Sherman’s letter to the people of Atlanta, a city he believed must fall for his march to the sea to continue and for the North to win the Civil War. Though he’d once lived in the South, though he had not begun with any strong objection to the practice of slavery, he now saw himself as an instrument of a power that must not be slowed down. To view Atlanta, this city that lay before him and his plans, as the sum total of its people would be to make the whole affair personal, not professional, and thus impossible. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” he told them as he rejected
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