| michael kors outlet |
Indeed, while all the materials, experiences, methods, languages, and justifications for "total war" were readily available for Yankees and Confederates alike, Neely insists that they were generally rejected. When, for example, Confederate General Sterling Price rode with his bedraggled troops into Missouri in 1864, he might have expected a taste of the medicine that the grisly fighting between Union soldiers and pro-Confederate guerrillas had produced there: murders, executions, and other atrocities that led Jefferson Davis to complain of the "savage ferocity" of the enemy. Instead Price's raid saw "the return of traditional combat situations." "Union generals fought Confederate generals one way and guerrillas another," Neely observes, arguing against the notion that the brutality of guerrilla warfare in Missouri set the larger direction for "total war."
Around the same time, Union General Philip Sheridan began a campaign in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia that has been likened in its brutality to General William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea through Georgia. Aiming to destroy the valley as a "breadbasket" for the Confederacy, Sheridan is supposed to have scorched it. But Neely finds much exaggeration and myth-making in the accounts of Sheridan's campaign. Sheridan, it appears, looked chiefly to eliminate the valley's agricultural surplus, not its basic subsistence; and he ordered that farm dwellings be spared unless the inhabitants were guerrillas, in which case all restraint was to be relaxed. The distinction between "civilized" warfare and "savage" warfare was again in play, and the dynamic of "total war" consequently contained.
