War Crimes Against Southern Civilians

by Walter Cisco

  A dozen miles outside Fayetteville, at the home of Duncan Murchinson, Kilpatrick's cavalrymen charged into the bedroom of a small girl desperately sick with typhoid. They were looking for items to steal but found nothing and were asked to leave. "Go ahead boys," growled an officer. "Do all the mischief you can." Seventy-year-old Mr. Murchinson was dragged to the swamp and assaulted while vandals destroyed furniture, slashed family portraits, and poured molasses into the piano. The little girl died while the troopers were still in her home. Fortunately, Federal horses left a little uneaten corn on the ground, for that was all the family had to live on after the invaders moved on."'

  A woman who lived near Fayetteville told of Yankees murdering two citizens. "They hung up three others and one lady, merely letting them down just in time to save life, in order to make them tell where their valuables were concealed; and they whipped-stripped and cowhided-several good and well known citizens for the same purpose." She went on to recount that soldiers killed "every living thing, even to our pet dog," before breaking tools and burning the fences. After stealing or destroying all the food they could find, one Federal asked her sarcastically what she would live on. "Upon patriotism," she replied. "I will exist upon the love of my country as long as life will last, and then I will die as firm in that love as the everlasting hills." The interview concluded when he departed with "a fiendish chuckle.""

  Josephine Worth, a young girl at the time, remembered that "the sky was lurid with the flames from the burning homesteads, but it has passed into a proverb that Sherman's route could be traced by solitary chimneys where happy homes once stood." At her uncle's place, four miles from Fayetteville, they vandalized everything. "Even the family Bible was not sacred," wrote Josephine. "One of them opened it and spread it over a mule's back and rode off on it for a saddle." At least a servant was able to find a small quantity of precious cornmeal at a friend's home. "My aunt made some bread from the meal and as she was cooking it before the fire, a scamp sitting by kept spitting over and around it. `Please don't spit on my bread,' said my aunt. With that, he spat directly into it-the bread intended to feed our hungry little children.""

  One Yankee told of torching turpentine mills in the Fayetteville vicinity, something "which certainly made the handsomest fires I ever saw, especially the smoke as it rolled up in great black volumes was splendid. We blazed our way well through here."I"Homes went up in flames too." Churches were used as barracks, vandalized, and desecrated." In all cases, factories were slated for destruction.

  In Fayetteville, city fathers gathered with the mayor and town board to ask an audience, begging that the conqueror spare the cotton mills. They pled their case, meeting with Sherman in the home he occupied as headquarters, and argued that the people needed the employment those mills provided. It probably went unsaid-but understood by all-that the war was nearly over in any case. Sherman let them finish before dismissing them with three sentences: "Gentlemen, Niggers and cotton caused this war, and I wish they were both in Hell. On Thursday those mills will be blown up. Good morning.""

  One witness described what happened in a single neighborhood. "J.P. McLean was hung up by the neck three times and shot at once, to make him disclose hidden valuables. W.T. Horne, Jesse Hawley, and Alexander McAuthor, were all hung up until nearly dead. John Waddill was shot down and killed in his own

  The home of Georgia Hicks was on the Goldsboro and Wilmington Road, near the village of Faison, from where she was able to learn much of the behavior of Union troops as they passed through. A relative, Rachel Pearsal, "aged and ill, was thrown from her bed to the floor, so that they could look for valuables they thought hidden there." Georgia's father, Dr. James H. Hicks, was asked by Federal soldiers to come and treat one who was sick.

  He was carried far away and when he was brought back later, he had the appearance of a man that had almost seen death. These ruffians hung him by the neck twice, in their endeavor to secure information as to hidden valuables. They finally released their victim who refused to divulge his secrets. He never recovered from this terrible shock."

  "They haven't recognized their deliverers yet," observed Clara Maclean, referring to terrified black children cowering in silence as Yankee soldiers plundered the home. An elderly lady there had the front of her dress ripped open in their search for hidden coins. A watch and other items were grabbed from the pocket of another. One of the troopers claimed that they had come after hidden "rebels." "And after watches," shot back Clara. "Oh, well!" he smiled. "We must make the thing pay somehow.""'

