SOUTHERN-UNIONIST-L Archives

From: josie bass <>
Subject: [S.Un] On the March
Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2002 13:38:20 -0500

Sorry, i didn't realize some wouldn't know some of the history of the 1st
Alabama-Union and their participation on the March. When Sherman left
Vicksburg after the Union victory in 1863, and the Confederate army was
occupied elsewhere they cut a wide path burning and looting as they went,
burned Meridian, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi.

"For a look into the mind of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman,
consider a letter he wrote his wife on July 31, 1862. In explaining the
strategy he meant to employ against the Southern people (lately his fellow
citizens and neighbors), he told her, “extermination, not of soldiers
alone… but the people”, was his goal. Long before the wanton burning of
Atlanta, Georgia and Columbia, South Carolina, he ordered his men to burn
Randolph, Tennessee, along with the towns of Meridian, Jackson, and
Vicksburg, Mississippi. In a wire he sent to General Grant in the spring of
1863, Sherman happily reported, “Meridian no longer exists”. A quote by
Sherman on the eve of his infamous March To the Sea in 1864 in which he
declares “we must kill 300,000”. Still another quote which helps clarify
Sherman’s intentions is “that the present class of men who rule the South
must be killed outright”.

In a recent article by Joseph Stromberg titled “Strategies of Annihilation:
Total War in US History”, Stromberg takes note of the historical record of
Sherman’s depredations in the South and asks a question totally ignored in
history classes across the country. Whatever happened to the 50,000 missing
Southern civilians that were never heard from again as a result of
Lincoln’s determination to take the war to noncombatants? Historian John
Bigelow, in 1915 described the war as practiced by the North as
“depredation and spoliation”. Space does not allow for a recitation of the
atrocities that history records of Sherman’s crimes against the Southern
people, but one instance may shed some much needed light on its universal
application to all Southerners. These kinds of facts have been too long
closeted in the dark shadows of Yankee self-righteousness.
In Francis W. Springers 1990 book, “War For What”, he cites instances that
suggest the real fate of those 50,000 civilians who disappeared along
Sherman’s line of march and as the result of Lincoln’s “compassionate” war
policy."

“A raiding party from Sherman’s army on its way north came to the home of
Robert Hemphill, a wealthy South Carolina planter. In the absence of all
white men, they were met by a trusted old Negro, Burrell Hemphill. When the
faithful slave refused to reveal the hiding place of the family valuables,
the raiders dragged him at the end of a rope into the forest, hanged him
and riddled his body with bullets. His 12-year-old grandson witnessed the
whole proceedings. A granite marker now stands 3 miles northeast of
Blackstock, South Carolina. It is engraved: In memory of Burrell Hemphill,
killed by Union soldiers February 1865. Although a slave he gave his life
rather than betray a trust.”

You can visit this website to see a detailed list of authors, titles,
descriptions of books old & new in various categories which is most helpful
in describing events in the South from the Rev War, the Constitution,
Slavery, through Reconstruction.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/wilson5.html

The South and Southern History
by Clyde Wilson
Basic Books

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of
South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

William Gilmore Simms, The Sack and Destruction of Columbia, South Carolina
(eyewitness account by the South's greatest writer at the time)

josie

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