April is Confederate History Month

Blazor · April 16, 2020, 03:29:43 PM

Lincoln's plan was a radical departure from Western civilized ethics and practices of the conduct of war. Emmerich de Vattel (1714-67), the Swiss jurist and author of The Law of Nations and world expert on the practice and conduct of war, wrote: "The people, the peasants, the citizens, take no part in [war], and generally have nothing to fear from the sword of the enemy." This remained true for all civilians as long as they refrained from hostilities themselves. They would continue to live their lives in a normal manner and "live in perfect safety as if they were friends." Growing corn, beans and wheat was not yet considered a war activity by civilians. Enemy or occupying soldiers who stole or destroyed private property or harmed civilians were regarded as savage barbarians. Thaddeus Stevens, a congressman from Pennsylvania, stated in Congress in July 1861 that the time had come when the constitution could no longer stand in the way of the U.S. in its conduct of the war against the Southern States. He confidently entertained a high level of comfort in challenging Congress: "Who pleads the Constitution against our proposed action?" He knew that it was universally recognized by all other civilized nations that pillage and wanton destruction of private property was not permitted by the laws of war. He was voicing public recognition of the great moral abyss that separated the industrial materialistic North from its classical European roots and the Southern States. President Davis argued publicly against this new radical departure of the U.S. government saying: "When prosecuting the war with Mexico, we respected private property of the enemy," and that the "sectional hatred" of the North for the South and the "vain conceit" of the North's "newly acquired power led to the idle prophecy of our speedy subjection, and hence the Government of the U.S. refused to act as required by humanity and the usages of civilized warfare."

Actual genocide and ethnic cleansing by U.S. military forces began early in its invasion of the Confederacy at the first major battle of the war, the battle of First Manassas in July 1861. U.S. military forces first plundered and then burned private homes across northern Virginia. This violation of the basic constitutional and human rights of Virginians quickly became pervasive and the commonly accepted practice of U.S. military commanders. It became officially established as U.S. policy on 20 June 1862, one year into the war. Remember, most often, military policy changes occur following the existing changes in common practice.

So violent and savage was this practice that the Commanding General of the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the United States, General George McClellan, a trained and educated soldier who recognized the character of these events from the beginning, wrote Lincoln from Harrison's Landing imploring him to conduct the war according to "the highest principles known to Christian civilization" and to "avoid knowingly" targeting the civilian population. He wrote:

It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people of any State in any event. It should not be at all a war upon populations, but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States, nor forcible abolition of slavery, should be contemplated for a moment.

Lincoln's response was to ignore his letter and replace McClellan as head of the United States Armed Forces. McClellan was so convicted concerning Lincoln's conduct of the war that he ran against Lincoln as the Democratic candidate for president in 1864. The war's goal was clearly manifested from its beginning. It was the extermination or total subjugation of the Southern peoples.

Mark Grimsley in The Hard Hand of War observed that the U.S. Army was full of "thieves, freelance foragers, and officers willing to look the other way," and that by October 1861 General Louis Blenker's division "was already burning houses and public buildings along its line of march" in Virginia. Early in the summer of 1861, before the Battle of First Manassas the Army of the Potomac was known for "robbing hen roosts, killing hogs, slaughtering beef cattle, cows, the burning of a house or two and the plundering of others."

In 1862 General Sheridan adopted the theory of "collective responsibility" in an unethical, violent and feeble-minded attempt to "justify" attacking innocent defenseless civilians. (Who were these civilians? They were the ones not in the army. They were the women, children, and the elderly.) In retaliation for his own poor performance as a tactician and general on the field of battle, a theory and practice won the praise of his commander-in-chief, President Lincoln. Sheridan adopted this theory earlier articulated by U.S. General Pope who commanded his army to plunder and kill, at will, civilians. Sherman later termed this practice as "the final solution."

Blazor · April 16, 2020, 03:30:14 PM

Sheridan was careful to not leave too much in writing, but at one point he suggested that General Louis D. Watkins "burn ten or twelve houses of known secessionists, kill a few at random, and let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is fired on from Resaca to Kingston." He was only advising other generals to follow what he and others had already put into practice.

Pope had commanded that "All villages and neighborhoods ... will be laid under contribution." Any males wishing to retain their homes were commanded to take the U.S. Loyalty Oath or be shot. Many were not given the option. Subsequently, Sheridan, as had Pope, burned the entire towns. He burned Randolph, Tennessee to the ground because Confederate snipers were firing at Union gunboats on the Mississippi River. He then took civilian hostages (who were these hostages?3/4women, children, and the elderly) and either traded them for federal prisoners of war, a barbaric and radical departure from the commonly acceptable practices of civilized warfare, or murdered them. Memphis was destroyed and left unpopulated for three years after the war.

