- Historic Sites October 1957 | Volume 8, Issue 6 Perhaps
General William Tecumseh Sherman had caught the idea. It might
be going too far to say that he had thought the thing through,
but something in him seemed to respond instinctively to the
changed condition. He fitted in, where Stuart and Semmes did
not. He was no man for the knightly gesture or the grand
flourish that both of these men understood so well, but he knew
precisely what to do when he came across the enemy’s corncribs
and machine shops and he did it without a qualm. What he did
finally won the war, but it was not very pretty. For a firsthand
glimpse of it you might read When the World Ended , which is the
diary of a seventeenyear-old girl who lived in Columbia, South
Carolina, edited by Earl Schenck Miers and brought forward here
as an illustration of the unhappy fact that war in the modern
world embodies things which the romantic outlook overlooks. Emma
LeConte lived in Columbia just when Sherman’s destroying army
came marching into the place