Several historians have portrayed Sherman as the progenitor of modern “total war,” which reached its climax in World War II. Grimsley maintains that the actions of Sherman and other Union commanders were “seldom the wanton, wholesale fury of legend” but rather struck a “balance between severity and restraint” and were “indeed discriminate and roughly proportional to legitimate needs.” Compared with the policies of Philip II of Spain against the Dutch in the sixteenth century, with those of the British in Ireland and of all armies in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, or with the murder and bombing of civilians by both Axis and Allies in World War II, “the restraint of Union armies in the Civil War acquires fresh salience.” This argument will not change the minds of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Mark Grimsley’s The Hard Hand of War is the latest and best study to strip away the myth and explore the reality of Sherman’s attack on the Southern civilian economy and population as a means of winning the war. In recent years, however, his devil image has undergone considerable transformation outside the ranks of neo-Confederate partisans.
And no victorious general since Genghis Khan has a worse historiographical reputation than Sherman. No defeated nation has had more numerous and ardent champions than the Confederacy. The American Civil War is a highly visible exception to the adage that victors write the history of wars. The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrated their defeat of the plan for a monument (Bentonville Battlefield is a state park) as a glorious victory by the heirs of those who should have won the war. These words are a fair sample of opinion among guardians of the lostcause legend in the South.
They were thieves, murderers, rapists, arsonists, trespassers.” His soldiers deserved no monument, agreed the state commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Sherman was “more evil than Ivan the Terrible or Genghis Khan,” declared the Secretary of Cultural Resources for North Carolina.
A proposed monument to Sherman’s soldiers at Bentonville, North Carolina, where one of the last battles of the Civil War took place, ran into a firestorm of local opposition.
Sherman’s army set forth on its march from Atlanta to the sea, Sherman’s legacy remained vivid and bitter in the South. In 1994, one hundred and thirty years after General William T.
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