-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes only~~
[Title 17 U.S.C. section 107]
The Other Reparations Movement
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Jack Kershaw of Memphis, Tennessee, wants to
file a class-action lawsuit against the US
government for reparations. Not on behalf of
the descendants of slaves but on behalf of
Southerners of all races whose ancestors
were the victims of the US government's
rampage of pillaging, plundering, burning,
and raping of Southern civilians during the
War for Southern Independence.
In 1860 international law -- and the US
government's own military code -- prohibited
the intentional targeting of civilians in
war, although it was recognized that civilian
casualties are always inevitable. "Foraging"
to feed an army was acceptable, but compensation
was also called for. The kind of wanton looting
and destruction of private property that was
practiced by the Union army for the entire
duration of the war was forbidden, and
perpetrators were to be imprisoned or hanged.
This was all described in great detail in the
book, International Law, authored by San
Francisco attorney Henry Halleck, who was
appointed by Lincoln as general in chief of
the Union armies in July 1862.
International law, the US army's own military
code, and common rules of morality and decency
that existed at the time were abandoned by the
Union army from the very beginning. A special
kind of soldier was used to pillage and plunder
private property in the South during the war.
In The Hard Hand of War Mark Grimsley writes
that the federal Army of the Potomac "possessed
its full quotient of thieves, freelance foragers,
and officers willing to look the other way," and
that "as early as October 1861" General Louis
Blenker's division "was already burning houses
and public buildings along its line of march"
in Virginia. Prior to the Battle of First
Manassas in the early summer of 1861 the Army
of the Potomac was marked by "robbing hen roosts,
killing hogs, slaughtering beef cattle, cows,
the burning of a house or two and the plundering
of others."
In Marching through Georgia Sherman biographer
Lee Kennett noted that Sherman's New York regiments
"were filled with big city criminals and foreigners
fresh from the jails of the Old World."
Unable to subdue their enemy combatants, many Union
officers waged war on civilians instead, with
Lincoln's full knowledge and approval. Grimsley
describes how Union Colonel John Beatty warned the
residents of Paint Rock, Alabama, that "Every time
the telegraph wire was cut we would burn a house;
every time a train was fired upon we would hang a
man; and we would continue to do this until every
house was burned and every man hanged between
Decatur and Bridgeport." Beatty ended up burning
the entire town of Paint Rock to the ground.
The Union army did not merely gather food for
itself; it pillaged, plundered, burned, and raped
its way through the South for four years. Grimsley
recounts a first hand account of the sacking of
Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December of 1862:
Great three-story houses furnished
magnificently were broken into and
their contents scattered over the
floors and trampled on by the muddy
feet of the soldiers. Splendid
alabaster vases and pieces of
statuary were thrown at 6 and 700
dollar mirrors. Closets of the very
finest china were broken into and
their contents smashed . . . rosewood
pianos piled in the street and
burned . . . Identical events occurred
in dozens of other Southern cities
and towns for four years.
Sherman was the plunder-in-chief, and he had three
solid years of practice for his March to the Sea.
In the autumn of 1862 Confederate snipers were
firing at Union gunboats on the Mississippi River.
Unable to apprehend the combatants, Sherman took
revenge on the civilian population by burning the
entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, to the ground.
In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife Sherman
explained that his purpose in the war was
"extermination, not of the soldiers alone, that
is the least part of the trouble, but the people."
In the spring of 1863, after the Confederate Army
had evacuated, Sherman ordered his army to destroy
the town of Jackson, Mississippi. They did, and in
a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant Sherman boasted
that "The inhabitants [of Jackson] are subjugated.
They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated
for 30 miles around."
Meridian, Mississippi was also destroyed after the
Confederate Army had evacuated, after which Sherman
wrote to Grant: "For five days, ten thousand of
our men worked hard and with a will, in that work
of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars,
clawbars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation
in pronouncing the work well done. Meridian . . . no
longer exists."
In Citizen Sherman Michael Fellman describes how
Sherman's chief engineer, Captain O.M. Poe, advised
that the bombing of Atlanta was of no military
significance (the Confederates had already abandoned
the city) and implored Sherman to stop the bombardment
after viewing the carcasses of dead women and children
in the streets. Sherman coldly told him the dead bodies
were "a beautiful sight" and commenced the destruction
of 90 percent of all the buildings in Atlanta. After
that, the remaining 2,000 residents were evicted from
their homes just as winter was approaching.
In October of 1864 Sherman even ordered the murder
of randomly chosen citizens in retaliation for
Confederate Army attacks. He wrote to General Louis
D. Watkins:
"Cannot you send over about Fairmount and
Adairsville, burn ten or twelve houses . . .,
kill a few at random, and let them know that
it will be repeated every time a train is
fired upon . . ." (See John Bennett Walters,
Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total
War, p. 137).
The indiscriminate bombing of Southern cities, which
was outlawed by international law at the time, killed
hundreds, if not thousands of slaves. The slaves were
targeted by Union Army plunderers as much as anyone.
As Grimsley writes, "With the utter disregard for
blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the
soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever
they liked." A typical practice was to put a hangman's
noose around a slave's neck and threaten to hang him
unless he revealed where the household's jewelry and
silverware were hidden. Some slaves were beaten to
death by Union soldiers.
General Phillip Sheridan engaged in the same kind of
cowardly, criminal behavior in the Shenandoah Valley
of Virginia in the autumn of 1864, after the
Confederates had finally evacuated the valley.
General Grant ordered him to turn the valley into
a "desert," and he and his army did. A sergeant in
Sheridan's army, William T. Patterson, described the
pillaging, plundering, and burning of
Harrisonburg, Bridgewater, and Dayton Virginia:
The work of destruction is commencing
in the suburbs of the town . . . The
whole country around is wrapped in
flames, the heavens are aglow with the
light thereof . . . such mourning, such
lamentations, such crying and pleading
for mercy I never saw nor never want
to see again, some were wild, crazy,
mad, some cry for help while others
throw their arms around yankee soldiers
necks and implore mercy. (See Roy Morris,
Jr., Sheridan, p. 184.)
It is important to recognize that at the time the
Valley was populated only by women, children, and
old men who were too feeble to be in the army. In
letters home some of Sheridan's soldiers described
themselves as "barn burners" and "destroyers of
homes." One soldier wrote that he had personally
burned more than 60 private homes to the ground,
as Grimsley recounts. After Sheridan's work of
destruction and theft was finished Lincoln
grandly conveyed to him his personal thanks and
"the thanks of a nation."
Historian Lee Kennett, author of Marching through
Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during
Sherman's Campaign, wrote an article in the Atlanta
Journal and Constitution last year in which he
argued that Southerners had been too critical of
Sherman. His book is very favorable to Sherman
and Lincoln, but he nevertheless wrote on page
286 that:
Had the Confederates somehow won,
had their victory put them in
position to bring their chief
opponents before some sort of
tribunal, they would have found
themselves justified (as victors
generally do) in stringing up President
Lincoln and the entire Union high
command for violation of the laws
of war, specifically for waging war
against noncombatants.
If Mr. Kershaw's lawsuit goes to trial, Lincoln and
his high command will finally be put before a
tribunal, of sorts. He probably has little if any
hope of winning such a case (in federal court!),
but the trial record would go a long way toward
combating the whitewashing of history that has
occurred for the past 140 years.
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