At the mere mention of these anecdotes, however, many good Georgians and North Carolinians blazed up with indignation: “If he had his gloves on here, I should like to know what he did with his gloves off!”—and it was not easy to convince them that they had suffered less than their neighbors in South Carolina.
A Confederate brigadier-general said to me: “One could track the line of Sherman’s march all through Georgia and South Carolina by the fires on the horizon. He burned the gin-houses, cotton-presses, railroad depots, bridges, freight-houses, and unoccupied dwellings, with some that were occupied. He stripped our people of everything. He deserves to be called the Great Robber of the nineteenth century. He did a sort of retail business in North Carolina, but it was a wholesale business, and no mistake, in Georgia, though perhaps not quite so smashing as his South Carolina operations.”
Confederate soldiers delight in criticisms and anecdotes of this famous campaign. Here are two or three samples.
“When we were retreating before old Sherman, he sent word to Johnston that he wished he would leave just a horseshoe, or something to show where he had been. Hood always left enough; but Johnston licked the ground clean behind him.”
“Didn’t we have high old times laying in the water, nights when we had a chance to lay down at all! I remember, one of our boys was told he must move his position, one night, after we’d just got comfortably settled down in the wet. Says he, ‘I’ve got my water hot, and I be d——d if I’m going to move for anybody!’”
“The approach to Savannah was defended by splendid, proud forts, bristling with long old cannon, and our cowardly militia just run from them without firing a shot!”
“You should have seen Washington’s statue, at Columbia, after Sherman burned the city! Nose broke, eyes bunged, face black and blue, and damaged miscellaneously, the Father of his Country looked like he’d been to an Irish wedding.”
The citizens talked with equal freedom, but with less hilarity, of the doings of the “Great Robber.” A gentleman of Jones County said:—
“I had a noble field of corn, not yet harvested. Old Sherman came along, and turned his droves of cattle right into it, and in the morning there was no more corn there than there is on the back of my hand. His devils robbed me of all my flour and bacon and corn meal. They took all the pillow-slips, ladies’ dresses, drawers, chemises, sheets, and bed-quilts, they could find in the house, to tie up their plunder in. You couldn’t hide anything but they’d find it. I sunk a cask of molasses in a hog-wallow; that I think I should have saved, but a nigger boy the rascals had with ’em said he ’lowed there was something hid there; so he went to feeling with a stick, and found the molasses. Then they just robbed my house of every pail, cup, dish, what-not, that they could carry molasses off to their camping-ground in. After they’d broke open the cask, and took what they wanted, they left the rest to run in a river along the ground. There was one sweet hog-wallow, if there never was another!”
A lady, living near Milledgeville, was the president of a soldiers’ aid society. At the time of Sherman’s visit she had in her house a dry-goods box full of stockings knit by the fair hands of patriotic ladies for the feet of the brave defenders of their country. This box she caused to be buried in a field which was afterwards ploughed, in order to obliterate all marks of its concealment. A squadron of cavalry arriving at this field, formed in line, charged over it, and discovered the box by a hollow sound it gave forth under the hoofs of the horses. The box was straightway brought to light, to the joy of many a stockingless invader, who had the fair ladies of Milledgeville to thank for his warm feet that winter.