Uncle Billy ends his walking tour of Georgia Dec 22 1864

[Valin]

General Sherman to President Lincoln
SAVANNAH, GA., December 22, 1864
(Via Fort Monroe 6.45 p.m. 25th)

His Excellency President LINCOLN:

I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.

W.T. Sherman,
Major General.

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Sherman’s War
November 9, 1999
by Victor Davis Hanson

American Heritage

The General’s March through Georgia is usually remembered as a ruthless campaign of indiscriminate terror, waged against helpless civilians rather than southern soldiers. But Victor Davis Hanson argues that it was brillant, effective, and, above all, humble.

By the fall of 1846 no army in either Europe or America was as mobile, self-supporting, and lethal as William Tecumseh Sherman’s, Which was composed of soldiers in prime physical condition expert in the handling of modern firearms. Their general was in some sense not merely the most powerful man in America but also the most dangerous person in the world. The Macon Telegraph warned its readers: “It would seem as if in him all the attributes of man were merged in the enormities of the demon, as if Heaven intended in him to manifest depths of depravity yet untouched by a fallen race…. Unsated still in his demoniac vengeance he sweeps over the country like a simoom of destruction.”

The advent of Sherman’s army must have been a terrifying experience for an agrarian society. The southern Central Valley of California where I live is similarly about three hundred miles from north to south; its eastern corridor between the Sierra Nevada and state freeway 99 is a belt about forty to sixty miles wide that comprises the richest farmland in the world. To comprehend anything comparable to Sherman’s coming into Georgia is to imagine a huge column of mobile burners, starting out in the state capital to the north at Sacramento and descending to torch all the farmland of this valley southward to Bakersfield. Everything between San Francisco and Los Angeles would be as desolate as the sixty-mile-wide corridor between Atlanta and Savannah.

I can imagine in my homeland, situated in the exact center, continuous columns of marchers coming down through Fresno and sweeping east to the Sierra Nevada, burning and destroying as they moved through small towns, tearing up the main railroad from San Francisco to Los Angeles, section by section, each day. I can envision that Americans from a different region of the country, with different accents and customs–perhaps Easterners, whom we often automatically distrust and do not fully fathom still–would come onto this farm, lecture and berate us, and strip our residence of everything I now gaze upon: furniture, silver, paintings, rugs, ancestral clocks, the sum of the collective acquisition of five generations of family members who have lived in this same house.

DOUR, TOUGH MEN, MORE dangerous than any trespassers I have run off on evening walks from this small 120-acre farm, would ride in, camp, sleep, and feast as they saw fit, destroying our pump and water well and killing our five dogs and assorted pets. To understand Sherman’s onslaught would be to see torched the barn outside my window, constructed by my great-grandfather well over a hundred years ago, trees stripped of fresh fruit, and bins of stored raisins, nuts, and dried fruits–the past year’s work and the only chance of cash for the future–consumed or simply dumped. Fences and outbuildings, literally everything wooden, would be collected and burned. Some of the flotsam and jetsam would be the result of gratuitous thievery: my grandmother’s silver platter used for target practice, some two thousand books in my study thrown on the dirt and trampled in the alleyway. To imagine Sherman’s arrival would be to see flames on every large farm in this immediate vicinity, made worse with the realization that heroic defense meant instant death and, worse still, that the ravagers were not always the ignorant and illiterate but occasionally the learned, who would hector me about how the destruction of my farm was inevitable –the moral wages of my support for the evil of slavery and the treachery of sedition. In short, our 120-year-old farm, where now five separate family households reside, would resemble the Canning plantation after Sherman’s army moved through it on November 28, 1864: “We could hardly believe it was our home. One week before it was one of the most beautiful places in the state. Now it was a vast wreck. Gin-house, packing screws, granary–all lay in ashes. Not a fence was to be seen for miles … the army had turned their stock into the fields and destroyed what they had not carried off. Burning cotton and grain filled the air with smoke, and even the sun seemed to hide its face.”

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKhvqRd2i-4