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

should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.” To take the issue to a larger scale, until the people of the South demanded that their leaders stop the war, they were a part of the equation that kept the war going. “Even yet, my heart bleeds when I see the carnage of battle, the desolation of homes, the bitter anguish of families;” Sherman wrote, “but the very moment the men of the South say that instead of appealing to war they should have appealed to reason, to our Congress, to our courts, to religion, and to the experience of history, then will I say peace, peace.”
    Sherman reserved a special hatred for the Southern intelligentsia who had been seduced by the hollow god of secession. Of one such man, Sherman wrote that he was “endowed with intellect, wealth, power and experience—He chose war, and for him I have no mercy. He should drink the cup of poisoned venom to its bitterest dregs.” Speaking of this leadership class to his wife, Sherman was no less vengeful. “We must Kill those three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.”
    Another corollary was the supremacy of law as an antidote to the progressive fragmentation of civil society. “The law is or should be our king; we should obey it, not because it meets our approval but because it is the law and because obedience in some shape is necessary in every system of civilized government. For years this tendency to anarchy had gone on till now every state and county and town…makes and enforces the local prejudices as the law of the land. This is the real trouble, it is not slavery, it is the democratic spirit which substitutes mere opinions for law.” The end game here was chaos. “If the United States submits to a division now,” Sherman warned, “it will not stop, but will go on till we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.”
    Speaking to a trusted aide, Sherman made it plain that the “war is on our part a war against anarchy .” God, Sherman was certain, simplywouldn’t allow “this fair land and this Brave People” to slide into the abyss of social chaos. On another occasion he declared himself the sworn enemy of “mobs, vigilance Committees and all the other phases of sedition and anarchy which have threatened and still endanger the Country which our Children must inherit.” Such havoc challenged the natural order of leadership that was part and parcel of Sherman’s idealized society. The war, he told a clergyman in 1864, “is intensifying the greatest fault and danger in our social system. It daily increases the influences of the masses, already too great for safety. The man of intelligence and education is depressed in value far below the man of mere physical strength. These common soldiers will feel their value and seek to control affairs hereafter to the prejudice of the intelligent classes.”
    The great and important objects of the war that was being waged, Sherman believed, were order and peace. Those goals were so important that anything impeding their most efficient and rapid prosecution was subject to serious scrutiny and even suppression. That included the fourth estate. A “free press…,” Sherman snapped, “rarely comprehended the necessities of battle.” He was convinced that while Southern newspapers were kept on a tight leash, those in the North operated without controls, irresponsibly providing the enemy with accurate strength estimates and often informed speculation concerning future movements.
    “I say with the press unfettered as now we are defeated to the end of time,” Sherman grumbled. He issued orders promising arrest as a spy for any reporter whose coverage “might reach the enemy, giving them information, aid, and comfort.” When the newspapers pushed back, Sherman dug in his heels. “If the press can govern the country, let them fight the battles,” he declared. “I