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Sept 01 1864
varian
Member Posts: 2,257 ✭✭✭✭
Sherman is burning Atlanta. as much as i dislike what that little Buckeye did, i have to admit he understood what war was about. Sherman wrote: You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
Comments
The South should have burned Washington.
No such thing as a 'nice' war. It is killing and destruction.
The Union "brought war into our country..."
I am from Atlanta. We don't like Sherman.
On his way there..
https://www.knowitall.org/video/shermans-march-through-south-6-burning-columbia#:~:text=General%20Sherman%20hated%20Columbia.%20Not%20only%20was%20Columbia,where%20shells%20hit%20the%20unfinished%2C%20new%20state%20house.
I lived in Milledgeville Ga. for 20 years. Milledgeville was the state capital in 1864, and Sherman came through. Did not burn the town.
Yankee troops went in to the State Legislature building, got drunk and had a mock meeting of the Georgia Legislature, and they voted to repeal the Act of Secession. Pretty good sense of humor I must admit.
In 1985 my buddy was running a metal detector in a garden downtown, one block from that legislature building, he found a brass button from a Massachusetts soldier. It featured a horse rearing up. Lost on Nov. 22 or 23rd, 1864.
From Billie Boy, "To make the Rebels understand, you have to make them bleed". My ancestors burned Richmond rather than give it away. Native Son of Richmond -----Ray
By the way the Renaming Committee has picked half a million $ of the Confederacy to be wiped clean from West Point and around $27,000 from the Naval Academy. Lee is everywhere at the Point. They plucked him from Monument Avenue in Richmond. When will this BS ever end?
Don't think they will remove Battle Monument at Trophy Point. (A tribute to the marksmanship of the Confederate Army)
Miss so many that were so knowledgeable about this subject here on the "Forum"
Me and my theories.
The people of the South were paid land by Great Britain for helping fight the French and Indian wars and suppress the tribes which may have been turning into trafficking gangs because corrupted by contact with the Barbary Pirates.
They may not have been organized enough to conduct an effective war, for a few reasons. First, many of them came from Midlands or Ulster county, which had lost much of their leadership fighting one another and were somewhat lawless in the 1600s in places. They may have been a little too independent to conduct a war to defeat the tribes.
Second, if they did conquer the Southern British Colonies for law and order, then why did the USA have to send Zachary Taylor and Andrew Jackson to fight?
Third, just because they made a very strong showing in the Civil War doesn't mean they were always formidable. One source claimed there had been massive illegal immigration from Canada in the 1840s and 1850s. There was also legal immigration when the Potato Blight got out, two years after the expulsion of the last large Native tribe from the Southeast. That means their numbers went way up, and those people couldn't possibly claim to have a hereditary right to the land just because they were allowed to come here to avoid a famine.
Besides the massive increase in numbers, the USA acquired a military academy to which the South sent many of its best and brightest, so the South acquired excellent military leadership starting after 1802. That suggests that before 1802, maybe the leadership was not so good. I don't know how gangsta the people of Midlands were (they had been called Crackers even when they were still in Britain and Scotland) but their organization may have been more along the lines of cooperating with the tribes and looking out for yourself, for all I know.
Supposedly, the attitude to look out for one's self and not cooperate hurt them in the Civil War, according to the Burns documentary, where they said the South "Died of a Theory" because for example the governor of Georgia was sitting on 80,000 uniforms near the end of the war and other states' troops were suffering from cold in improvised or old uniforms.
So, the ones who came in the 1600s and 1700s didn't do the fighting they were paid in land for, and the ones who came during the 1840s and 1850s weren't promised anything but a chance to avoid a famine, if they weren't out and out undocumented immigrants.
Can it be the later immigrants were positioning themselves to conquer a piece of the New World away from the USA?
Early was late.
The Union, under Lincoln, started the war and conducted nearly all of it in the South. Then after it was over, they heaped all sorts of agony on the Southern States for decades.
I'm a native Georgian with lots of Southern veterans in my line ( own some British land grant property too, original deed has shredded/worn ribbon and the Kings signature & wax seal ). Sometimes now when I travel around downtown Atlanta and some of the suburban areas I think, where the Hell is Sherman now. And yes Sherman was right, war is a cruel endeavor as many of us have witnessed first hand. Agree or disagree I think with all our rights, wrongs, good & bad we're better off as one nation.
"Never do wrong to make a friend----or to keep one".....Robert E. Lee
The common folks on either side didn't want that war. Like all wars it's the politicians and the people with the money in power that start the wars and it's the common people that are dragged into it that pay for it with their blood.
No need to discuss it anymore it is what it is and nothing will change it.
I can guarantee you one thing though. If I had an arm load of news papers from the day after the election in 2008 that showed what happened to this country after the north won the war to take back and hand out at the Union recruiting stations in 1861 there would not have been enough men signing up to even field a Union Army.
The South decided they deserved nationhood and imported soldiers for two decades before they struck, then lost the war.
The Oconee River flows through Milledgeville. One day in 1985 I was driving across the bridge. I saw 2 RVs parked along the shore, and some guys were down there with scuba gear. The river is only 8 feet deep. I went down to investigate.
It turned out that when Sherman occupied the town, his troops entered the State Armory. They collected a wagon load of artillery shells. They drove the wagon to the middle of the old bridge, and dumped the shells into the river. These guys had done the research and had learned that there were 455 of these shells on the bottom of the river.
They had already collected 150 shells and were determined to recover every one of them. They told me that one shell was going for $600. These shells looked like a big bullet. They were 3 inches diameter and about 6 inches long. A quarter million dollars worth of Civil War relics there in the mud of the Oconee River.
"where the Hell is Sherman now"
In Hell, burning! Aint that some irony!
In the 1600s and 1700s, the king decided he needed a counterbalance to the townsfolk and gentleman farmers of the northern colonies because they seemed to want to rule themselves and to think that they were able to rule themselves.
Most present day Southerners could be descended from the immigration that occurred after the potato blight and after the Scottish lords decided to reduce the common folk so they could have more room to raise wool, but before that, the king deliberately chose to send people who might want to have a king.
The Midlands and Ulster county were apparently a little less orderly than now, back in the day, because the lords had killed one another fighting and the townsfolk had run off. The King's plan may have been that the remaining folk would need and appreciate the firm guidance of the new landed gentry of the South, the plantation owners.
The plantation owners were often loyalist during the Revolutionary war.
Perhaps the colonists rebelled when they realized the King was building a society which would be loyal to him and which could send armies to keep the North in line. The tax issue may have only been part of the "long train of usurpations and abuses."
Fast forward to the 1840s. How to get loyalists to come here without making an obvious show of conscripting an army. First, wait until the United States expels all the larger, more dangerous tribes from the Southeast. Then, ban the cultivation of all but one crop. Then, take the blight spores which you had saved in a jar, and let them loose. Pretty soon, all that space the Cherokee created is being flooded with people. Send them officially to Canada, knowing their economy doesn't have a lot of room even if their land does. They will of course flood South across the enormously long, hard-to-defend border.
After all that, the king had his assets in place.
I am not completely against what Nunn said about the North bringing war to (their) country because it's possible Beauregard felt the North preparing for war, but they only did that because the King was clearly positioning his assets to reestablish royal rule.
It makes you wonder whether Harry and Megan are "the Queen's Own Royal Comintern!" Royalists may be trying to subvert politics to allow the border to be open and to rile up the native malcontents to riot. Suppose the royals are actually here to capitalize and try to obtain recognition for their rule from the masses? I actually think Ms. Megan was sincerely disguisted by the whole royal thing but hey, there are other possibilities.