Beschreibung:

Lot of 46, including 11 war-date letters written by Private Dick Ransom to his friends and family accompanied by modern photocopies of additional correspondence, 22 war-date letters from Ransom's mother, father, and sister, as well as photographs and other personal items. "War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman. In many ways, Sherman was a proponent of total war. He and the troops under his command were responsible for the “March to the Sea,” which destroyed cities and towns in a 40 to 60-mile-wide war path through Georgia. Yet, it was not the first time his men set fire to cities. Two years earlier, on Sherman’s Yazoo Expedition from December 20, 1862, to January 2, 1863, one of the thousands of soldiers under Sherman’s command, Dick Ransom, witnessed and participated in the looting and burning of Southern towns and cities. While traveling down river, Ransom wrote extraordinarily detailed letters home about the movements and the actions of Sherman’s unruly bunch, revealing their cavalier attitudes towards ceasing Southerners’ property and how some Union soldiers viewed African Americans as “creatures” and treated them like slaves. Five days into the expedition on board steamer Des Arc, Ransom wrote home: The Commander of the Division we are now in is Gen. A.J. Smith, a West Pointer. and the men do not like him at all He is no such man as Morgan L. Smith of our Division we are the right of the right division now before we were the left of the left Division There are four Divisions here under Gen. W.T. Sherman The two Smiths-Gen. Stiel’s and Gen. Morgan’s Ours is most all Ohio troops. We were selected. (our two guns and ten men) to go on this boat as Gen. Smith’s artillery escort and there are two companies of Infantry and ten men of Cavalry So we are not crowded as other boats are (about 25 miles above Vicksburg, December 25, 1862). Similar to the behaviors of soldiers during the “March to the Sea” several men broke rank and burned a town. Ransom wrote: On Monday morning some of the soldiers set a house on fire in the town and soon enough more were going to burn the most of the place…Tuesday night we went as far as Gaine’s Landing Ark and tied up for the night the place begun to be burnt before dark and kept up all night and in the morning but one or two houses were left. Gen. Smith ordered that the men that set the fires to be tied hand and foot and thrown into them or if the fire was burnt out when they were caught he would throw them tied into the river and if one was caught before two in the morning he should be hung and one was caught and brought in and he told him he should be shot at two o’clock the next day but before the time came he told him he might go that Gen. Sherman had pardoned him and gave him agood talking to and let him go (about 25 miles above Vicksburg, December 25, 1862). On a lighter note, mischief (or insubordination, depending on one's perspective) happened aboard the ships. Ransom wrote: Since we have boarded on this boat we have drawn our own fodder from barrels boxes and etc. around the boat such as flour, bacon, coffee, sugar, rice, molasses, vinegar, candles, soap-hard tack and sow belly and some of the boys have been down in the hold and tapped sundry barrels of pure government “jiggers” which is said to be the “real stuff” direct from the inspectors without reducing (Pecan Grove, Louisiana Corral Co., January 5, 1862). A few soldiers took advantage of their liberties and stole a large amount of goods from below. Ransom wrote: Last night about nine o’clock [the Colonel] had a guard of infantry placed all over this boat to protect the “hard tack” …but the boys say that there was more stolen last night than altogether since we have been on the boat so that it must be the infantry that did it all but some of the infantry guards lost their ramrods some of their bayonets some of their cartridge boxes &c.