SUNLIT UPLANDS: US Civil War

By Alan Stang

Our source for the present discussion is War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, by Walter Brian Cisco (Pelican, Gretna, Louisiana, 2007). It is important to establish that the spiritual and political inheritors of the war criminals who committed those crimes do not deny them. They ignore them, hoping that if they say nothing those crimes will fade away; and so far they have been successful. Remember, the winner of a war writes the history of the war. They will respond only if their crimes become sufficiently known.

It is important to correct the record. The crimes and the criminals need to be named. More, they must be explained, because the motives that inspired them continue to motivate the men who run our country, regardless of political party. As we shall see, little has changed. Only if we drag this continuing horror into the light do we have a chance of exorcising it.

Let’s begin with a revealing contrast. In 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee invaded the North. The South by then had suffered two years of Yankee crimes and some Southerners thought the invasion was their chance to retaliate. Not so, said Lee. In a proclamation he reminded his men that “the duties exacted of us by civilization and Christianity are not less obligatory in the country of the enemy than in our own.”

“The commanding general considers that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of the barbarous outrages upon the unarmed and defenseless and the wanton destruction of private property, that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country. . . .”

Remember that at the beginning of the war Lincoln offered Lee command of the Union army. Imagine the humane result had he been able to accept. We make war “only upon armed men,” said Lee. Taking vengeance for the “atrocities of our enemies” would lower ourselves and offend “against Him to whom vengeance belongeth.” What atrocities is he talking about? Our source is divided into the states of the Confederacy. Let’s begin with Missouri.

Union Brigadier General James H. Lane: “We believe in a war of extermination. I want to see every foot of ground . . . burned over – everything laid waste. . . .” Whoa! A war of extermination? Why? Wasn’t the restoration of the Union the goal of all this? Wouldn’t that have been accomplished simply by occupying the offending states? As we shall see, some other motive was at work.

But so it was. Civilians, male and female – yes, female – died by the hundreds in diseased Yankee jails. The Yankees stole everything they could lift. Lane himself stole a carriage, a piano and women’s dresses. My favorite was his chaplain, Rev. Hugh D. Fisher, who stole the altar furnishings from an Osceola church. He needed them for his own church in Kansas. “Brethren, let us worship.”

A long caravan of stolen property wound its way to Kansas. Arson, theft and murder became commonplace. No citizen was allowed to own guns or ammunition. At war’s end, vast sections of Missouri were uninhabited. Lane’s policy of extermination had been imposed.

General William T. Sherman wrote that “rebel” farms should be given to immigrants from the North. “Enemies must be killed or transported to some other country.” Deported Missourians left the state in miles-long wagon trains laden with household effects. Foraging Yankees robbed and killed them on the way. One report speaks of a road “crowded with women and children, women walking with their babies in their arms, packs on their backs and four or five children following after them . . . .”

There is a word for all this. At the time, the word had not yet been coined. It is “genocide.” Indeed, that is what the UN calls forcibly removing one population and replacing it with another. Genocide was settled Yankee policy imposed from the top.

In Tennessee, pastors were told to declare allegiance to the Union. They refused and were jailed. Episcopal rector George Harris was arrested and told to pray for Lincoln or be hanged. Happily, he was able to escape. The Yankees used his church to store munitions. The Communists would later do something similar to churches in Russia. The Yankees closed every church in Murfreesboro and all the schools in Nashville. In that city, there was an election for circuit court judge and the secessionist won. He was arrested, charged with treason and sent to the penitentiary.

How did the Yankees treat blacks? In Athens, Alabama, they raped a slave girl at the home of Charlotte Hine. At the John Malone plantation, they went to the slave quarters and raped again. A black woman charged a soldier with the crime; his commanding officer refused to prosecute: “I would not arrest one of my men on Negro testimony.” Doesn’t your Communist school textbook say the Yankees had come to free the slaves, not to rape them?