  Cornelia Spencer of Goldsboro recognized the approach of Sherman's army, "heralded by columns of smoke which rose from burning farm-houses on the south side of the Neuse [River]."

  One of the first of General Sherman's own acts, after his arrival, was of peculiar hardship. One of the oldest and most venerable citizens of the place [Richard Washington], with a family of sixteen or eighteen children and grandchildren, most of them females, was ordered on a notice of a few hours, to vacate his house, for the convenience of the General himself, which of course was done. The gentleman was nearly eighty years of age, and in very feeble health.2"

  The devastation the Union army had wreaked upon North Carolina did not go unrecognized by the Federals who had overseen the destruction. "I never before had an idea of how desolate our army leaves a country," remarked a Federal colonel, "and we thought we were letting North Carolina off easy. It is terrible the wretched, suffering condition the people are in."''

  Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army on April 9. The Confederate capital of Richmond had been abandoned six days earlier. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston ordered his men to lay down their arms on April 26. It was not until three days later that Sherman's troops in North Carolina were required to cease their "pillaging and marauding" of civilians."

  Chapter 24

  Abuse of African-Americans

  "They asked me who my master was," recounted Fanny Carr on her confrontation with the Yankee soldiers. "I said I had no master, that I was a free colored woman." Fanny Carr, a resident of Alexandria, Louisiana, though born a slave had been free for more than twenty years. The widow stayed in her own home on the outskirts of town with a grown daughter, Catherine. Catherine, also free, worked as a domestic for a neighbor, Mrs. Thomas C. Manning. The Carrs kept farm animals for their own use. Their frame dwelling was proudly maintained and filled with prized household possessions. Fanny cherished the watch left by her husband, and young Catherine took special pride in her bonnets and jewelry. Mother and daughter were respected members of the community. Thomas Manning, associate justice of the state supreme court, characterized them as "truthful and industrious people."

  The blue-clad invaders arrived in Alexandria in mid-March 1864 and immediately began plundering the town. "On seeing me they asked who I was," said Fanny. When she tried to make them understand that she was free, they called her a liar. When she said that the house belonged to her and to no one else, "they cursed me and called me a liar again, and said niggers could not own property in this State."

  "They commenced pillaging the house," said Fanny. "I begged them to stop." It was no use. Taken from the home were her silverware, plates, tablecloths, sheets, and mirrors, along with her and Catherine's clothes. Expensive woolens and linens were stolen, "and my husband's gold watch," said Fanny, "which I minded more than the clothes." All their food supply disappeared, along with the poultry and a hog. A store of lumber she had accumulated was chopped to pieces. The vandals then proceeded to pull down the house itself, even taking bricks from the chimney.

  Fanny was literally left with nothing but the clothes on her back. She later saw her stolen garments being given by the troops "to one of their colored women and a white woman who came off one of the gunboats in the river just in front of the town."

  Catherine had been at work when the invaders came and did not get home until the next day. Furious over the theft and destruction, she stormed to the headquarters of Brig. Gen. Joseph Mower. "The Yan
kees said we should not have our things back; that they knew they were not ours, for colored people were not allowed to own so much property down here. I told them they did belong to us," insisted Catherine. She then asked Col. William T. Shaw for provisions since his soldiers had taken all that she and her mother had to live on. "They wanted me to go away with them." When she refused, Shaw sarcastically replied "that if I wanted to stay down here I could get the Rebels to feed me." She told him the rebels would feed her, and she would not go off with Yankees.'

  In the spring of 1863 Federals marching up Bayou Teche stopped to plunder the mansion of the late Dubriel Olivier. Olivier, a wealthy planter and slave owner, was reported to have raised and equipped at his own expense a Confederate company two years earlier. Now his widow, Aimee, defiantly met the invading Yankees and ordered them away. "Where is your master?" laughed a soldier. Assuming she was the maid, they insisted she have more respect for white people. It finally dawned on the intruders that she was indeed mistress of the plantation, that Dubriel and Aimee Olivier were Bens de couleur libre-"free people of color."

