Posted on 05/24/2009 6:22:51 AM PDT by kellynla
I know that this was much more common than one would surmise, as the census data immediately thereafter (tax rolls and other documents) listed numerous children unrelated to the HoH living with them.
My ancestor's wife and three small children left the devastation and the state to middle Florida to escape the yankees and Reconstruction.
And yankees think that they were the epitome of nobility during the war and Reconstruction.
You are a moron.
NO...an illiterate, uneducated moron.
Learn History.
I’ve often wondered if that happened to any of my wife’s Georgia relatives. Her parents were pretty quiet about specifics of what happened.
Back in WBTS times, I think they sometimes referred to rape in veiled terms, perhaps to protect the ladies involved. If you’ll remember, I once posted about some women who were badly burned by Federal troops in Arkansas in an attempt to find where they might have hidden money and other valuables. One sentence in the report struck me as possibly indicating rape: “Notwithstanding these outrages [the burnings], that of still deeper infamy is now the suffering pangs at heart of some of the helpless ladies of Johnson.”
Bump. Many on the other side are of the opinion that the account must use the word "rape", or else it must have been tiddly-winks they were playing.
When "Beast" Butler ordered that the ladies of New Orleans showed contempt for yankees that she was to be 'treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation', he meant to treat them as prostitutes, without recourse to legal remedies for their rape.
The article went on to describe what had happened: "In an instant the cabin was filled, a light was struck, and as the man was no where to be seen, a purpose more fiendish than that which had induced them to enter the dwelling, took possession of the marauders. The girl was at once seized, and with violence, alike criminal and brutal, they [nine of the eleven] accomplished their fiendish purposes, one after another, in the presence of the father and the mother."
The word rape was never used in the article, which appeared in the Picayune on March 3, 1864.
The Captain Brown story is found in the old book about the Civil War years in Bradley County, Tennessee that I often reference here. It's available on Google books. The page linked contains an overview of the character of Captain Brown.
page 89 of "HISTORY OF THE REBELLION IN BRADLEY COUNTY, EAST TENNESSEE"
Page 108-109 contains a partial list of some of the Unionists who were victims of Brown's extortion, one of whom is one of my relatives.
Beginning on page 245, chapter 23, "Murder of the Two Carters", details a grotesque atrocity occurring in the wake of a Wheeler raid with possible partial knowledge by the general himself. Today this episode would be labelled a war crime. There is also an account of a rebel crime spree in the wake of another Wheeler raid through Bradley, but this one was pretty obviously done without the knowledge of the general.
This book's early chapters also details the progress of secession in Tennessee and shows why many considered the Tennessee secession an illegal travesty not even considering the Constitutional issues. And if anybody had relatives in Bradley at the time, the appendix has an extensive listing of the sheep and goats, Bradley's Union and rebel soldiers and Union and Confederate citizens.
As far as Sherman's raid, I have to admit the conduct in South Carolina often crossed the line. It was no surprise that SC got it worst, it had a bad reputation even among some Southerners. But much of what happened, such as Columbia, was against Sherman's wishes. And the view that the SC conduct was significantly a response to SC's leading secession role is supported by the way the the rampage quieted down once in NC.
Sorry I'm tardy in responding, but your posts often require a day or two to study and think about which is a compliment to the quality of your contributions.
That's a sad and interesting story. I'm curious as to the general part of the world that it happened in. Was it South Georgia on Sherman's march? I know there were some terrible crimes brought about in Sherman's expedition, but the book I linked in post #106 shows that in some areas it was the rebels who were the criminals and the Yankees who were understandibly regarded as the liberators and allies. Had the Yankees made faster progress my kinsman would not have been murdered by the Confederates in the mountains of North Georgia.
Very similar things like that in Bradley County happened with respect to elections in Kentucky with Federal troops striking Democrats off the ballot. Both sides abused their power. I see in your link that General Wheeler showed that the two Carters were not bushwackers by his question about whether they were armed. It sounds like the five who captured the Carters were not Wheeler's men, but some who later participated in the killing of the Carters might have been.
If what happened to Unionists in East Tennessee was bad (and it was), then what happened to Southern sympathizers in Kentucky and elsewhere was also bad. There was much more Southern land occupied by Federals than Union-favoring land occupied by Confederates. IMO, there was consequently much more opportunity for bad/brutal administration by Federals than by Confederates. It is one reason we have so much bad behavior by Federals to point to.