In New Orleans, Cpl. William M. Chinock raped Mary Ellen De Riley, a black woman. He was fined $40 and reduced to private. Captain S. Tyler Reed fired his pistol at William Bird, a black boy, and put out an eye. His sentence? A reprimand. Major General Benjamin Butler, known as the “Beast,” made crooked millions in New Orleans, committed outrageous atrocities and was the only Union commander the Confederacy called a criminal. After the war the people of Massachusetts elected him Governor, proving that, with some noble exceptions, they were already as stupid as they are now.

In occupied Virginia, Union Brig. Gen. Robert H. Milroy wrote his wife that “my will is absolute law – none dare contradict or dispute my slightest word or wish . . . both male and female tremble when they come into my presence . . . I feel a strong disposition to play the tyrant among these traitors.” Wow! They actually trembled, Bob? So then, you must have been something like a god, correct?

In South Carolina, “. . . The free blacks who made up Charleston’s force of firefighters struggled heroically to protect their city and its people.” Free blacks? In South Carolina? Trusted to run the fire department? Hmm!

In Louisiana, Union brigadier general William Dwight wrote: “The scenes of disorder and pillage . . . were disgraceful to civilized war. Houses were entered and all in them destroyed …. Ladies were frightened into delivering their jewels and valuables into the hands of the soldiers by threats of violence toward their husbands. Negro women were ravished in the presence of white women and children.” The Union, forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah.”

“The home, barn, and store of Samuel Schmulen were looted and burned. . . . Benjamin George, a fifty-year-old slave who lived nearby . . . tried to help his neighbor at least try to save the store. The effort was in vain. Then a group of drunken soldiers surrounded George, demanding to know why he, a black man, would try to assist this white Southerner. They demanded his money, and when George pleaded that he did not have any, one of the soldiers shot him in the right thigh. He survived the wound but was crippled for life.”

The forced evacuation of Atlanta saw “aged grandmothers upon the verge of the grave, tender girls in the first bloom of young womanhood, and little babes not three days old in the arms of sick mothers, thrown out upon the cold charity of the world.” A Yankee reported, “The African Methodist Episcopal Church, built by the colored people with their hard earnings, was also demolished by our soldiers.”

Union war criminals even introduced a criminal scheme later perfected by Chicago gangsters. One of them told a lady he had orders to burn her house, but, “I’ll insure it for fifty dollars.” Selling “insurance” against their own depredations was one extortion technique they used. “You buy my insurance or I breaka you head. Capish?”

In Columbia, South Carolina, Union terrorists stole everything. “Purses, watches, hats, boots, overcoats . . . were taken from victims, white or black.” A witness says: “Commissioned officers, of a rank so high as that of a colonel, were frequently among the most active.” They took the rings from the fingers of a dying woman. They urinated on the beds. They opened graves in search of lucre and left the corpses on the ground.

But here is la pièce de résistance. “Countless women had earrings ripped from bleeding ears.” A foreign diplomat wrote: “I have myself seen a lady with the lobes of both ears torn asunder.” Witnesses saw soldiers torching the Catholic convent. “What do you think of God now?” they shouted to the nuns. “Is not Sherman greater?. . .”

In St. Landry Parish alone, in western Louisiana, there were 1,596 free blacks just before the war. Some owned sugar plantations and slaves. What? Yes, blacks owned slaves. Invading Yankees were shocked. One Connecticut officer was indignant because they dared “call themselves Americans.” The Yankees stole from these free blacks as well as from the whites.

In Nashville, in September, 1862, blue bellies couldn’t find seats in a crowded theater. They ejected blacks from the “Negro gallery,” beat them and threw them down the stairs. After enjoying the performance, they attacked every black they found in the streets. In Gallatin, in May, 1864, they torched two new schools for black children, murdered one freedman and swore they would kill every black in town.

In southeast Georgia there were many free blacks who had accumulated substantial property. Indeed, so had hard working slaves. Union goons stole it all, even threatening black wives. In some cases, black husbands had to rescue them. They stole everything from a black nurse and killed her animals. “Honey, I never knowed a Yankee that wasn’t mean as dirt. . . . What can you spec from a hog but a grunt.”

