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CRIMES AGAINST SLAVES
It is arguable that those who suffered the most from the various war crimes committed by Federal Troops were against the very people whose liberation the war was purported to be all about.
Sherman himself exhibited virulent racism against Blacks. According to biographer Michael Fellman, Sherman’s view was that “They were a less-than-human and savage race, uncivilized to White standards, and probably un-civilizable. They were obstacles to the upward sweep of history, progress, wealth, and White destiny.” (Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, 1995, pages 260 – 261)
As Native Americans were to find out less than a decade later, Sherman felt the same way about them; Sherman had ordered his subordinate Phil Sheridan to attack Indians “without restraint” and gave him “prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary when they attacked Indian villages.” (Fellman page 271)
In July of 1865, Sherman was put in charge of the Military District of Missouri (all land west of the Mississippi) and given the assignment to eradicate the Plains Indians in order to make way for the federally subsidized transcontinental railroad.
Like Lincoln, Sherman was a friend of Grenville Dodge, the chief engineer of the project. He was also a railroad investor and he lobbied his brother, Senator John Sherman, to allocate federal funds for the transcontinental railroad. “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop and check the progress of the railroad,” he wrote to General Grant in 1867 (Fellman, p. 264).
Fellman writes:
“The great triumvirate of the Union Civil War effort [Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan] formulated and enacted military Indian policy until reaching, by the 1880s, what Sherman sometimes referred to as “the final solution of the Indian problem,” which Sherman defined as killing hostile Indians and segregating their pauperized survivors in remote places.
Sherman did nothing to encourage slaves to join his army and often deliberately burned bridges to prevent them from doing so, leaving them alone and isolated without even provisioning them with food and medicine.
During the Federal invasion of Louisiana in 1863 and 1864, thousands of slaves were encouraged to follow Maj. Gen, Nathaniel Banks. However, while they were encouraged to run away and thereby injure the Southern economy which depended on them thus helping the Union war effort, many who did so were then simply abandoned by their liberators.
General Sherman stated
“I won’t trust n—s to fight yet, but don’t object to the (Federal) government taking them from the enemy & making such use of them as experience may suggest” (William T. Sherman to John Sherman, April 26, 1863, Sherman Papers, Library of Congress)
Many slave children were separated from their parents and many, both adults and children, died from disease and starvation. In 1863, 2000 slaves that escaped to the Union army perished; In Rapides Parish, it is estimated that between 1863 and 1864, 8000 slaves left to follow the Federal forces and that more than half died of exposure.
Of course, during the march to the Sea through Georgia burned slave residences, stole whatever meager property slaves held and often subjected slave women to brutalization and rape.
“Regiments, in successive relays, committed gang rape in Columbia on scores of slave women (William G. Simms “City Laid Waste” page 90)
Sherman’s treatment of runaway slaves was so wretched that, despite the fact that his army overflowed with foodstuffs and supplies looted from any civilians unlucky enough to be caught his army’s rapaciously destructive path, he failed to leave behind the ample food, medicine and shelter to serve their human needs. (Thomas G. Robisch, “General William T. Sherman: Would the Georgia Campaigns of the First Commander of the Modern Era Comply with Current Law of War Standards?” Emory International Law Review 9, no.459, 1995 – page 461)
But humanitarian concerns – whether it be for POWs, Southern civilians, slaves or Native Americans counted for nothing when set against the overall goal of annihilating the Confederacy and overthrowing the Union established under the Constitution of 1789.
As long as there was any Confederate resistance to this overriding concern, Sherman believed it was open season on Southern citizens for political reasons. His ruthlessness is neatly captured in his 1864 letter to Maj. R.M. Sawyer:
“To those who submit to the rightful law and authority all gentleness and forbearance; but to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better… Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives.” (Official Records, Series 1, Vol.32, page 579)
Later in 1864, Sherman wrote Halleck indicating that if Southerners wanted to rid themselves of “barbarity and cruelty” they must stop the war.
There can be no doubt: Sherman knew his premeditated policies were “barbaric and cruel” and his mass destruction and violence against civilians were intended to terrorize the civilian population into abandoning the war as the only way to get rid of him.
In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife (from his “Collected Works”) he wrote that his purpose in the war was: “Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the [Southern] people.” His wife Ellen wrote back that her fondest wish was for a war “of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like the Swine into the sea.”
Federal Plans to Assassinate Confederate Leaders
The Dahlgren Affair
The Dahlgren Affair was an incident involved a failed Union raid on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia on March 2, 1864, ostensibly to free Union POWs. According to papers found on the body of the raid’s commanding officer, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, the mission objectives included assassinating Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet as well as burning the Southern capital.
“Dahlgren was twenty-one, tall, fair-haired, and dashing, with an abiding taste for adventure untempered by even a modicum of common sense. Dahlgren’s father, Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren, was an expert in naval ordnance, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and a close friend of the president’s.”
