WHAT MAKES SHERMAN’S campaigns of 1864 and 1865 so memorable is that he put a torch not only to southern property but to the conventional moral language of warfare. His disdain for “hypocritical appeals to God and humanity” represented a decisive rejection of the notion of war for which he had been trained at West Point. For Sherman, “outrages, cruelty, [and] barbarity” were mere “side issues” in war. Like Clausewitz, Sherman believed that focusing on such considerations was thus “idle and nonsensical.” The “only principle,” he insisted, was “which party can whip.” Sherman dismissed the war’s humanitarian missionaries with contempt. He snubbed the agents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the delegate-missionaries of the U.S. Christian Commission as “crowds of idlers” and “curiosity hunters.” (In Atlanta, Sherman summarily put one Indiana sanitary commission agent out of business.) Even the torment of Union prisoners was not enough to distract him from his single-minded focus on bringing the war to a speedy and hard end. When given the opportunity, Sherman declined to exchange the Confederate soldiers he held for all the Union soldiers at the Andersonville prison camp; exchanges, he feared, would “slow the progress of his army and prolong the conflict.” After he authorized a failed cavalry raid to free the prisoners at Andersonville in the summer of 1864, Sherman reproached himself for making a bad tactical mistake. He even wondered whether the modern practice of taking prisoners was a wise policy. “At times,” he mused, “I am almost satisfied it would be just as well to kill all prisoners. . . . They would be spared these atrocities.”
Nothing could have been further removed from the Enlightenment model of the laws of war. Sherman often spoke in dangerously loose terms. “To secure the navigation of the Mississippi,” he declared in 1863, “I would slay millions.” He repeatedly urged the mass relocation of the southern population and the resettlement of their land by loyal Unionists from the North, though he pursued this policy in only two isolated instances, once at the Confederate cotton works at Roswell, Georgia, and then again at Atlanta. These were ways of talking about armed conflict that diverged sharply from the Enlightenment’s moral logic of war. But Sherman found himself thinking that the orthodox approach to constraints on warfare took a crabbed and distorted moral perspective.
Sherman coined a phrase for the peculiar moral vision adopted by the conventional international laws of war: “the humanities of the case,” he called it. What he meant was that his humanitarian critics evaluated each situation—each case—in isolation, as if unconnected to the broader war effort, its aims, or its future ramifications. They condemned no-quarter warfare or violence against civilians without regard to the ends in view. What Sherman had keenly grasped was that the laws of war in the modern age had set aside the just war tradition’s concerns with right and wrong and replaced them with a new ethic of humanitarian constraint, an ethic that dismissed questions of justice as ultimately unresolvable.
In place of the narrow focus of the case-specific approach, Sherman adopted a wider lens that aimed to bring war to a just end with a minimum of unnecessary suffering overall. In this approach, reducing long-term suffering sometimes meant increasing war’s short-term destruction. That was what Sherman had in mind when he told Mayor James Calhoun of Atlanta that the way to end the suffering of his people was to end the war quickly. In early 1865, Sherman expressed the idea more bluntly: “the more awful you can make war the sooner it will be over.” Francis Lieber had proposed the very same notion in his code. Sharp wars were short wars, and all things considered, short wars were often more humane, even when they involved destructive tactics.
No one can be entirely sure when Sherman first said, “War is hell.” No one can even be sure whether he said it at all. One officer under his command later remembered Sherman saying the words over dinner in South Carolina in early 1865. But Sherman himself could not recall the occasion on which he had uttered the words for the first time. And for good reason. In one way or another, he said the same thing in so many words time and time again. “War is barbarism,” he said at Jackson in 1863. At Vicksburg in 1864, he wrote that “war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact.” In Atlanta, he told the Confederates that “war is cruelty.” Fifteen years after the end of the Civil War, he told a gathering of veterans what they knew only too well: “Boys, it is all hell.”