  One Connecticut officer expressed shock at seeing so many French-speaking, light-skinned blacks, individuals with the audacity to "call themselves Americans." "These are not the former slaves," he pointed out in a letter home, "but the former masters." St. Landry Parish's free African-American population totaled 1,596 in 1858, and some of those individuals prospered as the owners of sugar plantations and the masters of slaves. "Neither the color of their skin nor their special status mattered to the Yankees," wrote an historian. "The cattle, horses and sugar of Alphonse and A.D. Meuillon, Alexandre Lemelle, Jules Frilot, Sosthene Auzenne and Zenon Rideau, all free men of color, were taken and consumed just as readily as the goods seized from [white neighbors]."2

  It was not uncommon for even slaves to accumulate some savings in gold or silver coin, and these little hoards were targeted by invading Yankees. A favorite trick in Louisiana was for a soldier to claim that "Old Abe" or their commanding general had personally made him responsible for collecting valuables, that the owner would receive the money back once it and the liberated slave were transported beyond reach of the "rebels." One Louisiana slave named Jerry "deposited" his five hundred dollars' worth of savings into a safe aboard a Union ship. "He was referred by the officer to some other officer who he said had the key," it was reported later, "and by him to some other officer who was the one that received it, and by him to some other, and so on in endless continuity." When the Federal army and supporting riverboats withdrew, Jerry went along in a futile hope of somehow reclaiming his savings.`

  During the Federal invasions of western Louisiana in 1863 and 1864, thousands of slaves were encouraged to leave their homes and follow the troops. "We use uneducated horses and mules taken from the enemy," Union commander Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks was overheard to say. "Why not negroes?" Former slaves might end up in the ranks of his army, laboring on confiscated plantations for wages, or employed as prostitutes. All too often, women, children, and those too old or sick to work were simply abandoned by their liberators. "They were afraid to return to their former masters," wrote one historian, "because many of them had participated in the destruction and plunder before leaving, and because of the wildly exaggerated stories circulated by Union soldiers that Confederate pickets were shooting down runaways on sight."

  In late June 1863, after the Union army left Berwick's Bay, a horrendous discovery was made. On the banks of Bayou Ramos, some seven miles from Brashear, scores of dead and dying runaway slaves were found huddled in a thicket. Decomposing bodies were all around, while survivors "were crouched to the earth with their heads sunk between their knees, or lying with upturned faces and gazing vacantly at the air," according to a witness. Nearby was a building, part of a local sugar plantation belonging to a man named Sanders, that housed hundreds more. Dr. George Hill, for forty years an Opelousas physician, described what he saw there:

  The scene which then and there presented itself can never be effaced from my memory. On the right hand female corpses in a state of nudity, and also in a far advanced decomposition. Many others were lying all over the floor, many speechless and in a dying condition.

  All appeared to have died of the same disease: bloody flux. The floor was slippery with blood, mucus and feces. The dying, and all those unable to help themselves, were lying with their scanty garments rolled around their heads and breasts.... clouds of flies, such as I never saw before, would immediately rise and settle down again on all parts of the dying. In passing through the house a cold chill shook my frame....

  Refugee train

  As I passed from the house I met with a Negro man of my own, who informed me that he had lost his wife and two children. I asked him if his friends-the Yankees-had not furnished him with medicine. He said, "No, and if they had, I would not have given it to my family as all who took their medicine died in twelve hours from the time of its being given."

  Commissioners for the state of Louisiana took testimony and issued a report on the conduct of the invading troops. Though black survivors were almost unanimous in their belief that Federals tried deliberately to poison them, the report concluded this not to be true. Still, "we know the Negroes religiously believe what they state." A careful examination of the facts concluded that between May 21 and June 29, 1863, two thousand of those who ran away with the army had perished.

  The Federal Red River Campaign the following year made matters even worse. Often crowded into "contraband camps," it was inevitable that disease and starvation would take a terrible toll. Children were separated from parents. Those who eventually returned "all concur in representing their misery and destitution as deplorable, and the mortality as frightful." In Rapides Parish alone it was estimated that between May 1863 and March 1864, eight thousand slaves left their homes to follow the Union army and that one-half died.'

