MORNING GLORY: Will President Trump go full Sherman in the war on Iran?

If James McPhersons 1988 classic history of the American Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, has been translated into Farsi, the remaining leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps may want to read it quickly, especially the chapters about General William Tecumseh Shermans two famous marches. 

The first was the fabled “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah. The second was the less well known but longer, more difficult and far more devastating for the locals march from Savannah to North Carolina, a march that ravaged the home of secessionist fanaticism, , and did so in a way that the states people did not think possible given the geography of its marshy lowlands. 

Of course America has waged and won wars against tyrants before, but we do not love to wage war. We have never been a conquering empire, but when necessary, our leaders have been ruthless when it comes to concluding war.

“If we can march a well appointed army right through Jefferson Davis territory,” Sherman appealed to a skeptical General Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln, it would be “a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power that Davis cannot resist.”

“I can make the march and make Georgia howl,” Sherman added to the doubters Grant and Lincoln. Sherman was proposing something not done before in the long years of war to preserve the Union and free the enslaved — abandoning his lines of supply and living off the land his army would despoil.

Like Lincoln, Sherman “believed in a and a soft peace,” writes McPherson, and once approved by his chain of command, Sherman delivered on the “hard” in devastating fashion. 

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman said.

“It takes a simple, direct and ruthless man to wage war,” wrote a different American general in a different war. 

General George Patton recorded that blunt statement in his diaries, according to another great popular historian, Rick Atkinson, in his “An Army At Dawn” about Operation Torch in WW2.

Sherman had anticipated Patton by nearly 80 years.

“We must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war,” Sherman argued, saying of the Confederacys elite that his armies would make them “so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

“It is mercy in the end,” he concluded. 

Throughout Shermans two marches, Lincoln was open to peace on his terms. The greatest president even took a surprise trip to Grants headquarters to meet the Souths peace commissioners in person on February 3, 1865.

Because Lincoln was adamant about preserving the Union and freeing the slaves, his offers were rejected by Confederate President Jefferson Davis when they were returned to him. Lincoln had even offered some level of compensation to the Southerners who would see their enslaved freed, but that was not enough for the fanatics in Richmond. 

The South was already shattered at that point. The value of the confederate dollar had plummeted to 2% of its 1861 value and there was no more meat for General Robert E. Lees Army of Northern Virginia which continued the doomed effort to save Richmond. But the leadership of the Confederacy had devolved into denial of reality. 

Davis three days after Lincolns offer, and press reports at the time relayed to the North that the tone of the Confederacy’s president was one of “unconquerable defiance.”

“We will never submit to the disgrace of surrender,” Davis thundered. 

But, of course, the South effectively did submit on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered the largest of the Confederate forces to the Union, accepting defeat. Those two unnecessary months of war that occurred between Lincolns offer and Appomattox saw Shermans “70,000 Blue avengers” ravage South Carolina where the Civil War had had its start. “I almost tremble for her fate” Sherman said, but he did not hesitate to unl