central_va: "Not true, a fairy tail.
I personally wish that were true though...."
Even if we allow for Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania, where his forces pretended to pay for stuff they "requisitioned", the vast majority of Confederate forays into Union areas included specific purpose of securing supplies and destroying Union assets.
Those three different attacks on Chambersburg are typical, including stealing supplies, destroying infrastructure, and even occasion kidnapping and murder of civilians.
Here is a wonderful report of elements of Lee's army occupying Chambersburg in 1863:
"Come dawn, the true occupation began.
The Confederates were a mostly well behaved lot.
They hardly bothered the farmers, did not tear down fences, and took only a few of the cattle.
Most things they took were paid for in Confederate script.
Jenkins and his men cleaned out the downtown merchants, who were hardly amused with being paid in such worthless notes.
"General Jenkins and his Confederates paid for everything, but three particular items.
The first was horses, which he considered contraband of war.
When the horses were found to be in short supply, he proceeded to take all of the arms in the town.
Any make or model would do.
When delivered, he destroyed the worthless and kept the finest.
"The third item which Jenkins took while refusing to pay was black people.
His men rounded them up like they had wanted to round up horses. Slave, free, man, women, or child, it did not matter.
To them, a black person was a slave and nothing more.
"Chambersburg, like many larger towns, had a section where many of the black people lived.
According to a local paper, Jenkins’ men, 'went to the part of the town occupied by the colored population, and kidnapped all they could find, from the child in the cradle up to men and women of fifty years of age.'
"Rachel Cormany, a citizen of Chambersburg remembered that the Rebels 'were hunting up the contrabands &c driving them off by droves.
O! How it grated on our hearts to have to sit quietly &c look at such brutal deeds—I saw no men among the contrabands — all women & children.'
Cormany recognized that 'some of the colored people who were raised here were taken along.'
But she could do little apart from watching as the black women and children were 'driven like cattle.'
One women, she recalled 'was pleading wonderfully with her driver for her children – but all the sympathy she received from him was a rough ‘March along.’ "
For other examples, Morgan's raids into Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio show the pattern:
"Unionist newspapers bragged after the raid that Union forces had hidden the best horses in the area and that Forrest had only captured horses stolen from private citizens.[98]
Furious, Forrest ordered Buford back into Kentucky.[98]
Buford's men arrived on April 14, forced Hicks back into the fort, and captured an additional 140 horses in the foundry, exactly where the newspaper reports had placed them."
Point is: there are many similar stories of Confederate raids into Union areas.
Always their commanders' purposes included securing supplies and destroying Union assets.
Hardly Shermanesque.