William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

1 General Sheridan's dispatch reciting the destruction of the Shenandoah Valley is in the following words: ‘In moving back to this point, the whole country, from the Blue Ridge to the North Mountain, has been made entirely untenable for a rebel army. I have destroyed over two thousand barns filled with wheat and hay and farming implements; over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over four thousand head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than three thousand sheep. This destruction embraces the Luray valley and the Little Fort valley, as well as the main valley.’ This dread bulletin recites acts some of which are indefensible. The destruction of the crops, provision, and forage was allowable; for this deprived the enemy of immediate subsistence, and operated to the end to induce him to surrender. But the burning of the mills and farming implements cannot be justified, for that was to inflict vengeance upon the country for many years to come. It may indeed be said that the desolation of the Shenandoah Valley was a special measure designed to cover the frontier of the loyal States from invasion; but this, though plausible, is not a sufficient reason. I have cited above the destruction of the Palatinate, and the case is quite in point, both in respect to the act itself and the verdict history will pronounce thereon. ‘When,’ says a legal writer of the highest authority, ‘the French armies desolated with fire and sword the Palatinate in 1674, and again in 1689, there was a general outcry throughout Europe against such a mode of carrying on war; and when the French minister Louvois alleged that the object in view was to cover the French frontier against the invasion of the enemy, the advantage which France derived from the act was universally held to be inadequate to the suffering inflicted, and the act itself to be therefore unjustifiable.’—Twiss: Law of Nations, vol. i., p. 125. See also Vattel, L. III., c. 9,§ 166.