Sherman a National Hero.
“All the People Are Now Guerillas”
The Warfare of Sherman, Sheridan, and Lincoln, and the Brutality of the Twentieth Century
He commented in a letter to his wife: “The North may fall into bankruptcy and anarchy first, but if they can hold on the war will soon assume a turn to extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is at least part of the trouble, but the people” (qtd. in Walters 1948, 460–61).
Modern accounts of the campaign usually mention the freeing of slaves as the Union army moved southeastward, but the African American population suffered a wide variety of tribulations, including widespread rape of women and girls, whom Sherman’s troops seem to have singled out for rape. In the majority of reported cases of rape at this time, the victims were black. 10
** ( 10. See Lowry 1994, which includes a chapter on rape. See, as a typical example, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series 1, vol. 15, p. 373, for a case of the mass rape of slave women by Union troops. Patrick Alliot has done much work compiling reports from the Official Records and other sources. )
In his vast, almost demographic outlook, Sherman seems much less like a “fighting prophet” or a mere cruel warrior than a precise model for Erich Ludendorff, with his geopolitical plans for the German East after 1915, or for Hitler, with his Lebensraum schemes, or for Stalin, with his vast cleansing of “traitorous” peoples, combining forced labor and forced migration across the Soviet Empire. Indeed, Sherman’s wholesale adoption of the concept of collective guilt is quite comparable to Hitler’s and Stalin’s ideas on the subject.11 The brutalities of the Union armies from 1862 to 1865 are no more defensible than Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars after 1945 or the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in 1915. And, as I intend to show, Sherman’s way of war was a direct ancestor of such defining events in the twentieth century.
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