Words of The Butcher!!

"To the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or SHE is disposed of the better. Satan and the rebellious saints of Heaven were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equal would not be unjustified.

"Gen. Sherman in a June 21, 1864, letter to Lincoln's Sec. of War, Edwin Station wrote, "There is a class of people men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order." Stanton replied, "Your letter of the 21st of June has just reached me and meets my approval."

"Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of it's roads, houses, and PEOPLE will cripple their military resources.I can make the march, and make Georgia howl."

"There is a class of people [in the South], men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order."

"I have deemed it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go South and the
rest North."

"The Government of the United States has in North Alabama any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war to take their lives, their homes, their lands, their everything, because they cannot deny that war does exist there, and war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact."

"Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully too, and another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many many people, with less pertinacity than the South, have been wiped out of national existence. To those who submit to the rightful law and authority, all gentleness and forbearance; but to the petulant and persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better."

Enemies must be killed or transported to some other country.

"The United States has the right, and the power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle - if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper."

Writing to his wife in 1862, Sherman said, "We are in our enemy's country, and I act accordingly the war will soon assume a turn to extermination not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people."