Even as a good Southerner, the infrastructure and crop destruction during the March to the Sea make perfect sense militarily to me. I suppose one could color the pillaging of individual homes with a military brush by calling the actions punitive, but that would seem to butt up against the Union’s stated purpose of reintegrating the Confederate states (the behavior might well have been hard to police, but throwing up your hands and saying “Boys will be boys!” is still throwing up your hand) and is the part of the expedition which really sticks in my and many other Southerners’ craw (including the young lady I know who dropped her drawers and squatted down to piss on the Sherman Monument in Central Park during her senior class trip). Interesting that in historical memory of the Valley Campaigns that sort of behavior is not highlighted. That series of events seem to be remembered more as merciless than as rapacious.
Of a different type and scale than the decades long insurgency that did take place, you mean?I suspect that if Grant had focused solely on the defeat of Lee's army or the capture of Richmond that the war would have been much more likely to have devolved into a decades long insurgency.
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