The Burning of Brooklyn: William Tecumseh Sherman and the Bummers

The word “bummer” was first coined during the Civil War to describe the Union troops under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman who “lived off the land” during Sherman’s march through Georgia by pillaging the country side.  According to American fighting Words and Phrases Since the Civil War, Second Edition (via The Civil War Parlor), “bummer” is:

(3) A generic name for the destructive horde of deserters, stragglers, runaway slaves, and marauders who helped make life miserable in the war torn South. Bummers robbed, pillaged, and burned along with General Sherman and his army in Georgia. These men were known far and wide as Sherman’s bummers. The term was not shortened to “bum” until after the war (c. 1870). It is almost certainly a modification of the German Bummler (“loafer”).

In November and December of 1864 Sherman led 62,000 men from his Military Division of the Mississippi across Georgia, from Atlanta to Savannah.  Sherman decided that the best way to win the war was to destroy the ability of the South to continue the war by demolishing infrastructure and agriculture and by demoralizing Southern elites by demonstrating that their homes far from the front were not safe from war.  So he cut a sixty mile wide swathe of destruction through the Confederate heartland.  His letter to the inhabitants of Atlanta, ordering them to evacuate before he occupied the city contains the famous lines,

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.

A few weeks later, after the city was evacuated, Sherman gave orders to burn it to the ground.  He then set out on his march

As he set out on his campaign, Sherman ordered his troops to forage for themselves, and to take what they wanted from the towns and farms they encountered along the way.  By this method, he was able to do away with supply lines the maintenance of which would slow the advance of his army.  Sherman not only sped up the advance of the Union troops through the South, but created a new tool in his war-fighting arsenal that allowed him to inflict damage on the Confederate home front without firing a shot.  In Special Field Order No. 120, he directed his officers not to allow any troops to enter private homes without invitation, but to feel free to take whatever food and resources could be had from fields, shops, and barns.  Resistance on the part of locals was to be punished by “devastation more or less relentless.”  And, when possible, the homes and businesses of the rich (“who are usually hostile”) where to be targeted for pillaging instead of “the poor and industrious.”  The results were cataclysmic for the Confederates.  Sherman took Atlanta, Savannah, and Charleston and tore up vital railroads and food production and manumitted thousands of slaves along the way.  His march crippled the Southern heartland.

Now we face our own cataclysm, here today.  As the Starfish Circus approaches Brooklyn again, inexorably like the thousand hungry maws of battalion of soldiers, we are faced with the ultimate bummer.

I say “ultimate” because, truly, it is the final iteration of the bummer, the final outrage, the perfect apex of being bummed.  I cannot imagine a future that eclipses how bummed Brooklyn will be.

When Greg and Dave come to the city, they will not reach out with a gentlemanly exchange of letters, they will not warn of their occupation and give us time to flea with our belongings and our families.  

No. They come to pillage us.

The Starfish Circus is a bummer because it will take our time and attention, it will take our laughter, and it will take a piece of our souls - leaving us emptier of life, but with a surfeit of shame.  Greg and Dave will run us down and grow stronger with our pain.  Dave will bark obscenities and Greg will spout non sequiturs until we capitulate to them with our laugher.  There will be other performances by talented people, yes, but that joy will never erase what we have seen.   

Brooklyn will burn, yes, but not with the fires of war, but with something altogether more sordid.  It will burn with the shameful knowledge of what we have seen and what we have allowed.  Unlike the rebellious citizens of Georgia, we will not have supported Walking the Room under duress, but will have allowed The Starfish Circus to take from us willingly with a smile on our face - we will be complicit in our own degradation.  And that will be the ultimate bummer.