I remember six years ago, the exhilaration and excitement evoked by the election of Barack Obama. Do you? And do you also remember how unwelcome were the few observers and commentators who tried to warn that Obama's professed desire for bi-partisanship was not just silly, but actually dangerous? Though I become more anxious as more time passes, and we continue to trod down paths that history warns us are perilous, it has been gratifying to me to watch opinion here shift over the past six years, as more and more Kossacks came to accept that the modern Republican Party is a reincarnation of the Confederacy, for which there can be no compromise.
Last week was the 150th anniversary of the beginning of General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea, in which Sherman and his army of 62,000 men shucked off their supply lines and marched 300 miles in five weeks to surround and capture the important seaport of Savannah.
Sherman and his boys had captured Atlanta in late July 1864; now it was November, winter chills were in the air forewarning of the season's inclement weather, and by standard military logic and tradition, the time for active military operations had come to a close. Faced with the approach of winter, an army would usually build itself or seize what shelter and foodstuffs it can, and hunker down until good marching weather returns in late spring.
But the spinning of fantasies by Fox News is not all that new. In November 1864, a surprisingly large number of people in the South believed that Sherman's army was being slowly, relentlessly killed off, sniper bullet by sniper bullet, and artillery shell by artillery shell, by valorous Confederate soldiers who still stood bravely on the ramparts of Atlanta. "We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people," Sherman wrote to Army Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck on December 24, 1864. "Thousands [have] been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time..."
By undertaking an new military campaign at the onset of winter, Sherman would "make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies," he explained to Halleck. Sherman's army was comprised of two vast wings of two corps each, and as it marched east and south toward Savanah, these four corps of 62,000 men covered a front some 20 to 30 miles in width. Everything in their path was subject to expropriation and seizure to feed and sustain them. This was entirely intentional, not just a necessity of survival: as Sherman proposed the idea to Grant months before, the intent was "to make Georgia howl."
Sherman began the March to the Sea by destroying the large enemy strongpoint he would leave in his rear - Atlanta. This is a photograph of Union soldiers destroying railroad tracks in the city.
The burning of Atlanta and the March to the Sea accomplished Sherman's goal: they ruthlessly demolished Confederate delusions and forced some sanity into some (not all) circles of the Confederate command hierarchy. (Even after Sherman's army had marched from Savannah to Raleigh, North Carolina and linked up with Grant and Meade's army, Confederate President Jefferson Davis refused to accept the reality of defeat. He ordered Confederate commanders to lead their troops into the Appalachian mountains and conduct guerrilla warfare. Lee and Johnston ignored the order.)
The New York Times chose to report on the 150th anniversary of these events by publishing "a churlish, venomous little screed by an obscure neo-Confederate diehard named Phil Leigh." That's the way Gary Brecher, who blogs as The War Nerd, described it. Brecher's posting is magnificent in its unrestrained contempt for contemporary neo-Confederates like Leigh, as well as its tremendous insight into the psychology that nurses a grudge the way the neo-Confederates have for a century and a half.
Leigh actually thinks he’s fixing blame—blame!—for Sherman’s perfectly sensible, conventional action, the burning of a major rail center in his rear before setting out unsupported across enemy territory.
What next? Will the NYT dig up some crusty tenth-generation Tory sulking in the suburbs of Toronto to ask, “Who Killed All Those Innocent Redcoats on Bunker Hill?” Or a sob story by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s last surviving sailor asking, “Who Sank All Our Carriers?”
Leigh’s silly article could only work on totally ignorant readers, or on his fellow tenth-generation sulkers brooding about what went wrong circa 1863. And the funny side of that is that Sherman, more than anyone else in U.S. history, devoted his life to trying to slap these Dixie dreamers into waking up and thinking like grown-ups.
Isn't that exactly the problem we face with the Republican Party today? They are reveling in dreams of their ideological and cultural superiority, and refusing to wake up and think like grown-ups. They refuse to admit that it was their policies and actions which led to two disastrous wars. They refuse to admit that it was their policies and actions which led to a financial and economic collapse. They refuse to admit that it was their policies and actions which laid the "Patriot Act" foundations after 9-11 for the new American police-state.
More below the fluer de Kos.
Brecher notes that before the Civil War, Sherman was a professor at a military academy in Louisiana, and he came to know well the attitudes and beliefs of the South’s ruling class of planters. He was even friends with a number of them.
Sherman tried to tell these idiots, over and over, that they were stupid and deluded. He wasn’t even going to debate the non-existent justice of their cause like Grant, who rightly called the Confederacy “the worst cause for which men ever fought.” Sherman, who was a much more analytical, intellectual man than Grant, focused on the fact that the South—the white, wealthy South, that is; the only one that mattered—was wrong. About everything. Every damn thing in the world. But most of all about its childishly romantic notions about war. Here’s what he said to his Southern friends before the war:
“You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”
That was Sherman’s advice to the South before the war even began. And he was, as usual, absolutely right. But he was talking like a grown-up to people who didn’t want to think like adults. Their whole society was based on horrible lies—“a bad cause to start with”—which gave them a deep aversion to cold truths.
There are a number of great zingers in Brecher's writing, and I would copy them all, were I allowed. But I think the more important thing is to focus on Brecher's dissection of Confederate psychology. It has important lessons for us today, I believe. Recall, for example, how Texas governor and US presidential aspirant Rick Perry so casually raised the specter of secession a few years ago. Or how the Republicans plunged ahead into the politically suicidal government shutdown a year ago - and are talking about doing it again.
Sherman was trying, in everything he did, to wake these idiots from their delusion. That’s why they hate Sherman so much, 150 years after his campaign ended in total success: Because he interrupted their silly and sadistic dreams, humiliated them in the most vulnerable part of their weird anatomy, their sense of valorous superiority. Sherman didn’t wipe out the white South, though he could easily have done so; he was, in fact, very mild toward a treasonous population that regularly sniped at and ambushed his troops. But what he did was demonstrate the impotence of the South’s Planter males.
The taking and burning of Atlanta were just one more chance to slap the South awake, as Sherman saw it. When he was scolded—by people who were in the habit of whipping slaves half to death for trivial lapses—for his severity toward the (white, landowning) people of Atlanta, he replied, in his “Letter to Atlanta,” in a way that shows how patiently he kept trying to talk grown-up sense to an insane population....
Brecher provides the famous quote from Sherman that "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." But pay attention to Sherman's next few lines:
The only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.
You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better.
There are some other
observations Brecher makes that I think offer great insight into our contemporary gun culture, and the antics of the NRA. And there is a powerful quote from a speech Sherman gave to graduates of a military academy in Michigan years after the war, about how ghastly and horrible war really is, warning them to shed their delusions of glory and grandeur. But I will close with this last excerpt from Brecher; it points to something important we need to think carefully about. I think it is quite correct of Brecher to imply how portentous it is that neo-confederate ideas such as states' rights (to reject health care exchanges, or medicare extension, for example), have become part of the public discourse again.
Sherman, as usual, saw clearly that the craziness of the white South was bone-deep, and could never fully be eradicated. He wouldn’t have been surprised to read Phil Leigh’s spitball-commemoration of his Atlanta victory. What Sherman did hope—and it was a realistic hope, fulfilled by history—was to suppress the South’s craziness for a few generations:
“We can make war so terrible and make [the South] so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.”
And it worked; it wasn’t until the past decade or so that these neo-Confederate vermin dared to raise their heads and start hissing their crazy nonsense in public.