  In Mississippi, the conduct of the Federals toward the slaves was much the same as evidenced in Louisiana. "They had taken all the money from every Negro on the plantation," wrote Susan Dabney Smedes of Hinds County, Mississippi, recounting a raid on her home by United States troops. One crippled sixty-three-year-old slave was a preacher named Isaac. "Uncle Isaac had buried eighty dollars in gold,-the savings of years," continued Mrs. Smedes. "This he was made to unearth. He had lately bought a new silver watch, for which he had paid forty dollars. This was taken from him."

  When Federals came through the neighborhoods of Guntown and Saltillo, Mississippi, they committed the usual theft and destruction of property. But they were particularly zealous to take all the slaves they could, presumably needing their labor. Rev. James Agnew wrote in his journal that "the Yankees shot two of [Thomas] Burris's Negroes down in the yard because they would not go with him."5

  "I won't trust niggers to fight yet," wrote William T. Sherman in the spring of 1863, "but don't object to the Government taking them from the enemy, & making such use of them as experience may suggest." In Union-occupied Tennessee the army impressed blacks and put them to work at hard labor or hired them out to private contractors who often literally starved them. When the Federal army decided to build fortifications around Nashville, they made a surprise raid on blacks living there and "gathered them in from barber-shops, kitchens, and even churches," wrote one of their kidnappers. "Many who traded Southern owners and overseers for Yankee bosses," observed an historian, "very quickly discarded any lingering notions about Northern benevolence." Those put to work for the army were poorly fed, not properly sheltered, and paid little or nothing. Death was common. One Union army officer in Nashville admitted that "colored men here are treated like brutes." A Davidson County civilian saw blacks working in an army camp and thought them "the most miserable wretched looking creatures I ever saw"; those who became sick were treated as if "they were so many dogs."

  Nashville's blue-clad conquerors were feared by black civilians. When Ohio soldiers were unable to find seats in a crowded theater one evening in Septembe
r 1862, they invaded the "Negro gallery" and began shoving patrons out of their way. "In ten minutes," read a report, "every Negro had been badly beaten and ejected, some of them being thrown entirely down the stairs, from the top to the bottom." After the performance, troops went about the streets of the city attacking every African-American in sight.

  Robbery was common, as was sexual abuse of black women by Yankee soldiers. A U.S. cavalry regiment recruited from among East Tennessee Unionists and described by one girl as "the meanest men I ever saw" rode into Gallatin in May 1864 and began a reign of terror. They torched two newly established schools for black children, murdered one freedman, and swore they would-as soon as they could-kill every black in town.'

  Liberty County in rural southeast Georgia had in antebellum times an unusually large number of free blacks, and some had gradually and laboriously accumulated substantial property. Many of those still in bondage had also managed to earn money with their skilled labor and purchased stock and grew crops of their own.' When Sherman's troops came through in 1864 everything was stolen or destroyed, whether owned by planters or by hardworking slaves. A white diarist recorded that black women were particularly threatened by the invaders. "These men were so outrageous at the Negro houses, that the Negro men were obliged to slap at their horses [causing them to bolt] for the protection of their wives, and in some instances they rescued them from the hands of these infamous creatures." One historian concluded that in Liberty County, "indiscriminate confiscation of black property, and other anti-Negro acts committed by Sherman's army, had a corrosive effect on the enthusiasm with which many had welcomed him.""

  In May 1864, Sherman began his invasion of northern Georgia. A black nurse living on a plantation near Kingston found herself in the path of that army. "They've took everything I had," she sobbed, telling her young mistress that her animals had been killed and her savings stolen by the soldiers. "Honey, I never knowed a Yankee that wasn't mean as dirt. They would skin a flea for his hide an' tallow. Everybody say the Yankees goin' to free us. Like a fool I believe 'em, an' now this is what they do. I might a-knowed it. What can you spec from a hog but a grunt.""