[110]
from women and the plunder of articles that never reached the commissary, &c. * * *
(See 2 Mem., p. 182.)
He not only does not say that he tried to prevent his army from committing these outrages, but says, on page 255, in referring to his march through
South Carolina:
I would not restrain the army, lest its vigor and energy should be impaired.
He tells on page 185 how, when he reached
General Howell Cobb's plantation, he ‘sent word back to
General Davis to explain whose plantation it was, and instructed
him to spare nothing.’
To show what a heartless wretch he was, he tells, on page 194, about one of his officers having been wounded by the explosion of a torpedo that had been hidden in the line of march, and on which this officer had stepped.
He says:
‘
I immediately ordered a lot of rebel prisoners to be brought from the provost guard, armed with picks and spades, and made them march in close order along the road, so as to explode their own torpedoes, or to discover and dig them up. They begged hard, but I reiterated the order,
and could hardly help laughing at their stepping so gingerly along the road, where it was supposed sunken torpedoes might explode at each step.’
It may be fairly inferred from
General Sherman's middle name (
Tecumseh), that some of his ancestors were
Indians.
But whether this be true or not, no one can read this statement of his without being convinced
that he was a savage. But he was not only a confessed savage, as we have seen, but a confessed
vandal as well.
He says, on page 256, in telling of a night he spent in one of the splendid old houses of
South Carolina, where, he says, ‘the proprietors formerly had dispensed a hospitality that distinguished the old
regime of that proud State.
I slept (he says) on the floor of the house, but the night was so bitter cold, that I got up by the fire several times,
and when it burned low I rekindled it with an old mantel clock and the wreck of a bedstead which stood in the corner of the room—the only act of vandalism that I recall done by myself personally during the war.’
Since the admissions of a criminal are always taken as conclusive proof of his crime, we now
know from his own lips that
General Sherman was a
vandal 
