Reddit reviews War Crimes Against Southern Civilians

I'm not one of those people who call northern people Yankees on a daily basis (just used it to try and get my point across in this post). I don't call the Civil war the "War of northern Aggression". I don't have a thick southern accent. I don't spit dip into a spittoon. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure you didn't think I was some stereotypical southerner.

Atlanta being small doesn't make it right to burn the whole place down. Sherman ordered his troops to burn down any public building that could be used to aid confederate troops. It may sound fine if you're thinking barracks, post offices, city halls, etc. but the fact is that his troops did a lot worse. They burned down houses, and killed civilians to make an example to the people. Sherman openly believed in Total Warfare, which means you demoralize the citizens so much that they no longer support the war, and the call the boys back home, which basically means the other side will surrender. So then you have to ask yourself, is destroying thousands of innocent people's lives worth not destroying the lives of thousands of soldiers? That is a real hard question to answer, and you can understand why the people who got the raw end of the deal become angry.

I'm very sorry people from Georgia called you a Yankee. I've never actually hated someone I don't know and blamed them for doing something they didn't do. Not everyone feels that way. My mom is from Atlanta and went to college in south Georgia, where she got called a Yankee, so no, people are not always reasonable.

> And wikipedia downplays Sherman's atrociousness because it is more concerned with fact than the stories that southerners tell to their kids.

If you are trying to say that Sherman didn't do wrong, then you probably shouldn't be in this argument.

Wikipedia downplays Sherman's role because people would rather believe that the world is black and white; that the good guys are always good, and the bad guys are always bad. Why do you think people don't like to accept that MLK or JFK had extramarital affairs? We think of them so highly that we forget that they are human beings, and are capable of making human errors. We'd rather ignore the facts, and romanticize fantasy. No one really wants to think that the Union troops were capable of anything bad when they were fighting slavery. No one wants to take a good look at an ambiguous situation and form an real opinion.

EDIT* Sorry, I don't own any complete detailed anthologies of the war, and am not anywhere near a professional historian, but google got me this. It's just people arguing about whether Sherman's acts were justifiable.

And by the way, don't even try to say that anyone saying Sherman acted inhumanely is just repeating stories that southerners tell their kids, because that a pretty silly way of saying you don't like to look at evidence. and I could always say that you are more interested in stories that northerners tell their kids, than you are in fact. It's a double edged sword, and you probably don't want to deal with it.

EDIT** Ok, here is a book written about Sherman's war crimes.

I'm sorry to tell you, but most Civil War historians will tell you that the north's atrocities get downplayed in history books, documentaries, etc. Here is the only thing I've found so far on Wiki (read the Total Warfare and Modern Assessment articles).

Yes, I made up the fact that rape and pillage occur in war. I wish.

here

here

here

It wasn't his sole property, it was the home of his family. They rendered his family homeless in retaliation for what he did. That was the sole purpose in their own words - retaliation and subjugation. So yeah, collective punishment.