Contents
-SUBJECT INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
James Ford Rhodes (1848–1927). History of the Civil War, 1861–1865. 1917.
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| reported. 1 In some cases punishment was inflicted. Howard directed that a soldier who had violently taken a watch from a citizen should have his head shaved and be drummed out of the service. Cox, who commanded the Twenty-third Corps in Schofield’s army, 2 executed the death sentence pronounced by court-martial for a rape; the culprit, according to his recollection, was a bounty-jumper. A military commission, having found a private soldier guilty of the murder of a North Carolina citizen, sentenced him to be “shot to death with musketry”; two days later the sentence was executed. 3 Sherman asserted generally that whenever individuals were detected in theft they were punished; but, in going over the evidence, one cannot fail to note many offences and few penalties. Yet despite the general lawlessness, of which we obtain glimpses from time to time, outrages on the persons of women were rare. Sherman testified under oath that in the whole of the march he heard of but two cases of rape. | 6 |
| The tendency of Federal officers, apart from the contemporary documents, has been to minimize the depredations, and the tendency of many Northern writers has been to gloss them over, so that even if every instance brought to light by Northern testimony be mentioned, the Union armies will suffer no injustice by the seeming redundancy of facts. So much of the Southern evidence is not specific and all of it is so pervaded with intense feeling that I have preferred to develop this subject from Northern sources, leaving the natural inference to be drawn that, if all had been told, the evidence against Sherman’s army would have been somewhat greater. 4 The men who followed Sherman were |
