From: cbp0521@yahoo.com
Read this letter this morning about Sherman's capture of Fayetteville and I had to reply. The website is pro-Lincoln. I would suspect I'll get banned from the site..........for telling the truth. Remember the Women's Home on Dick Street was headquarters for the SOB Sherman.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With his invasion of North Carolina underway, Sherman took time after the capture of Fayetteville, North Carolina to bring Grant up to speed with his immediate plans:
HEADQUARTERS MILITARY DIVISION OF THE MISSISSIPPI, IN THE FIELD,
FAYETTVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA, Sunday, March. 12, 1865.
Lieutenant-General U. S. GRANT, commanding United States Army, City Point, Virginia.
DEAR GENERAL: We reached this place yesterday at noon; Hardee, as usual, retreating across the Cape Fear, burning his bridges; but our pontoons will be up to-day, and, with as little delay as possible, I will be after him toward Goldsboro. A tug has just come up from Wilmington, and before I get off from here, I hope to get from Wilmington some shoes and stockings, sugar, coffee, and flour. We are abundantly supplied with all else, having in a measure lived off the country.
The army is in splendid health, condition, and spirits, though we have had foul weather, and roads that would have stopped travel to almost any other body of men I ever heard of.
Our march, was substantially what I designed–straight on Columbia, feigning on Branchville and Augusta. We destroyed, in passing, the railroad from the Edisto nearly up to Aiken; again, from Orangeburg to the Congaree; again, from Colombia down to Kingsville on the Wateree, and up toward Charlotte as far as the Chester line; thence we turned east on Cheraw and Fayetteville. At Colombia we destroyed immense arsenals and railroad establishments, among which wore forty-three cannon. At Cheraw we found also machinery and material of war sent from Charleston, among which were twenty-five guns and thirty-six hundred barrels of powder; and here we find about twenty guns and a magnificent United States' arsenal.
We cannot afford to leave detachments, and I shall therefore destroy this valuable arsenal, so the enemy shall not have its use; and the United States should never again confide such valuable property to a people who have betrayed a trust.
I could leave here to-morrow, but want to clear my columns of the vast crowd of refugees and negroes that encumber us. Some I will send down the river in boats, and the rest to Wilmington by land, under small escort, as soon as we are across Cape Fear River.
I hope you have not been uneasy about us, and that the fruits of this march will be appreciated. It had to be made not only to destroy the valuable depots by the way, but for its incidents in the necessary fall of Charleston, Georgetown, and Wilmington. If I can now add Goldsboro' without too much cost, I will be in a position to aid you materially in the spring campaign. Jos. Johnston may try to interpose between me here and Schofield about Newbern; but I think he will not try that, but concentrate his scattered armies at Raleigh, and I will go straight at him as soon as I get our men reclothed and our wagons reloaded. Keep everybody busy, and let Stoneman push toward Greensboro' or Charlotte from Knoxville; even a feint in that quarter will be most important. The railroad from Charlotte to Danville is all that is left to the enemy, and it will not do for me to go there, on account of the red-clay hills which are impassable to wheels in wet weather. I expect to make a junction with General Schofield in ten days.
Yours truly,
W. T. SHERMAN, Major-General.
Grant was now free to initiate his campaign in Virginia with the assurance that North Carolina would offer no refuge to Lee's army if he could force it to abandon Petersburg and Richmond.
My Remarks...
Since Fayetteville is my hometown and I have relatives in Charleston and other parts of the Carolinas, I felt a need to offer a few remarks. My Scottish ancestors came to Fayetteville in 1753.
Sherman didn't put in his letter than his men stole everything in sight from non-combatants, leaving them to starve to death. He stole their livestock, their vegetables, their clothes, their guns, and would have poisoned their wells if he had thought about it. Any black man that resisted him and didn't want to leave their homes were taken in chains. The South didn't lose the war due to lack of courage and stupidity on the part of generals; they lost it because they ran out of men to fight it. They didn't have the never-ending supply of immigrants coming into Boston and NY that immediately became soldiers. Almost always out-numbered the Southerner won battle after battle against Federal forces. The country that the Founding Fathers envisioned ended when Lee had to surrender to Grant. The dying institution of slavery in the South was finally "over", and now every state government and every citizen of every state are slaves to the centralized government in Washington, DC. The union of "free and independent states" over for good. Welcome to the Socialist States of America, courtesy of Lincoln, who Karl Marx greatly admired and for good reason.
