Rethinking Sherman's March: A Kindler, Gentler Total War?

[derspiess]

DG is the voice of reason here.  We did let the South off too easily with Reconstruction ending way too soon.   But mass executions?  Yeah, great way to heal the nation.

[Ed Anger]

DG is the voice of reason here.  We did let the South off too easily with Reconstruction ending way too soon.   But mass executions?  Yeah, great way to heal the nation.

His inner Beria is peeking out.

[Tonitrus]

Well, there's kind of a difference, Raz.  The Civil War was a civil war.  The other two weren't.

Indeed. Needed more Southern purges.

We should have turned over all of Alabama to the Kingdom of Jones.

[Razgovory]

DG is the voice of reason here.  We did let the South off too easily with Reconstruction ending way too soon.   But mass executions?  Yeah, great way to heal the nation.

We've executed people for less.

[Lettow77]

Mass executions sounds like a roadmap to ensuring Southern Independence, although it may take a few generations.

[The Brain]

If standing in arms against the government on the field of battle isn't treason, then what is? From a legal POV (and Americans love law shit) at least every Confederate combat veteran should have been executed. There is a time for leniency, and there is a time for taking a huge dump on states' rights.

[Eddie Teach]

There's a time for trolling and that's every time the ACW is mentioned. 

[CountDeMoney]

DG is the voice of reason here.  We did let the South off too easily with Reconstruction ending way too soon.   But mass executions?  Yeah, great way to heal the nation.

Meh, targeted and select executions would've been better.  Like Lee at Appomattox, left to rot in the sun for the vultures as an example of what not to do.  THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO SECESSIONISTS AROUND HERE

[Berkut]

Certainly many of them deserved to hang, but that doesn't mean it would be the right thing to do at the time.

[Razgovory]

Yeah, I mean it's not as if someone like Nathan Bedford Forrest would do any more damage.

[CountDeMoney]

Or let the Missouri Ruffians off the hook for all the atrocities they committed in Kansas before the war.

[Valmy]

Um guys the goal was to reunite the nation and end slavery, not create a desert and call it peace.

But granted there would have been many acres and mules to go around.

[CountDeMoney]

Meh, I suppose it turned out as best it could, all things considered.  The sustained romanticism of the "Lost Cause" mythos turns my stomach, though.  Squee.  Mew.

[Habbaku]

Um guys the goal was to reunite the nation and end slavery, not create a desert and call it peace.

But granted there would have been many acres and mules to go around.

Most of the chuckleheads posting murderous sentiments are, fortunately, merely trolling.  Or I hope they are.  Maybe they just think they're playing a strategy game and people's lives are just bad POPs they wish they could get rid of.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed at the time.  Guys like Forrest, though, should have been imprisoned at the very least.

[Lettow77]

I'm interested why you feel that way in Forrest's case in particular.

Granted, he almost certainly merited arresting on a postwar case of ax-murder, but that was so well concealed it still is not public knowledge, and I assume you refer more to either A) the events at Fort Pillow, or B) the activities of the Klu Klux Klan. In either case, I feel he is much less culpable than you may believe.

At Fort Pillow he certainly gave no massacre order, and is on record as having to try and stop it once it became clear post-surrender killings were taking place. If any confederate commander is culpable it would be Chalmers, who appears to have turned an initial blind eye as the man on the spot where it first broke out.

As to the Klu Klux Klan, his membership was largely an honorary one; Grand Wizard and Leader were in practice very distant things. Due to the enormous prestige of his name in Tennessee, he was asked to join and, giving his consent, was given the highest title to be had. Once the Klan's unsavory practices became clear, he called for them to be curtailed, and attempted, in fact, to disband the Klan.

Besides this, he turned down ideas of continuing the conflict in Mexico as he had been expected to do; Sherman was surprised by Forrest's willingness to reconciliation. Forrest in fact urged his men to be good citizens of the Union in his farewell address, and subsequently gave a very progressive speech on race-relations to the precursor of the NAACP in Memphis. His time and energy (such as it was, for the war very much broke his health) were dedicated to private industry that helped folks in the region.