Southern Storm by Noah Andre Trudeau Read Free Book Online Page A

command who preyed on civilian populations. “No goths or vandals ever had less respect for the lives and property of friends and foes,” he fumed at one point. Even in 1862 Sherman was complaining to his superiors that “too much looseness exists on the subject of foraging.” By 1863 Sherman found himself forced to reexamine his convictions. He was an eminently rational being (“My idea of God is that he has given man reason, and he has no right to disregard it,” he said). Too much of what Sherman had observed in the war up to that point did not fit the rules as he had learned them. Too many lines were being blurred, especially regarding civilians and the war. The labor of Southern farmers fed Southern armies, the eyes of Southern civilians informed Southern strategy, the actions of Southern civilians fighting as guerrillas made them a foe almost impossible to confront in any conventional manner.
    Sherman’s battlefield successes and increasing national prominence gave him the confidence to analyze the problem and provided the authority to act on his conclusions. His response was not to discard the rules of war, but to imbue them with a great elasticity. “[The] northern people have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth,” he wrote. Almost every military action Sherman took after 1862 would be justified in reference to the rules of war, but what some of his equally well-schooled opponents never understood was that these were Sherman’s rules of war.
    Sherman was an adept problem solver thanks to the way he approached matters. From the data and assumptions before him he would select those that fitted best with his sense of what was right, endow those conclusions with the qualities of absolute fact, and act upon them—seldom, if ever, reconsidering the matter. The driving and defining force behind everything he did was his personal faith, a highly individualized amalgam of patriotism and national destiny. He believed that the United States, in the years just prior to the commencement of the war, had achieved a divine balance. The nation, as Sherman later wrote, had “prospered beyond precedence,” and its citizens “realized perfectly the advantages they possessed over the inhabitants of other lands.” God—Sherman’s, that is—intended the United States “for a long and prosperous nation[al] life, & not for destruction in the bloom of its youth.”
    By the tenets of his faith, the South had forfeited any consideration for a gentle application of the rules of war. “On earth, as in heaven, man must submit to an arbiter,” Sherman wrote, as if penning a prayer. “He must not throw off his allegiance to his government or his God without just reason and cause. The South had no cause.” Sherman’s cold reasoning led him inexorably forward. “Satan and the rebellious saints of Heaven,” he continued, “were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equally would not be unjust.” Some twenty-three years after the fighting had ended, Sherman would still insist: “We veterans believe that in 1861–5 we fought a holy war, with absolute right on our side, with pure patriotism, with reasonable skill, and that we achieved a result which enabled the United States of America to resume her glorious career in the interest of all mankind, after an interruption of four years by as needless a war as ever afflicted a people.”
    In applying his rules of war to the rebellious South, Sherman used a number of refining corollaries. He believed very much in collective responsibility. If a band of irregulars ambushed some of his transports from the riverbank, then everyone within an area along the waterway who could have known about the action were coconspirators. His instructions in such cases were that “army commanders