As Sherman’s army prepared to leave Savannah, Georgia and advance through South Carolina, their excitement was palpable. From private to general, all the Yankee soldiers viewed South Carolina as the origin of secession and ultimately of the war itself. It was in South Carolina that many Federal soldiers intended to inflict some payback.
throughout history have encountered circumstances in which discipline simply breaks down. A man with a gun often feels omnipotent anyway. That sense of discipline can hang but by a thread. In South Carolina, that diminished discipline took various forms. One was the bummers or foragers, who would range far ahead of the main body. The bummers would openly, deliberately, pillage and plunder. I previously wrote about the bummers here.
Plunder
Another way that decreased discipline manifested itself was women. For various reasons, the black female became the object of Federal soldiers’ baser desires. The blacks were surprised, at first. They expected Sherman’s men to represent freedom – and often, those men did indeed free a good many slaves. But, they also stole and plundered many slave cabins, just as they did the larger, more comfortable white dwellings. As one former slave would later recall, “Us looked for the Yankees . . . like us look now for da Savior. Dey come one day in February. Dey took everything carryable off the plantation.”
One clever slave saw the Federals carrying off his blankets and those of the white family. To save his precious goods, he told the soldiers not to mix the blankets from the main house with his blankets, because the house girls all had “some catching disease.”
Female Companionship
Sherman’s men also felt freer to seek female companionship amongst the slave population. One female ex-slave from Winnsboro, South Carolina would recall the Yankees as “a bad lot dat disgrace Mr. Lincoln dat sent them here. They insult women both white and black.” Many of the white Federals believed black females were legitimate prey. Some officers believed that “colored women are proud to have illicit intercourse with white men.” A Northern missionary based in South Carolina reported that “no colored woman or girl was safe from the brutal lusts of the [white] soldiers – and by soldiers I mean both officers and men.”
One slave described the coming of Sherman’s soldiers as “scandalous days.” Heddie Davis thought they “was de worst people dere ever was. Every Yankee I see had de stamp of poor white trash on them.” Another slave commented, “They trolled around big ike [sic] fashion, a bustin’ in rooms widout knockin’, talkin’ free to de white ladies, and familiar to de slave gals, ransackin’ drawers, runnin’ deir bayonets into feather beds, and into de flower beds in de yards.” This at a time when polite males did not speak to a woman to whom he had not been introduced.
Dr. Campbell suggests the nature of the crimes and the general illiteracy of the black population have resulted in only a few records of this brutal treatment of a vulnerable population. A white woman in Camden, South Carolina said she had heard of abuses of Negro women, but could not offer specifics. She said the women were so ashamed they “could not bear to tell.” Anther white woman told her sister that Yankees had stripped black women and “spanked them round the room” in front of their mistress, apparently meaning their [former] owner. “They violated all the women servants publicly and left them almost dead, unable to move.”
Dr. Campbell acknowledges that for white Southerners, tales of poor treatment by Yankees would seem self-serving. But it makes some sense. Social mores would prevail among the white women that might not hold among a more vulnerable population. One Union soldier complained that there were no white women in South Carolina, only these “damn Negro wenches.” The same soldier later overcame his distaste. But, he said he only took Negro women because the white prostitutes who came here were diseased. e The same soldier would lat The same soldier overvcame
Source:
Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North From the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Washington D.C.: Univ. North Carolina Press 2003), pp. 45-48.