Though the term genocide did not exist before 1944, I do believe General Sherman was trying to commit just that on the Southern population during his famed march to the sea. His comments to his wife and fellow soldiers are no secret. They have been published often and show that he was certainly bent on destroying the people of the South.
I have brought up this notion of Sherman and genocide to a couple of people in my circle, whom I consider to be very intelligent. Both hesitate to strap the already shameful Sherman with the crime of genocide.
Consider the definition of genocide as was adopted in 1948 by the United Nations in the wake of the Jewish Holocaust.
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[1]
After conducting a study of Sherman’s war practices enacted upon his enemies, there can be no question that Sherman would have been tried as a war criminal had he dared to carry out his campaigns today. Even his own fellow generals abhorred his tactics.
As recently as 2008, one scholar likened Sherman’s practices to “war crimes and probably genocide.”[2] It is obvious that Sherman’s army killed and wounded Confederate soldiers. But, with the able men off in other places fighting the war, Sherman rampaged his way through the South. It is no secret that Sherman encouraged his men to destroy everything in their path after they had foraged for themselves. This left the women and children and old men with no food, no livestock, no crops, no cotton bales (a source of income), no valuables for which to sell, and in many instances, no homes. Such destitution brought about starvation, a sure way to prevent the births of anymore Southerners.
One might argue the last element of the definition—that of forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. While it is true that Sherman did not remove the children from their Southern parents, he did cause that the children were forced from their homes, with their parents, while carrion from the north moved in. This resulted in the desired outcome of watering down the Southern population.
In my opinion, there is no doubt that General Sherman was trying to rid the country of Southerners through criminal means. It is true that war is hell and many unfortunate things happen to the innocent. However, there is a moral code most men live by but Sherman was dispossessed of any morals. He was not the great military mind his fans set him up to be. The hero they worship was nothing short of a war criminal, a disgrace to his uniform, no one to be lauded or honored.
[1] “What is Genocide?” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 4 May 2009. 13 Jul. 2009
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007043, par. 4
[2] Allan D. Cooper, The Geography of Genocide, University Press of America, 2008, p. 150
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