Sherman Civil War Quotes

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice.

Real strategists are warriors and must be willing and able to fight battles, to “see the elephant,” as Civil War soldiers were fond of saying.

People are deceived and drawn on step by step, till war, death and destruction are upon them.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

I have for some days held and controlled every avenue by which the people and garrison of Savannah can be supplied, and I am therefore justified in demanding the surrender of the city…I am prepared to grant liberal terms to the inhabitants and garrison; but should I be forced to resort to assault, or the slower and surer process of starvation, I shall then feel justified in resorting to the harshest measures, and shall make little effort to restrain my army—burning to avenge the national wrong which they attach to Savannah and other large cities which have been so prominent in dragging our country into civil war.

The American Civil War lays out the stark contrast: the greatest generals in war are often abundant failures during peacetime, and vice versa. McClellan and Sherman are the sharpest contrasts; but there is also Grant the peacetime drunkard, and Stonewall Jackson the barely tolerable military professor. Only Lee stands out as effective in both peace and war (and even he had a mentally unstable father, and himself may have been dysthymic in his general personality). This conflict reflects, I think, the different psychological qualities of leadership needed in different phases of human activity, peace and war being the two extremes.

While many a Georgian condemned the Yankees for ravaging the countryside, it should be noted that the Confederates often treated Southerners just as badly, if not worse. Major

There is an undeniably daffy aspect to Sherman. Calling him a motormouth understates the case: he was a veritable volcano of verbiage, as borne out by a mountain of letters, memoranda, and other official papers, not to mention the uniformly gabby impression he left among contemporaries. If there were a contest for who spoke the most words in a lifetime, Sherman would have been a finalist—he lived a long time and slept very little; otherwise he was talking. He said exactly what was on his mind at that instant, until his quicksilver brain turned to an entirely different matter, then to a third, and perhaps to a fourth, then back to the first—unceasing—spewing orders, analysis, advice, and anecdotes in a random pattern that often left listeners stunned and amazed. One prominent Civil War historian, Gary Gallagher, described Sherman as lacking cognitive filters. It all came out. And this is a real problem in trying to resurrect the man’s nature.

He had bludgeoned the Southern will to resist the military strength of the United States. He had destroyed any realistic hope of ultimate Confederate success, and the people of the South realized that the Confederate armies could not protect them. The

The North’s three greatest generals would all be Ohioans: Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.3 And of the next six men to be elected president of the United States—through 1900, that is—all but one would be Ohio-born Republicans who had fought for the Union.

Freeing negroes seems to be the latest Confederate government craze … [but] if we are to lose our negroes we would as soon see Sherman free them as the Confederate government,” insisted one Southern woman. “Victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves,

Sherman making a mockery of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s recent assertion, while visiting the Rebel army, that the Yankees would have to retreat from Georgia or starve, and predicting that the retreat would be “more disastrous than was that of Napoleon from Moscow.

Somehow, our men had got the idea that South Carolina was the cause of all our troubles; her people were the first to fire on Fort Sumter, had been in a great hurry to precipitate the country into civil war, and therefore on them should fall the scourge of war in its worst form.

Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, “reserv[ing] and set[ting] apart for the settlement of the negroes . . . the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida,” to be subdivided “so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

Major Hitchcock expressed his disgust numerous times about “the most atrocious lies” that were spread about the conduct of the Yankee forces—“our uniform cruelty, our killing all the women and children, burning all the houses, forcing the negroes into our army in the front rank of battle, etc., etc.” He said that everywhere such stories were systematically and persistently circulated—alleging that Sherman actually ordered such terrible acts and his whole army carried them out—and the lies were believed, “even by intelligent people.”40

...I found out that many subjects were taboo from the white man's point of view. Among the topics they did not like to discuss with Negros were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the Part of the Negro. The most accepted topics were sex and religion.

Sherman was a warrior, not a scholar, but he thought deeply about the issues posed by war. The Marches were to Sherman fundamentally a moral expression of Union military power, even a moral equivalent of battle. That is to say, they were designed to humiliate the South and especially secessionist leaders, to humble its swaggering warriors, and to leave them in a state of despair contemplating unavoidable defeat. As the South had been humiliated, Northern arms should henceforth be treated with respect. The Marches thus sought a propaganda or moral victory aimed at the Confederate military and civil will. They would reveal to the world, not only to the South, that a tremendous change had occurred in the Civil War's military balance. Despite its redoubtable resistance throughout 1864, any Confederate success would prove transient⁠—another road pointing to defeat.

And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.

