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IPFS News Link • Secession

The Last Americans To Believe in the Voluntary Union of the States

• https://www.lewrockwell.com By Thomas DiLorenzo

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John C. Breckenridge, Aug. 12, 1803, regarding the New England secession movement

"No state . .  can lawfully get out of the union . . . acts against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary . . ."

Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

"Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people [of the South]."

Letter from General Sherman to his wife, July 31, 1862, explaining his purpose in the war

Anyone who knows anything about the War to Prevent Southern Independence has heard of General Sherman's "march to the sea" through Georgia, a pleasant euphemism for all the rape, pillage, plunder, murder, arson, and terrorism of the civilian population by Sherman's "bummers," under his direct, personal supervision.  It wasn't just a pleasant springtime march through the South with bands playing "Yankee Doodle" and "John Brown's Body."  Less known, however, is what Sherman's rapists, plunderers, and murderers did in South Carolina.  A new book by Karen Stokes entitled South Carolina in 1865 compiles letters and diaries by South Carolinians of the day describing what happened when Sherman's "army" went through Columbia, Charleston, and other South Carolina towns.  (Stokes is an archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society).