Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/178

 Missionary Ridge by a front attack if Lee and his men had been on top of it.

The Union army has been blamed for cruel acts of vandalism, committed in the Southern country, especially during the latter part of the war. This charge, which has indeed been very much exaggerated as it went from mouth to mouth, and from newspaper to newspaper, is not entirely groundless. In his report on our march from Chattanooga to Knoxville for the relief of Burnside, General Howard complains that acts of robbery and wanton destruction of property had been committed by some of the soldiers—in a country, too, in which a majority of the population were faithful Unionists. This complaint did not apply to his own troops, but to a corps of Sherman's army which preceded ours on the march. I myself saw evidences of this. I found several houses on the road completely stripped of everything that could be moved. I saw a field covered with feathers from a feather bed that had been ripped open. I saw a cradle standing by the roadside a mile or more away from the nearest human habitation. Evidently, it was the mere lust of looting that had induced soldiers to carry away things so absolutely useless to them. Later, in 1865, when I joined General Sherman's army at Goldsborough, N. C., after its great march through Georgia and the Carolinas, I saw some soldiers frying their bacon on silver platters, and in a general's tent I was treated to the finest Madeira wine poured from a large silver pitcher into silver goblets. When I asked where those things came from, the answer was that the army had been fairly stumbling over them in South Carolina, and that there was a lot of such stuff still left there. I do not mean to be understood as saying that I observed many such instances, but I observed some, and I was told that when the army was foraging for its sustenance in Georgia it was