We can punish South Carolina as she deserves, and as thousands of people in Georgia hoped we would do,” Sherman wrote. “I do sincerely believe that the whole United States, North and South, would rejoice to have this Army turned loose in South Carolina, to devastate that State in the manner we have done in Georgia.

the devastation and misery that attend our progress, but that all history teaches us that war, pestilence and famine are the usual order of things by which the Almighty allays the storms of human passion after the long calm of peace.

that war is war, and not popularity seeking.”40

Isaac, the black body servant of Colonel John Nisbet of the Sixty-sixth Georgia, joined his master in the breastworks from time to time to try his hand at shooting Yankees. Amos Rucker was technically a body servant in another Georgia regiment, but it was "well known that he was in the fights around Atlanta on several occasions". When Rucker died many years later, his former comrades-in-arms saw to it that he was laid to rest in the uniform of the Confederate States Army.

The Battle of Atlanta was an unusually confusing engagement for those who fought in it , with assaults coming from unexpected directions and the fortunes of battle changing directions from one moment to the next. Arkansas troops, pinned down in front of the Sixteenth Iowa's works, came in and surrendered, but before they could be moved to the rear other Confederate troops appeared from that very direction; the Iowans tried to put their prisoners between this new threat and themselves, but the Arkansans became belligerent and began to take up arms again. There was a period of total confusion; in the press an Iowa soldier asked an Arkansas which side was surrendering, and the Rebel answered with a laugh: "I'll be damned if I know". In the end it was the Sixteenth Iowa that went off in captivity.

if he had attended burial services for one of his bitter enemies, said, “No, I didn’t patronize the funeral, but I approve of it.

Among the eulogies raised to the departed general, the terse words of his friend Whitelaw Reid seemed to summarize most perceptively the mercurial Sherman: “He never acknowledged an error and never repeated it.

Another was a return to the suggestion advanced informally by Pat Cleburne the previous winter, soon after Missionary Ridge, that the South free its slaves and enlist them in its armies. Hastily suppressed at the time as “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor,” the proposition seemed far less “monstrous” now than it had a year ago, when Grant was not at the gates of Richmond and Sherman had not made his march through Georgia. Seddon, for one, had been for it ever since the fall of Atlanta, except that he believed emancipation should follow, not precede, a term of military service.

I've heard of more ways to die in this war than I knew there were corpses. I've heard there isn't a battle where both sides don't shoot their own men -- sometimes on purpose and sometimes for mercy, but most of the time by mistake. I've heard boys on both sides are killing themselves, so they don't burn or smother or drown or starve, or pass whatever they're dying of to others. I've heard about guerrillas and murders and firing squads. I've reached the point where I don't know if anyone ever just dies from the other side's bullets.

I felt entangled now: this March, this South, this war, history. History could not possibly let the South get away with slavery; history would not possibly let us get away with what we were doing to the South. Somehow or other, we'd both have to pay.

Criticism of Davis was neither new nor unusual, for his Confederacy was by no means a monolithic state. Secession had been imposed upon many loyal Unionists in the South, devoted patriots who, though subdued, remained hostile to the Rebel government; Union conventions had been held in the Confederacy during the war, and thousands of Southerners served in Union armies out of conviction that slavery and secession were twin evils. Many more thousands deserted the Confederate army to spend most of the war at home or in hiding. The more numerous poor whites and small farmers, who owned no slaves and worked their own lands, usually despised the few wealthy planters who controlled the slave system and the political apparatus as well. North Carolina’s Governor Zebulon Vance, in his forthright fashion, had put this issue to Jefferson Davis himself in terms that had become a rallying cry: “It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

After some minutes of Grant trying to ease the situation by talking about the Mexican War, to which Lee responded in a polite, abstracted fashion, Lee reminded Grant of the reason for their meeting.

During the fight Geary’s teamsters became scared, and had deserted their teams, and the mules, stampeded by the sound of battle raging around them, had broken loose from their wagons and run away. Fortunately for their reputation and the safety of the command, they started toward the enemy, and with heads down and tails up, with trace-chains rattling and whiffletrees snapping over the stumps of trees, they rushed pell-mell upon Longstreet’s bewildered men. Believing it to be an impetuous charge of cavalry, his line broke and fled. The quartermaster in charge of the animals, not willing to see such distinguished services go unrewarded, sent in the following communication: “I request that the mules, for their gallantry in action, may have conferred upon them the brevet rank [an honorary promotion] of horses.” Brevets in the army were being pretty freely bestowed at the time, and when this recommendation was reported to General Grant he laughed heartily at the suggestion.

By May 1864, the Fort Pillow affair became a matter of Congressional investigations, with many leaders from both Union and Confederate camps anxious to condemn Forrest simply on principle alone. Certainly those who had personally experienced his temper and knew of his volatile reputation could easily imagine him capable of a massacre. Somewhat surprisingly, one of the men who believed Forrest was not guilty of an intentional massacre was General Sherman, who by 1864 begrudgingly admired his troublesome adversary. Based on statements taken from many of his own men who had been taken prisoner by Forrest and attested that “he was usually very kind to them,

Racism is a virus which can only be spread by us!

Once real war begins, new men, heretofore unheard of, will emerge from obscurity, equal to any occasion.