If James McPherson’s 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 Sherman’s 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, South Carolina, and did so in a way that the state’s 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.
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“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 hard war 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.
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“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.
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“We must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war,” Sherman argued, saying of the Confederacy’s 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 Sherman’s two marches, Lincoln was open to peace on his terms. The greatest president even took a surprise trip to Grant’s headquarters to meet the South’s 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. Lee’s 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 addressed the Congress of the Confederacy three days after Lincoln’s 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 Lincoln’s offer and Appomattox saw Sherman’s “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 unleash his forces.
“The war in South Carolina wasn’t pretty and hardly glorious,” concluded McPherson, “but Sherman considered it effective. ‘My aim then was to whip the rebels. To humble their pride, to follow the to their inmost recesses and make them fear and dread us.’”
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Sherman did just that. As did the relentless Grant to his long-time foe Lee. Presiding over the long and bloody war from Washington, D.C., was a man of supreme vision and moral clarity, the indomitable Lincoln, misjudged by almost everyone from before the beginning of the war. He had never demanded emancipation before the war was begun by secessionist fanatics who imagined an empire of slavery from the old South into Mexico and extending into Cuba.
Lincoln ordered done what had to be done to break the will of the fanatics in Richmond and spread throughout the confederacy. Like Presidents Wilson, FDR and Truman in the next century, Lincoln had his terms and would accept nothing less.
Lincoln’s price for peace grew higher as the cost of Union lives grew higher too. The 20th century presidents were far from Lincoln in wisdom and eloquence. It is arguable that Wilson was our worst president despite his vast intellect and refinement. Wilson could not win the peace after America won World War I, and in the failure was the seed of the Second World War.
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FDR, of course, was a deeply flawed man when it came to character but a superb leader in the Second World War, and like Churchill, ruthless when necessary. Truman did what had to be done and didn’t lose any sleep over the atomic bombs which saved tens of thousands of American lives. Presidents do what they think best in wartime. History assesses and often second-guesses them, but they are obliged to act in the moment.
Lincoln was a man of great soul and sorrow but also of indomitable spirit. Like Sherman and Grant and Lincoln’s famed “Team of Rivals,” Lincoln persevered even when a significant peace party sprang up in the North and even when he lost 25 of his 123 Republican seats in the midterms of 1862.
We have no idea what will follow President Donald Trump’s deadline to the IRGC tonight — we can dispense with the fiction that the mullahs are running Iran now — but there is a very hard core at the heart of the American experience of which we have to hope the IRGC generals are aware. If Trump taps into that and decides to do to Iran’s oil and energy and transportation infrastructure from the air what Lincoln allowed Sherman to do to the Confederacy in Georgia and South Carolina via an army on the ground, it will not be unprecedented. It could in fact eventually result in freedom for an enslaved people.
Trump’s critics are legion, and they are especially enraged when he posts what they conclude to be vulgar and unnecessarily provocative posts. What the impact of those posts are on the IRGC we cannot know. Eventually we will. In the meantime, Iran’s people yearn for a freedom that only Trump can deliver and probably only through hard measures.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6 p..m ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996, where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
