re: #90 Timothy Watson

Had an ex-coworker who compared Lincoln to Hitler and Stalin.

In the deep south there is a huge body of folklore built around family stories, essentially legends, of the alleged atrocities committed on Sherman’s March. I saw a really interesting study of this that attempted to correlate these stories with Sherman’s actual progress through the region. It considered only the stories that could be identified with a specific documented place (“grandpappy’s farm outside Clinchfield”). It found that many of the claims involved locales that were up to 200 miles from Sherman’s documented line of march, and that the average deviation was over 60 miles. Now, Sherman’s foragers did occasionally range that far, but 60 miles as an average is absurd.
I can’t guarantee that I remember the details exactly, but they are close. Unfortunately, there is no link to it that I can find. Y’all might have better luck.