Lincoln was always aware of what was going on; waging war on civilians — his own citizens — was his own policy from the very beginning, as Cisco proves. In May of 1861, for example, Captain Nathaniel Lyon recruited some seven thousand new German immigrants (mostly without uniforms) to eliminate suspected secessionists in St. Louis. They rounded up some six hundred men and paraded them through the streets playing the Star Spangled Banner (which must have been completely foreign to the mostly non-English speaking Germans). When the citizens of St. Louis protested, the recruits fired on them, killing twenty-eight civilians and wounding seventy-five. Lyon was promoted to brigadier general a week later, while some ten thousand civilians fled St. Louis. By 1863 Missouri, under U.S. Army occupation, was a place were arson, theft, and murder became so common that vast sections of the state were uninhabited. Cisco quotes Union General James H. Lane as saying, We believe in a war of extermination. I want to see every foot of ground in Jackson, Cass and Bates counties burned over — everything laid waste. Another practice of the Union Army that is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century was forced relocation of suspected dissenters. Cisco gives chapter and verse of how this occurred in Missouri, Tennessee, and elsewhere, as thousands of civilians were forced to leave their homes. This even included Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham. Plunder and pillage was also the Official Policy of the Lincoln regime from the start of the war, as Cisco shows. Before being defeated in the Battle of Fredericksburg the Union Army occupied the town for a short while. Cisco quotes a Union Army officer as saying that the men had emptied every house and store of its contents, and the streets, as a matter of course, were filled with chairs and sofas, pianos, books, and everything imaginable. . . . An entire chapter is devoted to the sacking of Athens, Alabama, in 1862. Every store and shop in the town was looted, along with most private homes, where U.S. troops went about stealing what they wanted and destroying the rest. The commanding officer in charge, a Russian immigrant named Col. John Turchin, told his soldiers that he would shut his eyes while they went about plundering the town. That was the way of the Russian Cossacks, he said. One of Turchins superior officers, General Don Carlos Buell, relieved Turchin of his brigade command for committing such crimes against civilians. But he was overruled by the Lincoln regime, which promoted him to the rank of brigadier general instead. Cisco also describes the shelling of civilian-occupied cities like Charleston, South Carolina by the Federal Army. [D]uring one nine-day period in January no fewer than 1,500 shells fell on the city. Later, a single gun nearby threw 4,253 missiles into Charleston. . . (Much of Ciscos information comes from the U.S. Government publication, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.) This is how many of those 50,000 Southern civilians were killed. Gary.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 01:51:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015