>CSA has Fort Pillow Massacre, Shelton Laurel Massacre, Sultana Bombing, Champ Ferguson, Bloody Bill Anderson, the Lawrence Massacre, and Andersonville Prison on record.
>Dixiecucks still kvetching about Sherman's march on Georgia.
Total war isn't one-sided.
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Killing black POVs isn't "total war" tho, it's just a war crime.
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>all those Yankee revisionist "sources"
This is a really well crafted bait
>yankee revisionist
my god
Can someone explain what international body existed in 1864 that could accuse, investigate, and punish governments for war crimes? Of course this implies that there was a list of actions to be considered as a "war crime".
You know. I've found ways to deal with the political tribalism and autistic screeching that has seemed to infect our entire political system ever since Obama became president but today I was on the web page for one of the local newstations.
There was an article about how Obama had made a tweet quoting Nelson Mandela in relation to the events in Charlottesville.
>"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."
I don't even like Mandela but I can still appreciate the message and the meaning behind it, so I go down the comments to see if anyone else felt the same way I did about it.
Want to know what I found in the comment section Veeky Forums? Here is an exact quote of one of the top rated comments.
>"You know where I come from we were taught that when we claimed something someone else created or said as our own. It was called plagiarism and we would be punished and I remember hearing something about possibly going to jail as well. Shame this has been washed up bafoon still true to be in the limelight and not only that but rips off someone else's work. Shame!"
I have no words, literally none. I am ashamed for what my country has become I'm a die hard patriot I have lost limbs, friends and blood for this country. Yet many of it's citizens want a fascist/communist government or support an ideology millions of our countrymen died fighting.
We have become so lost to what it means to be American, that every person has the chance to achieve the American dream, that everyone's worth is based coupon their character not by the color of their screen or whether or not they're part of the proletariat.
I'm not here to choose or cheerlead for any side, I'm here as an American wondering how did all of this happen. When did we lose our sense of self?
The funny thing is that Sherman's March was a direct response to Hood doing the same.
Sherman wanted to meet Hood in a proper battle. Instead Hood just ran around with his army, trying to strike and disrupt Sherman's supply lines.
Sherman got frustrated and basically said "fuck this" and abandoned his supply lines, and struck at Hood'
s. They also happened to be the rest of the Confederacy's as well.
>the CSA constitution
>the Articles of Secession
>revisionist sources
We got fat and lazy. People have been sedated and are now willing to allow tyrants to do whatever they want just so long as they get a comfy life style.
Giving up liberty for security and getting neither and all that. Hopefully we'll snap out of it before the whole thing literally collapses around us.
>>"You know where I come from we were taught that when we claimed something someone else created or said as our own. It was called plagiarism and we would be punished and I remember hearing something about possibly going to jail as well. Shame this has been washed up bafoon still true to be in the limelight and not only that but rips off someone else's work. Shame!"
Enforced serfdom when?
Step away from the internet, user. You're in too deep.
This isn't real life. It's not a perfect lens through which we can view the American Zeitgeist, laying down in stone what it means to be American and have American values.
It's a magnifying glass, zooming in with lightning focus on this or that one element and giving them a voice. It concentrates, amplifies. Those who do not speak are made all the quieter by those who do, since they speak ten times louder when their voice can reach millions.
Don't look at one comment on one website. Hell, don't even look at the polls or mass media. Look at a sporting event, or a big 'ol party. Look at a 4th of July Barbeque. Don't look for Americans finding a reason to hate. Look for Americans finding a reason to love.
Countries don't stand on hate. So don't bother giving the hate attention.
Can I just note that not once, in any of the art or photos I've ever seen of him, is general sherman depicted smiling?
Hell, not even looking neutral, or bored, like most of the other old photographs you find. He always has the same frustrated frown, as if he's dealt with your shit for too long already, even though you've just met him.
I can't possibly hate him. I can hate him no more than he hated the South, and he really didn't...he just wanted it over with, and he did not care, give not one flying fuck, what he had to do to get the job done.
I wonder what kind of men live now who have that level of not-give-a-fuck.
