Sherman’s March to the Sea (I)

choi

Alan Blinder, 150 Years Later, Wrestling With a Revised View of Sherman’s March; A strategy to destroy the South’s war machine, not homes. New York Times, Nov 15, 2014
www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/15 ... shermans-march.html
("Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. * * * To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated ‘Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts’ and talks of how, 'contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.' Sherman’s aggressiveness, the marker concludes, ‘demoralized Confederates’”)

Note:
(a) "ATLANTA — This city would seem a peculiar place for sober conversation about the conduct of William T Sherman. To any number of Southerners, the Civil War general remains a ransacking brute and bully whose March to the Sea, which began here 150 years ago on Saturday [Nov 15-Dec 21, 1664; '[t]he campaign began with Sherman's troops leaving the captured city of Atlanta, Georgia, on November 15 and ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21'  Wikipedia], was a heinous act of terror. * * * Yet this week, Atlanta became the site of a historical marker, sponsored by Georgia Historical Society] * * * near the picnic tables at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum
(i) sober (adj):
"3: sedate and rational <a sober attitude to a problem>
* * *
5: free from exaggeration or speculation <he told us the sober truth>"
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/sober
(ii) "The "historical marker" in the quotation is a metal sign, whose photo the online version of the report shows, with a legend: "The historical marker for Gen William T Sherman and the March to the Sea, which began where the Carter Center lies."

(b) "Stephen Davis, the author of 'What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta'”
(i) publisher: Mercer University Press
(A) Mercer University
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_University
(private; coeducational; in Macon, Georgia; Established 1833; The school was named for Jesse Mercer, a prominent Baptist leader who provided a founding endowment and who served as the first chairman of the board of trustees)
(B) The English surname Mercer: "a trader, from Old French mercier, Late Latin mercarius (an agent derivative of [noun feminine] merx, genitive mercis, ‘merchandise’)"
(ii) year of publication: 2012