Tag

William T. Sherman

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Another Eyewitness to Union War Crimes

Dr. Daniel H. Trezevant, The Burning of Columbia, S.C., edited by Karen Stokes. Shotwell Publishing, 2022. Dr. Trezevant was a respected Columbia physician who experienced fully the Yankee robbing and burning of South Carolina’s capital by Sherman’s army in February 1865.  He wrote a series of newspaper articles just after, which became a pamphlet. Although there was a facsimile edition…
Clyde Wilson
January 3, 2023
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Shermanized

Editor's Note: This poem was delivered by Miss Lucy Powell Harris at a concert give by the pupils at the Houston Street Female High School in Atlanta, Georgia, May, 1st, 1866. It was originally written by L. Virginia French, the daughter of a prosperous Virginia family. She relocated to Tennessee and became a teacher after her mother died and her…
Abbeville Institute
October 21, 2022
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Bad History Masquerading as an Appeal to Peace and Piety: A Response to Allen Guelzo’s “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause”

It is a testimony to the prevalence of anti-Southern sentiment that The Gospel Coalition (TGC), one of the most prominent evangelical parachurch entities, has provided a platform for such sentiments by publishing an article entitled “Why We Must Forget the Lost Cause.” Written by the prominent Princeton University Professor Allen Guelzo, this piece was published in the “Bible and Theology”…
Tom Hervey
May 24, 2021
Blog

A Night to Remember

The diary of Emma LeConte is one of the best known documents chronicling the sack and destruction of Columbia, South Carolina. On February 17, 1865, the city surrendered to the besieging army of General William T. Sherman. His soldiers pillaged the city throughout the day and in the evening set fires that would destroy much of the place. Emma LeConte’s…
Karen Stokes
February 17, 2021
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The Great Lie and the Real Controversy

The following address was delivered as part of a symposium at the 150th anniversary of the burning of Winnsboro, S.C., in February 2015, sponsored by the Winnsboro Historical Society. It is published here for the first time. By preface, I have one common-sense comment on the manufactured controversy over who burned Columbia. An army who torches and pillages every town…
James Everett Kibler
November 19, 2020
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How Yankees Fostered Southern Disease

In August of 1862, two years before his infamous ‘March to the Sea’, General William T. Sherman declared, “Salt is eminently contraband.” The Southern leaders’ positioning of the South’s economy as dependent on cash crops created well-known shortages of many sorts. One aspect of this approach concerned the use of money acquired from cash crops to purchase food and salt.…
Vann Boseman
October 31, 2019
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Operation Desert Storm: Lee or Sherman

As the brilliant American military victory in the Persian Gulf approaches its second anniversary, the focus has shifted from the emotions of homecoming celebrations to the seriousness of lessons learned and lessons validated. While the ingredients of victory are a combination of many factors, from logistics to training to armament, history has shown that one of the most important elements…
Jeffrey Addicott
November 26, 2018
Blog

Northern Lies about the Burning of Columbia

When you hear or read about the burning of Columbia, General Sherman’s principal target in South Carolina, you are often told that the origin of the fire is a historical mystery that can't be conclusively solved, or that the fires were actually initiated by the evacuating Confederate troops, or even by the citizens of Columbia themselves—none of which is true.…
Karen Stokes
February 15, 2018
Review Posts

A Legion of Devils

A review of Karen Stokes, A Legion of Devils: Sherman in South Carolina (Shotwell Press, 2017). Many of us have read about the horrendous things William Tecumseh Sherman did as he and his "bummers" marched through Georgia, things a lot of us would rather not have read about. However, if we are to properly understand our history we are often compelled…
Al Benson
October 10, 2017
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Union or Else

In 1864, General William T. Sherman wrote to a fellow Union officer that the “false political doctrine that any and every people have a right to self-government” was the cause of the war that had been raging in America since 1861. The general was forgetting, or ignoring, that this very “doctrine” had led the American colonists to declare their independence…
Karen Stokes
February 17, 2017
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Sherman’s March

The History Channel’s recent presentation of "Sherman’s March" has been rightly drawing a lot of criticism from those of us who care about such things. In theory, historical events should become clearer as time passes and the controversies they involved grow less heated. But that is not the case in regard to the War to Prevent Southern Independence—because the myth…
Clyde Wilson
November 9, 2016
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Sherman’s Army in North Carolina

Some historians have suggested that General William T. Sherman's terror campaign through the deep South came to an end when his troops crossed the state line into North Carolina, and some of his officers are on record noting a pronounced change in the conduct of their soldiers. It is true that North Carolina did not see the scale of ruthless…
Karen Stokes
April 14, 2016
Review Posts

The Destruction of Old Sheldon Church and Other Ravages of War

From time to time an unsuspecting tourist visiting the ruins of the Old Sheldon Church will insist that they caught a glimpse of a spectral figure hovering among the scattered remains of the time-weathered gravestones. Some might scoff at such sightings, but the reports of the ghost are consistent. Witnesses describe what appears to be the ethereal figure of a…
Gail Jarvis
March 22, 2016
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Death is Mercy to Secessionists

