“To show how this order was executed, the same writer tells a story of how he witnessed with his own eyes General Lee and a surgeon of his command repairing the damage to a farmer’s fence. Colonel McClure, of Philadelphia, a Union soldier himself, bears witness to the good conduct of Lee’s ragged rebels in that famous campaign. He tells of hundreds of them coming to him and asking for a little bread and coffee, and others who were wet and shivering asking permission to enter a house, in which they saw a bright fire, to warm themselves until their coffee should be ready. Hundreds of similar instances could be given, substantiated by the testimony of men on both sides, to show the splendid humanity of that great invasion. Blessed be the good God, who, if in His wisdom denied us success, yet gave to us and our children the rich inheritance of this great example.
“Major General Halleck, the commander-in-chief, under the President, of the armies of the Union, on the 18th of December, 1864, dispatched as follows to Sherman, then in Savannah: ‘Should you capture Charleston, I hope that by some accident the place may be destroyed; and if a little salt should be sown upon its site it may prevent the growth of future crops of nullification and secession.’ On December 27th, 1864, Sherman made the following answer: ‘I will bear in mind your hint as to Charleston, and don’t think “salt” will be necessary. When I move, the 15th corps will be on the right of the right wing, and their position will bring them naturally into Charleston first, and if you have watched the history of the corps you will have remarked that they generally do their work up pretty well. The truth is, the whole army is burning with insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate; but feel that she deserves all that seems to be in store for her.... I look upon Columbia as quite as bad as Charleston.’ Therefore Columbia was burned to ashes. And though he knew what was in store for South Carolina, so horrible that he even trembled, he took no steps to avert it, for he felt that she deserved it all. Did she, indeed? What crime had she committed that placed her outside the protection of the law of civilized nations? What unjust, or barbarous, or brutal conduct had she been guilty of to bring her within the exceptions laid down by the writers on the laws of war as authorizing extraordinary severity of punishment? They are not even imputed to her. South Carolina’s crime, and the crime of all the seceding States, was that of a construction of the constitution of the United States differing from that of General Sherman and the 15th corps—which ‘always did up its work pretty well.’ Happily the Divine Goodness has made the powers of recuperation superior to those of destruction; and though their overthrow was so complete that ‘salt’ was not needed as the type of utter desolation, Marietta and Atlanta are thriving and prosperous cities.”
Governor Vance does not wish to confine himself, in quoting, to Southern testimony. There are plenty of honest and truthful soldiers in the Federal army, who served in its ranks, to tell all we want and more. This is what one of them says, writing to the “Detroit Free Press” of that campaign: “One of the most devilish acts of Sherman’s campaign was the destruction of Marietta. The Military Institute and such mills and factories as might be a benefit to Hood could expect the torch, but Sherman was not content with that; the torch was applied to everything, even the shanties occupied by the negroes. No advance warning was given. The first alarm was followed by the crackling of flames. Soldiers rode from house to house, entered without ceremony and kindled fires in garrets and closets, and stood by to see that they were not extinguished.” Again he says: “Had one been able to climb to such a height at Atlanta as to enable him to see for forty miles around, the day Sherman marched out, he would have been appalled at the destruction. Hundreds of houses had been burned; every rod of fence destroyed; nearly every fruit tree cut down, and the face of the country so changed that one born in that section could scarcely recognize it. The vindictiveness of war would have trampled the very earth out of sight, had such a thing been possible.”
One cold and drizzly night in the midst of this marching General Sherman found shelter and warmth beneath the roof of a comfortable plantation home.
“In looking around the room,” he says, “I saw a small box, like a candle box, marked ‘Howell Cobb,’ and, on inquiring of a negro, found we were at the plantation of General Howell Cobb, of Georgia, one of the leading rebels of the South, then a General in the Southern army, and who had been Secretary of the Treasury in Mr. Buchanan’s time. Of course we confiscated his property, and found it rich in corn, beans, peanuts, and sorghum molasses. Extensive fields were all around the house. I sent word back to General Davis to explain whose plantation it was, and to instruct him to spare nothing. That night huge bonfires consumed the fence-rails, kept our soldiers warm, and the teamsters and men, as well as slaves, carried off an immense quantity of corn and provisions of all sorts.”
Do the records of civilized warfare furnish a parallel to this petty and mercenary wreaking of spite upon the helpless home of a gallant foeman?
The General furnished us with proof of how worthy of their selection his staff-officers proved during that memorable raid. While camped that night on Cobb’s plantation, Lieutenant Snelling, who was a Georgian commanding his escort, received permission to visit his uncle, who lived some six miles away.
“The next morning,” says the General, “he described to me his visit. The uncle was not cordial by any means to find his nephew in the ranks of the host that was desolating the land, and Snelling came back, having exchanged his tired horse for a fresher one out of his uncle’s stables, explaining that surely some of the ‘bummers’ would have got the horse had he not.” It was the eternal fitness of things that the staff-officers of this prince of free-booters should be renegades capable of stealing from their nearest kin.
The unfailing jocosity of this merry marauder breaks out in his recital of a negro’s account of the destruction of Sandersville: “First, there came along some cavalrymen, and they burned the depot; then came along some infantrymen, and they tore up the track and burned it, and, just before they left, they sot fire to the well!” The well, he explains, was a boxed affair into which some of the debris was piled, and the customary torch was applied, making the negro’s statement literally true. This was one of the incidents to leaving the pretty town of Sandersville a smoking mass of ruins.
But why enumerate further details of an unresisted movement which cost Sherman one hundred and three lives, and the State of Georgia one hundred million dollars, twenty millions of which he frankly states he carried off, and eighty millions of which he destroyed? It began in shame at Atlanta—it passed with a gathering burden of infamy to Savannah. Starvation, terror, outrage hung upon its flanks and rear. Its days were darkened by the smoking incense from unparalleled sacrifices upon the altar of wantonness; its nights were lurid with flames licking the last poor shelter from above the heads of subjugated wives and children.