“It was might white of the United States to put an end to slavery in this country at the expense of the lives of hundreds of white soldiers. Too bad the Blacks and Muslims in Africa and the Middle East never got around to ending slavery in their neck of the woods.”
When suffering associated with slavery and the Civil War is discussed the fate of poor white farmer families who did not own slaves during and after the Civil War is rarely mentioned. While Robert E. Lee’s Confederates were respectful of the civilian population during his incursions into the North, Union soldiers raped, pillaged, and plundered their way across the South. Sherman and his men deliberately committed what today’s moralistic liberals would characterize as “war crimes” on white civilians as well as the freed slaves. After the war millions of non-slave owning whites were left homeless losing their land, their crops, their livestock, and their personal possessions. Many starved and those who survived became sharecroppers (a form of servitude). Northern investors built textile mills in the late 19th century to take advantage of poor black and white people in the South economically binding them to the company through the debt to the company store and the squalid company housing in the mill towns.
Not condoning Shermans methods but he said “War is cruel. The crueler it is the sooner it’s over’’.
My family suffered in many ways exactly in the manner you described. Our country at large was the primary benefactor of putting an end to the institution of slavery. The great tragedy is that we couldn’t find a way to do it without war.