Reparations for War Crimes Committed Against the South
409
people have signed this petition. Add your name now!
409
people have signed. Add your voice!
41%
Maxine K. signed
just now
Adam B. signed
just now
- "The truth is it was not war!!! It was hell unleashed on Southern civilians, non combatants. Citizens who were defenseless women, innocent children and unarmed old men." These brutalities were directed by President Abraham Lincoln, General Philip Sheridan, General William Tecumseh Sherman and more. I don’t blame all of the Union soldiers as I believe Lincoln hired evil mercenaries from European countries and street criminals to carry out many of these brutalities, torture, rape, and other actions committed against the South and its citizens. The South is owed reparations for the many "war crimes" committed against it during the War for Southern Independence. There are many, so it is hard to know where to begin. I live near Roswell, Georgia, so I will begin with one associated with Roswell.
- In 1864, many people living in and around Roswell, GA, fled upon hearing that Union troops were headed for the area. Even the owners of a Roswell Mill left leaving their mill and a large number of young women and their children who worked there. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's troops found the mill. A frenchman named Theopholie Roche may have had some ownership of the mill, but when the troops found products produced for the CSA, they burned it down. Sherman ordered the women and their children (many also from a nearby mill) sent to Marietta. They were placed on railcars in Marietta and sent to either Indiana or Kentucky and abandoned. Sherman said "The women will howl". His remark was disrespectful and cruel about the plight of these mostly young, naive women. His comments became the title of a book by Mary Deborah Petite that documented the plight of these women and children. Some of the women had to give away their children as they were not able to care for them. Some, especially elderly parents died enroute to the North. They settled in areas where there were many other refugees and jobs were scare, especially for these Southern women. Some of the women made the trip back to Roswell, but it took years. One woman returned to find that her husband had married another woman not knowing what happened to her.
- New Orleans was occupied by Union soldiers and Union General Benjamin (the Beast) Butler hanged William Bruce Mumford, private citizen. Mumford's crime was the removal of a "stars and stripes" flag from in front of a federal building. General Butler had this man hanged. http://www.vaiden.net/Execution_of_William_Mumford.html
- This same Union General sent into exile Eugenia Levy Phillips, a prominent Jewish Lady, for laughing during a funeral for a Union soldier.
- I read a story written by the son of a woman in Arkansas. Sherman’s troops threatened this woman by holding her leg over hot coal to reveal where her husband's wealth was hidden. She refused to reveal where it was hidden and must have suffered greatly from the burns. Her home was burned down and she watched many neighbors' homes being burned down as well. Later, this woman was taken to a nearby hospital only to have her leg amputated. She lived only two more years.
- Lincoln was responsible for the deaths of over 700,000 men, women and children. At the beginning of the war, Union General John C. Fremont freed slaves in Missouri. Lincoln did not approve, General Fremont’s actions were rescinded, slaves were returned to servitude, and Fremont was fired.
- Lincoln abolished the writ of habeas corpus, especially in Maryland. He was afraid that Maryland would vote to secede from the Union. So, he arrested and incarcerated without due process or trial Maryland judges, legislators, newspaper editors and anyone else who disagreed with him.
- His Generals Sheridan and Sherman were brutal and all-out-war leaders. Their troops burned down homes, churches, schools, businesses, destroyed crops, pillaged and stole whatever they could carry away with them. What they could not carry away, they destroyed. They threatened servants to tell them where valuables like silver were hidden. After destroying crops, they poured salt on the fields. These made the fields unusable for years to come. They stole the livestock. They killed animals and threw the animal carcasses into wells so as to contaminate the water supply. If the citizens drank the water, they would become ill or it caused their deaths. A friend told me his Great-Grandmother wore a large feed sack under her dress. She hoped that the federals would not bother her if she looked pregnant.
- The following is a request dated 3/22/1864 from Atlanta’s Mayor to Union General Sherman: “Many poor women are in an advanced state of pregnancy; others now have young children, and whose husbands for the greater part are either in the army or dead. Some say, I have a sick one at my house; who will wait on them when I am gone? Others say, what are we to do? We have no house to go to, and no means to buy, build or rent any; no parents, relatives or friends to go to. This being so (they say) how is it possible for the people still here (mostly women and children) to find any shelter? And, how can they live through the winter in the woods—no shelter, no subsistence, in the midst of strangers who know them not, and without the power to assist them much if they were willing to do so? This is but a feeble picture of the consequences of this measure. You know the war—the horrors and the sufferings cannot be described by words; imagination can only conceive it; and we ask you to take these things into consideration.” To this General Sherman replied “I have your letter of the 22nd in the nature of a petition to revoke my order removing all the inhabitants from Atlanta. I have read it and give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned, and yet I shall not revoke my orders.” And, he did not; the people were driven out and their homes burned down and Atlanta destroyed.
- Freed slaves piled into Natchez, Mississippi. Sherman’s troops forced them into a place known as “Devil’s Punch Bowl”. It was a Concentration Camp where the freed slaves had limited supplies, little food, no freedom and died from disease. The troops gave them shovels to bury the former slaves where they fell. To this day, fruit and vegetation grows in the former “Devil’s Punch Bowl”. The locals know the history of the area and will NOT eat anything grown there.
