Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Historian, Lee Kennett, On Lincoln and His Violations of International Law

"Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified (as victors generally do) in stringing up Lincoln and the entire Union command for violations of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants."............................................................................Oh, and if you think that the black people of the South fared any better under Union occupation, think again. This quote is from Mark Grimsley's 1995 book, "The Hard Hand of War" - "With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked."...That and there were literally hundreds of first hand accounts (many of which were ultimately put into letters and diaries and currently stored at the University of South Carolina) of black women being brutally raped by these very same soldiers (a large chunk of them having previously been thugs, big city criminals and immigrants recently released from European jails). Really nice, huh?................................................................................P.S. And I also want to point out here that professors Kennett and Grimsley are NOT libertarians and that they are both generally pro the North in their overall analysis. So, no, there isn't any sort of a southern bias period.

2 comments:

Les Carpenter said...

How dare you Sully the memory of Lincoln and the Union army!

BB-Idaho said...

Kennett was a Georgia history professor. I'm thinking that like
Shelby Foote (southerner through and through, but labeled Lincoln as one of the few geniuses of the era) he could shake off any bias.
As for example, his book on Sherman is pretty fair.