Sherman didn't 'hate the South', he did what he thought would work. He didn't do it out of vengeance or anything like that.
He later went on to slaughter some Injuns with Southern battalions.
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Whats the point? This guy clearly has an agenda, I'm not even going to finish reading this shit. Next time find someone who isn't firmly planted on one side.
>next time find someone who's not objectively right
No can do anonymoo
>less than 1,500 people combined died from those events the confederates did
>Union killed so many on the march they couldn't count it and destroyed 1.4 billion dollars worth of property
hmmmm
>some confederates like slavery
>therefore the war is about slavery
>make zero effort to actually attack unarmed people
>crops, railroads, and supplies only
>civvies who flee aren't pursued, refugees who follow are settled per Special Field Order 15
VS
>systematic abuse and execution of over a thousand helpless prisoners
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Also, they DID account it. about 3100 people were killed over the course of the campaign.
2100 of them were Union. The rest were Confederate Militia.
>source: your ass
>crops ... and supplies
Well gee I didn't know civilians could just eat air and didn't need crops
>enlist in army
>get caught
>get killed when you knew it was a very real risk when you signed up
I don't see an issue here
I have trouble understanding posts like this. When a man plows through your army and kills hundreds of thousands of young men in the space of a few days it's slim pickin's compared to a man leading an army through a 60-mile wide stretch of countryside, eating what they find, fighting only people who don't run away, and generally just being a considerable nuisance to the populace.
Ooooh, he took the war to the people! He's a monster! Somehow he's more monstrous than the men who led the meat-grinder battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Stones River. For tearing up rail lines and eating on the run.
Never mind that General Hood had cut off his supply lines, so he actually HAD to press through to friendly lines or risk his own 60,000 men starving. But that's not an issue because they were dressed in blue.
Just like the 1500 or so men that you don't seem to mind being starved, beaten, and executed. They were dressed in blue, too. Then they surrendered. I guess that makes them subhuman, does it?
Sherman wanted one thing: to END the WAR. He wanted it with as few people killed as possible. He wanted to demonstrate to the naive bumblefucks who inhabited Georgia and South Carolina what they were actually doing to the poor sons they dressed up in grey and sent to die every day for a lost cause.
But because he did it by stealing food instead of killing men by the hundreds of thousands you call him a monster.
I just don't get you.
do you even understand what total war is? all the killings you listed were carried out on fair war targets, with the exception of a few minor localized incidents in which innocent civilians died. Sherman, however, was a General with a command from the President, and was responsible for ruining the lives of innumerable innocents and taking those of many others.
let me make it clear that I don't really find Sherman evil--his actions are generally defensible--but I hate him for what he did to my people. If the South had shown the same cruelty to the (very limited) northern territory under its control at one point or another, then they would have hurt their own cause, as Union volunteer and conscription rates were incredibly low, something like 40%, and some atrocity would just enrage the fighting-aged men who weren't already in the Union forces. It was a lost fucking cause from the start.
You still didn't address my points. But I'll go along with it I suppose. There is a difference between the battles you mentioned and stealing food from civilians. Soldiers in the Union enlisted by choice IIRC, and thusly knew what they were getting into and that killing other soldiers was their job. Civilians aren't like that. They're just trying to live their lives. If they wanted to fight, they'd be in the army. So the killing of soldiers is not a concern. What is, is making life hell for the common man like Sherman did. He had no regard for civilian life at all if it meant victory for him and his cause. Civilians didn't choose nor deserve the fate they got at the hands of the HellBringer himself. And you still didn't provide a source for your claims.
>my claims
you're fighting on multiple fronts user. I'm just pointing out that you're giving a man shit for explicitly trying to avoid the loss of life.
It was war and he knew it. He knew it better than most, I feel. He also knew that if he kept making war in the traditional way, beating the Confederates on the battlefield while the civilians only knew war through a paper they read or a story whispered in a bar, they'd go along with it right up until it exhausted every field, barn, and meadow and they were all dying of starvation and disease.
