thank you very much paul. and thank you all very much for coming. merchant of terror, demon, a killer. if you type was sherman a into google the auto complete includes war criminal, hero or villain. and if you add a couple more letters you get terrorist. the urban dictionary, a popular website, describes generally william t. sherman as having employed the vicious tactic of targeting civilians. continuing, such tactics had previously been deemed morally unacceptable. the deliberate targeting of the civilians for attack was taken up in world war ii ending in the deaths of millions. the bombing of european cities by both sides of the war and japanese cities by the u.s., as well as attacks on civilians in china, the philippines and korea by japan were consistent with and encouraged by sherman s precedent. the logic of saving lives in the long run by these tactics seems to have been refuted by history. finally if you scroll through this entry, the words related to general william
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 they re busy burning down thaddeus stephens house. chasing free blacks all over pennsylvania and rounding them up. is there anything equivalent in sherman s 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 wouldn t 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 cobb s 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 it s one thing if they sort of trash the house, but they burn a lot of the books
through the first thing i would say is there is this misconception that people say oh, sherman s men cut a swath 50 miles wide or 60 miles wide. that is i always tell my students you don t 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 oi m 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 sherman s men and him and african american african americans is a really interesting question. i love paul s that sherman s 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
and had the federal authorities not arrested him, put him in a cell at fort monroe, clamped him in irons and made a martyr out of him, he would have been denounced through much of southern history. but they turned him into the man who was persecuted for the white south but made him a hero. even so, post-war confederates did not like to air their dirty linen in public and most of them did not do so. johnston was also praised in the writings of his federal opponents. william t. sherman had good things to say about johnston in his memoirs published in 1875. u.s. grant had good things to say about johnston. i mean, after all, grant said i worried more when joe johnston was in command in front of my army than when robert e. lee was. i don t know if grant actually said that or not, but if he did, that alone should take his reputation down many notches. because among other things, johnston almost never commanded troops in front of grant s army. only for a few weeks in january and fe
bladensburg, at which i think it s tomorrow. is tomorrow. really funng to be a day for me and i am looking forward to hearing from our panel of experts. normally, you hear the elected officials talk a lot. this will be the most you hear me. we will get to those who are here who are experts and will and might in us all. on our panel am a i am introducing, i m not sure if he is here yet, christopher george, who is a medical editor by profession and is an independent historian. he was born in liverpool, england, lives in baltimore, he has a ba in history from loyola university of baltimore, and an mla from john hopkins university. he is now a u.s. citizen, but he readily admits to divided loyalties over the war of 1812. founding founder editor of the journal of the war of 1812 and the originator and coordinator of the national war of 1812 composed him series series.m his book, the terror on the chesapeake, was published in 2001. wrote aboutre sun his book, it must be co