Within the past few days, on posts relating to the surrender of Lee's army in 1865, a number of Kossacks referred to secession as "treason," and to Confederates as "traitors." When, some months ago, I posted arguing to the contrary, I received numerous highly personal and nasty flames, with even the All-Knowing Armando labeling me a "fool."
Nothing but persistent, in response to the recent calumnies, I again posted a diary. Following a brief, snarky preface, I presented, otherwise without comment, some eminent persons' defenses of state sovereignty, generally, and the right of secession, specifically.
More below.
My sources were not Calhoun, Davis, or Robert E. Lee, but such notorious "traitors" as Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln. I cited such incendiary screeds as the act whereby the State of my birth, New York, acceded to the Constitution, while reserving the right to re-assume the powers that it was delegating to the national government - in other words, the right of secession.
And how did Kossacks respond to my quoting Northern authorities in support of secession? Several, let me say, were civil. Several defended me against charges of being a "troll." But several of you were appalling. My first respondent snarked, "Sherman: where are you now that we need you again?" Indeed, a recurring theme in the hostile responses was loving praise for General William T. Sherman. WTF? Is this your guy, Kossacks? One approved Sherman's depredations in Georgia: without them, the respondent argued, the war might have continued until 1868. I trust that particular respondent will shortly enlist in the U.S. Army, to aid efforts to destroy Iraq's population, economy, and infrastructure, the better to get today's war over with, and quickly.
Strange to say, belief in the Supreme Being being a sentiment more commonly associated with us backward types from below the Mason-Dixon line, one Kossack rhapsodized that General Sherman was "one of the best things God ever gave America." Now that's a sentiment! The general, another Kossack gushed, was a rock star because he "knew how to shape myth and mythos in direct service of the cause he espoused."
Well, what WAS the cause Sherman espoused? From the horse's mouth: "[I] profess to fight for but one single purpose, viz., to sustain a Government capable of vindicating its just and rightful authority, independent of niggers, cotton, money, or any earthly interest." (Official Records, War of the Rebellion, vol. XXX, pt. IV, p. 235). Or, as the biographer John F. Marszalek, wrote (in Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order) Sherman viewed Confederates, and later the Indians he ordered slaughtered, as recalcitrant resisters to the "legitimate forces of an orderly society," by which he meant the central government.
And what was Sherman's methodology? The slaughter of women and children as well as men, and the wanton destruction of the means of life, to intimidate the "enemy" population, and to deprive civilians and soldiers alike of the means of survival. Very much like the U.S. government is doing today in Iraq.
Readers are referred to John Bennett Walters' Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and total War, or Mark Grimsley's The Hard Hand of War. A few exemplary quotations, however, ought to suffice to show what manner of men were Sherman, Grant, Sheridan (and the many other Union Army figures - Pope, Howard, Miles, Terry, Ord, Augeur, Canby, and Custer) who pioneered total war, first against Southern civilians and later against the Native American or Amerindian populations of the Great Plains, who were largely annihilated in the quarter century after Lee's surrender, with Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan again leading the way.
Many of Sherman's defenders, including Victor Hanson, excuse his excesses in the South by lauding his alleged belief that the Yankee army were "political avenging angels" offended by racial inequality as prevalent in the South, and determined to "guarantee the American proposition that each man is as good as another." Bullshit. As pointed out in Michael Fellman's Citizen Sherman (at p. 153) in 1862 Sherman found himself affronted that the country was aswarm with Jews. More precisely, "dishonest Jews." At Sherman's request, General Grant imperiously banished all Jews from his department (Order of 12/17/1862). The trouble with Jews, in Sherman's mind, was that they were like "niggers, greasers [Mexicans] or Indians," which is to say, members of classes or races permanently inferior to his own. (Id.) Moreover, although slavery had been abolished in most of the North by 1860, free blacks were relentlessly discriminated against, and many Northern luminaries, Lincoln included, desired an "ethnic cleansing" to remove all of them to some place in Central America.
Sherman wrote to Grant on 10/9/1864: "Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources." (Official Records, War of the Rebellion, vol. XXXIX, pt. III, p. 162).
In his official report of his "March to the Sea," Sherman boasted: "I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia . . . at $100 million; at least $20 million of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction." (Official Records, War of the Rebellion, Series I, vol. XLIV, p. 13). Some of my ancestors were slaveholders. My great-grandparents, however, who lived in Georgia were devout people who objected to slavery on religious grounds. Nonetheless, they saw the Northerners as invaders, and fought in the Confederate army.
Sherman wrote to Sheridan: "I am satisfied . . . that the problem of this war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory . . . a great deal of it, yet remains to be done . . . Therefore, I shall expect you on any and all occasions to make bloody results." (Official Records, War of the Rebellion, vol. XLIII, pt. II, p. 553).
Conclusive proof, I think, that Sherman was far from an "all men are brothers" kinda guy was that, within months after Appomattox, the Northern army, with Sherman (assisted by Sheridan) again at the fore, started a 25-year campaign of slaughtering the Amerindians and the buffalo on which their economy depended, to make way for railroads and for white expansion.
Like Lincoln, Sherman was an individual investor in the federally-subsidized transcontinental railroad. He lobbied his brother, Senator John Sherman, to allocate federal funds for the railroad. Sherman wrote to Grant in 1867, "We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop and check the progress of the railroad." (Fellman, p. 264). Were he alive today, perhaps Sherman would refuse to allow a few stinking ragheads to keep the white man from taking "our" oil from underneath "their" sand.
