Thursday, December 25, 2014

December 26, 1864---"Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift . . ."



DECEMBER 26, 1864:      

Abraham Lincoln telegraphs Sherman in Savannah:

Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift . . . Please make my grateful acknowledgements to your whole army, officers and men.

The legend of Sherman’s cruelty toward Georgia is so ingrained that it is hard to find people who disbelieve it. Yet Sherman spared Savannah in whole (some say because he had a paramour in the city). But he also had spared residential Atlanta, residential Milledgeville, and the residential districts of scores of other towns. Homes, even plantation houses, were generally let be. Inevitably, there was damage and injury done to homes and to the people in them. Sherman was followed by a host of profiteers, sutlers, emancipated slaves, and others who took what they could when they could. His often unsupervised “bummers” also caused harm despite his strict orders, but not to the degree that the collective memory recalls --- at least not in Georgia.

Railways, roads, and bridges were routinely destroyed, as were cotton gins, mills, warehouses, barns, and anything else that might be of use to the Confederate war effort. Sherman would issue no such order for restraint against homes when crossing into South Carolina, the next target of his March.   


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