The internationalist and dictatorial mindset of the Sherman brothers was clearly evident in the statement made by John Sherman, brother of William Tecumseh, when he said “Nationalize as much as possible (and thereby) make men love their country before their states.” This quote was in the book Donnie Kennedy and I wrote Lincoln’s Marxists, on page 127. You have only to compare this quote with the rantings of former presidential candidate John McCain when he ranted about “country first.” It sounds so patriotic until you stop and think about it. Seems that if I recall correctly, that was the same tack that Hitler took.
However, any similarities between General Sherman and Hitler are more than coincidental. They were both endowed with the same mindset.One thing most noteworthy of Sherman’s barbarian hordes was their attitude toward clergymen and toward Christians in general. In Sherman’s March Burke Davis noted: “The Reverend Mr. Connor, a Methodist minister whose parsonage was burned, emerged with a sick child wrapped in a blanket. A (Yankee) soldier seized the blanket. ‘No!’ Connor said, ‘he’s sick.’ The soldier tore off the blanket and threw it into the fire. ‘Damn you’ he said. ‘If you say one more word I’ll throw the child after it’.” Now there’s Yankee charity and mercy at its finest! The Yankee/Marxist mindset in it’s finest hour!
Sherman’s bummers treated the Catholics no better than the Protestants. The account is given in Davis’ book about a Catholic convent destroyed when Atlanta was burning.
According to Davis: “Father O’Connell led a final benediction. The schoolgirls were kneeling, reciting the rosary, when the chapel door was broken in by ‘the most unearthly battering…like the crash of doom. Drunken soldiers piled over each other, rushing for the sacred gold vessels of the alter,…Father O’Connell led them to a nearby church, from which they saw the burning convent roof collapse into a fiery grid of timbers. The sturdy building endured until long after nearby structures had burned to the ground, but at three in the morning its cross plunged earthward in a cascade of flames and embers. Laughing soldiers taunted the nuns and blew cigar smoke in their faces. ‘Oh holy! Yes, holy! We’re just as holy as you are!…Now, what do you think of God? Ain’t Sherman greater’?” You are forced to wonder how many of the “forty-eighters” marched in Sherman’s columns. Their freethinking mindset would make this sort of abuse of Christians right up their alley. And you can bet that Sherman, who, was at best, an agnostic, would have had no problem with all of this.
It seems that Sherman’s men had a real antipathy toward Christianity and Christians. Davis observed in his book that:
“Sergeant Fleharty watched as the village church was attacked: ‘First the pulpit and seats were torn out, then the siding and the blinds were ripped off. Many axes were at work. The corner posts were cut, the building tottered, the beautiful spire, up among the green trees, leaned…vibrating to and fro,…By the use of long poles the men increased the vibratory motion of the building, and soon, with a screeching groan the spire sunk down…and as the structure became a pile of rubbish, some of the most wicked of the raiders yelled out: ‘There goes your damned old gospel shop’.”
With some exceptions this seems to have been the mindset of Sherman and those barbarians he commanded.
And in keeping with the Marxist mindset of many in the Union armies Sherman was strongly inclined to a program of “land confiscation.” He wanted to dispossess Confederate leadership from their property. Sherman’s beloved brother, John, mentioned earlier, had said: “If we can’t depend on the loyalty of the white men of the South, I would give the land to the blacks or colonize a new set (of northern whites).”
Sherman, himself, since 1862 had threatened to take the land away from Southerners and to redistribute it to Northern white colonists and in 1864 he wrote: “…it may be both politic and right that we should banish them and appropriate their lands to a more loyal and useful population…If they want eternal war, well and good; we will dispossess them and put our friends in their place…” This was Sherman’s mindset, as well as the mindset of his brother in Washington.
How different was this from what Karl Marx advocated “Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.” Most historians have yet to deal with the Marxist mindset of many Northern generals and politicians. It’s hard for them to grasp that the sainted Mr. Lincoln was a friend to the Marxists and socialists and had no problem whatever with their mindset or with what they did to the South.
Christians have no concept of the depredations perpetrated against churches in the South during the war. That’s another whole subject in itself–another subject that almost never gets touched upon.
They have been bemused into thinking Lincoln was a truly godly man because many pastors have told them this. No supporting evidence is necessary, in fact, most of the real primary sources you will run across say exactly the opposite–that Lincoln was really anti-Christian in his outlook. But then, in our day, our Christian brethren are hardly noted for their aggressive search for any truth that conflicts with the “cunningly devised fables” they have been fed, so they just go along to get along and never question anything. Their concern for historical truth is like the Platte River “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
It is rumored that the people of Georgia didn’t forget Sherman’s March for over 100 years after it happened. Who can blame them? I have just touched on a very few incidents here. There were many, many more and some so horrendous as to be beyond description. Until we begin to deal with the penetration of Marxists and socialists into Northern political and military life in the 1860s and before, we will never understand the War of Northern Aggression and the part people like Sherman played in it.
revisedhistory