About the Indians, Sherman wrote to Grant: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children." Writing to his brother, the Senator, Gen. Sherman stated "I suppose the Sioux must be exterminated." (Fellman, p. 264).
Early on in his Indian campaigns, Sherman ordered his troops: "During an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out. . . " (Marszalek, p. 379).
Grant, of course, was out of the army during the Indian campaigns, but as President he approved the mass extermination of the buffalo, which were reduced from more than 15 million to fewer than 1 million by about 1875.
As Sherman viewed Native Americans, so too did he view the people of the South. (I almost said the "white people of the South," but blacks, too, suffered from Sherman's crimes, including many African-American women who were raped, and occasionally murdered, by his marauders). Sherman wrote to his wife in 1862: "Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the [Southern] people." Sherman's like-minded wife wrote back that she, too, hoped for a war "of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like the Swine into the sea." (Sherman, Collected Works).
In fighting Confederates, Sherman seldom gave battle directly, preferring to exploit his army's greater mobility in flanking movements that enabled him to avoid armed men, the better to conserve his resources for crimes against property and the civilian population. When, later, he set about a "final solution" (Sherman's own term; I seem to have heard it in some other context . . .) of removing Indians from the path of the federally-subsidized railroad and white expansion, he favored Sheridan's innovation: winter raids, in which men, women, and children all would be found together, and so could be slaughtered at once. Sherman authorized Sheridan to kill as many women and children, as well as men, as he and his subordinates deemed necessary. (Fellman, p. 271). Livestock was also killed, to that any survivors would be more likely to starve to death.
Eight years into his war of extermination against the Indians, Sherman wrote to his longtime partner in crime, Sheridan, that he was "charmed at the handsome conduct of our troops in the field. They go in with the relish that used to make our hearts glad in 1864-5." (Fellman, p. 272).
As I suspect that few Kossacks are so illiberal as to approve of the genocide of the Plains Indians, I respectfully request that the Kossack admirers of Sherman et al., who were enthusiastic, bloody-handed major players in that effort, explain exactly why these same men are to be applauded for similar (and similarly-motivated, as Sherman's own words show) efforts against people of the South.
If it is the considered view of Northern liberals that Sherman did well to lay waste to the South, why then this polite half-Southerner hopes you will retire to, say, Mexico, and not come to Dixie. And let me suggest that you continue to play the hypocrite in addressing Southern audiences (African-Americans included), since if you think that enlightened Northern racial attitudes circa 1864 provided a license for genocide, well, you're wrong. I think it implies, further, that your attitude toward Southerners, black and white, is condescension toward the former, and condescension plus hatred toward the latter. Feel free to explain to me why that is not so. Or maybe, in response to my prior diary, you were just snarking. Well, some shit isn't funny. Er, do you tell Native Americans that the war against them ended long ago, and to "quit [their] fucking whining"? When Israeli troops bulldoze Palestinian dwellings, do you post her at DKos (as have several, with regard to Sherman and the South) that "it's a shame that Hitler didn't finish the damn job"?
By 1890, the Plains Indians were all dead, or on reservations "where they could be watched." In a December 18, 1890 letter to the New York Times, Sherman expressed disappointment over the fact that "civilian interference" had stopped him and his army from "[getting] rid of them all;" Sherman would have preferred to kill every last Indian in the U.S. (Marszalek, p. 400).
Much fault can be found with the speeches and writings of Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederate vice president. I find myself in agreement with him, however, in his belief that "There is no difference between consolidation and empire; no difference between centralism and imperialism. The consummation of either must necessarily end in the overthrow of liberty and the establishment of despotism."
Harder to fault, I think, is the character of Gen. Robert E. Lee. In 1866, writing to Lord Acton, Lee called the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people "not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government."
Since 1860, and with the enthusiastic and significant contributions of men such as Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, American history is largely the story of the destruction of the rights Lee described as essential safeguards. If you venerate Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, you must approve of the reduction and marginalization of the Native American population -- both by the purposeful destruction of its economic base, and by warfare that declined to differentiate among men, women, and children. Sherman himself likened his efforts against the Indians to those he had pursued against my Southern ancestors. While more limited - the South was subjugated, whereas the Indians were all but annihilated - the war of Sherman, his sponsors, and his collaborators against my ancestors had the same, genocidal, moral underpinnings.
I submit that Sherman's purpose - to further the tyranny of the central government, on behalf of corporate interests - in his wars on the South and on the Native Americans was very much like Bush's, Cheney's, and Rumsfeld's war against Iraq. Those who resist the imperial power, the railroads, American oil companies, are inferior peoples, who must be subjugated or destroyed.
General Lee, also in his December 1866 letter to Lord Acton, predicted that "the consolidation f the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."
If you think Sherman was God's greatest gift to America, I fail to understand any basis for you to repudiate Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. If you wish to see evidence of the prescience of Robert E. Lee, of a vast republic "aggressive abroad, despotic at home" and in danger of ruin, then look around you.
(Many of the citations are from J. Kennedy and W. Kennedy, The South Was Right!, Pelican, 1991, and Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "How Lincoln's Army `Liberated' the Indians.")