General Sherman’s “Love of the South” Revisited

No one can deny General Sherman’s consummate ability as a soldier, but those of us who opposed him in Georgia and in South Carolina can never believe him to be the kindly gentleman and friend of the South which Major Boyd represents him.

Just when a man begins to believe he’s seen and heard it all (in a manner of speaking), fate will sometimes throw that man a sinking, inside curveball the likes of which he has never encountered before, and often lofted from the most bizarre and unexpected of places. He in turn will either take a desperate swipe at it, or he will watch it whiz by him in frozen awe.

No analogy is perfect, but the foregoing paragraph fairly describes my initial reaction the first time I heard someone – anyone – say that the Nero of the 19th Century, General William Tecumseh Sherman, was a lover of the South and a warm admirer of the Southern people; that it was this Nero’s intimate knowledge and love of the South in point of fact that was the casus belli for his determination to make Total War on her aged, and her defenseless women and children in the WBTS. Indeed, by one account at least, General Sherman was a Northern man merely *by birth*, otherwise he was a Southern man through and through. If these stunning revelations happen to be new to you, I humbly direct your attention to my Nov., 2022 article titled, Et tu Dr. Robertson? wherein, in keeping with my analogy, I take a desperate swipe at the claim, if only to make contact enough to foul it out of play.

Once I’d written the article just mentioned, I considered the matter closed so far as my interest and involvement with it going forward was concerned. However, and as so often is the case, fate seems to have had a different future in store. Roughly a year and a half later (April-May 2024 timeframe), this “closed matter” opened itself to me once again, only this time in a much more informative way than it had been introduced previously. I say the matter “opened itself to me” because I certainly wasn’t pursuing it when it suddenly appeared for the second time. Ready yourselves, y’all, ‘cause we’re fixin’ to get to the bottom of this and potentially put the matter to rest for good.

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The author of my epigraph heading this essay was a Southerner named James Hugh McNeilly (1838-1922), of Nashville, Tennessee. Rev. McNeilly served as chaplain in the Confederate Army (49th Tennessee Infantry Regiment) throughout the war, and was a first-hand witness to the depredations the Sherman-led wing of the “Grand Army” savagely inflicted on the South in their infamous March to the Sea expedition through Georgia and the Carolinas. Rev. McNeilly’s statement forming the epigraph concludes a lengthy missive he wrote in direct response to a curious item that appeared in the September, 1910 edition of The Confederate Veteran (hereinafter The Veteran) magazine. The item to which I refer was a heretofore unpublished, posthumous tribute to General Sherman purportedly written some years before by Confederate Major, David French Boyd (1834-1899).

Noteworthy in this connection is that this “gushing tribute” (-S. A. Cunningham) was first made public fully forty-five years after war’s end, whereas Maj. Boyd allegedly wrote it sometime between General Sherman’s death (1891), and his own death eight years later. Parts of the paper at least are also of questionable authenticity, given that Maj. Boyd purportedly wrote it at the behest of a Union Brevet General, by way of whom the paper ultimately landed on the desk of S. A. Cunningham at The Veteran. As to the question of its authenticity in part, a self-described lifelong friend and comrade of Maj. Boyd wrote the following to the forenamed editor:

It is true there was a friendship between Boyd and Sherman till Sherman’s death, and Colonel Boyd was a man of as warm and tender feeling as a woman, yet he was not the man to go to Sherman’s grave and shed a tear over it. He was not that kind of man, and he was totally incapable of making any such allusion to President Jefferson Davis as you attribute to him. That part of Dr. Green’s and Colonel Heath’s narrative is all a myth. They didn’t know Colonel Boyd as I knew him.

It should be noted in lieu of moving forward with our investigation that “that part of Dr. Green’s and Colonel Heath’s narrative” alluded to in the above quotation is actually included in the paper whose authorship is attributed to Maj. Boyd, so you see therein that this correspondent in particular was already of a mind that key parts of the narrative at least were really the products of Dr. Green and/or Col. Heath, and not of his friend, Maj. Boyd. This is one of several reasons for which I wrote earlier of the “questionable authenticity” of the Boyd sketch.

