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"I will bear in mind your hint as to Charleston, and do not think that salt will be necessary. When I move, the Fifteenth Corps will be on the right of the right wing, and their position will naturally bring them into Charleston first; and if you have watched the history of that corps, you will have remarked that they generally do their work pretty well," etc. (2 Sherman's Memoirs, pp. 223-227-8.)
Of this infamous conduct on the part of Sherman, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, of New York, our present representative at the Court of St. James, has recently written in "Ohio in the War," pp. 475-8-9, referring especially to the burning of Columbia, as follows:
"It was the most monstrous barbarity of this barbarous march. * * * "Before this movement began, General Sherman begged permission to turn his army loose in South Carolina and devastate it. He used this permission to the full. He protested that he did not wage war upon women and children. But, under the operation of his orders, the last morsel of food was taken from hundreds of destitute families, that his soldiers might feast in needless and riotous abundance. Before his eyes rose, day after day, the mournful clouds of smoke on every side, that told of old people and their grandchildren driven, in mid-winter, from the only roofs there were to shelter them, by the flames which the wantonness of his soldiers had kindled." * * * "Yet, if a single soldier was punished for a single outrage or theft during that entire movement, we have found no mention of it in all the voluminous records of the march."
Let us ask, Who alone had any semblance of authority to give this permission to Sherman and who gave it? There can be but one answer—Abraham Lincoln, the then President of the United States. Will the people of the South lick the hand that thus smote their fathers, their mothers, their brethren and their sisters by now singing peans of glory to his name and fame?
"Lord God of hosts, defend us yet
Lest we forget, lest we forget."
The New York Evening Post, one of the most sectional papers in the country, said editorially, a short time since, that—
"Mention of Sherman still opens flood gates of bitterness. He was a purloiner of silver; his soldiers spared neither women nor children; he burned towns that had not offended, and cities that had surrendered; and he spared not even the