You know, like the Japanese nearly did, because we didn't have the option of taking the war straight to their doorstep. Conventional bombing, even firebombing, doesn't break the will of a nation, and beating their armies doesn't work, especially in the antiquarian age of no war reporting, until they start to run out of troops. Which takes a good long while and *millions* of lives.
Sherman knew that the war would grind on, and on, and on, until it drained the south dry, because they believed their cause was righteous and they were defending their homes in doing so. So he hit below the belt. He broke the rules. He changed the game, because it let him do his job.
It let him win the war. And the sooner that happened, the better it was for EVERYONE.
You're spot on. Sherman was a great general, and all the horrible things he did sped up the end of the war, which was to everyone's benefit. But there's something incredibly disgusting about a man willing to kill innocent men, women, and children of his kindred blood like that. He was a monster, and is probably burning in Hell.
btw I'm not the guy you were responding to
>exhausted every field, barn, and meadow
You mean like he almost did throwing his troops at their lines like meat to dogs? With no sense of tactics or honor. It took them 4 YEARS to put down a country with significantly less manpower, less industry, less railroads, and still had more deaths than the Confederacy did. Fucking hell. If he really cared, he wouldn't have sacrificed his men like that or put his own troops in such a position to not have supply lines in the first place.
Sherman's Hell was war. He called it so, many times. At one point he begged a class of graduates at an officer's academy NEVER TO USE THE SKILLS THEY HAD LEARNED:
"I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.
Suppress it!
You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!"
Whatever fire and brimstone, if indeed he even believed in such things, after what he'd been through, he felt was waiting for him, it was probably still sweet release.
Look at him:
Look at his face. What more can you do to him that his own life hand't done already?
>1861+156
>people are STILL defending the Slaveholders' Rebellion
So let me see if I get this:
If he really cared, he'd have fought a conventional war all the way to the end? Fought until the South had no crops left to harvest, no troops left to fight with, and no land left to defend? You said yourself, they had less men, less industry, less everything except leadership and good cause to fight, and the first of those went away after a few years, and the second is openly debateable.
How long do you think the war should have gone on, then? Sherman started his march in November of 1864, just after Lincoln's re-election. The North would have been able to prosecute the war with ease for another 4 years at minimum (congress was pretty much rock solid abolitionist so the midterms were a shutout). What would another 4 years of that do to the Confederacy?
I submit to you: without this mangy devil you pile all your hate upon the Confederacy would not have realized the hopelessness of their cause so soon, and would have charged headlong into oblivion. Give him your hate, and I'm sure he would accept it; he made no illusions about his work. But without him the South as we know it would not exist.
It would have burned to the ground.
>current year argument
I'm saying the Union should've known how to fight a fucking war in the first place and used human wave like it's going out of style. And it did burn. Sherman was the one who burned it. Perhaps there was merit to all the atrocities he committed for his country. Perhaps he did end the war sooner. But there wouldn't have really been one if the Union had some form of competence in their war.
*not used human wave
Both sides did that, tripfag. Don't claim superiority in tactics.
And a swath of Georgia and South Carolina is a pittance compared to all 11 states. Don't lie and say you wouldn't have given it your all, you're a proud son of the South and we both know it.
You'd have gotten yourself and everyone you knew killed.
>both sides did that
>Union soldiers dead: 365,000
>Union soldiers wounded: 282,000
>Confederate soldiers dead: 290,000
>Confederate solders wounded: 137,000
If they did, it wasn't nearly on the scale of the Union.
And aren't you happy that number isn't two or three times that big?
The confederacy had a population of about 10 million people, of whom 3.5 million were slaves.
Do the math. By war's end you'd thrown nearly eight percent of your (by the CSA's definition) population into the meat grinder.
By contrast the union had a population of 18.5 million, not including slaves (Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Maryland, lol). Thus they had only expended about three-and-a-half percent. And again, they had the industry and agriculture (you can't eat cotton) to keep going.
It was to everyone's benefit the war ended as soon as it did. Anything accomplished in that effect, short of somehow killing as many people in the reduced timespan as would have been killed in normal war operations had the war continued, is horrors indeed.
