History of Lynchings in the South

[pandabear]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/us/hi ... .html?_r=0

[Jester]

This is just a typical attempt to re-open old divisions.

But its interesting that the professor in the article is at Uiversity of Georgia. There was an infamous murder in the early 1960's by some of his fellow Athenians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuel_Penn
And there is indeed a marker.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/site ... k=QTSEpwY4

Since noone goes to see sites like this anyway, except history nerds like me, there is no reason for more markers to be erected.
Time to stop waving the "bloody shirt" and move on.
Kids dont have dads, neighborhoods are infested with gangs, drugs are everywhere, and TV teaches butt-twerking.

The Klan ain't the problem.

[pandabear]

In the South, the White folks are still angry about General Sherman and Reconstruction.

[Mr.Darcy]

I live in the south and it does have some progressive cities. The winners: Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Raleigh, Birmingham(is currently rising). The losers are New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. Going to Memphis from Nashville is like stepping back in time 40 years I swear.

[Jester]

In the South, the White folks are still angry about General Sherman and Reconstruction.

No doubt. I knew a fellow whose aunt, as a young girl, was slapped in the face with a bayonet by a Yankee horse thief under Sherman's command. She bore the scar for life.

But no historical marker for the misdeed.

And there were the scores or hundreds of defenseless Black women gang-raped by Sherman's brave troops in South Carolina:

http://civilwarodyssey.blogspot.mx/2011 ... rrors.html

William Gilmore Simms, the antebellum South’s literary luminary, wrote in 1865, “There are some horrors which the historian dare not pursue. They drop the curtain over crime which humanity bleeds to contemplate.”
.....Convoluted wording, indeed, but Simms wrote during the genteel Victorian era. It’s clear Simms was writing about the rapes and sexual “outrages” he witnessed during Union Gen. William T. Sherman’ occupation of Columbia, South Carolina’s capital. Simms’ account was first published serially in his hastily assembled newspaper, the Columbia Phoenix, an amazing feat considering Sherman’s troops had burned three-fifths of the city, including its newspaper offices. (Controversy still rages about whether it was Sherman's men or others who burned much of the city.)

Simms explained that most of the “horrors” against women had taken place away from Columbia. He wrote that Union soldiers and Sherman’s hangers-on might have threatened white women, but they actually targeted black women in rural areas. In the city, Simms’ on-the-ground reporting, however, revealed what we can only call a gang rape:

The poor negroes were terribly victimized by their brutal assailants, many of them . . . being left in a condition little short of death. Regiments, successive relays (emphasis by Simms), subjected scores of these poor women to the torture of their embraces, and – but we dare not farther pursue the subject – it is one of such loathing and horror.

…Two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by the wretches and afterwards murdered – one of them being thrust, when half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was suffocated.

But no historical marker.

[pandabear]

But no historical marker.

NYC has one



As does Washington, DC (which is sort of a Southern town).

[Jester]

Haha well okay yeah, something to blow up/melt down when the SHTF.

What I meant of course was that there is no monument to the suffering of Sherman's victims.

(But you knew that.)

[pandabear]

The stories of Union atrocities have been largely exaggerated:

http://78ohio.org/wp-content/uploads/20 ... -March.pdf

.....In the postwar South, the legend of Yankee ruffians waging campaigns of fire and vandalism was surely useful in several respects. First, it helped Southern conservatives to convince their fellow white Southerners that a terrible wrong had been done them--a conviction that resonated well with the humiliations of military Reconstruction. Second, it played into the myth of a South beaten down by brute force, not defeated by military art and certainly not by internal divisions or a failure of national will.

Third, the myth of Yankee atrocities accounted for the economic disaster that gripped the South after 1865. As historians have since pointed out, the destruction of Southern crops, livestock, factories, and railroads, and other infrastructure was anything but complete; much of the damage was repaired within a few years. The really serious economic losses can be traced to two things: the emancipation of slaves, which wiped out billions of dollars in Southern wealth, and the worthlessness of Confederate scrip, bonds, and promissory notes into which many Southerners had sunk most of their savings. Both, of course, could be better traced to the South's decision to secede--and so begin the war--than to anything that Union soldiers did. Thus the emphasis on hard war, as an explanation for the economic devastation of the South, may have diverted attention from Southern responsibilities in bringing on the war, and thus for the outcome.

