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Joseph Rhett Vanderford
English 1102
Sullivan
March 4, 2013
Evil Flame
What makes someone a villain? No one knows for sure. I believe that a villain is
someone who goes out of his or her way to cause harm and damage to people’s lives. General
William Sherman is known throughout all of Georgia as one of the greatest villains in history.
His name alone causes Southerners to cringe. Some would say that he was a war hero, but no one
will hear a true southerner say it. Not everyone believes the villain is doing wrong; sometimes,
many people agree with them. However, I personally believe Sherman is a villain- not because
he was a Union General in the Civil War, but because of his unnecessary destruction of the
beautiful Georgian lands.
William Sherman was not always a villain. Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio on
February 8th, 1820. His father was a member of the Supreme Court of Ohio and a lawyer.
Unfortunately, Sherman’s dad died when he was just a small boy. Sherman had many brothers
and sisters, and his father’s death left his mother incapable of caring for them all. William was
raised by Thomas Ewing, a senator and attorney. He sent Sherman to a Military Academy for his
schooling. People first noticed that Sherman was crazy when he asked for two-hundred thousand
troops to drive the Confederate army out of Kentucky. Everyone started to view him as insane
when the press started publishing stories declaring his insanity. All of the claims against
Sherman’s sanity drove him into a depression. At that point, he first started to transform into a
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villain. The Union’s head General sent Sherman to the west because of all the pressure that he
was facing.
William Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia from the Confederacy. The capturing of
Atlanta contributed largely to President Lincoln’s re-election. Once the election ended and
Lincoln was re-elected, Sherman told his army of sixty-two thousand men to burn all of the
buildings that the confederacy kept supplies in. The government buildings were not the only
buildings that were burned- many homes and private stores were burnt to the ground also.
Sherman should have supervised his troops, but he did not and as a result, thousands of innocent
southerners were left homeless.
Sherman ruined many Southerners’ homes on his “March to the Sea”, which spanned
from Atlanta to Savannah. Imagine all of the Confederate soldiers walking home from a war they
had just lost. They were hungry, dirty, tired, and sick. Looking forward to getting home, taking a
nice bath, eating some extraordinary homemade food, they mostly wanted to see their lovely
wives and beautiful kids. They had walked hundreds of miles and finally walked to a no longer
existent front porch. There is nothing left of the house but ashes and scolded braces where it once
stood. Everything that they worked for and lived for was burnt to the ground. That is the scene
that many of the Confederate troops came home to. This horrific scene was painted by the hands
of William Sherman.
Altogether, Sherman’s March to the Sea created around one-hundred million dollars in
property damage, including destroying confederate army supplies. I can understand his
destruction of the confederate supplies because he was fighting a war that he needed to win;
however, allowing soldiers to burn and raid houses that were owned by civilians was inhuman.
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Many of the houses were even owned by widowed wives accompanied by small children. Where
were these people with no homes, burnt crops, and no belongings to sell supposed to turn?
Before Sherman’s destructive March to the Sea, Georgia’s land was unscarred and
beyond beautiful. I know the plantations were from the pictures I have seen. Just thinking about
all the beautiful land and homes being burnt sets me on fire. Any sane man would be incapable
of burning such beautiful land the way that Sherman did. The huge plantation homes with
graceful, white columns, the thick green grass, the trees that lined up perfectly, the crystal clear
creeks and the never ending fields of snow white cotton. How could anyone burn something so
beautiful? After Sherman came through, the houses were gone, the grass was burnt, the trees
were toppled, the creeks were black from ash, and the fields were just dirt. They say that
Sherman gave mercy to one city known as Madison. He said that it was so beautiful that he just
could not burn it. I go through that city about six times throughout the summer and it is a very
pretty city, but that one good deed does not make all of his evil actions right.
Sherman’s goal was to destroy the South’s morale and make their life hell for seceding
the Union. After his march to the sea he moved on to the Carolinas and also burnt down the
government owned buildings. Ulysses S. Grant did not want Sherman to burn the Carolinas
originally but he talked Grant into the idea in hope of higher success. The Union would have
succeeded whether they burnt the Carolinas or kept it standing. He wanted to destroy South
Carolina more than North Carolina because they were to first to secede and he was successful.
He didn’t do nearly as much damage to North Carolina.
Union General William Sherman will forever be known as a villain by the people of the
south because of his heinous, unforgivable actions. He captured Atlanta and many other cities in
Georgia and the Carolinas. After the election in November of 1864, Sherman started a march.
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Sherman had around sixty-two thousand soldiers, caused over one-hundred million dollars’
worth of property damage, and burned many homes and plantations while raiding and stealing
anything worth value. Sherman left thousands homeless with nowhere to go. All of the things
Sherman did to the south during the civil war were evil, and the few good things he did could
never overcome all of the pain and suffering he caused the families of the south at the end of the
Civil War. If anyone committed the same acts that Sherman did during the civil war in today’s
society they would be considered a terrorist. No one should be able to destroy so many lives and
still be considered a hero by anyone. While some of the south was in the wrong for owning
slaves, it could have been taken care of much more peacefully than it was and not all southerners
owned slaves at the time. Sherman will never be a name people are happy to hear in Georgia, and
he will remain the most hated man of the south.
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Works Cited
"The James Holmes Movie Shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and the Meaning of "Evil" : The New
Yorker." The New Yorker. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2013.
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/james-holmes-aurora-and-themeaning-of-evil.html>.
"William Tecumseh Sherman." About North Georgia. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2013.
<http://ngeorgia.com/ang/William_Tecums
In my paper I used Logos and Pathos. I used pathos in paragraph four trying to target the
reader’s emotions by putting them in the soldier’s shoes. It would make them feel remorse for
the soldiers and ultimately convince them that what Sherman did was wrong. For logos I used
factual information about the damage he caused. I told the reader that he caused one-hundred
million dollars’ worth of property damage which is considered to be a lot of money these days.
Anyone would go mad knowing that one-hundred million dollars’ worth of property and crops. I
also used logos when I talked about how many troops he had and the actual march itself. I feel
that the two rhetorical appeals that I picked would work best for the villain William Sherman.