NEW YORK TIMES / ATLANTA JOURNAL: …Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. Instead, those experts contend, the strategy was an effective and legal application of the general’s authority and the hard-edged masterstroke necessary to break the Confederacy…
To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated “Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts” and talks of how, “contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.”…
“It has not been a legend that white Southerners have been particularly eager to surrender because it was all part of their sense of grievance, that they had been so severely wronged during the Civil War,” said James C. Cobb, a professor at the University of Georgia and a former president of the Southern Historical Association. “The old stereotype is a long way from disappearing. There’s this sort of instinctive sense of Sherman embodying the whole Yankee cause and the presumed vindictiveness and unrelenting harshness that the white South was subjected to.” … (more)
EDITOR: For almost a century, it was Southern historians who wrote the history of the country. Hence Grant and Sherman were demonized. Also, Southerns chaired most committees in both houses of Congress and produced most of the presidents. To a considerable extend, the North won the war but lost the cause. Little wonder that so much of what we learned in schools was distorted, and probably is still being taught.
