IT'S NOT TERRORISM WHEN WE DO IT:

In his fiery temper and autocratic command style, he became the ideological counterpoint to his dour friend Grant, and the two men came to dominate the Union war effort. In September 1864, Sherman captured the stronghold of Atlanta, and in September he embarked on his notorious "March to the Sea," leading two large armies through the heart of the supine Confederacy. He severed communications with Washington and ordered his men to "forage liberally" off the land. In his Memoirs, Sherman almost seems to believe his own euphemism, and whole phalanxes of historians since have taken him at his word, as flatly absurd as that word is. In reality, as Bruce Catton put it, "The army went down to the sea like a prairie fire forty miles wide, living on the supplies it took from plantation barns and smokehouses and pantries, looting where it did not burn, making war with the lid off as if the whole business had come down to a wild Halloween brawl."

That "war with the lid off" was brutal, yes; Sherman intended it to be so, in order to send a message to the Southern population that their government couldn't protect them and so didn't deserve their support. But the brutality was also its own end, ordered and countenanced by Sherman to an extent that would land him in a courtroom at the Hague today. McDonough is content to soft-pedal the whole business, writing that however we categorize things, "Sherman's intentions were clear: destroy anything of military value to the Confederacy, while subjecting Southern civilians to the inevitable depredations inflicted by a large army tramping through their country and living off the land."

But those depredations weren't inevitable until Sherman made them that way, and the definition of "military value" was from the onset stretched so far as to lose any meaning. Whole towns were put to the torch, despite pleas not to dispossess their women, children, elderly, and infirm. Whole populations were uprooted and put on forced marches. Assaults, rapes, and murders, absent from the general's recollections, were liberally reported by Southerners; reading accounts less accommodating than McDonough's leads to the inescapable conclusion that war was "all hell" largely because William Tecumseh Sherman made it that way. In Sherman's March was born No Gun Ri, My Lai, and a dozen other massacres perpetrated on a helpless and innocent civilian population by U.S. forces allowed to conduct "war with the lid off."

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