War Crimes – Destruction of the South

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Increasingly throughout the course of the War, the Union engaged in hard war against Southern civilians. Starting with Embargo and Blockade (which has become common accepted practice sense) then escalating to shelling of towns and cities, mass arrests, forced expulsions, destruction of food supplies, burning and destruction of whole towns, intimidation and takeover of churches, plunder of personnel property (sometimes for resale in the North), and even murder. In the case of shelling of cities and towns, the confederates were not hiding in these areas but did everything possible to engage the Union troops in open areas away from civilians such as in Fredericksburg, but Union forces specifically chose to destroy the city anyway. Although those whose knowledge of the war is limited to talking points from high school history classes are generally unaware of this with the possible exception of Sherman’s march to the Sea, no historian or anyone who has undertaken to study the war would dispute any of this (1 p. ch. 1).  It was well documented in the time period from many perspectives ranging from the slave to the aristocrat to the perpetrator and has been the subject of many essays, papers, and books.  What modern historians will tend to do, however, is to downplay it or justify it.  The main implementers of the policy of “hard war” were common names still recognized like Sherman, Pope, Sheridan, and Custer. President Lincoln, however, tended to be a micromanager of the military effort and not only was aware of these practices but a party to them.(2 p. 172)

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Some examples in roughly chronological order taken primarily from Thomas Dilorenzo’s, Lincoln Unmasked, are provided for reference below. A couple other recommended references are Walter Cisco’s, War Crimes against Southern Civilians and Paul C Graham’s, When the Yankees Come – Former South Carolina Slaves Remember Sherman’s Invasion although there is no shortage of source materials on this subject.

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• While being soundly defeated by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, General Pope started to wage war on the civilian population justifying this on the grounds they weren’t providing enough information on confederate troop movement.  His troops were instructed to plunder at will stating, “All villages and neighborhoods… will be laid under contribution.”(2 p. 178)

• While attempting to subdue Memphis in 1862, Sherman’s gunboats were being fired on by Confederate snipers.  Sherman took vengeance on the people by burning the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee to the ground.“ (2 p. 180)

• Looting was a standard practice for Union forces.  One typical account from Fredericksburg goes as follows,  “Boys came in… loaded with silver pitchers, silver spoons, silver lamps, and castors, etc. Great three story houses furnished magnificently were broken into and their contents scattered over the floors and trampled on by the muddy feet of the soldiers…”(2 p. 179)

• In Jackson Mississippi in 1863 Sherman ordered that the town be bombarded every five minutes day and night. This again was standard practice that happened repeatedly across the South(2 p. 184)

• Churches and clergy weren’t exempt from Union violence and Catholics were on many occasions specifically targeted.  In Louisiana Union troops shot at Fr. Jan of Martinville while he was saying Mass and he was then beaten.  In another town Union troops put on the priest’s vestments and danced on the Altar. In another incident Irish Union troops mutinied when ordered to burn down a Catholic church.(3 p. 254)

• After the confederates were finally pushed out of Shenandoah Valley, Grant ordered Sheridan to make a final pass through the valley, plundering and burning everything. Grant stated in part, “Carry off stock of all descriptions, and Negroes, so as to prevent further planting,” (2 p. 195)

• After taking Atlanta, Sherman’s army continued their pattern of looting and burning. They even looted the cemeteries.  Graves were dug up and bodies stripped of jewelry and other valuables. Out of 4,000 private homes only 400 were left standing. 90% of the city was utterly destroyed (2 p. 186)

• While there were still pockets of resistance in northern Georgia after Atlanta fell, Sherman ordered the murder of randomly chosen civilians as retaliation for attacks on Union troops by Confederate forces (2 p. 187)

• Trading POWs was common throughout the war but as the war drug on into its final phases the Union would capture Georgian civilians and trade them for Union prisoners. (2 p. 189)

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Many Unions soldiers and officers kept diaries chronicling the destruction.

