Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 29.djvu/124

108 fires in garrets and closets and stood by to see that they were not extinguished." He then further says:

"Had one been able to climb to such a height at Atlanta as -to enable him to see for forty miles around, the day Sherman marched out, he would have been appalled at the destruction. Hundreds of houses had been burned, every rod of fence destroyed, nearly every fruit tree cut down, and the face of the country so changed that one born in that section could scarcely recognize it. The vindictiveness of war would have trampled the very earth out of sight had such a thing been possible."

Again he says:

"At the very beginning of the campaign at Dalton, the Federal soldiery had received encouragement to become vandals. * * * * When Sherman cut loose from Atlanta everybody had license to throw oft restraint and make Georgia ' drain the bitter cup.' The Federal who wants to learn what it was to license an army to become vandals should mount a horse at Atlanta and follow Sherman's route for fifty miles. He can hear stories from the lips of women that would make him ashamed of the flag that waved over him as he went into battle. When the army had passed nothing was left but a trail of desolation and despair. No houses escaped robbery, no woman escaped insult, no building escaped the firebrand, except by some strange interposi- tion. War may license an army to subsist on the enemy, but civilized warfare stops at live stock, forage and provisions. It does not enter the houses of the sick and helpless and rob women of their finger rings and carry off their clothing."

He then tells of the "deliberate burning of Atlanta," by Sher- man's order, of the driving out from the city of its whole population of all ages, sexes and conditions in the fields of a desolated country to starve and die, as far as he knew or cared. You have only to read these recitals and you have the picture which Sherman made and which he truly denominated "Hell."

The correspondence between Mayor Calhoun and two council- men of Atlanta, representing to General Sherman the frightful suffering that would be visited on the people of that city by the execution of his inhuman order, and General Sherman's reply, can be found in the second volume of Sherman's Memoirs, at pages 124-5; we can only extract one or two paragraphs from each. The letter of the former says, among other things: