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It was late in July, and Atlanta, Georgia, was the focus of international attention. Inside the city, residents wondered what, if anything, they might do to stop the bombs, the death and destruction, the sheer terror that swept over their homes and shops.
This happened during the summer of 1864, and the Atlanta terror resulted from shells fired into the city by Union artillery commanded by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman was not following orders to besiege and capture Atlanta. He had no such orders. He was supposed to engage and defeat the Confederate army commanded by John Bell Hood.
Rather than follow orders and pursue Hood after he abandoned the city, Sherman occupied Atlanta. Not for military reasons, but to make a political statement that would help in Abraham Lincoln's re-election campaign.
With the abundant and favorable publicity about how
Atlanta is ours and fairly won,
voters might not
miss seeing that the Union war effort was largely stalled
that summer, and that Sherman had failed in his assigned
mission against Hood's army.
Sherman proceeded to evict the civilian population. I
am not willing to have Atlanta encumbered by the families
of our enemies. I want it a pure Gibraltar,
he wrote,
and when there were protests about studious and
ingenious cruelty,
he noted that War is cruelty and
you cannot refine it.
Then followed his famous march to the sea; by his own
estimate, four-fifths of the devastation was simple waste,
designed to make Georgia howl.
In short, he used deliberate violence against civilians to make a political statement. By any definition I can think of, Cump Sherman was a terrorist.
We can't say he was following military orders, because he deliberately disobeyed his orders. U.S. Grant, his commander, nagged him to do something about Hood's army, and instead Sherman marched across Georgia, then north into the Carolinas, all the while wreaking havoc on civilians while avoiding military engagements.
Why delve into this stream of American history?
Not to demean William T. Sherman, certainly. He was a brave commander who shared his troops' dangers and privations, and who eschewed useless drill and formality. A brilliant strategist, he is often credited by military historians as the inventor of modern warfare.
Sherman saw past archaic notions of chivalry and grasped
the reality of total warfare. Ever since my schoolboy days,
I have admired his intellect and his way with our language:
If he [Hood] will march north, I'll give him rations. My
business is down south.
I will not accept if
nominated and will not serve if elected.
There is
many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but,
boys, it is all hell.
But the fact remains that William T. Sherman was a terrorist.
So also were the founders of the modern state of Israel,
if Encyclopedia Britannica can be trusted: In the last
years of the war [WWII], the Irgunists and the Sternists
began resorting to terror to remind the British of their
commitment to Zionism.
The refusal of the British
government ... was followed by more Jewish terror against
the British in Palestine.
The founders of our country qualify as terrorists, what with the violence against Loyalist civilians.
And despite all this recent hand-wringing about
America losing its innocence,
terror has been a
staple of American life ever since then.
It was the main tactic in the Indian Wars on the Great Plains, practiced by both sides. Terror was a feature of labor struggles, often in Colorado, with 13 scab miners getting blown to pieces by a bomb at the Independence railroad depot on June 6, 1904, with two women and 11 children from union families dying at Ludlow on April 20, 1914. There were bombs on Wall Street and in Los Angeles.
Terror was the heart of U.S. strategy in bombing North Vietnam, and we have more recently been treated to an interesting exercise in definitions.
If you or I caused a civilian airliner to crash and kill everyone on board, it would be an act of terrorism. When our armed forces do so in the Middle East, it's a regrettable accident.
And there, finally, might be the operant modern definition of terrorism: violence aimed at civilians, perpetrated by the Other Side. If our side does it, it's patriotism or national security or support of valiant freedom fighters or progress toward a drug-free America (400 resident civilians died in the U.S. invasion of Panama) or any of a host of other noble causes.
It would be wonderful if, when our leaders gather to combat terrorism, they were more open-minded in their definition of terrorism. But that's expecting too much -- we're supposed to pretend that it's something new, so that we'll turn on the news and get exposed to more advertising and to demand ever more government to protect us.
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