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• “But there is another class of devastations widely different from these, which have been perpetrated to an extent of which the North has little conception. These may be classified, as first, deliberate and systematic robbery for the sake of gain. Thousands of soldiers have gathered by violence hundreds of dollars each, some of them thousands, by sheer robbery.
  When they come to a house where an old man may be found whom the most rigid conscription had not taken, they assume that he has gold and silver hidden and demand it. If he gives up the treasure cheerfully, he escapes personal violence. If he denies the possession of treasure and they believe him, he escapes. If they do not believe him they resort to violent means to compel its surrender. With a rope they will hang him until he is nearly gone. Then let him down and demand the money-and this is repeated until he or they give up.” - Capt. George W. Pepper, Chaplain of the 80th Ohio(4)

•  “For five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, claw bars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done. Meridian… no longer exists.” General Sherman (note that this happened long after there was any confederate resistance). (2 p. 185)

•  “Never before have I witnessed so much wanton destruction as on this march. The soldiers are perfectly abandoned.”Unnamed Union Soldier

•  Captain Poe described the March to the Sea as an orgy of “robbing and plundering” and prayed to God that “it may never be my duty to see the like again.”(2 p. 190)

 

Confederate Secretary or War, Judah P. Benjamin said this in response to a foreign visitor who inquired as to why the Yankees were so cruel which is an appropriate summary:

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“If they had behaved differently; if they had come against us observing strict discipline, protecting women and children, respecting private property.… But they could not help showing their cruelty and rapacity, they could not dissemble their true nature, which is the real cause of this war.  If they had been capable of acting otherwise, they would not have been Yankees, and we should never have quarreled with them.”(5 p. 104)

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Historian James M. McPherson estimated that 50,000 southern civilians were killed in the course of the war (1 p. ch. 1).  Other estimates were much higher including some by Union officers after the war with a high range being as many as 300,000.  Counting dead and displaced civilians in a war is difficult because it has to be done well after the fact and requires you to know how many people were there in the first place. Differentiating deaths from direct military action as opposed to disease and starvation is also somewhat subjective. McPherson, who is the most mainstream of mainstream historians reflecting a neo-conservative perspective, admires Lincoln calling his management of the war “brilliant” and a work of “genius”.

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Attempts to justify all of this tend to focus on blaming the victims, especially Southern aristocracy and slave owners, but poor people in general including slaves and free-Blacks fared no better (1). Rapes are generally omitted from most accounts but this seems to have been targeted towards Black women and descriptions of Union troop’s treatment of slaves indicates they were treated with low regard. “With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked” (2 p. 189).  Southern churches and clergy were also directly targeted with Union troops requiring that they affirm allegiance and pray for the President.  The following account relating to Andrew Jackson, who was Union military governor of Tennessee, is the taken from War Crimes against Southern Civilians but is also representative in a broad sense:

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“The clergy of Nashville were among the first to feel Johnson's wrath. A group that included Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Christian Church ministers and educators was ushered into the governor's office, where he demanded they declare allegiance to the country at war with their own. When they refused, the pastors were jailed. "They are the enemies of our government," Johnson explained to the provost marshal, "and should receive such consideration only as attaches to a person guilty of so infamous a crime." Episcopal rector George Harris was arrested by military authorities and told he must "pray for the President of the United States or be hung." Harris was able to escape into exile. His church, Holy Trinity on Sixth Avenue South, was seized by the U.S. Army and used for the storage of munitions. The Methodist publishing house was commandeered for the printing of government documents. First Baptist Church was converted into a hospital before being destroyed!”(1 p. ch. 4)

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From the onset of the war the possibility of plundering was a concern to some Union officers.  Then, as in other wars, how to deal with conquered or occupied peoples was a concern and there are consistently two diverse opinions.  One is hard war to break the will of the enemy to fight which, in this case, would destroy any latent Union sympathy and turn those who would prefer to be neutral into adversaries bent on revenge who wouldn’t see themselves as having any other viable choice but to resist.  The other is to treat opposing civilians with respect and try to win the “hearts and minds” of the population. The need to consider this choice would, of course, only apply to the aggressor.

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The issue was a concern to General McClellan who wrote to Lincoln on June 20, 1862 requesting that the President ensure the war be conducted according to “the highest principles known to Christian Civilization” and directed only against “armed forces and organization”.  The burning and pillaging began almost immediately in the Shenandoah Valley in 1861 which McClellan would have been well aware of.  Lincoln accepted the letter but didn’t directly respond.  He supported the passage of the Confiscation Act and replaced McClellan several months later.  McClellan ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 1864 and lost. (2 p. 177)

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There were both cultural and written standards for the conduct of war at the time. The Geneva Convention established a set of standards that documented what was largely in place during that prior century. Nations agree that it was a war crime, punishable by imprisonment or death, for armies to (1) attack defenseless cities and towns, (2) plunder and wantonly destroy civilian property, and (3) take from the civilian population more than what was necessary to feed and sustain an occupying army and that further, the only just war was a defensive war (2 p. 194). The concept of total war migrated directly and indirectly from the American war to the future conflicts. When Union General Sheridan was sent to observe the Prussian Empire’s conquest of France in 1870, Sheridan told Otto von Bismarck that defeated civilians “must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war." Bismarck was shocked by this advice but it pointed the way to a darker world to come.(1 p. ch. 1)