You mentioned that the things that happened to South Carolina were against Sherman's wishes. I'm skeptical of that. He had written orders that appear that he was against the burnings and atrocities (CYA, IMO), but I believe his purpose was to destroy Columbia.
The part I posted above about Sherman and his officers traversing the streets everywhere during the "demonic saturnalia" (as Simms called it elsewhere in his book) but doing nothing about it was from Simms' original newspaper account. Is Simms telling the truth? If Hurlburt's book about East Tennessee is believable, why shouldn't Simms' book about the burning of Columbia be given similar credence.
A commission was set up in 1866 by South Carolinians to document what happened. Depositions were taken from some 60 individuals. The results were quoted from many years later by a 1920 history book: [History of South Carolina]. On page 801 of that book, Sherman is reported to have said the following in Salem, Illinois, in July 1865 about a change in policy he made on his march to the sea. "Therefore, I resolved in a moment to stop the game of guarding their cities and to destroy their cities."
Sherman also said that his feeling and that of the army officers and troops in 1865 was that South Carolina deserved extirpation. [Source: New York Times, May 10, 1873]. Union Captain George Whitfield Pepper reported in his 1866 book I mentioned above that Sherman said the following to a group of Columbia ladies who asked for protection, "Do not ask me for protection, I am an enemy and destroyer." [Pepper's book, page 315].
Incidentally, Pepper's book also confirms Simms' account of Union troops cutting firehoses of local firefighters trying to put out fires. [Pepper's book, page 312]. Pepper also says on his way into town the next day after the fire, he was met by crowds of soldiers "waving gold watches, handsful of gold, jewelry, and rebel shinplasters [rb: paper money] in the air, and boasting of having burned the town." [page 312-313]
I learn history by responding to your posts. Thanks.
We have been told of successful outrages of this unmentionable character being practiced on women dwelling in the suburbs. Many are understood to have taken place in remote country settlements, and two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by the wretches and afterwards murdered -- one of them being thrust, when half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was suffocated. ... Regiments, in successive relays, subjected scores of these poor women [rb: black women in this case] to the torture of their embraces ...
I think Wheeler in the Carter incident displayed the effects of many months as a cavalry commander in the Civil War. I doubt something like that would have been allowed to happen in in 1861, but by this time the man was probably physically and mentally weary and had become hardened to the actions of the criminals acting in the wake of the raid. It might even be suggested that Wheeler here was a small scale version of Sherman as he was by the time he reached Columbia.
Both Hurlburt and Simms had part of the story to tell. I guess the thing to avoid is to focus only on one of the stories and to pretend the other didn't exist.
Always enjoy what you write. They loght a match on things to consider and that's why it ususally takes me a day or two to ponder the issue before I respond.
I bought a hard copy of the following book by David Power Conyngham, Sherman's March Through the South. Thanks to Google the book is online at the above link. The author was a war correspondent, and I was curious whether his observations about Sherman's march through South Carolina had made it to his paper during the war (I still don't know).
The first chapter of this book relates the situation in East Tennessee as described to the author by others. Interestingly on page 16, it says the following, "The father [a Unionist] returned home to find his house burned down, the body of his wife in ashes, and his outraged daughter a maniac." I had seen the term "outraged" in connection with women many times in documents of the time and not until this thread did I confirm what it really meant back then.
It did make some women "maniacs." Here is another woman who was described as a maniac. From the Official Records [Link]: "About the 14th ultimo, at a place called Hutt's Store, near the center of Westmoreland County, some of the negro troops went to the house of Private George, of Ninth Virginia Cavalry, and committed a rape upon his wife, who had just been confined with a babe only six weeks old. She is now almost a maniac, and begs that some one will kill her." The next page of the Official Records shows that that particular case made it all the way up to Robert E Lee and the Confederate Secretary of War.
Right the Constitution no longer functions. And the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th Amendments are major sources of the problem. Only a fool can think that the Founders intended the 9 Justices on the Supreme Court to be the holders of the leash on Federal power. It was the independence of the States that was to keep the Federal Government in check. This is why the Confederacy is so demonized by the left. Keep America in the dark about its past and you can rule by deception. How sad.
Right. But we did have a war for Southern Independence. And in case you missed it in your government school, the good guys lost :(
great minds think alike!
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