William Tecumseh Sherman was indeed the founding father of terrorism perpetrated by the U.S. government and disquised by the language of “collective security.” Sherman biographer William Fellman (author of
Citizen Sherman) quotes Sherman as saying this about his fellow American citizens from the Southern states:
“To the petulant and persistent secessionists, why death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better… Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources” (emphasis added). Sherman was referring here to his plans for the civilian population of Georgia
after the Confederate Army had left the state.
Referring to his plans for the civilian population of Northern Alabama, Fellman quotes Sherman as saying that the
“Government of the United States” had the
“right” to
“take their lives, their homes, their lands, their everything… We will take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property… “ And he was not referring to slaves when he used the word “property.”
In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife Sherman wrote that
“the war will soon assume a turn to extermination not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people . … There is a class of people, men, women, and children, who must be killed…” (emphasis added).
In the autumn of 1862 Confederate snipers were firing at U.S. Navy gunboats on the Mississippi River. Unable to apprehend the combatants, Sherman took revenge on the civilian population by burning the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee to the ground. In the spring of 1863, after the Confederate Army had evacuated, Sherman ordered the destruction of Jackson, Mississippi. Afterwards, in a letter to Grant Sherman boasted that
“The inhabitants are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated for 30 miles around.”
Sherman’s troops also destroyed Meridian, Mississippi after Confederate troops were driven out, after which Sherman wrote to Grant:
“For five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done. Meridian … no longer exists.”
When Sherman’s chief military engineer, Captain O.M. Poe, advised that the bombing of Atlanta after the Confederates had fled was of no military significance, Sherman ignored him and declared that the corpses of women and children in the streets was
“a beautiful sight,” as Fellman writes in
Citizen Sherman.
In October of 1864 Sherman ordered the murder of randomly-chosen citizens in retaliation for Confederate Army attacks on his army. He wrote to General Louis Watkins:
“Cannot you send over about Fairmount and Adairsville, burn ten or twelve houses … kill a few at random, and let them know that it will be repeated every time a [military] train is fired upon… “ (See John B. Walters,
Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War, p. 137).