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In contrast to what was done to the South, when Southern armies had an opportunity to seek vengeance against northern civilian populations, they were restrained. At Gettysburg, General Lee addressed his men as follows:

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“It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending Him to whom vengeance belongeth” Robert E Lee (6)

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Collective acts of violence that occur in a war are commonly summarized, in part, in order to present them in the context of a greater event but also to make them less personal and less emotional.  The broader this process of generalization becomes, the easier it is to justify them or simply conclude it wasn’t that important in the greater scheme of things.  Yet acts of violence against civilians in particular are generally very personal as is the response to them.  There are many accounts of confederate partisans who started out as non-participants in the war but became warriors in response to atrocities committed against their families. The movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales” was written about a fictional composite character in Missouri but there is no shortage of material from which to create such a man. We will conclude this section with an example of a fairly well known and unlikely partisan fighter who took a terrible toll on Union forces in Kentucky. 

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In the fall of 1862 two of Jack Hinson’s sons, George 21 and John 17 were hunting near the family’s farm when they were arrested by Union Troops and executed alongside the road as being suspected confederate guerillas or spies. They could have enlisted in the Fourteenth Tennessee but didn’t as the family were Unionists. The patrol leader then beheaded the bodies with his saber, put the bodies on display, and proceeded to the Hinson farm to arrest the rest of the family. According to many accounts they hung their severed heads on the gate to the property. (7 pp. 148-55)

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Until that moment, Jack Hinson was a man of peace, a leading citizen of Stewart County, Tennessee.  Owner of a large prosperous plantation, Bubbling Springs, home to his family and a number of slaves.  Although many of his friends and family were secessionists, he was opposed to both secession and the war and wanted no part of it. At the nearby battle of Fort Donelson he had been neutral and had been a friendly acquaintance of both General Grant and confederate commanders. General Grant was even a guest in his home after the battle.(7 p. 24)

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When the troops came to the Hinson home there was a good chance that the Hinson family could meet the same fate but Jack remained controlled and buried his sons but the Scott-Irish warrior ethos welled up inside him. For the next several months, they harvested their crops and went about life and Jack studied Union supplier routes and troop behaviors while having a custom made rifle built with a rifled barrel. It was 15 pounds and had to be fired off a stand but was accurate at long distances. Jack Hinson was 57 years old at the time but had very good vision, was methodical, analytical, tough, and was completely at home “between the rivers”, where he had lived, living and moving swiftly and quietly through the wilderness.  When the time was right, he sent the remainder of his family away to relative safety and disappeared into the countryside. (7 pp. 150-55)

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For the remainder of the war he would become a renowned Confederate sniper taking a heavy toll on the Federal Army and Navy, killing and disappearing into the woods. He would also become a friend of and scout for General Nathan Bedford Forrest. He would take a particularly heavy toll on Union shipping on Twin Rivers to the point where he would affect Union war policies (7 p. 152). He is believed to have killed over 100 Union Officers and soldiers focusing on officers along with a number of bandits and other predators preying on the local population (7 p. 152). Elements of nine regiments, both cavalry and infantry, and an amphibious task force with specially built navy boats and a special-operations Marine brigade targeted the elderly man with a growing price on his head but they never got him.

 

Bibliography

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1. Cisco, Walter Brian. War Crimes Against Southern Civilians. Gretna, Louisiana : Pelican Publishing company, 2008.

2. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln. New York, New York : Three Rivers Press, 2002.

3. Coulombe, Charles A. Puritans Empire A Catholic Perspective on American History. s.l. : Tumblar House, 2008.

4. Pepper, George W. Internet Archives. [Online] 1865. https://cwnc.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/items/show/153.

5. Kennedy, James Ronald and Kennedy, Walter Donald. Yankee Empire. Colombia, South Carolina : Shotwell Publishing, 2018.

6. Earle. Deo Vindice. [Online] August 22, 2014. [Cited: June.] https://sesquicentenary.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/it-must-be-remembered-that-we-make-war-only-upon-armed-men-and-that-we-cannot-take-vengeance-for-the-wrongs-our-people-have-suffered-without-lowering-ourselves-in-the-eyes-of-all-whose-abhorrence-has/.

7. McKenney, Tom C. Jack Hinson's One-Man War. Gretna, Louisiana : Pelican Publishing Company, 2009.