Put on the mantle piece so i was glad to get it. I thanked him for it and i was going to waco to do some research at baylor, wrapped it up in old dirty tshirts and put it carefully in my suitcase and went down to waco in the rental car the next day, spoke well and came back and went to the airport at dfw, checked the bag to go to washington because i was going up there to a smithsonian program. I spent a few days at my brothers doing research in the archives. Did that, the jar still wrapped up in its tshirt. Went back after i finished to the airport, checked the bag to go back to my home in americas where i was living then and changed planes in atlanta and they changed the bag to the little world war i plane that they used between atlanta and albany, georgia. Got down to albany, picked up my suitcase, put it in the car and drove back. I was convinced that bell jar was broken and there would be a million pieces of glass and i would have to throw out everything in the suitcase, but i got
Through the first thing i would say is there is this misconception that people say oh, shermans men cut a swath 50 miles wide or 60 miles wide. That is i always tell my students you dont want to think of it like a lawn mower strip. It is not 50 miles wide of lawn mower. It is 50 miles from the edge of one column through four columns to the furthest edge of the other. So in many ways it is very what is the word oim looking for. Not sporadic or episodic. But sometimes a house is targeting and other houses a mile away are not targeted. That being said, where shermans men and him and African American African Americans is a really interesting question. I love pauls that shermans army was probably one to great armies of liberation. They are not probably very willing liberators. Sherman was not certainly not a fan of racial equality or after the war according civil rights to African Americans. He did not he was perfectly content as they went on the to plantations to have his men liberate the
Question. Of course, natchez does the same thing. But i have another question. In 1863, confederate troops went out of their way, in fact, arrived late at gettysburg, because theyre busy burning down Thaddeus Stephens house. Chasing free blacks all over pennsylvania and rounding them up. Is there anything equivalent in shermans march that says does his army target politicians house, do they march out of their way just to seek revenge against particular politicians and are they rounding up any white confederates and enslaving them . No, i wouldnt say they go out of their way, but sherman takes a particular delight, and he has a long passage about it in his memoirs about camping for a night in georgia, and freeing cobbs slaves. And the next one that comes in for a lot of destruction, the South Carolina poet simms. They destroy his house. I read a diary that soldiers were dismayed, because its one thing if they sort of trash the house, but they burn a lot of the books in simms library, an
Libraries, and there are lots of things that you can dig out of that volume. But by the spring of 1862, the powder works quickly constructed by incorporating the industrial capacity of much of the south by having the individual parts of the factory produced in different places, including some of the incorporating wheels, the big what you can kind of think of as grinding wheels in nashville, the drive shaft in the incorporating House Building which was in segments, which is almost 300 feet long, was cast in segments in chattanooga, and then shipped by rail to augusta and assembled in the complex. There was a refinery for refining, removing impurities from the principal component of gunpowder at that time, potassium nitrate. And then large cooling magazines, and also storage magazines. And the complex was laid out essentially so that all the materiel progressed from downstream to upstream, and the finished product, and also the most dangerous part of the product was also located furthest
To maintain tight control and lipity explains defined foraging parties and centralized distribution systems, chaos could ensue, and the army could really descend into a sort of armed mob engaging in pillage and so forth. So whats interesting is that you would have expected lipity to use shermans march as his examples as hes making this complicated case. He doesnt. He actually goes back to napoleons russian campaign. In fact, though, he doesnt ignore the march when hes talking about how an army can descend into chaos. Thats where he uses napoleon. He actually defends shermans march and he claims at first that when seizing Household Goods the men carefully discriminated between and this is actually the language from shermans orders, discriminated between the rich who were generally hostile to us meaning the union, and the poor and industrious who were usually friendly or at least neutral, and he describes sherman as having this very organized system with rules and receipts, and he explai