I suspect the mythology served less political purposes as well. Imagine that you are a woman living in the 1880s or 1890s, and that you are telling your grandchildren what it was like to live through the passage of Union armies through your village or farm. Obviously you survived the encounter, and probably so did the house you lived in. You may tell your grandchildren that the slaves ran off, that a Yankee soldier pilfered the silverware, that other soldiers tracked mud through the parlor, that they ransacked the smokehouse and burned the cotton gin. All these details will be accurate enough. But how can you satisfactorily convey the mortal peril you remember having felt, the fear that you might be assaulted, raped, or killed? It seems to me that you could hardly expect to convey this by pointing out that Yankee soldiers rarely did such things. Instead you would have every reason to repeat stories, however dubious, of assaults, rapes and murders that occurred elsewhere. This mythical retelling would serve an important purpose: It would keep alive a sense of the terror you felt, whereas a fully accurate retelling would make your fears seem misplaced. Further, the sense of violation that attended the invasion of your house by Union soldiers and the loss of precious family heirlooms would be undercut if you were to emphasize, for example, that in fact only a few soldiers got inside the house and that an arriving officer soon ordered them to leave.

Let me give you an example of this private myth-making at work. It comes from the unpublished reminiscences of a woman, Grace Pierson Beard, who lived about eight miles from Winnsboro, South Carolina. Her postwar account, now preserved in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, consumes fifteen typescript, single-spaced pages. In it she describes how, returning to her home in February 1865, she encountered soldiers in her house, seated on benches taken from her piazza. They were roasting potatoes taken from her potato bank in a fire they had built in her fireplace. "I shall never forget that sight!" she writes dramatically--but then goes on to say that these men turned out to be members of Wheeler's Confederate cavalry, and nothing in her narrative suggests that she was in the least disturbed by their trespassing into her home.

Instead, the purpose of the men in her narrative is to convey a message about the danger she is in. Sherman's men were coming, they told her, and when she informed them of her plan to leave before their arrival, they responded that leaving would only guarantee the destruction of her house. "Sherman's orders are to burn all vacant houses and all provisions." Thus Grace decided to remain.

Next day, a group of Union soldiers arrived, killed a dog, and ate everything at her table, but left without assailing anyone. The day after a major force passed through--they ransacked her house for provisions and allegedly told her slaves not only that they were free, but also entitled to their mistress's possessions. (No one acted on this, however.) Her barn and outbuildings were burned. Some soldiers said threatening things, but another soldier deterred them with, "The first man who attempts to enter that house will have his brains blown out." Subsequently a second, self-appointed guard appeared, followed by a soldier who looked so much like her husband that her toddler son ran up to him, leaped into his arms, and called him Pa. The soldier "seemed to be much affected" by this. So was she: "I felt as if my baby was everlastingly polluted."

That was the extent of Mrs. Beard's experience with the coming of Lucifer's legions: vigorous foraging, the destruction of outbuildings, the liberation of slaves, and repeated efforts to extort possessions from her--which were never pursued to the point of assault and were, in any case, countered by soldiers who actively protected her family and herself. All this information is in her reminiscences, but the tone is one of fear and outrage, and the tone governs what an uncritical reader takes away from her reminiscences. In effect, Mrs. Beard--like thousands of other white Southerners--has constructed a mythical reading of her experience that emphasizes the harshness and injustice of that experience.

The influence of this myth can hardly be exaggerated. Even educated Southerners, far removed in time from the conflict, accepted it uncritically, indeed passionately. Eventually the murderous severity of the Union armies' attacks on civilian property became an article of faith. By the 1940s, one Southern historian could write, in a scholarly monograph, that "the invader did not limit himself to the property of people," but evidenced "considerable interest also in their persons, particularly the females, some of whom did not escape the fate worse than death"--without feeling the slightest need to document his lurid (and largely inaccurate) claim.