William T. Sherman viewed Southerners as he later viewed American Indians, to be exterminated or banished to reservations as punishment for having resisted government power. They were subjects and merely temporary occupants of land belonging to his government whom they served. The revealing excerpts below are taken from “Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama,” published in 1872: Headquarters, Department of…
Bernard Thuersam
March 21, 2016
Review Posts

Southern Core Values

In American higher education of the past forty years, I have observed two American histories, and two American literatures – which teach different American ideals and values, resulting in different societies and different vision of what it means to be an American. Today we have a Northern history and a Southern history; we have a Northern literature and a Southern…
David Aiken
March 3, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

Sherman’s March

The History Channel’s recent presentation of "Sherman’s March" has been rightly drawing a lot of criticism from those of us who care about such things. In theory, historical events should become clearer as time passes and the controversies they involved grow less heated. But that is not the case in regard to the War to Prevent Southern Independence—because the myth…
Clyde Wilson
February 18, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

The War Lover

The American Enterprise magazine, a slick-paper, coffee-table arm of the neocon publishing empire, has recognized the premiere of the Civil War film epic "Gods and Generals" by devoting its March issue to the Late Unpleasantness. TAE brings out some deep thinkers to examine American history 1861 – 1865 under the rubric "Just War." (Shouldn't there be a question mark in…
Clyde Wilson
February 11, 2015
Blog

The Invasion Begins

By mid- January 1865, General Sherman’s campaign in South Carolina had begun in earnest. Some of his forces began moving through the parishes of Beaufort District at this time, and one of their first targets was the village of Hardeeville, where troops of the 20th Corps arrived on January 17th. During their days there, they burned down or tore apart…
Karen Stokes
January 30, 2015
Blog

The Cruel Winter of 1865 in South Carolina

January 2015 ushers in the last year of the sesquicentennial of the War for Southern Independence. One hundred and fifty years ago, the first month of 1865 was the beginning of a cruel and catastrophic winter for the state of South Carolina. Having completed his destructive march through Georgia, General William T. Sherman took possession of the coastal city of…
Karen Stokes
January 7, 2015
Blog

The “Hard Hand of War”

The kind of military onslaught that Union Gen. William Sherman unleashed on the South, beginning with his infamous conquest of Atlanta and subsequent "March to the Sea," followed by his capture of Savannah 150 years ago this month, came to be called, in the 20th century, "total war." That meant a war waged with full military mobilization not only against…
Kirkpatrick Sale
January 5, 2015
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Rehabbing Sherman

“The amount of plundering, burning, and stealing done by our own army makes me ashamed of it. I would quit the service if I could for I fear we are drifting towards vandalism. Thus you and I and every commander must go through the war justly chargeable for our crimes.” – General William T. Sherman, 1863 “I have felt a…
James Rutledge Roesch
November 18, 2014
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The Crime of William Dougherty

During the War Between the States, thousands of Americans were incarcerated for political reasons in various Northern prisons without due process of law. One of these Americans, Rev. Isaac W. K. Handy, kept a diary during his fifteen months of confinement at Fort Delaware, Delaware, and in it he sheds light on a particularly interesting fellow prisoner there. In his…
Karen Stokes
October 7, 2014
Blog

The Wizard of the Saddle

One of the greatest men in American history was born on this date (July 13) in 1821 near the town of Chapel Hill, Tennessee, then known as Bledsoe’s Lick. It is said that a few years after the great American war of 1861—1865 an Englishman asked General R.E. Lee who was the greatest soldier produced by the war. Lee answered…
Clyde Wilson
July 14, 2014
Blog

Conservatives for War Criminals?

I regularly get bulk e-mails from a website called Clash Daily, which is run by a fellow named Doug Giles. Their stuff is your typical Tea Partyish fare, but it tends toward a more in-your-face attitude. It also has a masculine vibe with frequent articles about guns, hunting, etc. Of course, it often contains the unfortunately typical advocacy of military…
Dan E. Phillips
June 2, 2014
Review Posts

“Monsters of Virtuous Pretension”

When I was a child growing up in Kirkwood Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, I was fascinated by three works of Atlanta public art: The Cyclorama next to the Atlanta Zoo, is a 358 foot wide and 42 foot tall painting of the Battle of Atlanta, July 1864, the largest painting in the world – longer than a football field…
David Aiken
May 8, 2014
Review Posts

Violating the Lieber Code: The March From the Sea

On April 24, 1863—-just three months after the cruel and retaliatory Emancipation Proclamation--Lincoln issued an order drafted by Columbia University law professor Francis Lieber that codified the generally accepted universal standards of warfare, particularly as it related to the lives and property of civilians. Among the actions it deemed to be criminal and prohibited were the “wanton devastation of a…
Kirkpatrick Sale
April 8, 2014