This practice had been universally held in contempt for hundreds of years by European governments. Dozens of Southern towns in Southern States no longer existed by the end of the war. At times Sheridan summarily had unarmed civilians shot on sight. In the federal Official Records of the War there are accounts of U.S. soldiers shooting peaceful old men, women and children from the windows of trains during troop transport. Some whom they shot were guilty of the high crime of plowing their fields or walking down a sidewalk or simply "being a Southerner." Terrorists have no conscience. General Sheridan saw all Southern civilians as guilty and mostly they were guilty of being Christians and believing the South was just in its cause. He said, "First. Deal as hard blows to the enemy's soldiers as possible, and cause so much suffering to the inhabitants of the country that they will long for peace and press their government to make it. Nothing should be left to the people but eyes to lament the war."

Sheridan turned the beautiful Shenandoah Valley into "the valley of the shadow of death." By the end of the first year of the war, "authorized foraging," meaning pillaging and plundering and raping, became the plan of attack against the Southern economy and civilian population. When a man in his army was killed he would burn all the houses within a five-mile radius and kill some if not all civilians in the area. So indiscriminate were these planned massacres that some of the dead were supporters of the U.S. war effort, but that made no difference to the quality of men serving in and commanding the ranks of Lincoln's war effort. United States armed forces made certain the towns were clear of Confederate troops and snipers before sending their "forces" against the civilians. Their plan of attack faced the terrors of assaulting positions held by the elderly, women and children as they did their chores and played.

General Philip Sheridan evacuated and in some areas exterminated the Shenandoah Valley. He burned everything. He boasted in a letter to General Grant that in a few days he had "destroyed 2,200 barns ... over 70 mills ... driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock ... killed not less than 3,000 sheep.... Tomorrow I will continue the destruction." Upon receiving this report President Lincoln at the Executive Mansion in Washington, D.C. on 22 October 1864 wrote to General Sheridan: "With great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army the thanks of the nation and my own personal admiration and gratitude for the month's operations in the Shenandoah Valley." Earlier on 11 October Sheridan had written, "I know of no way to exterminate them except to burn out the whole country." Sheridan's troops in letters to their families described themselves as "barn burners" and "destroyers of homes." One soldier bragged of "burning 60 homes." The main exercise of his "military efforts" was against Southern civilians. Nearly all were women, children, or elderly men. This continued for four years.

In the autumn of 1864, after the withdrawal of the Confederate Army from the devastated Shenandoah Valley, General Grant ordered Sheridan to turn the valley into a "desert." He did. William T. Patterson, a sergeant in Sheridan's army, described the continued pillaging, plundering, and burning by Sheridan of Harrisonburg, Bridgewater, and Dayton, Virginia:

The work of destruction is commencing in the suburbs of the town.... The whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof ... such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy I never saw nor never want to see again, some were wild, crazy, mad, some cry for help while others throw their arms around yankee soldiers necks and implore mercy. Negroes, free and slave, were constantly targeted. Current figures place the death total of Southern negroes at 800,000 to 1,200,000. Negroes were targeted more often than Southern whites. Mark Grimsley writes of these generous liberators: "With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked."

Blazor · April 16, 2020, 03:30:45 PM

A common practice of U.S. troops was to put a hangman's noose around the slave's neck and threaten to hang or, indeed, actually hang him unless he told where the household's jewelry, silverware, and money were hidden. Their rape of black women was more common than that of white women. Negroes were randomly drowned, beaten, raped, placed in concentration camps and starved to death, or shot by occupying U.S. military forces, a face of this war not touched by Ken Burns and the PBS Civil War Specials. There were mass graves around the South of large numbers of Negroes killed by the invading U.S. military. In Sanders, Louisiana, 2,000 Negroes went to the U.S. army asking for help. Many of them were ill. The U.S. placed in them in a concentration camp and gave them neither food nor water until they were all dead. National Public Television showed where the U.S. Army drowned over 800 Negroes at bayonet point in a river near Charleston, South Carolina, thus saving ammunition.