The myth of indiscriminate Union attacks on Southern civilians has served other agendas as well. For persons revolted by the slaughter on the Western Front, Sherman's marches and similar episodes aptly illustrated the brutalizing effects of war. Its utility in this respect has proven durable. Paradoxically, the image of a sweeping campaign of fire and sword also fits snugly into the "realist" image of war. The Union hard war measures resonate well with those who believe that in war one must do whatever is necessary to win. There is thus an admiring quality to some of the literature on William T. Sherman, the best known of the hard war advocates, whom Lloyd Lewis called a "fighting prophet." T. Harry Williams admired Grant's willingness to wage economic warfare, and called him the first of the great modern generals. Bruce Catton invariably discussed the Union war against Southern property as a case of "doing what has to be done to win."

Few of these characterizations did great violence to the facts. They simply emphasized certain facts at the expense of others. The Federal effort against Southern property was indeed widespread and quite destructive. But an effort was also made to direct destructive energies toward certain targets and away from others. Neither Southerners, "realists," nor those antipathetic toward war had any reason to emphasize the substantial restraint shown by Union forces in their operations against civilian property. For Southerners, to do so would have undercut their sense of righteousness and comparative lack of responsibility for the debacle that engulfed them. For realists, it would have qualified their belief that one must do whatever must be done to gain victory in war. For those repulsed by war, it would have seemed to mitigate the brutalizing effects that war assuredly has on both societies and individuals.

But perhaps the most pervasive reason for the emphasis on the destructiveness of Union military policy has been the way in which it seemed to anticipate the sweeping struggles of the twentieth century. Especially after the Second World War, the Civil War appeared a clear prototype of modern, total war. It had witnessed the early development and use of trench warfare, ironclad warships, rapid-fire weapons, and even airships and crude machine guns. Its soldiers had traveled to the battle front aboard railroad cars and steam-driven transports; its generals had communicated with one another via endless miles of telegraph wire. It was one of the first struggles in which manufacturing and mass politics significantly affected the fighting and the outcome. The conflict's most striking modern aspect, however, was the Union attacks on Southern civilians and property. What happened to them no longer seemed merely atrocious; it foreshadowed the strategic bombardment of civilians during the two world wars. Thus it seems to me that historians bear considerable responsibility for perpetuating the mythology of Sherman's march.....

[pandabear]

And there were the scores or hundreds of defenseless Black women gang-raped by Sherman's brave troops in South Carolina:

According to some historians

http://www.americancivilwarforum.com/ho ... 13914.html

rapes by union soldiers were rare, and punished by death.

There were also some cases of union soldiers being convicted for raping former slaves:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... civil-war/

You make it sound like the Union Army was like the Red Army defeating the Nazis and raping every German woman they could find. It really wasn't like that, as far as I can ascertain.

In ante-Bellum Georgia, there were never any laws against raping a slave, were there?

http://spartacus-educational.com/USASbreeding.htm

According to the 1860 Census, fully 44 percent of Georgia's population lived in slavery

http://www.civil-war.net/census.asp?census=Georgia

That was 462,198 people. I suspect that a lot of these folks were quite excited at the prospects of being liberated.

Do White and Black Georgians resent Sherman equally? With Field Order 15, General Sherman had plans to give former slaves 40 acres and a mule each:

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/arti ... rder-no-15

But, President Johnson put an end to that promise.

[Jester]

The stories of Union atrocities have been largely exaggerated:

http://78ohio.org/wp-content/uploads/20 ... -March.pdf

.....In the postwar South, the legend of Yankee ruffians waging campaigns of fire and vandalism was surely useful in several respects.

It wasn't a legend. For example, Atlanta was burned to the ground AFTER Confederate forces withdrew. Grimsley, whoever he is, is a liar.

Second, it played into the myth of a South beaten down by brute force, not defeated by military art and certainly not by internal divisions or a failure of national will.

That's exactly what happened.

The South was beaten down by brute force, and Sherman was a main architect.

