Sherman's March

Dean Barnett writes over at Soxblog about Sherman's famous march to the sea:

THIS WHOLE COUNTRY WOULD BE BETTER off if it studied the life of William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman spent some of the happiest days of his life as the first president of Louisiana State University (L.S.U.). In Louisiana, Sherman developed a powerful fondness for the genteel Southerners and their ways.

A few years later at the battle of Shiloh, then-General Sherman was appalled by the carnage. More Americans died at Shiloh than had died in every previous battle held on U.S. soil combined. Sherman’s warm feelings for the Southern aristocracy soon turned to anger and something that bordered on hatred. The Confederacy’s soldiers were poor men fighting a rich man’s war. The soldiers paid the ultimate price, while the burdens borne by the wealthy civilians were minimal. That fact combined with Shiloh’s gore animated Sherman to find a better way to fight the war than sending his lines into battle with the Confederacy’s lines to efficiently butcher one another.

And that’s what Sherman’s “March to the Sea” and his sacking of Georgia were all about. With Sherman’s march, the landed aristocracy had the fight brought to them; until then they had avoided the war’s consequences even though it was a war that they themselves had started. Sherman changed that. He torched their estates, took all they had. In short order, the Southern power structure lost its appetite for the struggle for its “freedom.”

I didn't know Sherman had lived down South before the war, but it's an intersting insight, and the parallels he draws to our modern conflicts seem apt too.