Author: Walter Brian Cisco

ISBN: 9781589804661

            More and more southern scholars are presenting a radically different picture of the American Civil War than the familiar one that is taught in most schools and that has appeared in the print and broadcast media. In his book Abraham Lincoln’s Execution, John Chandler Griffin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina, provided shocking revelations of how and why the war started, along with a view of President Abraham Lincoln as “the great scoundrel” rather than as “the Great Emancipator.” [Click Here to see my review of the book and linked interview with Griffin on this web site – ] Now comes Walter Brian Cisco, who has spent practically his entire adult life in Civil War research, with an even more shocking account of atrocities generated by the Union Army generals, carried out by their murderous troops, and tacitly approved by President Lincoln.

            Cisco provides documented accounts of how Northern troops pillaged entire cities, looted and then burned thousands of southerners’ homes, thrust women and children into the streets and fields naked without food and shelter, hanged men without trial, imprisoned southerners in veritable dungeons on trumped up charges and tortured them or left them to die of starvation and disease, raped southern women, and shot all of the animals on farms for sport rather than food. The blind and the crippled were not spared. Neither were black slaves on whose behalf the Union Army was purportedly fighting.

            Perhaps the most startling aspects of the rarely told story of what actually happened in the Civil War are the documented accounts of Union Army troops robbing and raping black slaves, and the hostility of the slaves toward the northerners: so intense that they refused to be taken away from their masters and even died defending their masters for whom, contrary to popular belief, they expressed a surprising amount of affection. Those who agreed to be transported to the North found themselves embedded in a new kind of slavery in army camps where they were beaten and starved.

            Any attempt of northerners to wash away responsibility at the top of command, on the usual representation that the Union troops who committed the atrocities were drunken trash disobeying orders, is demolished by the documentation Cisco presents to the contrary. It is clear that Lincoln knew what was happening and did nothing to stop it. Generals such as James A. Garfield, who would become President of the U.S., were clearly implicated in the atrocities. The esteemed Northern General William T. Sherman emerges as a villain. One of the documents Cisco provides has Sherman stating: “we will remove and destroy every obstacle – if need be take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property…” Preparing for his famous march through Georgia, Sherman promised in a letter to Major General Henry Halleck that he would leave “a track of desolation.”

            The lionized General George Custer led his troops in the destruction of barns, mills, and stacks of hay and grain upon which civilian non-combatant men and women depended for food. For insulting Union troops, Major General Benjamin F. “Beast” Butler ordered many women of New Orleans to be publicly identified as “prostitutes” who were “fair game” for soldiers, and ordered men hanged for purportedly desecrating the Union flag or on any other contrived pretext. General William Tecumseh Sheridan ordered the entire city of Atlanta to be burned.

            In the final analysis, like Professor Griffin, Cisco lays the blame for the Civil War and the atrocities entailed in it on Lincoln’s determination to stop southern states from seceding from the Union so that an entirely federalized central government could be created. Lincoln's driving motive, taken together with the evidence of what happened to southern blacks, to a significant extent belies the popular image of dedicated white men fighting to “free the slaves."

The above review was contributed by: Burton H. Wolfe: Burton is an award winning journalist and the author of hundreds of published articles and of books such The Hippies (New American Library), Hitler and the Nazis (Putnam), and Pileup on Death Row (Doubleday).  Wolfe publishes an occasional newsletter called "Burton Wolfe's Internet Rag" and maintains a web site.

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