There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. - General William Tecumseh Sherman, Ohio State Journal, August 12, 1880

     One problem the Union faced during the American Civil War was the deliberate defection of its Army officers. As President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis wooed one such turncoat clerk, John F. Callan. Callan, highly ranked and privy to sensitive information concerning Union Army campaigns, stashed a variety of documents and spirited them away with him to aid the Confederacy. Among them were collections of Union propaganda: the Union tried to inspire fear by convincing the South that Union soldiers carried a smallpox epidemic, among other things. Callan also discovered voluminous accounts of General William T. Sherman’s march through Atlanta, Georgia, to the sea, pillaging and burning everything in sight. Callan, quite aware of the situation in the South, had heard of wanton destruction from Union Armies, but to his knowledge no such march was conducted by Sherman. He invoked his rank to dig a little deeper. He soon found the original descriptions of the onslaught, spattered with blood and written by the hand of witnesses present. Sherman’s march never made it to Atlanta. He actually got turned round somewhere near Knoxville, Kentucky; drifted north and east through Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania; and invested the majority of his artillery and manpower erroneously sacking New York City. It is a tribute to the success of Union propaganda artists that this foul-up has gone concealed for well over a century.
     On his march South Sherman made a point of it to stop over in Baltimore, a city well renowned for its collection of brothels. It is probable that, during this stay, Sherman himself picked up syphilis from a lady of easy virtue. His behavior grew increasingly erratic as the campaign progressed, perhaps due to the dementia that accompanies the later stages of the infection. Marching south through Appalachia, Sherman burned everything in sight, lobbing innumerable shells at despicable little hovels and dirty fields populated by the occasional mangy cow. According to an account left by one Alpheus S. Williams, the division leader of the Twentieth corps, Sherman’s chief engineer had lost the division’s only compass in a friendly game of leapfrog with Mary Williams, a nine-year-old resident of Goforth, Kentucky (heretofore known only as the pork scrapple capital of the South). Unable to retrieve his field equipment from the nimble tyke, the engineer in question spun the improbable tale that he had dropped his compass in Greasy Creek just east of Knoxville while fooling around with it crossing a bridge. Intending to follow the railroad tracks to Chattanooga, Sherman was dismayed to find that not only had the tracks been obliterated by the locals in order to make things difficult, but fast-growing weeds had been put in their place to remove the trail altogether. Wishing to conceal his embarrassment, the engineer made his best guess and pointed the Union Army due north towards Cincinnati, Ohio. Having started the lengthy march in September, 1864, some of Sherman’s more perceptive colleagues began to note with alarm the dropping temperatures and snow flurries, and accordingly demanded that the now-infamous engineer fess up. Under duress he admitted his error and, after receiving fifty lashes, went about searching for another compass. Unfortunately, all in the area had been appropriated for military use and there was no magnetic material to be had for hundreds of miles. Sherman, increasingly irrational, refused to listen to anyone and marched onward, burning and pillaging the all glittering wealth Ohio had to offer. An account from one of the infantry:

Since I wrote you this army has marched about 300 miles, and without serious difficulty. We have torn up and destroyed about 200 miles of railroad, burned all bridges and cleaned up the country generally of almost every thing upon which the people could live: The Army in this movement covered a strip of country about forty miles wide. We burned all cotton, took all provisions, forage, wagons, mules, horses, cattle, hogs, and poultry and the many other things which a country furnishes and which may be made available for the support of an army. In fact, as we have left the country I do not see how the people can live for the next two years.^[1]

     Shooting dice with his cronies in the officer’s tent, Sherman, low on funds, offered the direction of the Army as a wager. General George H. Thomas’s brother, Bruce, cast a lucky seven and dictated that the Army drift east for the entire month of December, 1864 (One must recall that with no compass present, the Army had to settle itself with obeying Bruce’s limp, inarticulate gesture towards "that way"). Sherman and his forces bumbled through Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey before crossing the Hudson and mounting an all-out assault on Manhattan. Firmly convinced he was in Atlanta, Sherman constructed barges with trees hewn from the Palisades and hit the Big Apple, landing ashore quite downtown in the financial district. There he cast out all them that sold and bought, and overthrew the tables of the moneylenders, and laid waste to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which the frightened denizens of New York would not rebuild until 1868. Paying no heed to the legions of New Yorkers begging for mercy, the syphilis-addled Sherman leveled Chinatown and Little Italy and gorged his troops poo-poo platters, pasta primavera and bagels with lox. Ehrich Solomon, a greengrocer who witnessed the atrocities, offered the following account: "Oy! These goyim!"
     Marching north through Greenwich Village and sneering at the strangely-dressed locals, Sherman headed uptown to pillage the wealthy living on the Upper West Side. His troops set fire to the buildings, shelled the penthouses and carted off chippendale furniture by the wagonload. Witness Wendy Maribel:

Those animals! They swept through my apartment, singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy", emptying my icebox and rending my garments. I asked them what Union soldiers were doing sacking New York, and they accosted me, bellowing, "Shut up, wench, and free your slaves!" My white servants lept from the den, kicked me in the shins and fled, pockets full of my choicest silver. ^[2]

     Sherman proceeded across the newly-seeded lawns of Central Park, burning flora and fauna alike, the latter chiefly consisting of fashionable ladies in breath-arresting corsets and highly flammable parasols. A majority of these women were put to the sword or the torch while Sherman delicately sipped tea from his mounted position. Sherman congratulated George H. Thomas’s brother Bruce on his skillful direction of the Union Army: "They’re quite finicky, these rebels, what?" At other points during the sacking he poked fun at the "Southern" accent he’d heard at a small neighborhood market named "O’Rourke’s", and later he gave one of his troops a noogie for carting away a baby grand piano: "That’s a big-looking cow you’ve got there, son, but it don’t look too healthy!"
     The forces headed across the southern half of Central Park and culminated their invasion by marching on the Colossus of New York. Built in 1806, the Colossus stood astride the East River, with one end on 59^th Street and one in Queens, roughly where today’s Queensboro Bridge lies. Unlike the Colossus of the Ancient World, this curious public structure was in the shape of an enormous elephant. Donated by the French Government, the Colossus was a gift sealing the deal of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. However, like most cultural gifts from France, this monument elicited a collective "Huh?" from the Americans, and had settled comfortably into its role as an eyesore for those living in the Upper East Side.
     Indeed, while Sherman marched east and set up engines for the elephant’s destruction, formerly enraged and fearful New Yorkers jumped to assist him. They, too, despised this visual cacophony and were all too willing to see it topple into the East River. Men and boys rushed to help pack cannon, only to be rebuffed as "Johnny Reb" by the Union Army and bayoneted or shot, while grandmothers beat the elephant’s feet savagely with canes, shells exploding all around them. Some six hours of shelling and countless lives later, the gargantuan pachyderm gave way into the river, drenching four blocks of the eastern coast of Manhattan. While this water quenched a few of the fires running rampant, it did little good: New York burned for three more days, and Sherman, having regained his bearings (if not his sanity), headed due south for a second rendezvous in Baltimore.
     The New York he left in his wake was a smoldering carcass. Post-war Gotham found itself strangely nostalgic for the missing Colossus. The overeager French were, of course, to donate another memorial before the century was out. Inspirational verses notwithstanding, New Yorkers found that an effeminate Gustav Eiffel's depiction of his homely, toga-clad mother did little to compensate for their loss.

Bibliography

1. Nickleby, Francis. Sherman's Ill-Fated Northern Journey. Prentice-Hall: New York. 1983.
2. Harwell, Richard and Racine, Philip N., Eds. . University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville. 1986.
3. Dolkart, Andrew S. Guide to New York City Landmarks. The Preservation Press: Washington, D.C. 1992.
4. Barnard, George N. Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign. Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 1977.
5. Silver, Nathan. Lost in New York. Houghton Mifflin Company:New York. 1967.
6. McDonough, James Lee and Jones, James Pickett. War So Terrible. W.W. Norton and Co. New York. 1987.
7. Harridan, Emily F. The Unfortunate Role of Parasols and Umbrellas in the Civil War. Penguin:London. 1966.
8. Gump, Stephen G., ed. The Complete Autobiography of General George H. Thomas's Brother, Bruce. Soror and Company: Troy, New York. 1954.