December 15, 2007
Sherman and Hood Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:15 AM EST On Monday, Christine Gibson’s lead piece for this website commemorated the day General Sherman reached Savannah in 1864. Near the beginning her piece, Ms. Gibson quotes Hood’s reply to Sherman’s request for a truce as Sherman compelled the civilian population to evacuate Atlanta: Hood complained that “the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.”
I have been thinking about this piece since reading it last Monday. One of my fist reactions was that Hood seems to have had a curiously feeble grasp of the dark history of war. When one reads Sherman’s actual note of September 7, 1864, the moderation of its language, and of the measure announced, is pretty striking, given the language of Hood’s response two days later. Here is what Sherman wrote to Hood, provoking the latter’s outrage: “GENERAL: I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go south and the rest north. For the latter I can provide food and transportation to points of their election in Tennessee, Kentucky, or farther north. For the former I can provide transportation by cars as far as Rough and Ready, and also wagons; but that their removal may be made with as little discomfort as possible it will be necessary for you to help the families from Rough and Ready to the cars at Lovejoy’s. If you consent I will undertake to remove all families in Atlanta who prefer to go South to Rough and Ready, with all their movable effects, viz, clothing, trunks, reasonable furniture, bedding, &c., with their servants, white and black, with the proviso that no force shall be used toward the blacks one way or the other. If they want to go with their masters or mistresses they may do so, otherwise they will be sent away, unless they be men, when they may be employed by our quartermaster. Atlanta is no place for families or non-combatants, and I have no desire to send them North if you will assist in conveying them South. If this proposition meets your views I will consent to a truce in the neighborhood of Rough and Ready, stipulating that any wagons, horses, or animals, or persons sent there for the purposes herein stated shall in no manner be harmed or molested, you in your turn agreeing that any cars, wagons, carriages, persons, or animals sent to the same point shall not be interfered with. Each of us might send a guard of, say, 100 men, to maintain order and limit the truce to, say, two days after a certain time appointed. I have authorized the mayor to choose two citizens to convey to you this letter and such documents as the mayor may forward in explanation, and shall await your reply.” It is worth noting that the most valuable civilian property Sherman threatened to expropriate was property in human beings, human beings his troops had made free. In any case, Sherman had, to a degree that seems startlingly mild by most past and future standards, brought the cost of the war home to some of the voters of the Confederacy. His subsequent burning of most of what remained of Atlanta—Hood had burned some of it when he evacuated the city on September 1, and Sherman spared the city’s churches and hospitals—helped Lincoln win the 1864 presidential election, arguably one of the crucial events in the creation of liberal modernity. If it was a crime, it was a crime at least somewhat extenuated by its outcome. The burning of Dresden, 80 years later, may or may not have saved enough lives to justify the lives there ended, but the burning of Atlanta may have been indispensable in achieving a morally urgent end. Had Hood and Sherman not burned Atlanta, it is conceivable that McClellan might have won the 1864 election. Near the end of her piece, after recounting the foraging, looting, and reprisals that Sherman’s men committed on their march to Savannah, Ms. Gibson writes that “As for Sherman, history has yet to reach full agreement on whether he was an ingenious hero or a shameless sadist.” My sense is that relatively few if any competent historians have thought Sherman a shameless sadist. The question that remains open is whether Sherman’s conscious decision to bring some of the cost of the war home to the Southern electorate that had demanded it was a grievous crime. The notion that it was a grievous crime requires the assumption that civilians should never be the intended victims of war, no matter how vile their cause, nor how guilty they are of having begun a war, nor what means their own troops have used to prosecute a war, nor how relatively mild the cost military action intends to impose on them. There is indeed much to be said in favor of this assumption. There may also be something to be said against it. It may be relevant to recall that wholly exempting enemy civilians is not how the Allies won either world war, or how the United States defeated the Confederacy, and that while the victors in those three wars might have been victorious without the direct and indirect measures they took against enemy civilians, such hypothetical restraint would almost certainly have protracted all three wars, perhaps very considerably increasing their toll, and might even have lost one or more of them.
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