The Yankees resorted to economic warfare on the civilian population.

No myth.

Again, Grimsley is a liar.

Both, of course, could be better traced to the South's decision to secede--and so begin the war--than to anything that Union soldiers did. Thus the emphasis on hard war, as an explanation for the economic devastation of the South, may have diverted attention from Southern responsibilities in bringing on the war, and thus for the outcome.

At the time of ratification of the Constitution, the Federalist papers had specifically stated that secession remained the right of the sovereign states. Just as Greece could choose to secede from the European Union and NATO today.

Secession being lawful, it was clearly not an act of war.

I suspect the mythology served less political purposes as well. Imagine that you are a woman living in the 1880s or 1890s, and that you are telling your grandchildren what it was like to live through the passage of Union armies through your village or farm. Obviously you survived the encounter, and probably so did the house you lived in. You may tell your grandchildren that the slaves ran off, that a Yankee soldier pilfered the silverware, that other soldiers tracked mud through the parlor, that they ransacked the smokehouse and burned the cotton gin. All these details will be accurate enough. But how can you satisfactorily convey the mortal peril you remember having felt, the fear that you might be assaulted, raped, or killed? It seems to me that you could hardly expect to convey this by pointing out that Yankee soldiers rarely did such things. Instead you would have every reason to repeat stories, however dubious, of assaults, rapes and murders that occurred elsewhere. This mythical retelling would serve an important purpose: It would keep alive a sense of the terror you felt, whereas a fully accurate retelling would make your fears seem misplaced. Further, the sense of violation that attended the invasion of your house by Union soldiers and the loss of precious family heirlooms would be undercut if you were to emphasize, for example, that in fact only a few soldiers got inside the house and that an arriving officer soon ordered them to leave.

Let me give you an example of this private myth-making at work. It comes from the unpublished reminiscences of a woman, Grace Pierson Beard, who lived about eight miles from Winnsboro, South Carolina. Her postwar account, now preserved in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, consumes fifteen typescript, single-spaced pages. In it she describes how, returning to her home in February 1865, she encountered soldiers in her house, seated on benches taken from her piazza. They were roasting potatoes taken from her potato bank in a fire they had built in her fireplace. "I shall never forget that sight!" she writes dramatically--but then goes on to say that these men turned out to be members of Wheeler's Confederate cavalry, and nothing in her narrative suggests that she was in the least disturbed by their trespassing into her home.

Instead, the purpose of the men in her narrative is to convey a message about the danger she is in. Sherman's men were coming, they told her, and when she informed them of her plan to leave before their arrival, they responded that leaving would only guarantee the destruction of her house. "Sherman's orders are to burn all vacant houses and all provisions." Thus Grace decided to remain.

Next day, a group of Union soldiers arrived, killed a dog, and ate everything at her table, but left without assailing anyone. The day after a major force passed through--they ransacked her house for provisions and allegedly told her slaves not only that they were free, but also entitled to their mistress's possessions. (No one acted on this, however.) Her barn and outbuildings were burned. Some soldiers said threatening things, but another soldier deterred them with, "The first man who attempts to enter that house will have his brains blown out." Subsequently a second, self-appointed guard appeared, followed by a soldier who looked so much like her husband that her toddler son ran up to him, leaped into his arms, and called him Pa. The soldier "seemed to be much affected" by this. So was she: "I felt as if my baby was everlastingly polluted."

That was the extent of Mrs. Beard's experience with the coming of Lucifer's legions: vigorous foraging, the destruction of outbuildings, the liberation of slaves, and repeated efforts to extort possessions from her--which were never pursued to the point of assault and were, in any case, countered by soldiers who actively protected her family and herself. All this information is in her reminiscences, but the tone is one of fear and outrage, and the tone governs what an uncritical reader takes away from her reminiscences. In effect, Mrs. Beard--like thousands of other white Southerners--has constructed a mythical reading of her experience that emphasizes the harshness and injustice of that experience.

Interesting how he gets inside the head of a victim, and does a pseudo-psychological analysis. I've seen writing like this before, justifying or minimizing well-known atrocities.

