Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/158

144 highest evidences that can be produced of their peculiar morale. The orders of Butler in New Orleans, Steinwehr, Milroy, Pope, Hunter, Sheridan and Sherman, and the pillage, devastation, insults and nameless outrages inflicted by some of their men on helpless old people, women and children, are deplorable illustrations of the savagery of war, and were well calculated to arouse the bitterest enmity of our soldiers as well as to provoke the sternest retaliation. The Federal soldiers burned probably sixty towns and villages in the South, besides hundreds of private houses. Sherman, in his official report of his "march through Georgia," said: "I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at $100,000,000, at least $20,000,000 of which have inured to our advantage and the remainder is simply waste and destruction. "In other words, he used for his army property valued at $20,000,000 and ruthlessly destroyed $80,000,000 more. His march through the Carolinas was equally destructive, and the outrages committed by the army and camp followers have not been and never can be fully described. Sheridan, after carrying out Grant's orders to desolate the Shenandoah valley, made his cruel boast that he had done his work so effectually that "a crow flying over that region would have to carry his own rations." Many others of the Federal commanders perpetrated like outrages, and the letters from home to Confederate soldiers were filled with stories of murders, outrages, raping and arson. And yet, when Bragg moved into Kentucky, or in the frequent raids of Morgan and Forrest across the border, in Lee's invasion of Maryland in 1862 and of Pennsylvania in 1863, there was no disposition on the part of the Southern armies to retaliate on the "Union" men, but they obeyed cheerfully the stringent orders against depredating on private property. After our first invasion of Maryland a prominent Union man wrote of our army in one of the Northern papers: "They were a set of ragged gen-