Peacefully settled, wrongly and destructively invaded, and standing in the ruins with a handkerchief to the forehead, exclaiming "What shall we do..." Not an uncommon, and often repeated, southern theme in many small communities.
I read this recently, which has some interesting clues on similarity:
The Myth
Since it is not at all difficult to show that Union forces exercised a directed severity during the war, an obvious question emerges: If the Union military effort against Southern property was indeed discriminate and roughly proportional to legitimate needs, why have so many interpretations insisted for so long that it was indiscriminate and all-annihilating? One likely reason such myth-making has been pervasive is that it has served a variety of agendas.
In the postwar South, the legend of Yankee ruffians waging campaigns of fire and vandalism was surely useful in several respects. First, it helped Southern conservatives to convince their fellow white Southerners that a terrible wrong had been done them--a conviction that resonated well with the humiliations of military Reconstruction. Second, it played into the myth of a South beaten down by brute force, not defeated by military art and certainly not by internal divisions or a failure of national will. Third, the myth of Yankee atrocities accounted for the economic disaster that gripped the South after 1865. As historians have since pointed out, the destruction of Southern crops, livestock, factories, and railroads, and other infrastructure was anything but complete; much of the damage was repaired within a few years. The really serious economic losses can be traced to two things: the emancipation of slaves, which wiped out billions of dollars in Southern wealth, and the worthlessness of Confederate scrip, bonds, and promissory notes into which many Southerners had sunk most of their savings. Both, of course, could be better traced to the South's decision to secede--and so begin the war--than to anything that Union soldiers did. Thus the emphasis on hard war, as an explanation for the economic devastation of the South, may have diverted attention from Southern responsibilities in bringing on the war, and thus for the outcome.
I suspect the mythology served less political purposes as well. Imagine that you are a woman living in the 1880s or 1890s, and that you are telling your grandchildren what it was like to live through the passage of Union armies through your village or farm. Obviously you survived the encounter, and probably so did the house you lived in. You may tell your grandchildren that the slaves ran off, that a Yankee soldier pilfered the silverware, that other soldiers tracked mud through the parlor, that they ransacked the smokehouse and burned the cotton gin. All these details will be accurate enough. But how can you satisfactorily convey the mortal peril you remember having felt, the fear that you might be assaulted, raped, or killed? It seems to me that you could hardly expect to convey this by pointing out that Yankee soldiers rarely did such things. Instead you would have every reason to repeat stories, however dubious, of assaults, rapes and murders that occurred elsewhere. This mythical retelling would serve an important purpose: It would keep alive a sense of the terror you felt, whereas a fully accurate retelling would make your fears seem misplaced. Further, the sense of violation that attended the invasion of your house by Union soldiers and the loss of precious family heirlooms would be undercut if you were to emphasize, for example, that in fact only a few soldiers got inside the house and that an arriving officer soon ordered them to leave.
"Thieves, Murderers, Trespassers": The Mythology of Sherman's March
Mark Grimsley
Copyright (c) 1997 by Mark Grimsley