Mark Grimsley wrote a first hand account of the sacking of Fredericksburg, Virginia in December of 1862:

"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 solders. Splendid alabaster vases and pieces of statuary were thrown at 6 and 700 dollar mirrors. Closets of the very finest China were broken into and their contents smashed ... rosewood pianos piled in the street and burned.... Identical events occurred in dozens of other Southern cities and towns for four years." Lee Kennett, Sherman biographer, says that historians radically downplay the horror of Lincoln's war on civilians and admits that Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified ... in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violations of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.

Describing Sherman's New York regiments he adds that they "were filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World." It took coercion to get some Northern men to do the criminal acts Lincoln and his generals commanded. Sherman admitted after the war that what he had been taught at West Point would indicate that he "could be hanged" for the things he did in the war. The British and much of Europe clearly understood the reason for the war and its true nature and its conduct. In December of 1861 Charles Dickens wrote that he detested slavery as most living in the North and the South did, but said:"the northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern States. "Union" means so many millions [of dollars] lost to the south; secession means the loss of the same millions to the north. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils ... the quarrel between north and south is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."

Virginia became the first victim of this genocidal Total War policy, suffering its effects first under Generals Sheridan, Pope, Banks, Blenker, Butler, Hunter and dozens of other U.S. generals. Virginia suffered more plundering, the murder of her civilians en masse, and devastation from this policy than any other State, even more than Georgia and South Carolina.

When these memories are brought into the open some people feel that the South is still fighting the war, but in reality the U.S. is still trying to cleanse their culture of their Southernness, especially her Christianity. Much to the continuing dismay of northerners the South continues to memorialize its mass graves and holocaust in much the same manner as the Jews remember their days of suffering and extermination under the Nazis. Because the South lost the war there is no public or governmental review and recognition of these crimes against humanity.

Thomas DiLorenzo in his essay "The Other Reparations Movement" writes:

Unable to subdue their enemy combatants, many Union officers waged war on civilians instead, with Lincoln's full knowledge and approval. Grimsley describes how Union Colonel John Beatty warned the residents of Paint Rock, Alabama, that "Every time the telegraph wire was cut we would burn a house; every time a train was fired upon we would hang a man; and we would continue to do this until every house was burned and every man hanged between Decatur and Bridgeport." Beatty ended up burning the entire town of Paint Rock to the ground. These were the actions of barbarians, not a civilized army. With the approval of President Lincoln, the U.S. Army, DiLorenzo continues, "pillaged, plundered, burned, and raped its way through the South for four years." In like manner General Sherman destroyed the cities of Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi. In a letter to General Grant, Sherman boasted, "The inhabitants [of Jackson] are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated for 30 miles around." He had to devastate the land since he could not defeat the army. Sherman bragged about the destruction he wrought on Meridian after the complete evacuation of the Confederate Army. He wrote, "for five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars and with fire.... Meridian no longer exists.

Blazor · April 16, 2020, 03:31:15 PM

Sherman was advised by his chief engineer, Captain O.M. Poe, that the bombardment of Atlanta would achieve no advantage since the city was of no military significance and the Confederate Army had withdrawn from the city. He implored Sherman to stop the destruction after seeing the bodies of dead women and children in the streets. Sherman responded that "their bodies were a beautiful sight" and continued until he had destroyed 90 percent of all the buildings in Atlanta. The movie Gone with the Wind did not show the masses of the dead lying in the center of the city to be civilians, women, children, and the elderly. The remaining 2,000 residents were evicted from their homes. The scenes of the burning of Atlanta from Gone With The Wind, as dramatic as they were, hardly portrayed the devastation of Atlanta and its civilian population. Winter was approaching. Sherman was more thorough than Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.For the North this was not largely a war against an opposing army; it was a slaughter of defenseless civilians3/4children, women and the elderly. His men systematically burned hospitals, homes, churches, schools, colleges, libraries and seats of city, county and state governments. They burned Bibles, hymnals, photographs of Southern individuals and families, and county, city, and State government records. Sherman wrote that eighty percent of his army's warfare was directed against civilians and their property. He boasted that his army destroyed $100 million in private property and carried home $20 million more during one short period of his march to the sea, and bragged about shooting civilians who simply disagreed with him. No home escaped robbery and no woman escaped insult. He permitted his men to leave women who were in the advanced state of pregnancy lying in the snow, gang-raped, with no food, no shelter, and no hope. Many died. Sherman wrote, "all the people are now guerrillas." Sherman's biographer, John Marszalek, wrote that Sherman "saw everyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line as an implacable enemy." This clearly defines the war effort as an exercise in genocide. There is also clear evidence that this was Lincoln's intent from the beginning of the war. On 31 July 1862 General Sherman wrote his wife explaining his goal and the strategy he planned to use "against the Southern people," against non-combatants and not just the military, with these words: "extermination, not of soldiers alone . . . but the people." Sherman's tender wife, his source of inspiration, wrote him back, saying that she wanted "a war of extermination and that all [Southron's] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword in their state till not one habitation is left standing."

