Total War Against Civilians Is Never Justified
When a just war of defense turns into a war of revenge, it ceases to be a just war and becomes an unjust war of aggression. That explains why Robert E. Lee—who followed the conventions of civilized warfare agreed upon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—saw his role as defense of the South, and not as aggression against the North. In 1863, he said:
It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.
In “The War Against the South and Its Consequences” Murray Rothbard points out that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, by contrast with Lee, abandoned all such conventions and launched a total war against civilians. Rothbard explains:
Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized “rules of war” that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism).
Veale attributes the blame for Sherman’s war strategy, particularly the attacks on civilians, to Lincoln:
Sherman only executed the most dramatic and devastating example of the strategy which was laid down by President Lincoln himself and followed faithfully by General Ulysses S. Grant as commander-in-chief of the Northern armies.
It was the deliberate policy of the Union army to view Southern civilians as no different from combatants. As reported in “War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies” published in 1880–1901, Sherman stated, “We will remove and destroy every obstacle—if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” Sherman’s apologists do not deny his total war tactics; on the contrary, they argue that these tactics were justified for various reasons including the claim that his war crimes were necessary in order to win the war.
In his book War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, Walter Brian Cisco examines the evidence in the Official Records concerning the Union war strategy. Cisco recounts civilian homes in Athens, Alabama being invaded, looted, and burned to “retaliate” against Confederates who were attacking Federal troops, and to discourage the civilian population from supporting the “rebels.” Feder
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