"You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about."

William Tecumseh Sherman, December 1860
from a letter to his friend, David Boyd - who was a southerner and a professor at a college in Louisiana - several months prior to the beginning of hostilities.

"I declare the confederacy Excomunicate Traitoris and must be purged!" -General Sherman


"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace."


He was the first Superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy which later became Louisiana State University