It's Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2021, a date in U.S. history memorable for nuts and grandiose Christmas gifts -- both courtesy of U.S. Army generals. As I wrote in this space five years ago, "Nuts!" was the succinct response given on Dec. 22, 1944, when German officers approached the U.S. lines under a truce flag during the Battle of the Bulge, demanding the surrender of Bastogne, a strategic city being held by the 101st Army Airborne Division. Surrounded, and with falling snow preventing resupply efforts or air cover, the Americans were warned that their foe stood ready to "annihilate" them.
The commanding general of the "Screaming Eagles" was Anthony McAuliffe, a West Point man who differed from most members of the military in one conspicuous way: He did not use profanity. "Nuts" was as strong a word as "General Mac" employed. As his reply was relayed to the Germans, however, Col. Joseph Harper helpfully added context. "Nuts," he explained, means "Go to hell."
The ostentatious Christmas present I mention was the city of Savannah, puckishly gifted to Abraham Lincoln by Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman on this date in 1864.
On Dec. 22, 1864, Gen. Sherman completed his famed 300-mile "March to the Sea" in Savannah, capturing not only the seaport and surrounding forts, but some 250 siege guns and 31,000 bales of cotton -- all this, he wrote to Abraham Lincoln, constituting a Christmas present to his commander-in-chief.
Sherman had started his march in Atlanta five weeks earlier, and as left the burnt-out Georgia capital on the Decatur Road, Sherman paused on a hilltop to look down on the site of the pivotal fighting the previous July, during which the city had fallen.
As he reminisced in his autobiography, Sherman's mind wandered back to the Battle of Atlanta and his departed friend Gen. James B. McPherson. His eyes sought out -- and found – "the copse of wood where McPherson fell."
"Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city," Sherman continued. "Away off in the distance, on the McDonough Road, was the rear of [Gen. Oliver] Howard's column, the gun-barrels glistening in the sun, the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south; and right before us the Fourteenth Corps, marching steadily and rapidly, with a cheery look and swinging pace, that made light of the thousand miles that lay between us and Richmond."
At that very moment, a marching band in the Union ranks struck up the anthem that Sherman called "John Brown's Soul Goes Marching On." Soon the men picked up the tune and began singing. "Never before or since have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!' done with more spirit, or in better harmony of time and place," Sherman wrote.
Many years after the fact, it became faddish to point to Sherman's March to the Sea as a fateful step on the doomed road to "total war" -- the doctrine that resulted in the unbridled carnage of the 20th century. It's also all the rage these days to impugn America's founding and its past as some sort of enshrinement of white power. Let's counter those twin revisionist narratives -- one from "Lost Cause" Southern apologists and the other from 21st century "anti-racist" radicals -- with this reminder: Sherman and the other men in the Union Army fought, marched, and sang to end slavery. And, at great personal cost, they succeeded.
Moreover, in stark contrast to the depredations of the trenches and sneak attacks and air raids and death camps of the world wars of the 20th century, William Tecumseh Sherman issued specific instructions to his commanders covering everything from how many freed slaves to let stay with them (as many as they could feed) and how to forage (for food, not revenge) to refraining from verbally abusing (let alone brutalizing) Southern civilians.
There was this in Sherman's orders as well: "As for horses, mules, wagons, etc., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly."
In that simple way was the class component of the Civil War succinctly and matter-of-factly acknowledged by a ranking Union commander. I think of this sometimes while walking in our nation's capital past McPherson Square, where a statue of Sherman's friend still stands.
Gens. Sherman, McPherson, and Ulysses Grant were all born in Ohio, as were two other distinguished Civil War veterans -- future U.S. presidents James A. Garfield and William McKinley.
Although his brother John Sherman served in the U.S. Senate and harbored presidential ambitions, William famously eschewed politics to the point that he rarely voted, not even for Abraham Lincoln. And Sherman really did say, in a telegram to a Republican Party kingmaker during the 1884 campaign season, "I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected."
I doubt he would have been a rigorous reader of RealClearPolitics, or care much about our polling averages. He didn't put much stock in the prevailing opinion, let alone party platforms, and wouldn't have valued polling data. "I make up my opinions from facts and reasoning, and not to suit anybody, but myself," he once said. "If people don't like my opinions, it makes little difference as I don't solicit their opinions or votes."
In a June 2, 1863, letter to his wife, Sherman was even more succinct on the subject of public opinion: "Vox populi, vox humbug," he wrote.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