Most historians have seen Sherman’s disillusioned realism as antithetical to the very idea of legal constraints on warfare. They have aligned themselves with Jefferson Davis’s account of Sherman’s conduct in Atlanta, which Davis labeled a “barbarous cruelty” like none since “the sixteenth century,” or with Davis’s evaluation of Sherman’s actions at Columbia, South Carolina, which Davis called “an act of cruelty” as barbarous as the excesses of “the Thirty Years’ War.” But this is far too complacent a conclusion. It rescues the easy nostrums of restraints in wartime without subjecting them to the scrutiny that men like Sherman and Lieber believed they deserved. Sherman’s conduct departed from the Enlightenment model of war. But so did the most exhaustive statement of the laws of war in American history to date. The Union’s code of May 1863 and Sherman’s march shared the same grim engagement with the moral limits of war.
LIEBER FOLLOWED SHERMAN’S campaign via private reports he received from Henry Hitchcock, an officer on Sherman’s staff and the nephew of Lieber’s colleague Ethan Allen Hitchcock. In 1862, after the battle at Fort Donelson, the younger Hitchcock’s mother-in-law had taken care of the injured Hamilton Lieber in St. Louis. Now his letters kept the professor well informed on the progress of Sherman’s army through the Deep South.
The reports left Lieber deeply impressed with some features of Sherman’s campaign. “Sherman moves his army better than Uncle Sam [delivers] our letters,” Lieber gushed. Here at last was a Union commander who seemed to grasp the nature of Lieber’s fierce thinking about war.
Yet the more Lieber learned about the events unfolding in Georgia and the Carolinas, the more he worried that Sherman’s destruction threatened to get out of control. Lieber approved of the general’s basic strategy, but the unorganized destruction his men wrought filled him with dread. “Assuredly my name is not namby-pamby,” he wrote to Halleck. He approved of “a manly, unflinching yet un-impassioned sternness” in war. Nonetheless, Lieber pleaded that it was vital to “stay the hand of mere ruthless revenge” by Sherman’s army in South Carolina. Mere “ruthless burning, killing,” and rape, he warned, “demoralizes an army.” Napoleon’s rise from popular general to dictator loomed large for the Prussian émigré Lieber. An undisciplined democratic army, he worried, was only a few steps away from becoming a politically destabilizing mob.
The difficulty was that even Sherman did not fully grasp the ethical implications of his march. Cutting free from his supply lines, Sherman had embarked on a kind of warfare that delegated radical discretion to individual soldiers. When the general ordered his army to “forage liberally on the country during the march,” he inadvertently touched off a revolution in modern military strategy. He had aimed to manage the foraging process from the top down by organizing formal foraging parties of fifty men “under the command of one or more discreet officers” who were to do the work of collecting provisions for each brigade. (It was, he told his men, “most important” that they “keep their places and do not scatter about as stragglers or foragers.”) Yet almost immediately the decentralizing imperatives of the campaign undid the fragile limits Sherman had sought to impose. Only one day out of Atlanta, Sherman described how a “soldier passed me with a ham on his musket, a jug of sorghum-molasses under his arm, and a big piece of honey in his hand.” “Forage liberally on the country,” the soldier joked in a stage whisper, quoting Sherman’s order back to him. Within days, the brigades’ official foraging parties were being supplemented by foragers from virtually every company in the army.
The logic of decentralized foraging quickly led to a dynamic that would embitter generations of white southerners. Competing with one anothe
r for the best provisions they could find, “Sherman’s bummers” (as the foragers came to be called) evolved into a system of individual initiative perfectly (if accidentally) designed to vacuum all the usable goods from a path fifty miles wide along the road from Atlanta to the sea. Some foragers tried to restrain themselves and leave the Georgia families they encountered with enough food to make it through the winter. But whatever one party of bummers left behind was likely to be taken by the next. To leave provisions on a plantation was thus no humanity at all, but merely to deprive one’s own closest comrades of provisions that would doubtless be scooped up by the next foragers to come along. What the 16th Iowa left, the 53rd Illinois would take. The very structure of the competitive foraging system undercut restraint. It produced instead a race to the bottom in which foragers swept up more provisions than centrally directed foraging parties possibly could have managed.
