ForeverFree
Major
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2010
- Location
- District of Columbia
The interesting thing about WWII was that the crimes of the Nazis were so horrific they weren't illegal! There had to be a re-evaluation of war and war crime. Words such as genocide were coined then to describe what had happened and give legal grounds to try the Nazis. There is nothing even remotely similar to their deeds anywhere in the Civil War. From time immemorial, whenever an army passes through they pillage the village and kill everybody. This didn't happen with Sherman - for one thing, he didn't stay long enough to really do hard core damage. When you consider that his army was, whenever it camped, the largest city in the South outside of New Orleans, it's amazing more didn't happen.
FYI, that is exactly the point made by the historian Stephanie McCurry recently. In June 2011 she attended a conference in Israel in which civil wars throughout history were discussed. She notes in the October 2012 issue of Civil War Times:
The level of barbarity and violence reached in the United States pales even in comparison to the other major example of a civil conflict fought conventionally. In the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), there were, in addition to 300,00 battlefield deaths, at least 200,000 extrajudicial killings of civilians-including the purposeful killing of many women and children behind the lines. Three-quarters of them were killed by Franco's forces in mass executions... More than half a million refugees were forced into exile, and many died in French concentration camps... There is little in the American record to compare to this systematic targeting, terrorizing and exterminating of civilians for purposes of political repression...
It is a sad truth that the civil wars of our own time constantly force the Civil War into new perspective. Observers of recent genocidal wars in Africa or Yugoslavia are unimpressed with the violence of the American war. What strikes them most is the level of restraint observed by Union troops in their treatment of enemy soldiers and civilians. What other country, they ask, adopted rules of war in the midst of the fighting? Indeed. It is one of the most impressive and - yes - unique features of our war; that the Lincoln administration was willing to bind itself to a set of regulations limiting the latitude of the Union army in its operations, including in occupied territory and guerrilla warfare. It says something profound.
There are real limits to this view, more than we are yet aware. For the record holds abundant evidence of one kind of violence to which we have yet to do justice: the torture, rape, and murder of enslaved men, women and children by both armies, but especially Confederate forces. While the Spanish have undertaken a belated accounting, in the United States there has been no such effort to estimate the extrajudicial dead. We know of Fort Pillow and other massacres of black POWs. But this number must pale in comparison to the number of noncombatant slaves killed. Official and personal records are littered with casual references: to slaves, including children, beaten to death on plantations, runaways hanged, male slaves executed, insurrections repressed by mass execution, and to torture, mutilation and murder by Southern "scouts," even after the surrender... For these war dead there has been no accounting.
It is a sad truth that the civil wars of our own time constantly force the Civil War into new perspective. Observers of recent genocidal wars in Africa or Yugoslavia are unimpressed with the violence of the American war. What strikes them most is the level of restraint observed by Union troops in their treatment of enemy soldiers and civilians. What other country, they ask, adopted rules of war in the midst of the fighting? Indeed. It is one of the most impressive and - yes - unique features of our war; that the Lincoln administration was willing to bind itself to a set of regulations limiting the latitude of the Union army in its operations, including in occupied territory and guerrilla warfare. It says something profound.
There are real limits to this view, more than we are yet aware. For the record holds abundant evidence of one kind of violence to which we have yet to do justice: the torture, rape, and murder of enslaved men, women and children by both armies, but especially Confederate forces. While the Spanish have undertaken a belated accounting, in the United States there has been no such effort to estimate the extrajudicial dead. We know of Fort Pillow and other massacres of black POWs. But this number must pale in comparison to the number of noncombatant slaves killed. Official and personal records are littered with casual references: to slaves, including children, beaten to death on plantations, runaways hanged, male slaves executed, insurrections repressed by mass execution, and to torture, mutilation and murder by Southern "scouts," even after the surrender... For these war dead there has been no accounting.
- Alan