To close his letter just quoted from, our suspicious Veteran correspondent gently advises Mr. Cunningham to apply stricter standards going forward in verifying purported authorship of, in this case, personally insulting, insubordinate statements he was quite positive Maj. Boyd could never and would never bring himself to make towards his former president, to wit:

Had Virginia not seceded, Lee would have commanded the Union army, and what a thrashing Jeff Davis would have got!

Meanwhile, another correspondent wrote to the editor that he had just as soon cancel his subscription to The Veteran forthwith as to see it publish a single item more like unto the “Boyd Gusher,” and its idolization of the fiend, General Sherman, or in any way to entertain the slightest hint of justification of the North’s scorched earth war policies.

For his part, S. A. Cunningham politely, yet firmly, stood his ground in answer to both would-be critics, defending his decision to publish the paper in its entirety just as his office had received it and in spite of its sender’s Unionist ties and sympathies, while also reminding his less tolerant detractors of his own scathing editorial condemning Maj. Boyd’s “gushing tribute” prefacing the paper’s appearance in the selfsame edition; and of his positing therein that apparently Maj. Boyd had been so thoroughly hypnotized by Sherman as a young man that his mind was thereby rendered impotent in later life to free itself of Sherman’s diabolic spell. As to questions of authorship and authenticity, Cunningham essentially dismissed them out of hand.

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This sketch of Captain Boyd repels fraternal feeling for Sherman, since it establishes that he knew the Southern people so thoroughly. It is repelled indignantly. So much space for the Boyd tribute is not only to give that part of General Sherman’s history that is least known, but to establish that his wickedness is all the greater.

Editor, The Veteran, Sep. Issue, 1910

Perusing the few sources I have quoted in this connection, one can readily see how deeply this issue cut and how it divided natural friends and wartime comrades on the Confederate side in the several months immediately following the paper’s publication. Setting aside the questions of authorship and authenticity, the important point to take away from the entire exchange, as it relates to Dr. Robertson’s teaching in any event, is that the contents of the Boyd paper were almost universally condemned and repudiated more or less vehemently by all who participated in the discussion.

In my first article broaching this topic, I was short on information and long on tolerance, content as I was, albeit reluctantly, to give Prof. Robertson the benefit of the doubt by way of ascribing “good intentions” to his motive(s) for planting the seed of the myth of General Sherman’s supposed love of the South in the fertile minds of his audience(s) (as y’all well know, and as I’m sure Dr. Robertson well knew, a seed planted in fertile soil will grow to produce its own kind of fruit and none other if and when its life reaches fruit-bearing maturity). By “short on information,” I mean I then had no knowledge of the claim’s source or origin, nor even of where to begin searching for it if I would; nor of the broader discussion of its merits, or, rather, the lack thereof, following abrupt appearance of its source in The Veteran. All I knew for sure at that date was that it certainly did not originate with Dr. Robertson.

At this date, however, my previous deficiencies as to the subject no longer apply; I am no longer short on information regarding the matter, and I’m certainly not long on tolerance for those of a certain station and influence among us who abuse said stations and influence by disseminating malign falsehoods matter of factly. After all, God only knows how many students of his still living Prof. Robertson infected with his matter-of-fact observations on Sherman’s character and alleged love of the South during the long course of his professorship and in his books! Coupled with his opinion of Lost Cause orthodoxy and its acolytes I quoted in the first article, his insistence on painting such a fiend as General Sherman in a favorable light, seems to confirm to me in my original suspicion that Prof. Robertson was in fact a neo-scalawag, collaborating with Yankees as he did to perpetuate Yankee revisionist history surrounding the WBTS and its leading actors.

I should inform you in closing, dear reader, that the entirety of the Boyd sketch, as well as the discussion its publication generated, may be found in the September-December, 1910 issues of The Veteran, which may be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive. Otherwise, I leave you for now with Dr. Dabney’s admonition in The New South, insisting that sons and daughters of the South “not allow the dominant party to teach him a perverted history of the past contests.” Nor of the contestants, I beg leave to add.

God bless y’all, and God bless our beloved Southland!