McNeill's Rangers SCV Camp 582 October 4, 2020 · YANKEE WAR CRIMES AGAINST SOUTHERN CIVILIANS
Mary Touchton Stevens is a graduate of the University of South Florida and the University of Georgia. She was a founder of the now defunct Southern Heritage Alliance.
"The truth is it was not war!!! It was hell unleashed on Southern civilians, non combatants. Citizens who were defenseless women, innocent children and unarmed old men." These brutalities were directed by President Abraham Lincoln, General Philip Sheridan, General William Tecumseh Sherman and more. Before readers condemn the South for slavery, slavery existed in the North, too. At the end of the 1700s, there were more slaves in New York than in Georgia. The states of New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island made a fortune off slave trading.
Lincoln hired evil mercenaries from European countries and street criminals to carry out many of brutalities, torture, rape, and other actions committed against Southerners. The South is owed justice for the many "war crimes" committed against it during the War for Southern Independence. It is hard to know where to begin. I live near Roswell, Georgia, so I will begin with one associated with Roswell.
In 1864, many people living in and around Roswell, GA, fled upon hearing that Union troops were headed for the area. Even the owners of a Roswell Mill departed leaving their mill and a large number of young women and their children who worked there. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's troops found the mill. A frenchman named Theopholie Roche flew a French flag over the mill and may have had some ownership in the mill, but when the troops found products produced for the CSA, they burned it down.
Sherman ordered the women and their children (many also from a nearby mill) sent to Marietta. They were placed on railcars in Marietta like cattle and sent to either Indiana or Kentucky and abandoned. When giving directions for how to handle these young women, their children, and elderly, Sherman said "The women will howl". His remark was disrespectful, hateful and cruel about the plight of these mostly young, naive women, who were kidnapped and sent North to unknown destinations. His remark became the title of a book by Mary Deborah Petite who documented the plight and horrors of these women and children. Some of the women had to give away their children as they were not able to care for them. Some, especially elderly parents, died en route to the North. Most settled in areas where there were many other refugees but jobs were scare, especially for these Southern women who faced prejudice. Some of the women made the trip back to Roswell, but it took years to return. One woman returned to find that her husband had married another woman not knowing what happened to his first wife.
New Orleans was occupied by Union soldiers and Union General Benjamin (the Beast) Butler who hanged William Bruce Mumford, private citizen. Mumford's crime?.....the removal of a "stars and stripes" flag from in front of a federal building. This same Union General exiled to Ship Island, MS, Eugenia Levy Phillips, a prominent Jewish Lady, for laughing during a funeral for a Union soldier.
Sherman’s troops threatened an Arkansas woman by holding her bare leg over hot coal to force her to tell where her husband's wealth was hidden. She refused to reveal where it was hidden and suffered greatly from burns to her leg. Her home was burned down and she watched many neighbors' homes being burned down as well. Later, this woman was taken to a nearby hospital and had her leg amputated. She survived only two more years.
Lincoln was responsible for the deaths of over 700,000 Northern and Southern men, women and children. At the beginning of the war, Union General John C. Fremont freed slaves in Missouri. Lincoln did not approve, General Fremont’s actions were rescinded, slaves were returned to servitude, and Fremont was fired.
Lincoln abolished the writ of habeas corpus. He was afraid that Maryland would vote to secede from the Union. So, he arrested and incarcerated without due process or trial Maryland judges, legislators, newspaper editors and anyone else who disagreed with him. Lincoln's Generals Sheridan and Sherman were brutal and all-out-war leaders. Their troops burned down homes, churches, schools, businesses, destroyed crops, pillaged and stole whatever they could carry away with them. What they could not carry away, they destroyed. They threatened servants to tell them where valuables like silver were hidden.
After destroying crops, they poured salt on the fields. This made the fields unusable for years to come. They stole the livestock for their own consumption. They killed animals and threw the animal carcasses into wells so as to contaminate the water supply. If citizens drank the water, they would become ill or it caused their deaths. A friend told me that his Great-Grandmother wore a large feed sack under her dress. She hoped that the federals would not bother her if she looked pregnant. The troops threatened servants if they did not tell where valuables were hidden.