- If anyone is guilty of committing genocide it would be Lincoln and Union Generals Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, economics professor at Loyola College in Baltimore, tells us that Sherman once wrote to his wife that his purpose was the "extermination, not of soldiers alone...but of the people" of the South. Sherman often ordered his soldiers, many of whom were street criminals from Northern as well as European cities, to shoot civilians at random. There is a famous quote from Sherman’s wife. ‘May ALL Southerners be driven like swine into the sea.”
- "The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred over 155 years ago when Union General Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred mile swath of flames in the Shenandoah Valley that left vast numbers of women and children tottering towards starvation and homelessness." https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/07/the-civil-war-and-150-years-of-forgotten-us-military-atrocities/
- Historians seem to comment at length about the Southern prison in Andersonville, GA. But, very few speak about the horrors of Union prisons such as, Camp Douglas in Chicago, Elmira in New York, Point Lookout, Maryland and others. These prisoners had to live in over crowded, filthy conditions and tried to survive horrible weather conditions. Many died of diseases, starvation, inclement weather and more. They were also tortured and the Union soldiers “played cruel games” with Confederate prisoners. Above is an actual picture of some Confederate soldiers walking with their heads sticking threw holes in the tops of barrels. The endless hours walking in these barrels was excruciating.
- "While Sheridan was destroying crops, killing livestock and starving women and children, a Yankee colonel named J. M. Chivington was slaughtering, scalping and mutilating Arapahos and Cheyenne camped at a place called Sand Creek in Colorado. The Indians in the camp had decided to live in peace with the white man, because they had come to trust Major Edward W. Wynkoop who was the commander of Fort Lyon located forty miles from Sand Creek. Wynkoop was removed from his post at Fort Lyon, because of his kindness to the Indians and was replaced with a cruel man named Major Scott J. Anthony who lied to the Indians and who, under the command of Colonel Chivington, raided the encampment at Sand Creek where they slaughtered men, women and children. Some of the Indians huddled together under a large American flag which belonged to the chief Black Kettle, but the Yankee soldiers killed them anyway." One little girl, Dee Brown tells us in the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee met the soldiers waving a white flag, and they still shot her down in cold blood. “The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous”. (comment by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman).
- "The government of the U.S. has any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war - to take their lives, their homes, their land, their everything...war is simply unrestrained by the Constitution...to the persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better.”..General W. T. Sherman, Jan. 31, 1864.
- General Sherman also issued the following military order at Big Shanty, Georgia (presently Kennesaw) on June 23, 1864: “If torpedoes (mines) are found in the possession of an enemy to our rear, you may cause them to be put on the ground and tested by a wagon load of prisoners, or if need be a citizen implicated in their use. In like manner, if a torpedo is suspected on any part of the road, order the point to be tested by a carload of prisoners, or by citizens implicated, drawn by a long rope.”
- This war on citizens was not simply restrained to be applied against men and women but also children. Gen. Sherman in a June 21, 1864, letter to Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Station wrote, "There is a class of people men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order." Stanton replied, "Your letter of the 21st of June has just reached me and meets my approval." While the war on civilians started much earlier than 1864, the above is simply proof that the war on children was part of that scheme!
- Gen. Sherman writing to U.S. Major George H. Thomas on November 1, 1864: “I propose…to sally forth and make a hole in Georgia that will be hard to mend.” In his report of the march to the sea, Sherman declared that he had destroyed the railroads for more than 100 miles, and had consumed the corn and fodder in the region of country 30 miles on either side of a line from Atlanta to Savannah, as also the sweet potatoes, cattle, hogs, sheep and poultry, and carried away more than 10,000 horses and mules. “I estimate the damage done to the State of Georgia and its military resources at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simply waste and destruction.” After admitting that “this may seem a hard species of warfare,” he comforted himself with the reflection that “it brought the sad realities of war home to those who supported it.” Thus condoning all the outrages committed by an unrestrained army, he further reported that his men were “a little loose in foraging, and did some things they ought not to have done.”
- Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham said the war was…… "a wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war"; "a war not being waged for the preservation of the Union"; "a war for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism”. (Lincoln banished Vallandigham to the Confederacy).
- The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious hubbub designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states. (Words of Charles Dickens, 1862).
- The preceding is certainly not all and much more could be added. Surely, you must realize that the atrocities committed by Lincoln against Southerners were disgraceful, cruel, and actions to force the South back into the Union and NOT to free slaves. Lincoln’s interest in freeing slaves was only for tactical reasons…..he hoped they would rise up against their Masters like those slaves did decades earlier in Haiti, the slaves would join the Union effort and England and France would side with the Union after seeing the slaves freed. For an excellent expose of these war crimes and their terrible extent, read War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco (Pelican Publishing Co. 2007, ISBN 9871589804661). Read Slavery was not the Cause of the War by Gene Kizer, Jr (Lives in Charleston, SC) and The South was Right by James and Walter Kennedy (Live in Louisiana).
- I don't know what reparations should be given to the South for the above. A sincere "apology" would be a good beginning.
Share on Facebook
Comment
See More 0