From Stalinists.

By the 1940s, one Southern historian could write, in a scholarly monograph, that "the invader did not limit himself to the property of people," but evidenced "considerable interest also in their persons, particularly the females, some of whom did not escape the fate worse than death"--without feeling the slightest need to document his lurid (and largely inaccurate) claim.

Here is the proclamation by General "Beast" Butler in occupied New Orleans, who was miffed that local ladies turned away rather than exchange pleasantries by Yankee troops trying to chat them up:

HDQRS. DEPARTMENT OF THE GULF

New Orleans, May 15, 1862.

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

By command of Major-General Butler:

GEO. C. STRONG,
Assistant Adjutant-General and Chief of Staff.

As understood at the time, this was an invitation for occupying troops to sexually abuse or rape women.

The claim is now documented.

The Union hard war measures resonate well with those who believe that in war one must do whatever is necessary to win. There is thus an admiring quality to some of the literature on William T. Sherman, the best known of the hard war advocates, whom Lloyd Lewis called a "fighting prophet." T. Harry Williams admired Grant's willingness to wage economic warfare, and called him the first of the great modern generals. Bruce Catton invariably discussed the Union war against Southern property as a case of "doing what has to be done to win."

So militarists cite Yankee violations of the rules of civilized warfare as precedent for the outrages of the twentieth century. Do what you have to to win. There are no rules.

[Jester]

http://www.americancivilwarforum.com/ho ... 13914.html

rapes by union soldiers were rare, and punished by death.

Rape was always "punishable by death". That's meaningless.

The link you posted here suggests a dozen White women raped by Sherman's troops between Atlanta and Savannah. Why is that minor?

Still, you are obfuscating the point, which is that Sherman's troops gang-raped large numbers of Black women in South Carolina.

Clearly the troops were degenerating into looters and bullies by that time.

And if I can indulge in a bit of psychological analysis myself, were probably angry that Blacks didn't hail them as liberators. Or "put out" on demand, as would befit their lower racial status.

There were also some cases of union soldiers being convicted for raping former slaves:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... -civil-war

Let's take a look at that article:

Disunion
Rape and Justice in the Civil War
By Crystal N. Feimster
...even after the code was in place, sexual violence was common to the wartime experience of Southern women, white and black. Whether they lived on large plantations or small farms, in towns, cities or in contraband camps, white and black women all over the American South experienced the sexual trauma of war.

Union military courts prosecuted at least 450 cases involving sexual crimes. In North Carolina during the spring of 1865, Pvt. James Preble “did by physical force and violence commit rape upon the person of one Miss Letitia Craft.” When Perry Holland of the 1st Missouri Infantry confessed to the rape of Julia Anderson, a white woman in Tennessee, he was sentenced to be shot, but his sentence was later commuted. Catherine Farmer, also of Tennessee, testified that Lt. Harvey John of the 49th Ohio Infantry dragged her into the bushes and told her he would kill her if she did not “give it to him.” He tore her dress, broke her hoops and “put his private parts into her,” for which he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In Georgia, Albert Lane, part of Company B, in the 100th Regiment of Ohio Volunteers, was also sentenced to 10 years because he “did on or about the 11th day of July, 1864 … upon one Miss Louisa Dickerson … then and there forcibly and against her will, feloniously did ravish and carnally know her.”

Black women were in even more danger. ........In the spring of 1863, John N. Williams of the 7th Tennessee Regiment wrote in his diary, “Heard from home. The Yankees has been through there. Seem to be their object to commit rape on every Negro woman they can find.” Many times, troops and ruffians raped black women while forcing white women to watch, a horrifying experience for all, and a proxy rape of white women. B. E. Harrison of Leesburg, Va., wrote a letter to President Abraham Lincoln complaining that federal troops had raped his “servant girl” in the presence of his wife. Gen. William Dwight reported, “Negro women were ravished in the presence of white women and children.”