All too often the race led to downright lawlessness. Bummers hanged Georgia farmers by the neck from tree limbs until almost dead in order to make them reveal the location of hidden supplies. Where the farmers had already fled, foragers held loaded pistols to the heads of blacks on the plantation to force them to disclose the whereabouts of their former masters’ goods. Torture and threats quickly moved from provisions to booty like jewels, silver, and cash. Executions sometimes followed for those who refused to cooperate. The five or six miles on either side of Sherman’s army became a kind of lawless zone of unconstrained violence. Confederate home guards and guerrillas roamed the byways of the country and executed foragers whenever they could, hanging them along the roadsides as grim warnings. By the time the march was complete, the Union command counted 173 of its men hanged or shot at close range. Plantation owners booby-trapped false caches of treasure and provisions before fleeing from Sherman’s onslaught. Sherman, in turn, ordered the execution of Confederate prisoners in retaliation.
The decentralized structure of the campaign produced similar effects when it came to property destruction. At the outset of the campaign, Sherman ordered that only “corps commanders” were authorized “to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, etc.” Even commanders were to forbear from destruction in neighborhoods whose residents allowed the army to pass unmolested. But Sherman’s men were vested with too much discretion to ever ensure that such orders were carried out. As they departed Atlanta, “firebugs” among his soldiers burned some 5,000 homes, despite his instructions against doing so. One New Jersey officer remarked in South Carolina in early 1865 that it seemed “almost as though there was a Secret organization among the men to burn Every thing in the State for thus far, in spite of orders, & the utmost efforts of officers, houses, in Some way, get on fire & Nearly all we have passed thus far are I think in ashes.” But the destructiveness of Sherman’s army was less the result of a secret organization than it was the effect of the purposeful organization of the campaign: its devolution of initiative down the chain of command.
Some of Sherman’s officers tried harder than others to interrupt the dynamic of destruction. (General Oliver Otis Howard was one who detested what he called the “inexcusable and wanton” looting of trunks and silver plate.) But Sherman himself quickly became resigned to the actions of his bummers. “I never ordered the burning of any dwelling,” he told one of his officers, “but it can’t be helped.” Sherman’s claim of innocence was not strictly true, and he knew it. “I say Jeff Davis burnt them,” he said slyly. When Sherman turned away one white woman who requested that he post a guard at her home, he turned to an officer and acknowledged that “the soldiers will take all she has.” After the war, Sherman would confess that “many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence, were committed” by his bummers. Belief that Sherman tacitly authorized such acts was sufficiently widespread that one man arrested for unauthorized destruction cited Sherman’s approval in his defense.
Halleck and Stanton had commissioned Lieber’s 1863 code in part to respond to the decentralization of authority that the war had already called into being in the second half of 1862. That was why it was issued as a General Order and printed as a pamphlet that was distributed to officers around the Army. That was why it was styled as instructions to the U.S. armies “in the field.” When Halleck passed the code along to his commanders in the field in May and June of 1863, he stressed the imperatives of decentralization and initiative, explaining that the application of the rules “in particular places” would “be left mainly to the good judgment and discretion of the commanders.” Lieber, too, had helped usher the laws of war into the age of entrepreneurial initiative. In the weeks after Lincoln issued the code as General Orders No. 100, a commercial publishing company in New York printed still more copies, packaging Lieber’s text together with advertisements for the publisher’s popular science texts and its volumes on ordnance, gunnery, and infantry tactics.
In Sherman’s march, however, the centrifugal forces of military decentralization outraced the technological advance the code represented for the laws of war. The difficulty was that Sherman’s men had begun sounding like the commander himself. “War is an uncivil game,” pronounced a soldier in Sherman’s ranks, “and cant be civilized.” “Truly,” said another, “war is cruelty.” Crossing into South Carolina, one of Sherman’s men crowed, “Boys, this is old South Carolina, let’s give her h-ll!”
