>Sherman made a critical error during the surrender negotiations with Joe Johnston at Bentonville that nearly ruined his career as a general. Lincoln had earlier made it clear that he alone would handle the political settlement of the war and that the generals were not to discuss anything with Confederate leaders outside strictly military matters. In that spirit, Grant arranged the surrender of Lee's army at Appomattox.>While negotiating with Johnston, Sherman acted on the apparent assumption that he knew exactly what the now deceased Lincoln would have wanted. His surrender terms for Johnston's army were nothing short of expansive--all Confederate soldiers would march to state arsenals, deposit their weapons in them, and return to their homes, farms, or places of business. After that, they would regain their citizenship, voting rights, and so forth, and all existing state governments in the Southern states would, if they took the oath of loyalty to the United States, be left intact and unmolested regardless of their secessionist past.
>>18249357Union should have executed all Southern civilians. Including the slaves.
>The Northern press united in outrage once word got out of this. Sherman's surrender terms were denounced as preposterous. If ex-Confederate soldiers simply deposited their weapons in state arsenals, they could easily retrieve them at some point in the future and re-arm themselves to resume the war. Allowing the white population of the South to automatically regain their rights as citizens with no other requirements seemed to also be an absurd idea; in effect it would nullify the entire last 4 years of bloodshed and leave the Southern people unpunished for starting the war. They might even resume slavery. Sherman was dismissed as insane, of plotting to make himself the dictator of a slave-holding empire in the South, and other wild claims.>Needless to say, Edwin Stanton also viciously denounced Sherman's surrender terms. It seems probable that if Lincoln was still alive he would have also rejected them but he was likely to have done so quietly and without making a big deal about it in public. But he was dead now and Stanton was the de-facto chief executive and he threw a veritable temper tantrum over Sherman. New president Andrew Johnson also condemned the agreement and said that all traitors must pay the price for their deeds. Grant boarded a steamer for the North Carolina coast and reached Raleigh on April 24. He gave Sherman the news and said that he would have to open a new surrender conference with Joe Johnston.>While there, Grant took time to write his wife Julia to tell her that Raleigh was a most beautiful town, having completely avoided wartime destruction, and its inhabitants were eager to have the war over with. He added that the suffering the South currently endured and certainly would a year from now was "unimaginable" and the Radical Republican sorts who called for vengeance and desolation on Southerners either did not know how bad things currently were or were a safe enough distance away that it was of no concern to them.
>Sherman met with Johnston a second time, arranged a surrender agreement that was a near-clone of the one Grant presented to Lee at Appomattox, and that was that. Meanwhile, Halleck issued a circular to all Union armies telling them that Sherman's original surrender agreement was invalid and they were not to act on any of its terms. Halleck also issued an erroneous claim that Jefferson Davis had absconded with a large quantity of gold from the Confederate treasury and was planning to take it with him to Europe. This rumor was abuzz in Washington for a few days, the newspapers were all running the text of Stanton's denunciation of Sherman and Halleck's circular to the Union armies, and it got Halleck and Stanton into Sherman's enemies list for the rest of his life. In the end no lasting damage was done to Sherman's reputation; he remained a conquering hero in the North and the Devil incarnate in the South.>At Bentonville, soldiers under General Slocum's command gathered a large pile of newspapers running anti-Sherman editorials and set fire to them. Slocum wrote afterward that it was the final act of destruction his troops carried out in the war and it had been an "immense pleasure" to do so.
>>18249359>>18249357>>18249358ain't it strange that the actual generals who fought this war weren't as bloodthirsty as Pajeets on image boards 150 years later
>>18249357>Joe JohnstonThis is the most American sounding name ever
>>18249357Reminder that Sherman wasn’t the avenging angel that modern liberals make him out to be but a hard military man with no particular animus towards the south despite his actions in Georgia and South Carolina. He just wanted the fucking war to end by any means necessary and was willing to offer generous terms once the Confederates surrendered.
Grant and Sherman were that type of guy everyone has probably encountered who's a total loser in civilian life but when he puts on a military uniform he instantly becomes awesome.
>>18249875Hindu still mad about Muslim and Brit
>>18250795Sherman never hit rock bottom in peacetime like Grant but at the start of the war he was running a military academy in Louisiana. Life in the peacetime Regular Army sucked. The war really revealed character—plenty of top West Pointers shit the bed while some bottom of their class guys thrived, and lots of amateurs found their inner warrior when they saw the elephant.
>>18250890the guys who finished in the top 10 were typically engineer types with no aptitude for field command (think McClellan or William Franklin). lower tier graduates were considered dumb meathead fighter types. as it were the top 10 guys in the antebellum era most often tended to be from the Northeast as it had the best public school systems while Southern cadets finished near the bottom a lot of the time, but were more aggressive fighters.
One historian estimated that 50k civilians in Georgia and South Carolina died of starvation because Sherman's troops ate all the food.
>On 5/28/64 Sherman burned the textile mills at Roswell, Georgia and ordered the deportation of its 400 workers, mostly female but also a few men considered unfit for service in the Confederate army for one reason or another, as the mill produced uniforms, rope, and blankets for the army. The women, at least 40% younger than 18, proved a significant problem for Sherman's army as they were difficult to keep compared to any male prisoner, nobody in the army had any experience with handling female prisoners, and as many of them were young, attractive girls (along with some older individuals as well) it was highly undesirable to keep them around the soldiers. Sherman said it would be easier to take the entire Confederate army prisoner than the Roswell women.>The mill owners attempted to deceive Sherman by flying French and British flags in an attempt to make it look like the mills were foreign-owned but the trick did not fool him.>The prisoners were transported north to a prison camp in Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Mary Walker, who operated the camp, was disliked by the women as she would not permit them to associate with the male guards. They were permitted to go north of the Ohio River if they took the oath of loyalty to the United States. It appears that most of the Roswell women did eventually stay in the Northern states, many finding work in Indiana textile mills and marrying local men. A smaller number returned home to Georgia after the war.
>>18252018the removal of the Roswell women is vastly exaggerated by Dixietards as an example of a Sherman war crime, mostly because they read wartime yellow journalism from Southern newspapers and take 150 year old propaganda as fact