....In the summer of 1864, Jenny Green, a young “colored” girl who had escaped slavery and sought refuge with the Union Army in Richmond, Va., was brutally raped by Lt. Andrew J. Smith, 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry. Thanks to the Lieber Code, though, she was able to bring charges against him, and even testify in a military court. “He threw me on the floor, pulled up my dress,” she told the all-male tribunal. “He held my hands with one hand, held part of himself with the other hand and went into me. It hurt. He did what married people do. I am but a child.”

..........Abraham Lincoln also reviewed the case and wrote, “I concluded” to let Smith “suffer for a while and then discharge him.”

Southern women’s wartime diaries, court martial records, wartime general orders, military reports and letters written by women, soldiers, doctors, nurses and military chaplains leave little doubt......

So there you have it.

Little doubt.

And we have sentences commuted, prison terms, discharges.

Hardly a firm stand against rape.

The article gives evidence of numerous, brazen rapes of Black women, in public, by Yankee troops. That they committed these crimes in front of White women suggests they knew that they could do whatever they wanted to Blacks, so long as the Whites were untouched.

In the one case mentioned where the girl (Jenny Green) got justice in court, it was because she was already in Yankee custody. Is there a similar case where those assaulted during occupation were able to have their day in court? And even still, Abraham Lincoln decided her assailant should suffer a while, then be discharged. Rape, at least of a Black woman, was apparently no big thing to good ol' Honest Abe.

And let's note, that even armies notoriously guilty of mass rape do occasionally hang a perp or two, when someone upstairs decides it's time to restore order.

Even the Russians executed a few soldiers for rape.

You make it sound like the Union Army was like the Red Army defeating the Nazis and raping every German woman they could find. It really wasn't like that, as far as I can ascertain.

Well, we agree that White Southerners didn't often suffer the same fate.

But specifically the Black women in South Carolina that underwent tacitly sanctioned mass gang rapes, similar to what German women underwent in Berlin and elsewhere at the hands of the Soviets.

So yes, Sherman's troops were like the Soviets.

In ante-Bellum Georgia, there were never any laws against raping a slave, were there?

Straw man.

This has nothing to do with what we are discussing.

That was 462,198 people. I suspect that a lot of these folks were quite excited at the prospects of being liberated.

Plenty did, and crossed lines to enlist in Union forces. But most Blacks in the South were generally as terrified of the foreign invader as everyone else was. As Sherman's troops demonstrated, their fears were justified.

Plenty of Blacks would have welcomed a peaceful emancipation, but not (deliberate) wartime starvation, followed by homelessness, and unemployment.

Or worse.

[Jester]

With Field Order 15, General Sherman had plans to give former slaves 40 acres and a mule each:

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/arti ... rder-no-15

Stalin managed to get a great subway system built in Moscow.
Nero built a beautiful palace.
Pablo Escobar made a park for kids to play.

But in discussing the various atrocities they each committed, those other accomplishments of theirs - would be irrelevant.

[pandabear]

In ante-Bellum Georgia, there were never any laws against raping a slave, were there?

Straw man.
This has nothing to do with what we are discussing.

Yes it does. If there were no laws against raping slaves, then nobody was doing anything illegal by raping slaves, at least according to the laws of the states.

[Cornfed]

It should be pointed out that the lynching of blacks was a good thing in that it saved countless human lives by keeping blacks in their box.

[pandabear]

The Total War concept, developed during the Civil War, was subsequently used ruthlessly in the American Indian wars in the West, and in the Philippine-American War, where civilians were targeted and about 200,000 people killed. Whole villages were slaughtered. But, the American Indians and Filipinos have largely gotten over it. Our White Southerners are still bothered by Sherman.

A lot of people in Vietnam also got killed and maimed indiscriminately by American napalm and bombs. There was also quite a lot of property damage. All for nought. But, I think that they have largely forgiven us.

Anyway, have you heard of the incident at Ebenezer Creek?

http://www.historynet.com/betrayal-at-e ... -creek.htm

Apparently, freed slaves marched along with the union army. However, one union general decided to leave behind several thousand freed slaves, who were quickly murdered by advancing confederate soldiers.