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than many. He was viewed by freed slaves on his march to Savannah as a conquering hero, and many followed him--something he tried to discourage. In Atlanta he met with a number of black leaders and decided to hand out land and equipment he had confiscated--the origins of "forty acres and a mule"--but Johnson later overturned his grants. One of the black leaders at the meeting commented that Sherman treated the freed slaves with courtesy at least equal to that he showed Stanton and the others from Washington.
Sherman gets labeled a racist for two main issues. First, he mishandled the many freed slaves following him (some even blame him for Johnson's reversal of his land grants), and second, he was opposed to freed slaves becoming troops in his army, even though the government had encouraged this. Both are taken somewhat out of context--Sherman's problem with the freed slaves was that he could not support them, and constantly encouraged them to stop following him (though they had no idea what else to do). His opposition to slaves in his army was was because he didn't want them to have to fight. He made some famous comment that Southerners were claiming the North couldn't defeat them except by fomenting rebellion amongst the slaves, and he wanted to prove them wrong.
He certainly felt, as most white people then (and many now) felt, that blacks were inferior to whites, but he did not seem to have an adverserial racism towards them. He was more paternalistic.
As for Ebenezer Creek, that was the result of one of his officers, Jefferson Davis (not THE JD). It was his plan, and his aggressive racism, that caused the slaughter.
Sherman also fought the Indians in the rest of his career, and was horribly brutal towards them, but that was more because of his attitudes towards war than towards Native Americans. At the same time, he was critical of America's treatment of Native Americans, especially on reservations. He once wrote in a letter to Savannah in response to them asking for leniency that he didn't start the war, and that the only way he saw to end the war was to make it so brutal that those who did start it wanted to stop it. After that, he said, he would be happy to dine with them, and would be their fiercest protector. That was his mentality in a nutshell. His actions were inspired by his attitude towards war, I believe, more than by racism.
And for the record I'm a Southerner and hate the bloody bastard.
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