But it will never be the greater evil than carrying the war on to the Confederacy's extinction. And I hope you can agree with me on that, at least.
>moving the goalposts
Read my posts. I've been trying to prove one point, and one point only, the entire time.
That it was good that the war ended so soon.
Tactics, casualty count, any nit you want to pick, take it. But that's all I care about.
Read again. If you're going to claim moral superiority and say that Sherman's Terror was necessary for a quick end to the war and thus saving lives, then they shouldn't have human waved the fuck of the South the way they did.
>thinking that K-D ratios matter
>caring about "honor" in warfare
Jesus Christ, the autism.
If anything, those human waves and their lack of effectiveness (re: disparate casualty numbers, thank you for posting those) only proved Sherman's point. He knew that the only way he'd win against a determined enemy with a homeground advantage in conventional war was to grind them down into nothing. He COULD, and any other general in his position (such as, say, Grant) WOULD: the North had the men, the guns, and the will to do it.
But Sherman wanted to avoid that.
If you want to be an idealist and say there should have been no dead at all, well, I'm not going to be an idiot and say the south shouldn't have seceded; secession was inevitable given the political and cultural conflicts prior to it. But as the devil said: War is cruelty. There is no refining it.
In his mind, once he knew the nature of the enemy, there was only one way to stop them from being destroyed.
Hate him all you like, it doesn't make him wrong.
I would also like to point out that once he DID win he immediately stopped the Terror, as you call it. In the surrender of Joseph Johnston's army he proposed peace terms so lenient his bosses in Washington rejected them.
But they do though. If you have to spam troops at your enemies and burn all their shit to win, then congrats on being a shit general.
>people are actually responding to a retarded baiting attention whore tripfag instead of filtering him
this is what kills boards
stop being retarded you faggots
>you're a shit general if you want to avoid the pointless loss of hundreds of thousands of lives
>you're a shit general if the other option is to pillage crops and fuck up railroads for several hundred miles
>you're a shit general if you give the enemy one bad winter in exchange for not robbing them of a generation of good men
being a shit general doesn't sound so bad
Alright, fine, I'll stop.
I just like defending WTS. He's the ultimate anti-villain of American history.
I'm not baiting. I'm DEbating. Very different.
Still hate the initial tactics, but at least it didn't drag on for longer, I suppose. I'll have to give him that.
filtered :)
>Still hate the initial tactics
So did he.
You're ignoring my point. He could have done all that by just being better at strategy and not spammed the first 3 years.
Hindsight's 20/20 ain't it.
Being good isn't.
There's literally nothing wrong with being firmly planted on one side in regards to a historical truth or falsehood.
>Judging humanity off of youtube comments
>what are the immortal 600
>you are a shit general if you leverage your advantages.
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Why would Sherman expect Hood to meet for a pitched battle? Sherman's army vastly outnumbered his. Also Hood wasn't even in Georgia when Sherman started his march to the sea.
>naming a bunch of small random acts of violence during a civil war as comparable to an entire army's campaign strategy.
The only two things in that list that you can hold the CSA high command responsible for are Andersonville and Fort Pillow. Both were exaggerated by the northern press. Fort Pillow "massacre" happened during a fucking battle, so getting shot down isn't a massacre. Fort Pillow never surrendered to Confederate forces so some poorly trained freedman dropping his rifle and running when the enemy breaks through your fortification doesn't qualify as a POW. Neutral european observers said it wasn't war crimes and even Sherman agreed when he investigated it. Andersonville on the otherhand was typical of civil war prisons and the death rate among CSA prisons were on par with Union prisons, another exaggerated "war crime".
Meanwhile Sherman's March to the Sea was seen as over the line because there was little if any organized enemy resistance in the state. Virginia saw more devastation but it was understandable as it was a active war front that saw a lot of action. In addition, the march had little effect on the union war effort and Sherman's men could have been better used elsewhere. Lastly Sherman's own conduct was pretty distasteful. For a guy who championed the "natural consequences" of war he constantly complained about his men being killed by southern locals when pillaging towns and kept lying about his culpability in the destruction by blaming Hampton and other confederates for starting the fires (he later admitted to this). All in all his conduct during this time was more on the level of a bushwhacker than a high ranking union general and I haven't even touched the mass starvation and death among slaves that his march caused.