The following is a request dated 3/22/1864 from Atlanta’s Mayor to Union General Sherman: “Many poor women are in an advanced state of pregnancy; others now have young children, and whose husbands for the greater part are either in the army or dead. Some say, I have a sick one at my house; who will wait on them when I am gone? Others say, what are we to do? We have no house to go to, and no means to buy, build or rent any; no parents, relatives or friends to go to. This being so (they say) how is it possible for the people still here (mostly women and children) to find any shelter? And, how can they live through the winter in the woods—no shelter, no subsistence, in the midst of strangers who know them not, and without the power to assist them much if they were willing to do so? This is but a feeble picture of the consequences of this measure. You know the war—the horrors and the sufferings cannot be described by words; imagination can only conceive it; and we ask you to take these things into consideration.” To this General Sherman replied “I have your letter of the 22nd in the nature of a petition to revoke my order removing all the inhabitants from Atlanta. I have read it and give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned, and yet I shall not revoke my orders.” And, he did not; the people were driven out, their homes burned down and Atlanta destroyed. A free person of color, named Solomon (Sam) Luckie was a very successful barber who worked out of an Atlanta Hotel. He and his wife, Nancy Cunningham became one of the first successful black entrepreneurs. On August 9, 1864, he was standing near a lamppost in Atlanta and speaking to other businessmen when he was hit by artillery shrapnel. He died within a few hours. Freed slaves piled into Natchez, Mississippi. Sherman’s troops forced them into a place known as “Devil’s Punch Bowl”. It was a large ravine used as a Concentration Camp where the freed slaves had limited supplies, little food, no freedom and died from disease. The troops gave them shovels to bury the former slaves where they fell. To this day, fruit and vegetation grow in the former “Devil’s Punch Bowl”. The locals know the history of the area and will NOT eat anything grown there.
If anyone is guilty of committing genocide it would be Lincoln and Union Generals Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, economics professor at Loyola College in Baltimore, tells us that Sherman once wrote to his wife that his purpose was the "extermination, not of soldiers alone...but of the people" of the South. Sherman often ordered his soldiers, many of whom were street criminals from Northern as well as European cities, to shoot civilians at random. There is a famous quote from Sherman’s wife. ‘May ALL Southerners be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into the states till not one habitation is left standing." "The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred over 155 years ago when Union General Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred mile swath of flames in the Shenandoah Valley that left vast numbers of women and children tottering towards starvation and homelessness."
Historians seem to comment at length about the Southern prison in Andersonville, GA. But, very few speak about the horrors of Union prisons such as, Camp Douglas in Chicago, Elmira in New York, Point Lookout, Maryland and others. These prisoners had to live in over crowded, filthy conditions and tried to survive horrible weather conditions.
Many died of diseases, starvation, inclement weather and more. They were also tortured and the Union soldiers “played cruel games” with Confederate prisoners. Many Confederate soldiers were forced to walk with their heads sticking threw holes in the tops of barrels. The endless hours walking in these barrels was excruciating.
"While Sheridan was destroying crops, killing livestock and starving women and children, a Yankee colonel named J. M. Chivington was slaughtering, scalping and mutilating Arapahos and Cheyenne camped at a place called Sand Creek in Colorado. The Indians in the camp had decided to live in peace with the white man, because they had come to trust Major Edward W. Wynkoop who was the commander of Fort Lyon located forty miles from Sand Creek. Wynkoop was removed from his post at Fort Lyon, because of his kindness to the Indians and was replaced with a cruel man named Major Scott J. Anthony who lied to the Indians and who, under the command of Colonel Chivington, raided the encampment at Sand Creek where they slaughtered men, women and children. Some of the Indians huddled together under a large American flag which belonged to the chief Black Kettle, but the Yankee soldiers killed them anyway."
One little girl, Dee Brown tells us in the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee met the soldiers waving a white flag, and they still shot her down in cold blood. “The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous”. (comment by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman).
"The government of the U.S. has any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war - to take their lives, their homes, their land, their everything...war is simply unrestrained by the Constitution...to the persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better.”..General W. T. Sherman, Jan. 31, 1864.