This dominant attitude in the North led one Northern soldier, Lt. Thomas J. Myers, to write:

I have no time for particulars. We have had a glorious time in this State [South Carolina]. Unrestricted license to burn and plunder [rape and kill] was the order of the day. The chivalry have been stripped of most of their valuables.

General Sherman has gold and silver enough to start a bank. His share in gold watches and chains alone at Columbia was two hundred and seventy-five.

We took gold and silver enough from the damned rebels [the women and their homes] to have redeemed their infernal currency twice over.

The damned niggers, as a general thing, preferred to stay at home, particularly after they found out that we wanted only the able-bodied men, and to tell the truth, the youngest and best looking women. Sometimes we took them off by way of repaying influential secessionists. But a part of these [thousands] we soon managed to lose, sometimes in crossing rivers [drowned 800 at bayonet point at one time in Charleston], sometimes in other ways. I shall write you again from Wilmington, Goldsboro, or some other place in North Carolina.... Love to grandmother and Aunt Charlotte. Take care of yourself and the children. Don't show this letter out of the family.

Your affectionate husband

This sounds like the press of today as when George Will called for a strategy of war against terrorists that includes killing their leaders and as many of our adversaries as possible. Will wrote "U.S. strategy [in war] should maximize fatalities among the enemy, rather than expedite the quickest possible cessation of hostilities."This Shermanesque blind rage of primitive hatred and bigotry is passed from one generation to the next. This was exactly the approach of Sheridan, Grant, Banks, Butler and most Northern commanders. General Sherman said: "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand [more than the total number of those left in the Confederate Army] ... and the further they run the harder for us to get them."

Blazor · April 16, 2020, 03:31:49 PM

In 1864, just before his March to the Sea, Sherman declared "We must kill 300,000," referring to civilians. Concerning the extermination of Southern men he wrote, "that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright." Sherman wrote, "I would not restrain the army, lest its vigor and energy should be impaired." There are hundreds of such statements explicitly defining this genocidal approach to civilians made by many northern generals, politicians, writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and news media persons before and during this war. And if that weren't enough the current news media praises Sherman as a saint for these policies and actions as we recently saw in the writings of the pseudo-conservative columnist and advocate of genocide, George Will. Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin had such supporters, like George Will, of their identical policies, who soothed the ears of those who might feel a twinge of conscience at such radical actions.

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln urged and supported these radical actions taken by his commanders from the beginning of the war. Typical of his and congressional U.S. support of a genocidal war against the South is the Preamble to House Resolution #97, also known as the "Retaliatory Orders," which was passed by both houses of Congress in January of 1865:

Rebel prisoners in our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding its parallels only in the conduct of savage tribes and resulting in death of multitudes by the slow but designed process of starvation and by mortal diseases occasioned by insignificant and unhealthy food and wanton exposure of their persons to the inclemency of the weather. It is nearly impossible to make an accurate report concerning the death toll of Southern civilians.

Recently, Joseph Stromberg in his essay "Strategies of Annihilation: Total War in US History," raises the question as to what happened to the 50,000 missing Southern civilians who disappeared along Sherman's line of march to the sea. Sherman's own account of this march notes thousands of atrocities he permitted and ordered against both black and white Southern civilians. It should be noted that only "a small portion" of such actions were documented in the federal government's Official Records of the War (the "O.R."). Enough was documented to shame any barbarian or civilized people. Wayne Carlson of Dublin, Virginia recently wrote:

It was actually Unionist armies, under generals like Sherman and Sheridan in Virginia that most closely resemble the murderous fanaticism we attribute to those we are presently slaughtering, referring to the Taliban and Al-Qaida ... [and that] these kinds of facts have been too long closeted in the dark shadows of Yankee self-righteousness.

The northern news media that survived Lincoln's period of media-cleansing, when he destroyed 325 presses, praised this new level of fanaticism and barbarism. Where are the unremitting condemnations that should be burning the government-controlled media airways from the lapdog press, the halls of Marxist academia, and our more gentle and ever more sensitive politicians who "feel our pain"?

On 9 October 1864 General Sherman wrote General Grant at City Point, Virginia: "Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.... I can make the march, and make Georgia howl." Genocide on a massive scale was the continuing war policy of the U.S. government.