It was one thing for Sherman to step outside the sometimes artificially constraining moral limits of the laws of war and to set aside case-by-case humanitarianism for an ethic of the long run. But it was entirely another to vest discretion to do so in tens of thousands of individual soldiers. What if 60,000 men took it upon themselves to decide when the orthodox rules ought to apply and when they were best set aside in the name of a higher morality or an all-things-considered humanity? One Ohio officer gave a grim answer. The “country behind us,” he said, “is left a howling wilderness, an utter desolation.”
IRONICALLY, the chief prophet of the new way of war was also among the least enthusiastic Union commanders when it came to using the war to reorganize the social life of the Confederacy. Only a massive transformation of the social structure of the South would bring a measure of equality to the 4 million people freed by the war. But as his march through the Carolinas neared its end, and as the armies of the South collapsed, Sherman hoped peace would restore the Union to its prewar condition—without slavery, to be sure, but otherwise unaltered. So did millions of other northerners. And that helps to explain the startling development at the war’s end. While Sherman was living out the radical new conception of the laws of war that Lieber had drafted and Lincoln had issued, a far more traditional idea of the laws of war surged back into view.
Chapter 10
Soldiers and Gentlemen
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in. . . .
—Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 1865
WHEN Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met on April 9, 1865, at Wilmer McLean’s farm in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, their armies were no longer comparable. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was on its last legs. Hunger and desertions had decimated its ranks. Neither, in Grant’s view, were the two armies morally alike. Sitting with Lee at the McLean farm, Grant reflected to himself that his counterpart’s cause was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”
Yet the Union commander had no doubt about the Confederate general’s sincerity. Grant thought “the great mass” of Confederate soldiers had fought with the same earnestness, and this made all the difference. The human tendency to persuade oneself of one’s cause was the starting point for the rules of Enlightenment warfare that Grant and Lee had learned at West Point. It was why civilized armies did not hold their enemies’ causes against them, even when they seemed heinous. And it was why, despite all their differences, the two men met that day as equals in the eyes of the law.
In keeping with the customs and usage
s of enlightened soldiers, Grant accepted Lee’s surrender on remarkably magnanimous terms. Some 25,000 Confederate soldiers went home on the promise not to take up arms again. Grant promised that so long as they kept their oaths, they would not be punished by the United States for their role in the conflict.
What Grant and Lee and every other West Point graduate knew was that civilized wars ended in agreements to forget the perceived wrongs of the contending sides, not in the punishment of a vanquished enemy. Once war was over, the need to retaliate for past violations of war’s rules in order to ensure future compliance virtually disappeared. Moreover, the prospect of punishment threatened to make war a ghastly fight to the bitter end. Men facing punishment and death might never surrender.
The favored practice in the age of enlightened warfare was to grant amnesty to the subjects of the warring states for their actions in the conflict, consigning violations of the laws of war to what eighteenth-century peace treaties called “a general oblivion.” As Francis Lieber’s old Prussian handbook put it, peace offered “forgetting and amnesty” (Vergessenheit in the German) for “all discord, enmity, hostilities and of whatever deeds had been committed during the war.” Nine days after Appomattox, William Tecumseh Sherman and General Joseph Johnston (two more West Point graduates) agreed to magnanimous terms recognizing the rebel state governments, restoring the citizenship and rights of rebels, and offering a broad amnesty. Newly sworn-in President Andrew Johnson refused to accept the Sherman-Johnston agreement on the grounds that Sherman had badly exceeded his authority, but barely a month later the president issued an amnesty for all rebel soldiers, excepting high-ranking officers and those who had treated captured Union soldiers unlawfully. Peace treaties the following year between the United States and five Indian tribes that had allied themselves with the South took the same approach, adopting a “general amnesty of all past offences.”
Lincoln's Code Page 37
