In the Civil War, Lincoln and his generals were immune from the laws of war--because they won".