On July 30, 1864 Confederate cavalry under General John McCausland’s command entered Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and demanded that residents pay $500,000 in greenbacks or $100,000 in gold. Confederates planned to use the money to compensate Virginia residents whose homes in the Shenandoah Valley were burned by Union General David Hunter’s troops. After Chambersburg residents refused to pay, General McCausland followed General Jubal Early’s orders and burned the town. (this map shows which sections of the town were burned). General McCausland’s forces left the following day with Union cavalry in pursuit. Philadelphia resident Sidney George Fisher heard about the attack on August 1st. Confederates, as Fisher noted, had “set fire to the place without giving the people time to carry anything away.” Fisher believed that the Confederate actions were the results of the “prolonged” conflict. “The barbarous act shows what a bitter spirit is animating the contest,” as Fisher explained. The Bangor (ME) Whig and Courier, a Republican paper, also expressed “[sympathy for] the suffers at Chambersburg.” Yet “if the atrocious outrage shall awake Pennsylvania to the performance of duties she has long and shamefully neglected in her own defense,” the editor argued that this incident “will in the end prove to be one of the greatest blessings which has been vouchsafed us since the war began.” You can learn more about this attack in Benjamin Schneck’s The Burning of Chambersburg (1864) and Everard H. Smith’s “Chambersburg: Anatomy of a Confederate Reprisal,” American Historical Review (1991).
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Why did the South burn Chambersburg?
One reason was just the nature of the South. SOuthern leaders were the kind of men who would torture women, sell infants, and burn to death mean who would fight back against slavery — and claim God told them to do it all.
We have white washed to an absurd degree the evil nature of the South. We have pretended Lee did not torture young girls — though Lee delighted in the torture of such girls, and kept a “Hunting List” in his own account book, and paid six times the normal bounty to catch one young girl, and screamed at her during her torture, then sold her child as extra punishment.
These were men who would gladly order unspeakable pain inflicted upon the most innocent people, and think themselves Godly for doing so.
Consider what George Mason said in 1780, himself a slave owner, and contemporary of George Washington. HE said slaver was a “slow poison” that rotted the minds and corrupted the souls of those raised from birth to see a large segment of humanity as contemptible and deserving of torture. These men may learn to speak and dress like “gentleman” but they were merciless tyrants.
He could not have described Lee and Davis any better.
Our text books and our history has, to an absurd degree, been written by the Southern apologist who still to this day worship these cruel vile men, and distort, twist, and lie about what they did and said.
To understand the Civil War, you have to understand 1820-1860, or you are just clueless. You have to understand how free speech was outlawed in the South, and how the government in the SOuth even told religions what they could, and could not, preach.
And you have to understand the extreme “religious” excuses by the Southern leaders, which they no more believed in, that the Tooth Fairy, but just used as an excuse to terrorize, torture, and take control.
If they had believed their religious nonsense, they would have continued to worship their “God of Slavery” after the war, at least in words. No one said they had to give up their God of Slavery.
But the day after Appomattox, not one Southern leader ever spoke of that fake nonsense God again. The God they said ordained slavery, the God they used to excuse torture, killings, revolution, terror. The God they screamed about while whipping slaves, selling infants, and burning men to death who resisted.
If you don’t understand the excuses and extremism of the South, you won’t “get” the Civil War, which was really an extension of it. In a very real sense, the Civil War was a religious war, and Lincoln’s God won.
The Southern God of slavery lost. Lincoln’s God killed the fake God of slavery so completely, that not only did they stop talking about that God, but for the last 150 years, their descendants have tried to pretend that God never even existed in the first place.
That is one thorough and complete obliteration of a fake God of Slavery
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