General Sherman also issued the following military order at Big Shanty, Georgia (presently Kennesaw) on June 23, 1864: “If torpedoes (mines) are found in the possession of an enemy to our rear, you may cause them to be put on the ground and tested by a wagon load of prisoners, or if need be a citizen implicated in their use. In like manner, if a torpedo is suspected on any part of the road, order the point to be tested by a carload of prisoners, or by citizens implicated, drawn by a long rope.” This war on citizens was not simply restrained to be applied against men and women but also children. Gen. Sherman in a June 21, 1864, letter to Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Station wrote, "There is a class of people men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order." Stanton replied, "Your letter of the 21st of June has just reached me and meets my approval." While the war on civilians started much earlier than 1864, the above is simply proof that the war on children was part of that scheme!
Gen. Sherman writing to U.S. Major George H. Thomas on November 1, 1864: “I propose…to sally forth and make a hole in Georgia that will be hard to mend.” In his report of the march to the sea, Sherman declared that he had destroyed the railroads for more than 100 miles, and had consumed the corn and fodder in the region of country 30 miles on either side of a line from Atlanta to Savannah, as also the sweet potatoes, cattle, hogs, sheep and poultry, and carried away more than 10,000 horses and mules. “I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simply waste and destruction.” After admitting that “this may seem a hard species of warfare,” he comforted himself with the reflection that “it brought the sad realities of war home to those who supported it.” Thus condoning all the outrages committed by an unrestrained army, he further reported that his men were “a little loose in foraging, and did some things they ought not to have done.” (an understatement)
"The rascals all came in, and in less than ten minutes the house was stripped of almost everything. Pa had the night before concealed his two watches and your jewelry in a very nice place . . . One of them came to me to know where they were, I, of course, refused to tell, he then immediately presented a pistol to my head and swore he would take my life if I did not tell him . . . They carried off every earthly thing we had to eat, did not leave a grain of corn or coffee, or anything that would sustain life one day, and they found all our silver and took every knife, fork and spoon we had in the world. They set the Piney Woods on fire all around us.
Tell Aunt Jenny they set on fire all the rosin she saw, and turned day into night. They carried off a great many of our clothes, have not left me a cloak or shawl of any kind, tore the silk you gave Jenny all to flinders, and carried off my best dresses, and two of Mama’s silks. Have not one blanket in the house, have only a half dozen quilts. The Yankees burned our barn and swore they would burn our house over our heads, but Providence saved it. I can’t tell you how. Well Pat, I must close by telling you that the Yanks never caught Papa and that we are not quite starved to death, though we came very near it, we went five days without a mouthful of bread. You will excuse the paper I know as it is all the Yankees left in the house, and ‘tis a wonder they left this."
Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham said the war was…… "a wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war"; "a war not being waged for the preservation of the Union"; "a war for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism”. (Lincoln banished Vallandigham to the Confederacy).
"The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious hubbub designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states." (Words of Charles Dickens, 1862).
The preceding is certainly not all and much more could be added. Surely, one must realize that the atrocities committed by Lincoln against Southerners were disgraceful, cruel, and actions to force the South back into the Union and NOT to free slaves. Lincoln’s interest in freeing slaves was only for tactical reasons…..he hoped they would rise up against their Masters like those slaves did decades earlier in Haiti, the slaves would join the Union effort and England and France would side with the Union after seeing the slaves freed.
Read the Emancipation Proclamation which mentioned slaves ONLY in the Southern states where Lincoln had no control and not in the North where he had control.
For an excellent expose of these war crimes and their terrible extent, read War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco (Pelican Publishing Co. 2007, ISBN 9871589804661). Read Slavery was not the Cause of the War by Gene Kizer, Jr (Lives in Charleston, SC) and The South was Right by James and Walter Kennedy (Live in Louisiana). What the Yankees did to Us by Stephen Davis. (Lives in Georgia)
A young Atlanta Girl, Carrie Berry, entered the following in her diary; "Aug. 1...We thought we would not have any shelling today...but before night I had to run to the cellar; Aug. 2...We have not been shelled much today; Aug. 3...This was my birthday. I was 10 years old, but I did not have a cake.... times are too hard; Aug 4...The shells have been flying all day and we have stayed in the cellar; Aug. 5...In the evening we had to run to Auntie's and get in the cellar. We did not feel safe in our cellar. They fell so thick and fast." I don't know what reparations should be given to the South for the above. A sincere "apology" would be a good start. More importantly, support Southerners with keeping and maintaining our monuments to our beloved heroes! [link=
[/link]
