My father was the fifth generation of a lineage of males who’s father was lost in a war by the age of 9 (they were loyalists during the American Revolution). He felt his culture it was silenced and all words published about the war were from the north. Even the Thirty Year War (Mom’s side of the family), drove Germans to the Carolinas and heartland where they fought in these wars (but no one in her family died).

I’m reading about the Civil War now because I wonder if war was the best solution. I don’t actually know much though. Why not pressure England to quit trading with the South since they had made slavery illegal in England? Why did they build Southern Warship? How much did the north play in continuing the role of slavery in controlling Black riots in New Orleans, or the Trail of Tears. Since Whites were outnumbered in the South I think Blacks eventually would have taken control. Although I suspect they would have legislated the same oppression they had been taught.

I’ve been left with the feeling that wars are murder and murder is immoral. When people fantasize about political actions as though they are games of winners and losers, I feel very sad. It’s all about the flag waving and then death that lasts for centuries.

Thanks again.

In his marches through Georgia, and his less publicized march through South Carolina of a similar kind, Sherman was striking at what today we would call “strategic” targets, facilities that were significant in aiding the enemy war effort. I don’t have enough specific knowledge about the Georgia or South Carolina marches to have any detailed judgment about how well he maintained military discipline among his men, although I have the strong impression that he did so pretty well.

It is a subject I want to look at more closely at some point, because in our day of air power and its lavish use in wars, the whole concept of hitting “strategic targets” is a very problematic one. I know that at some level, part of the point of the Georgia and South Carolina campaigns was psychological, to convince the Confederate Army that they had no hope of winning militarily. But I wonder to what extent Sherman was trying to do that via the civilian population, hoping they would bring pressure for surrender, and how well that worked. Because despite the faith of air power advocates since before the Wright brothers took flight that targeting the morale of the enemy’s civilian population will break the other side’s “will”, there is little evidence that it works in practice, and much evidence that it stiffens the enemy population’s determination to fight. So I’m curious as to how that may have played out in the case of Sherman’s Georgia and South Carolina campaigns.

I recall a conversation as I had in Mississippi as a teenager about the use of air power on civilian targets in Vietnam. One adult said, “Well, they [the Yankees] did it to us [Southerners of a century before] in the Civil War, why shouldn’t we [contemporary Americans] do it to them [the Vietnamese]?” A bizarre case of Southern white lore about the ruthlessness and amorality of Sherman serving as the justification for arguably ruthless and amoral air warfare against people whose ancestors had nothing at all to do with the American Civil War.

While I agree with you about the need to understand various perspectives in looking at historical events, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a historian (even us part-time and amateur ones) should have “no interest in any type of moral vindication for either side”. I just came across a 1949 essay by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on the Civil War in which he argued that there are some things that are so basic that historians are in fact obligated to take a moral position on them. He used the case of the Holocaust as an example, although I believe he referred to Nazi Germany in a more general way. We could add the Armenian genocide, the horrors of Rwanda or the Balkans in the 1990s, the burning of witches in early-modern Europe (and America), and others. As he put it then, if there is anything that we can say with certainty was morally wrong, then chattel slavery is surely one of them.

But I would also say that, in general, history is a very poor source for people looking for saintly inspiration or moral lessons. Especially because I think we learn those moral lessons very poorly.

Also, in addition to moral considerations in the broadest, humanitarian sense, there is also the fact that the outcome of the Civil War has been a very determining factor in the development of American democracy. To the extent that equality before the law and even the general rule of law prevailed (in practice, slaveowners had operated beyond the law in relation to their slaves), then American democracy as we understand its basic elements today did prevail. While that’s a factual and analytical judgment rather than “moral”, I’m not sure how any supporters of democracy could entirely separate a value judgment from that reality.

Keep up the good work and always hold your ground by forcing the individual to stick to historiography and legitimate argument.