The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans is the definitive work on this subject as far as I can tell.
If Jackson had been given free reign to his vision of a war of the "black flag" then it would have differed as much from Sherman's March to the Sea as the Rape of Nanking differed from strategic bombing. Given what I have read I have little doubt that Jackson would have waged as cruel of campaign as possible against the North. He was motivated by religious zeal and felt as though the hand of God guided his actions.
Such a campaign would have galvanized the Northern war effort in such a way as to make Sherman's March look like a stroll in the park. Lincoln would have been greatly saddened but even those Democrats who sympathized with the Copperhead movement would have called for harsh punishment towards the South. It's likely that Reconstruction would have lasted far longer and been much harsher with state boundaries being redrawn and war trials held in the aftermath. Hangings of the Confederate government would likely have followed. And there would be no Lost Cause ideology.
Benjamin
That's
your interpretation thereof; bear in mind, the author (Charles Royster) IMHO wrote that book with Vietnam-era blinders on in terms of wartime intent and so-called "terror tactics". The kind of devastation that might've allegedly been wrought by Jackson was one also entertained by the North (and not just by Sherman, may I add), and deliberately NOT put into place by the CSA government (who, for all their numerous flaws, knew what such actions would yield them should the war not turn out in their favor). Besides, much of the book uses recollections of of authors whose works were written 75 to 150 years after the Civil War occurred, which frankly takes away somewhat from the objectivity of the piece overall (rather fresh memories and such).
Remember this as well, that the author
himself caveats the book as an overlong essay, not a character study insomuch as looking at Sherman and Jackson's adaptation of new "shocking" tactics that stood in contrast to the generally less sanguineous attitudes (on BOTH sides) towards the war's conduct at its outset. Once the initial shock of just how bloody the fighting had gotten had dissipated, it was up to somebody to start trying to figure out how to knock the other side out of the war (much alike the development of strategic bombing, blitzkrieg, the atomic bomb, etc.). How anything Jackson
DID is somehow comparable to the Rape of Nanking (and the Chambersburg Raid, for example, hardly counts) is beyond me; personal memoirs are not necessarily smoking gun proofs of intent.
Arggh, hopefully this doesn't come across as rambling, I unfortunately have been pecking away at this reply on and off
