Stamp of Disapproval

In September 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman finally succeeded in taking Atlanta. After surveying his well-equipped army in the Georgia city, he proposed a bold plan which he thought would be so destructive to military resources and civilian morale that the exhausted Confederates would throw up the sponge and end the Civil War. In November, after General Grant had reluctantly sanctioned this maneuver, General Sherman assured everyone that he would "make Georgia howl," and began his historic March To The Sea. A month later, when the March ended at Savannah, Georgians had ample reason to howl and howl they did. By the tough general's own conservative estimate, the damage done amounted to $100,000,000. It was South Carolina's turn to howl next. General Sherman headed his troop: north and began destroying things right & left. By the time the capital city of Columbia was sacked and burned, South Carolinians were howling as loud as their Georgia neighbors.

Last week General Sherman had South Carolina and Georgia howling again. This time the harsh old warrior was going forth as an engraved image on a harmless new 3-c- stamp with likenesses of his old accomplices, General Ulysses Simpson Grant and General Philip Henry Sheridan at his side. But to many Georgians and South Carolinians, General Sherman is still repugnant in any form. At Columbia, where an indignant legislator heatedly recalled that the west wall of the State Capitol still bears scars made by Sherman's cannon balls, the South Carolina House oi Representatives passed a resolution calling upon South Carolina's national Senators and Representatives to demand that the Post Office Department stop the memoria issue because the military career of General Sherman "is a history of rapine, carnage, destruction and murder waged principally against defenseless women and little children. . . ." At Atlanta, the Georgia Senate considered a similar resolution while the House argued a proposal to approve the stamp only if the Government at this late date admit and pay for the damage Sherman's army did in Georgia.

The Post Office Department nevertheless announced that the stamp would go on sale this week. Southerners were assured that Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan ("Stonewall") Jackson would be memorialized on a 4-c- stamp next month.

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