Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 29.djvu/126

 110 Southern Historical Society Papers.

from women and the plunder of articles that never reached the com- missary," &c.

(See 2 Mem., p. 182.)

He not only does not say that he tried to prevent his army from committing these outrages, but says, on page 255, in referring to his march through South Carolina:

' ' I would not restrain the army, lest its vigor and energy should be impaired."

He tells on page 185 how, when he reached General Howell Cobb's plantation, he "sent word back to General Davis to explain whose plantation it was, and instructed him to spare nothing."

To show what a heartless wretch he was, he tells, on page 194, about one of his officers having been wounded by the explosion of a torpedo that had been hidden in the line of march, and on which this officer had stepped. He says:

" 1 'immediately ordered a lot of rebel prisoners to be brought from the provost guard, armed with picks and spades, and made them march in close order along the road, so as to explode their own torpe- does, or to discover and dig them up. They begged hard, but I re- iterated the order, and could hardly help laughing at their stepping so gingerly along the road, where it was supposed sunken torpedoes might explode at each step. ' '

It may be fairly inferred from General Sherman's middle name (Tecumseh), that some of his ancestors were Indians. But whether this be true or not, no one can read this statement of his without being convinced that he was a savage. But he was not only a con- fessed savage, as we have seen, but a confessed vandal as well. He says, on page 256, in telling of a night he spent in one of the splen- did old houses of South Carolina, where, he says, " the proprietors formerly had dispensed a hospitality that distinguished the old regime of that proud State. I slept (he says) on the floor of the house, but the night was so bitter cold, that I got up by the fire sev- eral times, and when it burned low I rekindled it with an old mantel clock and the wreck of a bedstead which stood in the corner of the room the only act of vandalism that I recall done by myself person- ally during the war" Since the admissions of a criminal are always taken as conclusive proof of his crime, we now know from his own lips that General Sherman was a vandal.