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War Crimes against Southern Civilians. By Walter Brian Cisco. (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 2007. Pp. 220. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-58980-466-1.)
Walter Brian Cisco, a professional writer, seeks in this work to convince a broad popular audience of the number and gravity of crimes committed by Federal forces during the Civil War. From eight states he draws many examples of unnecessary killing, imprisonment, coercion, exile, destruction, looting, and electoral interference. He covers in roughly chronological order incidents from the 1861 St. Louis riot to General William T. Sherman's 1865 march through the Carolinas.
Cisco believes that "all Americans are less free today, and live in a more dangerous world," because of the destruction of the right to secession, the strengthening of the central government, and the introduction of a...