“If there is to be a separation [i.e., secession of New England], then God bless them [the two countries] both, & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.”
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John C. Breckenridge, Aug. 12, 1803, regarding the New England secession movement
“No state . . can lawfully get out of the union . . . acts against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary . . .”
Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address
“Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people [of the South].”
Letter from General Sherman to his wife, July 31, 1862, explaining his purpose in the war
Anyone who knows anything about the War to Prevent Southern Independence has heard of General Sherman’s “march to the sea” through Georgia, a pleasant euphemism for all the rape, pillage, plunder, murder, arson, and terrorism of the civilian population by Sherman’s “bummers,” under his direct, personal supervision. It wasn’t just a pleasant springtime march through the South with bands playing “Yankee Doodle” and “John Brown’s Body.” Less known, however, is what Sherman’s rapists, plunderers, and murderers did in South Carolina. A new book by Karen Stokes entitled South Carolina in 1865 compiles letters and diaries by South Carolinians of the day describing what happened when Sherman’s “army” went through Columbia, Charleston, and other South Carolina towns. (Stokes is an archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society).
Since South Carolina was considered to be the birthplace of the Southern secession movement (A half century after the 1801-1814 New England secession movement culminating in the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814), Sherman had an especially murderous hatred for the people of that state. In other words, the previous generation of Yankees believed what all Americans believed – that the union was voluntary; the people of the free and independent states were sovereign; that they created the Constitution of the federal government as an instrument to serve them by delegating certain powers to it; and that that they reserved the right to reassume those powers should the federal government interfere with their “happiness.” Secession was “the” principle of the American Revolution, declared Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering, the leader of the New England secession movement who also served as George Washington’s secretary of war and secretary of state. As such, they debated secession for fourteen years, but in the end remained in the union.
The next generation of Yankees sought to destroy the voluntary union of the founding fathers, and they did. They did not “exterminate” all of the Southern people, as Sherman desired to do as seen in the above letter to his wife, but they did manage to murder one fourth of the Southern male population of military age, maiming for life more than double that number. Karen Stokes quotes a Walter B. Edgar who reflected shortly after the war of how “Some 60,000 sons of Carolina entered military service . . . . Of these, 21,146 (35 percent) were killed, a percentage twice that of England, France, Germany, and Russia in World War I when Europe ‘lost’ a generation.”
But South Carolina in1865 is about how Sherman waged total war on the civilian population of South Carolina after the Confederate Army had evacuated. It was truly an orgy of rape, pillage, plunder, and arson. In Columbia and Charleston, rockets were set off to announce the beginning of the war crime sprees, proving that Sherman himself, and all the rest of the Union Army high command, including Lincoln, knew of it, orchestrated it, and approved of and celebrated it. “About six in the evening their work of destruction began,” wrote Josephine LeConte in a letter to her son on Feb. 28, 1865. She was referring to how Sherman’s “bummers” set fire to almost every single home and building of any kind in Columbia. “One or two rows of buildings skirting the town are all that are left by that Vandal horde,” she wrote.
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