And finally, in Columbia: “One black woman . . . was raped by seven soldiers of the United States Army. She then had her face forced down into a shallow ditch and was held there until she drowned.” William Gilmore Simms reported how “regiments, in successive relays,” committed “gang rape on scores of slave women.” On the Sumter District plantation, the corpses of eighteen black women were found. Each had been stabbed in the chest with a bayonet. Yankee war criminals had done with them.

Remember, these are just a few examples. You really need to read the book. So what are we looking at? Obviously it is considerably different from the mostly mythical war to “free the slaves” your high school textbook told you about. Notice that it is motivated by an insane, messianic fury. The war criminals are enraged, utterly out of control. About what? Obviously not about slavery. Men outraged by slavery do not rob, rape and murder slaves. And remember that chief war criminal Lincoln was as foul a racist as ever lived, even discomfited other racists, staunchly defended slavery and wanted to ship American blacks “back” to Africa.

No, what drove these Yankee war criminals insane was that the Southerners had dared to come out from under, to say no to the Leviathan state, to total government, to go their own way. They had expressed their freedom through secession. They had invoked their inalienable right to depart.

A debate endures about whether they had the constitutional right to secede. I don’t know why. I can solve the problem for all time. The Founding Fathers seceded from England. In the Declaration of Independence – the nation’s birth certificate – they said that whenever a people find their government oppressive, they have the right to alter or abolish it. To argue that there is no right to secede is to say that only a few years later, these same men, would concoct a document – the Constitution – in which they would deny themselves that blood-bought right.

Indeed, there were a few incipient attempts to secede before Lincoln. No one tried to argue that secession was illegal. One area that seriously considered secession was New England. What? Yes. And all through the Twentieth Century, did not the United States vociferously advance the right to secede for other people? We even fought a couple of wars, and lost thousands of the best of the best, to ensure the independence of South Korea and South Vietnam. Could there possibly be a straight-faced argument that other people deserve independence but we do not?

The Founding Fathers did not create slavery; they inherited 150 years of it. Many Southern slaves were sold to the South by Yankee slavers who no longer had need of them. Slavery was an intolerable stain on the American record. That stain could only be expunged by total abolition. Other countries, including Russia, abolished it without violence. Only ours did so at the cost of some 600,000 men and the destruction of the Union, by men who claimed to revere it and who had owned slaves themselves – and who did all this to keep the South in economic subjection.

But even this is not the core. Remember the strutting Yankee generals who confused themselves with God. Indeed, remember the terrorist assertion that insane mass murderer Sherman actually outranks God. Consider the messianic fury we have mentioned. Something more than mere greed was at work.

It is literally a satanic perversion of Christianity, a perversion pretending to be Christianity, which erupts time and again across the centuries. From time to time people who are smarter than God appear, usurpers who have the temporal power to do the job right. If you disagree with them they burn you at the stake. If you try to get out from under them, they scream you are a rebel. You have betrayed them. They will rob and rape you, they will kill you; they will invade and burn your country to the ground, to persuade you to see it their way. Either do that or die. They are disciples of Satan.

The reason this is so relevant is that this very mentality rules the nation today. That is why the federal juggernaut is so merciless, so confiscatory, so totalitarian. Reconstruction continues, not just of the South; this time of the whole nation, conducted by men consumed by hubris, who believe they can improve upon God.

But Sherman is still dead. God is alive.

Alan Stang was one of Mike Wallace’s original writers at Channel 13 in New York, where he wrote some of the scripts that sent Mike to CBS. Stang has been a radio talk show host himself. In Los Angeles, he went head to head nightly with Larry King, and, according to Arbitron, had almost twice as many listeners. He has been a foreign correspondent. He has written hundreds of feature magazine articles in national magazines and some fifteen books, for which he has won many awards, including a citation from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for journalistic excellence. One of Stang’s exposés stopped a criminal attempt to seize control of New Mexico, where a gang seized a court house, held a judge hostage and killed a deputy. The scheme was close to success before Stang intervened. Another Stang exposé inspired major reforms in federal labor legislation.

(Reprinted with permission of the author.)