MEMPHIS, October 22,
1862.
Miss P. A. FRASER, Memphis:
DEAR LADY: Your petition is received. I will allow fifteen
days for the parties interested to send to Holly Springs and Little Rock to
ascertain if firing on unarmed boats is to form a part of the warfare against
the Government of the United States.
If from silence or a positive answer from their commanders I
am led to believe such fiendish acts are to be tolerated or allowed it would be
weakness and foolish in me to listen to appeals to feelings that are scorned by
our enemies. They must know and feel that not only will we meet them in arms,
but that their people shall experience their full measure of the necessary
consequences of such barbarity.
The Confederate generals claim the Partisan Rangers as a
part of their army. They cannot then disavow their acts, but all their
adherents must suffer the penalty. They shall not live with us in peace. God
himself has obliterated whole races from the face of the earth for sins less
heinous than such as characterized the attacks on the Catahoula and Gladiator.
All I say is if such acts were done by the direct or implied concert of the
Confederate authorities we are not going to chase through the canebrakes and
swamps the individuals who did the deeds, but will visit punishment upon the
adherents of that cause which employs such agents. We will insist on a positive
separation; they cannot live with us. Further than that I have not yet ordered,
and when the time comes to settle the account we will see which is most cruel—for
your partisans to fire cannon and musket-balls through steamboats with women
and children on board, set them on fire with women and children sleeping in
their berths, and shoot down the passengers and engineers, with the curses of
hell on their tongues, or for us to say the families of men engaged in such
hellish deeds shall not live in peace where the flag of the United States
floats.
I know you will say these poor women and children abhor such
acts as much as I do, and that their husbands and brothers in the Confederate
service also would not be concerned in such acts. Then let the Confederate
authorities say so, and not employ their tools in such deeds of blood and
darkness. We will now wait and see who are the cruel and heartless men of this
war. We will see whether the firing on the Catahoula or Gladiator is sanctioned
or disapproved, and if it was done by the positive command of men commissioned
by the Confederate Government, you will then appreciate how rapidly civil war
corrupts the best feelings of the human heart.
Would to God ladies better acted their mission on earth;
that instead of inflaming the minds of their husbands and brothers to lift
their hands against the Government of their birth and stain them in blood, had
prayed them to forbear, to exhaust all the remedies afforded them by our
glorious Constitution, and thereby avoid "horrid war," the last
remedy on earth.
Your appeals to me shall ever receive respectful attention,
but it will be vain in this case if General Holmes does not promptly disavow
these acts, for I will not permit the families and adherents of secessionists
to live here in peace whilst their husbands and brothers are aiming the rifle
and gun at our families on the free Mississippi.
Your friend,
W. T. SHERMAN,
Major-General,
Commanding.
SOURCE: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of
the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume
17, Part 2 (Serial No. 25), p. 287-8
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