{"id":25193,"date":"2015-04-09T07:56:08","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T15:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=25193"},"modified":"2015-04-09T07:56:08","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T15:56:08","slug":"forgotten-civil-war-atrocities-breed-more-carnage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/09\/forgotten-civil-war-atrocities-breed-more-carnage\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten Civil War Atrocities Breed More Carnage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"civil<\/a><\/h2>\n
This is the 150th anniversary of General Lee\u2019s surrender at Appomattox.\u00a0 Many commentators are touting Lee\u2019s surrender as a triumph for freedom.<\/a>\u00a0 While it was a great blessing that slavery ended, the Civil War set precedents for ignoring atrocities that continue to bedevil America.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a piece from the January issue of The Future of Freedom<\/a>:<\/h5>\n

Forgotten Civil War Atrocities Bred More Carnage<\/strong>
\nby James Bovard<\/p>\n

George Orwell wrote in 1945 that \u201cthe nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.\u201d The same moral myopia has carried over to most Americans\u2019 understanding of the Civil War. While popular historians have recently canonized the war as a practically holy crusade to free the slaves, in reality civilians were intentionally targeted and brutalized in the final year of the war.<\/p>\n

The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred 150 years ago when Union Gen. Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred-mile swath of flames in the Shenandoah Valley that left vast numbers of women and children tottering towards starvation. Unfortunately, the burning of the Shenandoah Valley has been largely forgotten, foreshadowing how subsequent brutal military operations would also vanish into the Memory Hole.<\/p>\n

In August 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to \u201cdo all the damage to railroads and crops you can\u2026. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.\u201d Grant said that Sheridan\u2019s troops should \u201ceat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.\u201d Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that \u201cthe people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war\u201d and promised that when he was finished, the valley \u201cfrom Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because people lived in a state that had seceded from the Union, Sheridan acted as if they had automatically forfeited their property, if not their lives. Along an almost 100-mile stretch the sky was blackened with smoke as his troops burned crops, barns, mills and homes.<\/p>\n

Some Union soldiers were aghast at their marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree, \u201cWe burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles [south of] Strasburg\u2026. It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.\u201d An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning \u201cdoes not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.\u201d A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan\u2019s army reported, \u201cHundreds of nearly starving people are going North \u2026 not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.\u201d<\/p>\n

After one of Sheridan\u2019s favorite aides was shot by Confederate soldiers, Sheridan ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five-mile radius.<\/strong> After many outlying houses had been torched, the small town at the center \u2014 Dayton \u2014 was spared after a federal officer disobeyed Sheridan\u2019s order. The homes and barns of Mennonites \u2014 a peaceful sect that opposed slavery and secession \u2014 were especially hard hit by that crackdown, according to a 1909 history of Mennonites in America.<\/p>\n

By the end of Sheridan\u2019s campaign the former \u201cbreadbasket of the Confederacy\u201d could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. In his three-volume Civil War history, Shelby Foote noted that an English traveler in 1865 \u201cfound the Valley standing empty as a moor.\u201d The population of Warren County, Virginia, where I grew up, fell by 11 percent during the 1860s thanks in part to Sheridan\u2019s depredations.<\/p>\n

Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study, The Sequel to Appomattox, quoted one bedeviled local farmer: \u201cFrom Harper\u2019s Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, the country was almost a desert\u2026. The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.\u201d John Heatwole, author of The Burning: Sheridan\u2019s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley (1998), concluded, \u201cThe civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman\u2019s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children, and other civilians who perished thanks to \u201cthe burning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abraham Lincoln congratulated Sheridan in a letter on Oct. 22, 1864: \u201cWith great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army the thanks of the nation and my own personal admiration and gratitude for the month\u2019s operation in the Shenandoah Valley.\u201d The year before, in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln had justified the Civil War to preserve a \u201cgovernment by consent.\u201d But, as Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner retorted, \u201cThe only idea \u2026 ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this \u2014 that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some defenders of the Union military tactics insist that there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. But, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln administration had adapted a total-war mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, Gen. William Sherman wrote to Grant that \u201cuntil we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.\u201d Sherman had previously telegrammed Washington that \u201cthere is a class of people \u2014 men, women, and children \u2014 who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.\u201d Lincoln also congratulated Sherman for a campaign that sowed devastation far and wide.<\/p>\n

The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South\u2019s postwar recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs\u2019s recent book, Sick from Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.<\/p>\n

Ironically, a war that stemmed in large part from the blunders and follies of politicians on both sides of the Potomac resulted in a vast expansion of the political class\u2019s presumption of power.<\/strong> An 1875 American Law Review article noted, \u201cThe late war left the average American politician with a powerful desire to acquire property from other people without paying for it.\u201d The sea change was clear even before the war ended. Sherman had telegraphed the War Department in 1863, \u201cThe United States has the right, and \u2026 the \u2026 power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle \u2014 if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.\u201d Lincoln liked Sherman\u2019s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.<\/p>\n

After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict and its grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion<\/strong>. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post\u2013Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared that \u201cthe only good Indian is a dead Indian\u201d) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes downplayed U.S. military tactics in World War II that killed vast numbers of German and Japanese civilians.<\/p>\n

The same pattern is repeating with the Vietnam War. The Pentagon is launching a major effort to commemorate its 50th anniversary \u2014 an effort that is being widely denounced as a whitewash. The New York Times noted that the Pentagon\u2019s official website on the war \u201creferred to the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, as the My Lai Incident.\u201d That particular line was amended but the website will definitely not be including the verdict of David Hackworth, a retired colonel and the most decorated officer in the Army: \u201cVietnam was an atrocity from the get-go\u2026. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.\u201d<\/p>\n

The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans\u2019 resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty-sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. misfires. The proclaimed intentions of U.S. bombing campaigns are far more important than their accuracy. And the presumption of collective guilt of everyone in a geographical area exonerates current military leaders the same way it exonerated Sheridan\u2019s 1864 torching of Mennonite homes.<\/p>\n

Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation\u2019s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

******<\/p>\n

On Twitter @jimbovard<\/p>\n

www.jimbovard.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the 150th anniversary of General Lee\u2019s surrender at Appomattox.\u00a0 Many commentators are touting Lee\u2019s surrender as a triumph for freedom.\u00a0 While it was a great blessing that slavery ended, the Civil War set precedents for ignoring atrocities that continue to bedevil America.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a piece from the January issue of The Future of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-25193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25194,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25193\/revisions\/25194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25193"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=25193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}