many discussed Sherman’s campaigns at length, they were notable for their relative restraint in criticizing his hard war tactics.⁵² These memoirs simply don’t portray Sherman as a bloodthirsty merchant of terror and death. A prime example is John Bell Hood’s Advance and Retreat, posthumously published in 1880. A brief examination of how Hood portrays Sherman makes clear how unusually malignant Davis’ view of Sherman was. To be sure, Hood—who had opposed Sherman in the fight for Atlanta—disapproved of Sherman’s campaign against the vital southern city. Sherman violated “the laws which should govern nations in time of war” in shelling Atlanta, evacuating the remnant of its civilian population, and subsequently burning much of it, Hood writes, and he offers many pages of densely cited legal authority in support.⁵³ This legalistic approach is matched by a measured, even analytical, tone, as this passage shows: “And whereas I marched out at night, allowing [Sherman] the following day to enter the city, unopposed, as he himself acknowledges, and whereas no provocation was given by the authorities, civil or military, he can in no manner claim that extreme war measures were a necessity.”⁵⁴ Hood’s account of Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, therefore, is much closer to a legal brief that alleges wrongdoing than an outraged condemnation of atrocities.⁵⁵ While he writes that Sherman violated the laws of war and caused unwarranted suffering, Hood doesn’t argue that Sherman is guilty of wanton cruelty or barbarism. Memoirs like Hood’s played an important role in shaping public opinion in the South. Even if these books criticized Sherman, often severely, “because the Southern generals who faced Sherman portrayed [him] as a professional, the people of the South mostly accepted Sherman as their former generals had.”⁵⁶ G. Mason Graham, one of the Louisiana Military Academy’s administrators when Sherman was superintendent, spoke for many southerners in an 1875 letter published by the New Orleans Picayune: “Whatever repugnant acts the necessities of war may have enforced on him, I … am satisfied that his sympathies are with the South in its struggles for peace, quiet, restoration, and self-government.”⁵⁷ But Sherman’s relationship with the South would begin to change dramatically following the 1881 publication of Jefferson Davis’ mammoth defense of the secessionist cause, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Davis’ attempts at character assassination, and Sherman’s equally harsh rebuttals, constituted the most protracted and bitter of Sherman’s public disagreements with ex-Confederates.⁵⁸ Even toward the end of Sherman’s life, when he sought to reconcile with as many old enemies as possible, Union and Confederate, he continued feuding with Davis.⁵⁹ This was indeed an “irrepressible conflict”: Both men were easily angered and provoked, unshakably convinced they were right, and committed to advocating endlessly for their radically incompatible views of the history and meaning of the Civil War. Sherman’s memoirs appeared before Davis’ account and say relatively little about the Confederate president, which might itself have been a kind of insult. The only direct attack came when he mocked Davis (in language that is restrained compared to what Sherman would eventually use) over Davis’ repeated public discussion in September 1864 of Hood’s plans to move his army north into Tennessee after the fall of Atlanta, effectively leaving Georgia to Sherman. Davis “made no concealment of these vainglorious boasts,” Sherman wrote, “and thus gave us the full key to his future designs.” Indirectly referring to his devastating March to the Sea, Sherman smugly concluded that “I think we took full advantage of the occasion.”⁶⁰ Davis had worse, much worse, to say about Sherman when his turn came. He called Sherman’s decision to remove Atlanta’s civilian population after the city’s surrender unparalleled in modern warfare. “Since
☛ Unlike his fellow former Confederate John Bell Hood (above, as he appeared during the war), Jefferson Davis (right, c. 1885) used his memoirs to excoriate Sherman’s Civil War record.
Alva’s atrocious cruelties to the noncombatant populations of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, the history of war records no instance of such a barbarous cruelty as that which this order designed to perpetrate.”⁶¹ The brutality worsened once defenseless women and children were outside the city, when they were stripped of their few remaining possessions by Union soldiers.⁶² Davis made perfectly clear whom he considered responsible for these depredations, thundering that Sherman had issued an “inhuman order” and that the “cowardly dishonesty of its executioners was in perfect harmony with the temper and spirit of the order.”⁶³ Davis next turned his attention to the burning of Atlanta and Sherman’s subsequent march to Savannah. He claimed Sherman deliberately and “utterly destroyed the city by a fire” in which “[n]ot a single house was spared, not even a church.” The line of Sherman’s march was marked by “[s]imilar acts of vandalism” in every town or village the army encountered. In Davis’ account, the March to the Sea proved that Sherman was something less than fully human: “The arson of the dwelling houses of noncombatants and the robbery of their property … made the devastation as relentless as savage instincts could suggest.”⁶⁴ Davis’ outrage only grew when he discussed Sherman’s February 1865 occupation of Columbia, South Carolina. The former president luridly described the march north from Savannah as
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