November and December of this year mark the 150th
anniversary of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous “march to the sea”
at the end of the War to Prevent Southern Independence. The Lincoln
cult – especially its hyper-warmongering neocon branch – has been holding
conferences, celebrations, and commemorations while continuing to rewrite
history to suit its statist biases. Business as usual, in other
words. But they are not the only ones writing about the event.
Historian Karen Stokes has published South Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s
Path: Stories of Courage Amid Civil War Destruction that contains a great deal of very telling information about
Sherman’s motivation in
waging total war on the civilian
population of South Carolina.
Stokes begins by quoting a letter that Sherman wrote to General Henry
Halleck shortly before invading all-but-defenseless South Carolina:
“[T]he whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance
upon South Carolina.” In another message a few weeks later, Sherman
reiterated to Halleck that “The whole army is crazy to be turned loose in
[South] Carolina.”
A
New York newspaperman who was “embedded” with Sherman’s army (to use a
contemporary term) wrote that “There can be no denial of the assertion that
the feeling among the troops was one of extreme bitterness towards the people
of the State of South Carolina.” The Philadelphia
Inquirer cheered on as Sherman’s army raped, pillaged,
burned, and plundered through the state, calling South Carolina “that
accursed hotbed of treason.”
In a January 31, 1864 letter to Major R.M. Sawyer, Sherman explained
the reason why he hated the South in general, and South Carolina in particular,
so much. The war, he said “was the result of a false political doctrine
that any and every people have a right to self-government.” In the same
letter Sherman referred to states’ rights, freedom of conscience, and freedom
of the press as “trash” that had “deluded the Southern people into war.”
Sherman’s subordinates expressed similar opinions. In 1865
Major George W. Nichols published a book about his exploits during Sherman’s
“march” in which he describing South Carolinians as “the scum, the lower
dregs of civilization” who are “not Americans; they are merely South
Carolinians.” General Carl Schurz is quoted by Stokes as remarking that
“South Carolina – the state which was looked upon by the Northern soldier as
the principal instigator” of the war was “deserving of special
punishment.”
All of this is so telling because it reveals that neither Sherman, nor his
subordinate officers, nor the average “soldier” in his army, were motivated
by anything having to do with slavery. South Carolina suffered
more than any other state at the hands of Sherman’s raping, looting,
plundering, murdering, and house-burning army because that is where the
secession movement started. It was NOT because there were more slaves
there than in other states, or because of anything else related to
slavery. It was because South Carolinians, even more than other
Southerners, did not believe in uncompromising obedience to the central
state.
Shortly
after the war ended some prominent Northerners began to pour into South
Carolina to revel in the scenes of destruction (and to steal whatever they
could). The goofy Brooklyn, New York, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher went
on one such excursion and gave a speech while standing under a giant U.S.
flag in Charleston in which he declared:
“Let no
man misread the meaning of this unfolding flag! It says, ‘GOVERNMENT
hath returned hither.’ It proclaims in the name of vindicated
government, peace and protection to loyalty; humiliations and pains to
traitors.
This is the flag of sovereignty. The nation, not the States, is
sovereign. Restored to authority, this flag commands, not supplicates .
. . . There may be pardon [for former Confederates], but no concession
. . . . The only condition of submission is to submit!”
In
other words, the purpose of the war was to “prove” once and for all the false
nationalist theory that the states were never sovereign; they did not ratify
the Constitution, as explained in Article 7; the constitution created them; that the states never delegated
certain powers to the central government in the Constitution (Article 1,
Section 8); and that the central government is to have unlimited “supremacy”
over all individuals and institutions.
This
was the nationalist superstition about the American founding, first fabricated
by Alexander Hamilton and repeated by successive generations of
nationalist/consolodationist/mercantilist despots such as John Marshall,
Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln.
This
is why Sherman and his army reveled so much in their brutalization of
defenseless South Carolinian women and children and the looting and
destruction of their property. And they bragged about it for the rest
of their lives. Much of the boasting is catalogued in South
Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s Path. Stokes quotes a
General Charles Van Wyck as writing that “nearly every house on our line of
march has been destroyed.” An “embedded” New York reporter named David
P. Conyngham is quoted as described one South Carolina town after observing “the
smoking ruins of the town, to tall, black chimneys looking down upon it like
funeral mutes” with “old women and children, hopeless, helpless, almost
frenzied, wandering amidst the desolation.” The book contains dozens of other
eye-witness accounts by Union Army soldiers and Southern civilians of the
burning down of entire cities and towns, rape, robbery, and wanton
destruction of all varieties of private property, all of it occurring after
the Confederate Army had vacated. All to prove once and for all, to
South Carolinians and all other Americans, North and South, that federalism
and self-government was a “delusion,” to quote General Sherman himself.