>"leverages advantages"
>gets nowhere and has to burn all our shit to win
You're a good person user.
What are the best Total War mods?
>Mods delete pro Maintenance of Confederacy statues thread
>Mods let b8 like this stay up
Wew
>All the starving slaves
>Thinking the Union Gave a shit about slaves
Lmao, they didn't even care enough about feeding poor Irishmen and keeping women and children from being maimed/burned alive in the work place. Why would they care about slaves?
>Dixiecucks still kvetching about Sherman's march on Georgia.
literally nobody ever posts about Sherman besides Yankees. Why is Civil War "discussion" on this board so awful?
It usually just degenerates into
>Was the war over slavery
Where yankees b8 post by over simplifying the war(it was ONLY slavery)/ accusing dixiefags of denying that slavery played any role, and where dixiefags screech in response. Then again maybe there are Yankees dumb enough to think that a civil war that took 600,000 lives was only due to one reason lel
>Andersonville Prison
I could be wrong, but didn't the guy running Andersonville at least tried to prevent it from becoming the humanitarian crisis that it became, but his superiors refused all of his requests?
/pol/ is not welcome on this board, so either lurk and dont post or just go back
>Of course this implies that there was a list of actions to be considered as a "war crime"
Happened 4 years later with the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, so everyone gets away with it
Most discussion of anything on this board is shit, the Civil War isn't uniquely shitty
The mods are leftists, there's IRC logs to prove it. They have /pol/ as the designated shitting board (meaning: total crap posting, bait, cuck porn and garbage stays on /pol/, no mod bothers to clean it up in order to maintain quality), while deleting anything race or politics related from other boards, even completely serious discussion.
One is about a current event this is about strategies and goals in a war centuries ago.
faggot
>knows the enemy can't replace their losses very well.
>does what he can to make the losses even harder to replace, making the enemies war even harder to fight
>not a sound or good decision
Wow, my almonds are really activated
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>confederates invading Union territory two times enslave thousands of free blacks they find because they think of blacks as nothing but slaves
hmmmm
>while deleting anything race or politics related from other boards
Those don't belong on Veeky Forums, nevermind /tv/, /k/, Veeky Forums, or anywhere but /pol/.
they did. they enslaved blacks in occupied union territory. it doesn't get anymore horrendous than that.
>his kindred blood
yes because only kindred blood are real human beings!
>confederates invading Union territory two times enslave thousands of free blacks they
do you actually have a source for that?
>fight on the defensive
>wrack up more kills from union soldiers charging your lines
I hate Sherman. He was far too merciful on the south. I haven't read even a single account of a rebel head on a pike during The March, to say nothing of drawing and quartering, use of the gibbet, or any number of just punishments that the traitors had earned for themselves. Nothing but a softie.
lmao
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>next time find a white supremacist blogger who spreads lies that make me feel in the right
ftfy, now fuck off you /pol/ack tourist. We don't want your ignorance on Veeky Forums.
>We don't competing opinions on Veeky Forums
>If you disagree with me on history (the greatest and most precise field, second only to mathematics)
>YOU ARE LYING
The absolute state of this user's mind
History is political kiddo, get over it
>Black soldiers and officers
You realize that Lee and the Confederacy once considered getting slaves to enlist in exchange for freedom, right?
Or are you just that retarded?
>Posting about the preservation of monuments on Veeky Forums , the history board
>Bannable Offence
that user didn't say any of those things. The person he was responding to, on the other hand, was clearly upset that the facts he was reading were contrary to his worldview, so he took the path of least resistance in his mind and accused it of being "one-sided" despite all the evidence coming freely from the mouth of Confederates themselves.
>History is political kiddo, get over it
so this is your excuse? that history can be influenced by politics and so therefore everyone's opinion is valid?
>The Civil was about Succession
>Succession was about State's rights to own slaves and obeying laws regarding fugitive slaves
>Therefore the civil War was about State's rights to have slave and enforce laws about slavery.
