[The old joke in the South is to ask where Sherman is buried....so we can go piss on his grave....JCB]
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General Sherman burned by history?
Man that South loves to hate may not have been so bad
By LEE KENNETT
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As a historian and biographer, I have spent the past decade going through the considerable mass of Gen. William Sherman's papers. Being a Southerner by birth and upbringing, I began my work with a vague, inherited dislike of the man; 10 years and two books later, I have not been converted into an ardent admirer. There were flaws of character in the general: a certain instability, a consuming preoccupation with his own image, and as a soldier a sometimes disturbing way of dealing with those under his command or control.
All this being said, 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 tha tthe 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.
Sherman's departure from Atlanta was attended by two cycles of destruction: the official one was supervised by Sherman's chief engineer, and its targets were installations and materiel of potential military value, using fire only in the final stages; the unofficial program was started earlier by bluecoats with matches and their own scores to settle with the Rebs.
For the March to the Sea, Sherman issued Special Field Orders 119 and 120, which also conformed to the traditional norms of warfare. Noteworthy was the injunction, "Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of inhabitants, or commit any trespass." But his soldiers paid more attention to another passage, encouraging them to "forage liberally on the country," which they saw as giving them a broad license. By almost universal testimony the march was accompanied -- as the North Georgia campaign had been -- by considerable petty theft, vandalism and, here and there, arson -- but by few serious crimes against individuals.
Sherman had made strenuous and continuous efforts to stop such things in previous campaigns. At least twice he had ordered daylong general inspections of his entire command that resembled a prison shakedown, producing a rich harvest of stolen items. But in the Georgia campaign, as commander of an army group, he lay down the basic rules and left enforcement -- and responsiblity -- entirely to subordinates commanding his three armies.
Sherman's overall record on Southern civilians was reviewed about a century ago by a War Department commission investigating orders authorizing "extreme repressive measures." They found four of his orders that had probably gone too far, including the one for hostages on the rail lines never carried out. But the commission's findings also put other distinguished names among the malefactors, including Gens. Grant, McClellan and Sheridon, and on the Southern side, Jubal A. Early and Jefferson Davis.
Tales grew over years
There is little doubt that the Georgians who were in Sherman's line of march during 1864 went through a wrenching ordeal they would never forget. The march from Atlanta to Savannah has traditionally been portrayed as a sinister version of Exodus, with pillars of fire and columns of smoke. The army's track, the "burned country," was marked by what were known as "Sherman's sentinels" -- forlorn chimneys, mile after mile of them, standing over the ashes of farmhouses and manors. But here exaggeration seems to have crept in with the telling and retelling; the tragedy gradually enhanced.
In the 1950s a geographer armed with old maps was able to trace the fate of houses along a 60-mile stretch of the "fiery trail" between Covington and Millegeville. He found that "a great many houses, perhaps even most of them" survived the Yankees' passage. A similar study of Milledgeville and its environs found almost no evidence of arson there.
And Sherman's personal role in the march also grew over the years. If a house or barn burned, it had been on his express orders. He spared a woman's home because she reminded him of his sister, or burned it because her husband was a notorious Rebel. People recalled encountering him everywhere; they had spoken with him or had reluctantly accepted him as an overnight guest. A writer who compiled these stories concluded that if the general had slept in all the houses that local tradition reported, his trip from Atlanta to Savannah would have taken not a month but a year.
'GWTW' sealed fiery image
For decades this carefully nurtured image of Sherman the Destroyer was confined to the South; for the rest of the country he was long considered a national hero without blemish. This, I think, is no longer the case. To be sure the U.S. Army still holds his memory in reverence; his hometown, Lancaster, Ohio, has recently erected a monument to him, and serious students of strategy continue to hail him as a great innovator in war.
But not long ago, the director of the National Park Service received a complaint concerning the giant sequoia named for the general; the writer, not a Georgian but a Californian, objected to naming the tree for "an inconsequential spoiler who is most often remembered for destruction." And in New York recently, an opponent of a crosstown freeway protested it would go through his community like Sherman went through Georgia.
I suspect that for the average American the name "Sherman" conjures up more often than not similar images of fire and destruction. Why? Quite possibly because so many people's knowledge of the Civil War is from Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind." Who can remain unmoved when halfway through the film version, the screen turns flame red and across it trails in gigantic letters, "And the wind swept through Georgia: Sherman!"
So a novel by a Confederate officer's granddaughter and one of Hollywood's most spectacular productions succeeded in conveying the vast sense of loss that most Georgians had known -- and also brought them a posthumous victory of sorts over the general.
What Sherman wanted more than anything else -- he made no secret about it -- was his "fair fame," eminence and reknown without blemish. They have denied him that. Sherman the Destroyer he seems likely to remain.
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Lee Kennett is the author of "Sherman: A Soldier's Life." He lives in North Carolina and is a professor emeritus of history at the University Georgia.
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