William Tecumseh Sherman: Hero, or Villain?

Post Reply New Topic

Because he not only freed your slaves, but set about giving them property?



True. Gen. Sherman's namesake barely gets a mention in our history books. He must have had considerable renoun back in the day, for White parents to name their son after him, rather than after some Blblical character.

Arrant, it's because he burned everything. And as far as freeing 'my' slaves...I am vehemently opposed to any kind of human trafficking whatsoever. I do not have any slaves and never would.

My use of the word "your" was intended as second-person plural rather than singular. Of course you-singular never owned any slaves.

I think that the people who shaped Georgian attitudes (and influenced what would be written in Southern textbooks) resented, first and foremost, the freeing of the slaves. Since this would be politically incorrect to state outright in the 21st century, they project their resentment onto Sherman, and claim that they only resent his destruction of property, which wasn't really all that bad, considering.

Well, Arrant, I lived in Georgia and Sherman left a tremendous scar on their psyche.

He also owned a huge plantation and a ton of slaves.



"Sherman is renowned for being a gentleman."

There! Now you have!



Unlike our brave soldiers in Vietnam, Sherman didn't massacre civilians and leave the corpses to rot in the road



He also probably never raped anyone. Rob Lee owned a bunch of slaves, whom he could rape whenever he felt like it.

Sherman's freeing of slaves in his wake was the moral equivalent of allied soldiers freeing inmates of Nazi concentration camps.

Do White and Black Georgians resent Sherman equally?

Who would argue that freeing slaves is bad?

Not sure about that because when I lived there, I didn't know any blacks. I was a kid. The consensus I got from my parents is that Sherman is generally despised, loathed, deeply hated and resented there. And btw, I lived on a military base so it's not like I have any roots there other than being born. So I can only look objectively and report what others feel.

Since no-one is allowed to say this, and this is what Sherman did, White Georgians have to mask their resentment by claiming that it was the property damage that left the tremendous scar on their psyche.

Oh come on, Arrant, you know how you would feel if it happened to you. Someone comes along and burns out your entire town. How would you survive the aftermath?

Your crops are burnt, animals gone, grocery stores have not been invented yet and if they were, they would be burned as well. Wouldn't you be a bit peeved over it?

Indeed. In that neck of the woods Sherman is still remembered in an unfond manner, even after all this time (circa 150 years).

ruveyn

Everything that the Union Army burned was rebuilt a long time ago.

The enduring legacy is the end of slavery.

True Arrant. Slavery is the ultimate human sickness. This despicable institution should be laid to rest never to be resurrected.

According to the 1860 Census, fully 44 percent of Georgia's population lived in slavery

http://www.civil-war.net/census.asp?census=Georgia

That was 462,198 people.

I suspect that a lot of these folks were quite excited at the prospects of being liberated.

Arrant, they were trying to survive then. Everyone. The south had it's problems. Sherman might have made it tougher for ex slaves by his acts of scorched earth.

Sherman himself was no all the fond of Negroes. He considered the slaves following behind his army as an impediment and a nuisance.

This is what Sherman thought of Negroes: His own words:

At Governor Moore’s dinner party, in fact, Sherman had if anything actually understated his views. For one thing, Sherman was a white supremacist. “All the congresses on earth can’t make the negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man,” Sherman wrote his wife in 1860. “Two such races cannot live in harmony save as master and slave.” In a letter to his antislavery brother-in-law about plans to bring his family to Louisiana, Sherman crassly joked about becoming a slave master himself. Making light of the problems he anticipated in keeping white servants, he wrote that his wife Ellen “will have to wait on herself or buy a n****r. What will you think of that — our buying n****rs?”

Blinded by his implacable racism, Sherman could see no worthwhile moral or legal debate to be had over slavery. History had forced this institution on the South, Sherman thought, and its continued prosperity depended on embracing it. “Theoretical notions of humanity and religion,” he flatly declared, “cannot shake the commercial fact that their labor is of great value and cannot be dispensed with.” Further, Sherman believed that slavery benefited both races. In 1854 he assured his brother that blacks thrived in the Southern heat and later told David F. Boyd, one of his professors at the Louisiana military academy and eventual friend, that he considered slavery in the South “the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world, now or heretofore.”



Sherman's beef with the South was NOT slavery. It was secession which he considered treason.



ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 15 Dec 2012, 10:37 am, edited 2 times in total.