Ohio History Journal

Back to results

"Think Kindly of

Us of the South"

A LETTER TO

WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

edited by LEE N. NEWCOMER

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

A LETTER TO GENERAL SHERMAN 149

Jackson, Mississippi, a city twice burned by his forces during the war. "I

do think," he told his brother John, the senator from Ohio, "some political

power might be given to the young men who served in the rebel army for

they are a better class than the adventurers who have gone South purely

for office."³

This rapprochement between the South and Sherman came to an abrupt

end in 1875 with the publication of the general's two-volume Memoirs. Can-

didly, the old campaigner surveyed in dispassionate terms the destruction

he had wrought in the South to shorten the war. It was a classic example

of untimely publication. The South, distraught by carpetbagger and scala-

wag, seized upon the grim general, marching through Georgia, as a vent

for and the focus of its bitterness. General Sherman became the symbol

of horror, of heartless cruelty, joining and in time replacing Ben Butler on

the "pedestal of infamy" in southern minds. The Sherman myth went into

reverse; he became, as Gerald Johnson has said, a "diabolical hero."⁴

The writer of this letter, Harvey W. Walter of Holly Springs, Mississippi,

was born in Ohio of Virginia parents, and grew up in Fairfield County,

where he and young Sherman as schoolboys attended the academy at Lan-

caster. In 1838 Walter, a youth of nineteen, went to Mississippi, read law,

and soon became a prominent and public-spirited citizen of Holly Springs.

An unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1859, he opposed secession but

entered the Confederate service, serving until the end of the war as judge

advocate on General Bragg's staff. When he wrote to Sherman in 1869 he

was again practicing law. Nine years later he and several of his sons died

while ministering to the sick during a yellow fever epidemic in Holly

Springs.5

In his letter Walter discusses with Sherman the character and condition

of his fellow-southerners. The general's reply has not been preserved.

Holly Springs, Miss.6

21st Sept. 1869.

Dear Genl.

Your letter has been before me a week. I must say a few words to "exclude a

conclusion." The Southern people are not a bad people. Their vices lie on the sur-

face. They are hot, hasty, passionate, but fraud, falsehood, & assassination are not

their vices. They are not hypocritical. They do not profess for their late foes a false

love, but they act a manly part toward them. Occasional wrongs are done, but not

more than in other communities of like number. These wrongs are of an open,

sometimes startling character. They are magnified by rumor with her ten thousand

tongues until they reach you of the North so distorted by falsehood that the original

wrong is not recognizable. The Southron is too proud to complain & too indifferent

to explain. Crimes too are frequently alledged against him, which on investigation

150 OHIO HISTORY

are found to be wholy false or justifiable. Crimes are committed (not more than

elsewhere) but rarely or ever by a true rebel soldier. The men who would not fight

in war are warring in peace. It is the skulker or deserter or coward, who maltreats

the Yankee because he is such or the negro because he is black. With you, I wish

sincerely these persons could be punished. But their number is not large though

their offenses are startling. I have been a leading lawyer, (pardon egotism) in this

part of my state for thirty years & I can truthfully say that our criminal calendar

has been smaller since the war than it ever was before. It does not suit our Public

Informers to represent the truth on this point. They are our office holders & a

Government of Constitution & laws would take away their loaves & fishes.

If slander would cease her vocation, if our informers would tell the truth, if

"falsehood were not suggested by suppression of truth," if real offenses were pun-

ished the Southron people would be vindicated in character & would not complain.

But Genl. we are both too old & know too much of this world to wish to ever kill

off all that is bad or corrupt. God has fashioned it just as it is & it would cease

to be His world if the bad were all out of it.

Jehu! Suppose we could remove them all. What a cry for emigrants would be

raised. The vexed question of laborers would be overwhelming in complexity. Emi-

grants would be demanded from Heaven or tother place--but I think from the latter,

just to make it what God intended it to be--a mixed world of good & evil. So don't

let us kill off all the rascals lest a greater evil befal us.

And you are a man of too much intellect to believe in decimation. Civil Govern-

ment does not permit it & Military Rule only tolerates it as an evil. In the Camps

where none can "break ranks" you stand a chance of getting the one scoundrel

in ten men. In Civil life the rascal is shrewd enough to get away before the lot is

cast. God does not tolerate this mode of judgment. He punishes each for his trans-

gression only, & permits vicarious suffering only in Himself & never in His creature.

I know you only said this in order to allude to our old teacher, whom I believe all

hated, not even excepting you & myself who won his favour by our hard labour.

And now Genl. I have made my protest.

Burn this, think kindly of us of the South & believe me.

Truly

Your Friend

H. W. Walter

Genl.

W. T. Sherman

Washington

D. C.

P.S. Judge Dent will be my guest part of this week. I wish you could be with him

& see something of the people of this part of Mississippi. If ever you get into this

region, come & see me. We are not savage & do not, I think, deserve a whipping.

THE EDITOR: Lee N. Newcomer is an

associate professor of history at Wisconsin

State College, Oshkosh. He is a native Ohioan.