Sherman Why I Came to Love William T. Sherman and 'Beast' Butler'.

I didn't think I could sit through a video about two of Lincoln's most famous useful idiots, but I made it. She is a good lecturer. Great post as usual.

Sherman graduated from the US Military Academy and Butler from Colby (then Waterville) College. You may dislike them but they weren't idiots. Sherman in particular proved quite useful helping to defeat three Confederate armies.
 
Sherman graduated from the US Military Academy and Butler from Colby (then Waterville) College. You may dislike them but they weren't idiots. Sherman in particular proved quite useful helping to defeat three Confederate armies.

And Butler was a **** good politician. He just ran into a more ruthless one in Lincoln.
 
And Butler?

I'm going to sound controversial as all hell here, but if not to the extent desired, his actions did play a role in keeping men around Richmond instead of with Lee's Miserables in 1864.

Imagine Lee having what became 4th Corps a month before Cold Harbor. And Pickett's division for that matter.

Would be mighty useful.

Of course, he then blew it by getting bottled up, but it has to count for something.

But marching through Baltimore ("lifting the blockade on Washington" in the words his biography in Generals in Blue) has to count as significant at that particular time. Not awesome, but not something just anyone would have done, and needed.
 
I'm going to sound controversial as all hell here, but if not to the extent desired, his actions did play a role in keeping men around Richmond instead of with Lee's Miserables in 1864.

Imagine Lee having what became 4th Corps a month before Cold Harbor. And Pickett's division for that matter.

Would be mighty useful.

Of course, he then blew it by getting bottled up, but it has to count for something.

But marching through Baltimore ("lifting the blockade on Washington" in the words his biography in Generals in Blue) has to count as significant at that particular time. Not awesome, but not something just anyone would have done, and needed.

Any comments on his visit to New Orleans?
 
Any comments on his visit to New Orleans?

I don't know enough about it to know the accuracy of the "Spoons" part, his infamous order on ladies dumping the contents of chamber pots on Union officers I don't know enough to weigh the final part (as in, what exactly is "as ladies of the town plying their avocation" supposed to mean? Arrest? Scorn? Sexual harassment? I haven't seen what he wrote as policy for such women), but his administration seems to have been good at dealing with yellow fever and other New Orleans ailments, and generally fair as opposed to vicious (again, I don't know enough on that order to know what to make of that specifically, but that's the only questionable policy I can think of - I don't know of him doing anything else onerous).

I'd say he didn't do a particularly bad job, but not a particularly outstanding one, if you want a simple answer. Good and bad mixed in some uncertain quantities.

On the whole, I find the notion of him being lovable rather harder to take seriously than him being loathesome.
 
Butler was, essentially, a political general. He got to be a general of US forces because he added considerably to US forces and actually helped Lincoln breath easier about keeping Washington. He earned Lincoln's loyalty.

As a battle-general, he was not remarkable. As a loyal political administrator, he was actually quite good. Which might explain Lincoln's reluctance to send him out to pasture.

Butler remains, to me at least, a good man maligned by happenstance.
 
Butler was, essentially, a political general. He got to be a general of US forces because he added considerably to US forces and actually helped Lincoln breath easier about keeping Washington. He earned Lincoln's loyalty.

As a battle-general, he was not remarkable. As a loyal political administrator, he was actually quite good. Which might explain Lincoln's reluctance to send him out to pasture.

Butler remains, to me at least, a good man maligned by happenstance.

Thank you Ole. Whenever Butler comes up there's a greater pile on than Sherman and Forrest put together and singing Kumbaya, swear. All common sense goes out the window along with the ability to type the symbols for ' google'. Whomever has had a vague notion of Butler insulting fair womanhood becomes exactly as insulted as everyone was 150 years ago with less cause- we have g o o g l e, plus 45 threads right here exhaustively going over his stint in New Orleans. Anyone, like poor Elennsar, who has some faintly even opinion to state finds themselves held to defending ALL of Butler, like someone has to be an instant Civil War wiki for the mere mention of this guy's name. It's crazy.

Butler refrained from placing women under arrest for assault for literally throwing human excrement over the heads of his officers. In my opinion, he behaved with restraint but I'm female and have less tolerance for other women behaving like whiners and shrews- and I mean that. The women in question also placed themselves by ' birth' and ' breeding' above others on the social scale, hence certainly had all these standards they expected everyone else to maintain. Butler was simply pointing out that if they were willing to take off the gloves of their own social standing, get down in the literal gutter, he was gosh darn well going to treat them the same way they behaved. When he did that- OH my gosh, the wailing and rending of sackcloth, his rapine of Southern Womanhood reverberated throughout..... and all this because Butler basically told them to puleeze stop throwing human manure on people, it's plain, old rude. 150 years later? Sackcloth is getting pretty shredded but it's still laying in heaps around some places, waiting for this to come up.
 
I suspect part of it (The outrage over what he did) - Butler wasn't the sort of person to present that sort of order in nice and gracious terms. He just bluntly spelled out that if they were going to act like (to use JPK Husons' term) whiners and shrews that they'd assumed to be worth no respect to speak of and if anyone howled while that was just too dang bad.