U.S. General O.O. Howard on 16 October 1864 wrote: "They [his troops] took from women and children the last morsel of food. In some cases these things were done ... in a manner as if it were frolic."

Only mentally weak and twisted men, like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, set goals that make war on women, children and old men. General Sherman wrote to General Kilpatrick: "Let the people [civilians] know that the war is now against them.... It is petty nonsense for Wheeler and Beauregard and such vain heroes to talk of our warring against women and children. If they claim to be men they should defend their women and children and prevent us reaching their homes."

The Cherokee saw the South set-up its government without violence and without the suspension of civil law or the closing of civil courts. They observed that military power was "nowhere placed above civil authorities." No one was seized and put in prison by the arbitrary use of power. They saw a unanimous South exercising its right to self-government separating itself from a union with the Northern States. In the South they saw citizens voluntarily rising almost to the man to defend against the invasion of northern armies. They also observed that "nowhere has it been found [by the Confederates] necessary to compel men to serve or to enlist mercenaries by the offer of extraordinary bounties," as had been done by the U.S. They witnessed the process by which the North was hiring foreign mercenaries by the hundreds of thousands. In their Declaration of War on the United States signed 28 October 1861, in the Northern States they witnessed:

...with alarm a violated Constitution, all civil liberty put in peril, and all rules of civilized warfare and the dictates of common humanity and decency unhesitatingly disregarded.... Military despotism has displaced the civil power and the law became silent amid arms. Free speech and almost free thought became a crime. The right to the writ of habeas corpus, guaranteed by the Constitution, disappeared at the nod of a Secretary of State or a general of the lowest grade. The mandate of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was set at naught by the military power, and this outrage on common right [common law] approved by a President sworn to support the Constitution. War on the largest scale was waged, and the immense bodies of troops called into the field in the absence of any law warranting it under the pretense of suppressing unlawful combination of men. The humanities of war, which even barbarians respect, were no longer thought worthy to be observed. Foreign mercenaries and the scum of [Northern] cities and the inmates of prisons were enlisted and organized into regiments and brigades and sent into Southern States to aid in subjugating a people struggling for freedom, to burn, to plunder, and to commit the basest of outrages on women; while the heels of armed tyranny trod upon the necks of Maryland and Missouri, and men of the highest character and position were incarcerated upon suspicion and without process of law in jails, in forts, and in prison-ships, and even women were imprisoned by the arbitrary order of a President and Cabinet ministers; while the press ceased to be free, the publication of newspapers was suspended and their issues seized and destroyed; the officers and men taken prisoners in battle were allowed to remain in captivity by the refusal of their Government to consent to an exchange of prisoners; as they had left their dead on more than one field of battle that had witnessed their defeat to be buried and their wounded to be cared for by Southern hands.

The war now raging is a war of Northern cupidity and fanaticism against the institution of African servitude; against the commercial freedom of the South, and against the political freedom of the States, and its objects are to annihilate the sovereignty of those States and utterly change the nature of the General Government.

These issues were clear to the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, peoples called savages in the U.S. Constitution, in the first three months of the war. However, it seems to not be so clear to today's "defenders of democracy." By October of 1861 it had become universally clear whom the true savages were, an opinion shared by nearly all in civilized Europe and many of us now living.

Blazor · April 16, 2020, 08:43:41 PM

I know the last one was long lol, but even if you skim it, you will see, that when the North came down here, they murdered women, children, and old people, and especially black folk. They pillaged homes and burned everything. They raped the women and slave women. They burned down crops as to starve us out, which is really what broke us, we were all hungry. Even in areas where there were no troops, they burned and pillaged. They wanted to starve us out, and make citizens beg for mercy. They drowned folks as to save ammo. They left their Yankee soldiers for captive down south, so as to make rations go even shorter. They cut off train lines and harbors, no supplies. They freed prisoners and hired foreigners, not to mention the draft. So many things.

Blazor · April 21, 2020, 11:14:41 AM

Have I lost y'all yet lol?

https://scontent.fric1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/93156599_10219845423144286_1455319710852710400_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&_nc_sid=110474&_nc_ohc=AICjBAG0YV0AX8RrqvW&_nc_ht=scontent.fric1-1.fna&oh=801f96dda3810649f1f82bd1a22385e0&oe=5EC4A2C0">

Blazor · April 24, 2020, 09:42:15 PM

I lost y'all

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April is Confederate History Month

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