“Nothing went according to plan. Dahlgren discovered the James (River) was running too high from the winter rains to cross. In a fit of particular savagery he turned on his guide, a black freedman… and had the man hanged from a tree on the riverbank. Proceeding toward Richmond but on the northern side of the James, Dahlgren soon ran into the city’s (Richmond) militia defenders.
Colonel Dahlgren and some one hundred of his men became separated and wandered off to the north and east of Richmond. On the night of March 2 they stumbled into an ambush set by Rebel cavalrymen and home guards. Lieutenant James Pollard, Ninth Virginia Cavalry, reported what happened next: ‘Col. Dahlgren who was in command and riding at the head of the column, saw a man who at that moment moved his position, and ordered him to surrender: which drew a volley from our men and Col. Dahlgren fell dead, struck by several bullets…
Shortly after the ambush in which Dahlgren was killed, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy named William Littlepage, who was a member of a schoolboy company of home guards, came upon the colonel’s body and searched it for valuables. What he found came to be called the Dahlgren papers–two folded documents and a pocket notebook containing several loose papers inserted between the leaves. Littlepage turned his find over to his teacher and company commander, Captain Edward W. Halbach.
The first of the documents, written in ink on Union army stationery bearing the printed heading ‘Headquarters Third Division, Cavalry Corps,’ was obviously an address to the officers and men of Colonel Dahlgren’s command. It covered two sheets, with the final six lines and the signature written on the back of the first sheet…
“We hope to release the prisoners from Belle Island first & having seen them fairly started we will cross the James River into Richmond, destroying the bridges after us & exhorting the released prisoners to destroy and burn the hateful City & do not allow the Rebel Leader Davis and his traitorous crew to escape…. An address to his troops on Cavalry Corps stationery was even more explicit: “The City it must be destroyed and Jeff. Davis and Cabinet killed.”
The Southern press was as predictably outraged as the Northern press strongly denied the allegation.
The most vehement assertion that the Dahlgren papers were ‘a bare-faced, atrocious forgery’ concocted by ‘the miserable caitiffs’ in Richmond came, not surprisingly, from Dahlgren’s father, Admiral John Dahlgren.
All this leaves the flowing question:
Who authorized the secret agenda of arson, pillage, and murder as outlined in the Dahlgren’s papers? The answer cannot be documented as readily as the question of the papers’ authenticity but a credible speculation regarding the guilty party can be made:
The trail of responsibility appears to lead straight to the office of Secretary of War Stanton.
One of the planners of the raid, Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick, a Union cavalry officer so incompetent he was given the nickname “Kill-Cavalry” by the troops he mislead, would not have been bothered by the murderous and destructive plan but was not the type to proceed without authorization.
“Stanton was never one to demonstrate respect for the niceties of civilized warfare. He had been, for example, the behind-the-scenes author of the set of draconian measures inflicted on Southern civilians in 1862. He was also exceedingly devious. An image comes easily to mind: Secretary Stanton describing for his visitor the perfidies of Jefferson Davis, rather in the manner of King Henry II speaking of Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, before an audience of his eager courtiers, saying, ‘Will no one rid me of this man!’ To Judson Kilpatrick, ambitious and ruthless, his duty would have seemed clear enough. To his new patron, the thought of liberating the suffering prisoners from Belle Isle and Libby Prison to wreak vengeance on their captors would have seemed a pleasing rationalization for the scheme.”
After the Northern victory, the papers were among a collection of important Confederate documents transferred to Washington after the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
In November 1865, seven months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, ordered Francis Lieber, the author of the Lieber Code to be the keeper of captured Confederate records and to turn over everything relating to the raid.
Lieber gave Stanton the original papers and notebook found on Dahlgren’s body, plus all relevant correspondence from the Confederate archives. Historian James O. Hall searched widely for the missing papers and finally tracked them to Stanton. “[S]uspicion lingers,” Hall wrote, “that Stanton consigned them to the fireplace in his office.”
Stanton presumably destroyed them; they have not been seen since.
Because of this, a debate has raged for many years over the authenticity of the Dahlgren Papers, with certain Civil War scholars such as James M. McPherson offering his judgment that judgment that “the genuineness of the Dahlgren papers is contestable….”
Unfortunately, the destruction of the records by Stanton has prevented their examination in modern times and restricted historical knowledge of them to the surviving copies and examinations conducted between March 5, 1864 and November 1865 when Stanton seized the papers.
“The Union denied that the papers were accurate but as Ernest Furgurson concludes, ‘though debates over the paper’s validity would run on… the weight of the evidence suggests that they were indeed genuine.” Jay Winik “1865” footnotes, page 441
Historian Stephen Sears makes a strong case for the authenticity of the papers in recent articles in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and in Columbiad. If the Dahlgren papers are authentic, it could be fairly argued that President Lincoln, by following a policy of Total War, allowed subordinates such as Stanton to believe that targeting his opposite number in Richmond was a legitimate act, AGAIN, under the justified by strictures of “military necessity.”
It could have been what set in motion the events that would end with his own assassination in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.
The need to have a proper understanding of the history of what is commonly referred to as the Civil War has a direct relationship to important issues currently facing our Nation.