Add in people itching for some reason, any reason, to pile on him and this turns into how the people who wrote the history books and the newspaper accounts wanted to write it.
 
Thank you Ole. Whenever Butler comes up there's a greater pile on than Sherman and Forrest put together and singing Kumbaya, swear. All common sense goes out the window along with the ability to type the symbols for ' google'. Whomever has had a vague notion of Butler insulting fair womanhood becomes exactly as insulted as everyone was 150 years ago with less cause- we have g o o g l e, plus 45 threads right here exhaustively going over his stint in New Orleans. Anyone, like poor Elennsar, who has some faintly even opinion to state finds themselves held to defending ALL of Butler, like someone has to be an instant Civil War wiki for the mere mention of this guy's name. It's crazy.

Butler refrained from placing women under arrest for assault for literally throwing human excrement over the heads of his officers. In my opinion, he behaved with restraint but I'm female and have less tolerance for other women behaving like whiners and shrews- and I mean that. The women in question also placed themselves by ' birth' and ' breeding' above others on the social scale, hence certainly had all these standards they expected everyone else to maintain. Butler was simply pointing out that if they were willing to take off the gloves of their own social standing, get down in the literal gutter, he was gosh darn well going to treat them the same way they behaved. When he did that- OH my gosh, the wailing and rending of sackcloth, his rapine of Southern Womanhood reverberated throughout..... and all this because Butler basically told them to puleeze stop throwing human manure on people, it's plain, old rude. 150 years later? Sackcloth is getting pretty shredded but it's still laying in heaps around some places, waiting for this to come up.
Yes, Annie. He did get a b ad rap for that. Confederate claptrap. At the time, treating as "women of the streets" meant that one didn't have to doff their hats, step off the sidewalk, or say "Yes ma'am." Outrageous! In short, he didn't require officers to give gentlemanly obeisance to the gentile ladies of New Orleans. Outrageous!

They were to be considered common ****s which, at the time, was still a regard for the gender. And wow! Did that honk them off!
 
Thank you Ole. Whenever Butler comes up there's a greater pile on than Sherman and Forrest put together and singing Kumbaya, swear. All common sense goes out the window along with the ability to type the symbols for ' google'. Whomever has had a vague notion of Butler insulting fair womanhood becomes exactly as insulted as everyone was 150 years ago with less cause- we have g o o g l e, plus 45 threads right here exhaustively going over his stint in New Orleans. Anyone, like poor Elennsar, who has some faintly even opinion to state finds themselves held to defending ALL of Butler, like someone has to be an instant Civil War wiki for the mere mention of this guy's name. It's crazy.

Butler refrained from placing women under arrest for assault for literally throwing human excrement over the heads of his officers. In my opinion, he behaved with restraint but I'm female and have less tolerance for other women behaving like whiners and shrews- and I mean that. The women in question also placed themselves by ' birth' and ' breeding' above others on the social scale, hence certainly had all these standards they expected everyone else to maintain. Butler was simply pointing out that if they were willing to take off the gloves of their own social standing, get down in the literal gutter, he was gosh darn well going to treat them the same way they behaved. When he did that- OH my gosh, the wailing and rending of sackcloth, his rapine of Southern Womanhood reverberated throughout..... and all this because Butler basically told them to puleeze stop throwing human manure on people, it's plain, old rude. 150 years later? Sackcloth is getting pretty shredded but it's still laying in heaps around some places, waiting for this to come up.
And that's pretty much what he did. You're gonna act like an donkey, you're going to be treated as one. Spoons Butler, the butcher of Nawleans.
 
And that's pretty much what he did. You're gonna act like an donkey, you're going to be treated as one. Spoons Butler, the butcher of Nawleans.
I would like to point out that you are not taking into account sensibilities of the society at the time. To treat the ladies like that would be identical to a public official, publicly stating that if unsocial behavior of the black population in a town will not cease, he will be publicly flogged, chained and put to some useful labor.
So yes Butler deserves his ill repute, as well as Sherman. People in the position of power who enjoyed power and used it to humiliate the defenseless population, to destroy their property leaving them destitute and hungry more often than not.
If such brutal reprisals against the civilian population are earning them a name of lovable individuals, ***deleted*** by moderator jgoodguy reason inappropriate content.
 
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To describe refusing to doff one's hat or step off the sidewalk to flogging, chaining, and forcing someone to do some "useful labor" as equivalent things is rather hard to make sense of, even in the context of "the sensibilities of the time".

I can understand a number of things that I disagree with to varying degrees, but this I fail to even understand.
 
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To describe refusing to doff one's hat or step off the sidewalk to flogging, chaining, and forcing someone to do some "useful labor" as equivalent things is rather hard to make sense of, even in the context of "the sensibilities of the time".

I can understand a number of things that I disagree with to varying degrees, but this I fail to even understand.
Oh well then change flogging for an ankle monitor for blacks only. If you fail to understand this, maybe you should work harder to understand "sensibilities of the time."
 
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