>that user didn't say any of those things
He said that if you disagree with anything in
Then you're a Nazi list who needs to go back to /pol/. Lmao.
>You mean you have to accept other people's opinions and can't just dismiss them because you don't like them
Yes. You can't seriously claim that being anti-dialogical towards dialectic you don't like makes you intellectually superior. That's ridiculous.
>Or are you just that retarded?
someone's butthurt. you're also outright ignoring the fact that i posted SOURCES that show that confederates enslaved or just plain slaughtered free blacks. It doesn't matter if it was from the invasion or not (pic related shows they did that too), but the fact that free blacks were treated less than human and so cruelly because that was inherent in the Southern worldview.
>You realize that Lee and the Confederacy once considered getting slaves to enlist in exchange for freedom, right?
"once" is a good way to put it. The union, meanwhile, consistently allowed blacks to serve in way higher numbers than the confederates, especially in the navy, but also in the army in the later part of the war. In other words, one was used in a last ditch attempt to even the odds against against the Union in hopes of winning the war, while the Union's allowing black soldiers was a symbol of their higher tolerance for blacks and not because circumstances forced their hand (though this certainly played a part in the later war)
*Secession not succession
Also,
>The only issue of states rights which the Confederacy fought for was slavery
It was a war over federalism vs states rights, slavery being one of the most prominent hot button issues of the time. Their idealogicsl differences were much more complicated than that which I will outline by quoting the "Cornerstone speech" made in 1861 slightly before the outbreak of war
>Again, the subject of internal improvements, under the power of Congress to regulate commerce, is put at rest under our system. The power, claimed by construction under the old constitution, was at least a doubtful one; it rested solely upon construction. We of the South, generally apart from considerations of constitutional principles, opposed its exercise upon grounds of its inexpediency and injustice. Notwithstanding this opposition, millions of money, from the common treasury had been drawn for such purposes. Our opposition sprang from no hostility to commerce, or to all necessary aids for facilitating it. With us it was simply a question upon whom the burden should fall. In Georgia, for instance, we have done as much for the cause of internal improvements as any other portion of the country, according to population and means. We have stretched out lines of railroads from the seaboard to the mountains; dug down the hills, and filled up the valleys at a cost of not less than $25,000,000.
>All this was done to open an outlet for our products of the interior, and those to the west of us, to reach the marts of the world. No State was in greater need of such facilities than Georgia, but we did not ask that these works should be made by appropriations out of the common treasury. The cost of the grading, the superstructure, and the equipment of our roads was borne by those who had entered into the enterprise. Nay, more not only the cost of the iron no small item in the aggregate cost was borne in the same way, but we were compelled to pay into the common treasury several millions of dollars for the privilege of importing the iron, after the price was paid for it abroad. What justice was there in taking this money, which our people paid into the common treasury on the importation of our iron, and applying it to the improvement of rivers and harbors elsewhere? The true principle is to subject the commerce of every locality, to whatever burdens may be necessary to facilitate it. If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden. If the mouth of the Savannah river has to be cleared out, let the sea-going navigation which is benefited by it, bear the burden. So with the mouths of the Alabama and Mississippi river. Just as the products of the interior, our cotton, wheat, corn, and other articles, have to bear the necessary rates of freight over our railroads to reach the seas. This is again the broad principle of perfect equality and justice, and it is especially set forth and established in our new constitution.
>He said that if you disagree with anything in
I think you forgot to finish your sentence. But anyway the user responding to the picture DIDNT state why he disagreed with the picture. He dismissed it on the grounds that "he is clearly favoring one side but I can't put my finger on why he's wrong!!!", which is another way of saying that he doesn't have evidence for why he's wrong but his worldview (i.e. his ideology) tells him that anything that runs against emotional intuition is wrong.
Good points, though you said it yourself; slavery was one of, if not the most, contentious issues of states' rights that the South and the federal government clashed on. Too many amateur and revisionist historians try to separate the two and thus justify a 'War of Northern Aggression'.