"Think Kindly of Us of the South" A LETTER TO WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN edited by LEE N. NEWCOMER |
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The following letter to William Tecumseh Sherman dates from a short and almost forgotten era of United States history, the few years following the Civil War in which the South thought well of General Sherman. Southern liking for Sherman, though short-lived, was well-grounded in fact. Before the war Sherman taught at what later became Louisiana State University; he liked the southerners and they liked him. Secession and war temporarily alienated these affections, but with the war drawing to a close Sherman was not vindictive. Grant was generous to the defeated Lee at Appomattox; Sherman was even more generous to the defeated General Johnston at Raleigh. For this leniency Sherman received some brickbats from the North but only plaudits from the South, and the latter was delighted by Sherman's speaking out after the war with gruff eloquence in the cause of peace and reconciliation. "Our country ought not to be ruled by the extreme views of Sumner or Stevens," he wrote.1 The reunited Union was in danger of being doctored to death: "I do want peace and do say if all hands would stop talking, and writing, and let the sun shine, and the rains fall for two or three years, we would be nearer reconstruction than we are likely to be with the three and four hundred statesmen trying to legislate amid the prejudices begotten for four centuries."2 Early in 1869, the year of this letter, the general returned to Louisiana, was welcomed by a friendly populace, and even was invited to stop at NOTES ARE ON PAGE 200 |