Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/251

Rh admit that Sherman did pass through the country and got plenty to feed his 60,000 men. The Confederate States government passed a bill requiring all farmers and planters to pay a tithe of all their products. Later Congress enacted a law that everything should be taken for the support of the army, except a certain allowance, which was stated, for each member of a family. In the summer of 1864, the writer was detailed to go to Rockingham county, Va., and was furnished with a wagon train to collect the tithe and the excess provisions for the use of the cavalry corps. This was the case all over the South, and where any family had more than enough provisions to supply them until next crop, the government took it for the support of the army. This was the condition in Georgia when Sherman marched through. So when Sherman took in his swath of sixty miles he did not cripple the Confederate Army at all, but he took this from the mouths of the women and children that were at home. I wish we could get before the Northern people the horrors of that march through Georgia of Sherman's, of which they so delight to sing. Sherman claims that in passing through Georgia he damaged the State $380,000; $180,000 of which he used for the support of his army and $200,000 was destroyed. As to the responsibility further of the treatment of prisoners, wont [sic] the corporal take the evidence of his famous general, Benjamin F. Butler. This is Spoons Butler, or Beast Butler, who attempted to whip the women of New Orleans with his army. To quote from General Butler's speech at Lowell, Mass.: "Every one is aware that, when the exchange did take place, not the slightest alteration had occurred in the question, and that our prisoners might as well have been released twelve or eighteen months before as at the resumption of the cartel, which would have saved the republic at least twelve or fifteen thousand heroic lives. That they were not saved is due alone to Mr. Edwin M. Stanton's peculiar policy and dogged obstinacy; and, as I have remarked before, he is unquestionably the digger of the unnamed graves that crowd the vicinity of every