The Last House in Randolph Col. C.C. Walcutt of the 46th Ohio Volunteers had his orders. In response to an attack by Southern guerrillas on the unarmed ship Eugene, bound for Memphis from St. Louis, Walcutt was to take a regiment and unit of artillery to Randolph, Tenn., about 30 miles north of Memphis along the river, near where the ship had been fired on. Once there, Walcutt and his men, in the words of his commander, William Tecumseh Sherman, were to "destroy the town, leaving one house to mark the place." Sherman had instructed Walcutt to "let the people know and feel that we deeply deplore the necessity of such destruction." Despite this regret, and even though he was sure that those actually responsible for the attack were already beyond the reach of Union forces, Sherman declared in his orders that "the cowardly firing upon boats filled with women and children and merchandise must be severely punished." Walcutt's troops did their work well. The next day, Sept. 25, 1862, Sherman could write in his official report that "the regiment has returned and Randolph is gone." There's no doubt the destruction of Randolph was a harsh response. However, given Sherman's reputation as an unrelenting scourge of Southerners in the last year of the war, it's easy to overlook that such collective punishment of civilians for guerrilla activity was largely accepted by the leading legal authorities of his time. In fact, both Union and Confederate commanders punished civilians in similar ways throughout the Civil War. Sherman's plans did not include the wholesale destruction of Southern towns when he became military governor of Memphis on July 21, 1862. At that time his main concern was to create a base of operations for deeper Union thrusts into the Confederacy. Perhaps surprisingly, Sherman tried to revitalize the moribund river town and secure the well-being of its 23,000 inhabitants. Sherman would recall in his memoirs that when he first came to Memphis he "found the place dead; no business doing, the stores closed, churches, schools, and everything shut up." He immediately launched several courses of civic improvement. He allowed traders and farmers to bring goods into the city along five closely guarded roads. He looked after the destitute by detailing Union soldiers to provide them with firewood and food as well as organizing relief efforts by well-off citizens. Sherman also got the city government up and running: he put the mayor back into office, assisted in the collection of city taxes, and helped reorganize the police force to secure the streets against unruly and dangerous elements. "I caused all the stores to be opened," he recounted later, and "churches, schools, theatres, and places of amusement to be reestablished." Sherman also allowed many saloons to operate - principally for the tax revenue they generated - as well as "parlor houses," in which both white and black women plied their trade. After the war at least one Union officer would remember the black prostitutes who were so grateful for the Yankees' occupation of the city that they waived their normal fees. Of course, more than simple altruism informed Sherman's treatment of civilians. His ultimate aim was to further the Union war effort. The question that plagued him, though, during his five months in Memphis was whether Southern civilians could be made part of that effort. At times, realistically or not, he allowed himself to hope that a firm but just military administration would convince Southerners in the area to reaffirm their loyalty to the national government. "I will do nothing hastily," he declared a few days after taking control of the city. Only if any persons manifest any active hostility will I deal with them summarily. A few weeks later he explained to a subordinate that he would afford "every opportunity ... to the wavering and disloyal to return to their allegiance, to the Constitution of their birth or adoption." By early November he wrote his friend Ulysses S. Grant that, at least in Memphis itself, he was "satisfied a change of opinion is rapidly growing here which I endeavor to foster & encourage." But Sherman felt differently about matters outside the city. "Tis idle to talk about union men here," he wrote in an Aug. 11 letter to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, referring to Tennessee's western interior. Many want Peace, and fear War & its results but all prefer a Southern Independent Government, and are fighting or working for it. A few days later, writing to Grant, Sherman flatly concluded that he was "certain there is nothing but Guerrillas" between Memphis "and Senatobia and Tallahatchee," Mississippi towns over 100 miles to the south. Events soon made clear the seriousness of the problems Sherman faced. There were the guerrilla attacks on Union supply trains and patrols. But also, as he explained in an Aug. 20 letter to his wife, "The River is far from being a safe place for boats. It is only 1000 yards wide and as it falls the boats at places must run close in to Shore. I expect we will be much troubled this fall by this course. Indeed they were. The attack on the Eugene in late September was only one of many guerrilla attacks on Union boats as they made their way to Memphis. As a professional soldier, Sherman would have found any sort of guerrilla activity angering, but he was particularly incensed by boats' being fired on from the shores of the Mississippi. Not only were the boats unarmed and filled with civilians, but, as he underscored in his orders to Colonel Walcutt, they usually carried "stores and merchandise for the benefit of secessionist families, whose fathers and brothers are in arms against us." Because the guerrilla attacks persisted, by the end of September Sherman seems to have given up the idea of converting Southerners outside Memphis to the Union cause. Instead, he focused on suppressing partisan efforts by imposing collective punishment on civilians in the areas where these attacks occurred. The destruction of Randolph was one such punishment. In mid-October, when more Union boats were attacked and several civilians killed or wounded, Sherman went even further. He ordered Walcutt's men back out into the field, this time requiring them "to destroy all the houses, farms, and corn fields" over a 15-mile area. Only if Walcutt was satisfied that a family had not been "rendezvousing" with guerillas - as hard as that burden of proof would have been to satisfy - would the Union soldiers exempt its property from the order of destruction. Sherman was not troubled in the least by his policy of collective civilian punishment. In a characteristic display of rhetorical excess, the general thundered a few days later to a Southern woman that "God himself has obliterated whole races from the face of the earth for sins less heinous" than the acts he was punishing. Sherman also decided to make the people of Memphis pay for the war-making sins of others. He publicized an order calling for the expulsion of 10 pro-Confederate families for every boat fired on. Eventually some 40 families were marked for removal, and while Sherman in time rescinded most of those orders, at least a few families and many individuals were sent out. In addition, at least once he contemplated using captured guerrillas as human shields on Union boats, but there is no evidence he actually did this. Historians continue to debate the extent to which Sherman was committed in 1862 to the "hard war" practices he later inflicted on Southerners as his armies cut through Georgia and the Carolinas. Some scholars hold that at this time Sherman wholeheartedly embraced these practices; others interpret his actions and words in Tennessee more conservatively, holding that his views on waging war against civilians were still evolving. Whatever the case, it's clear that during his time in Memphis Sherman had concluded that suppressing the rebellion would involve more than simply defeating the Confederacy's armies in the field. Winning the war required strong measures against the entire Southern population, whatever those measures turned out specifically to be. "They cannot be made to love us, but may be made to fear us," Sherman famously wrote to Grant on Oct. 4, reflecting on his efforts to fight the guerrilla insurgency. "We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South," he went on, "but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that . . . they are still mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war." No one fully realized it at the time, but in September 1862 a lone abandoned house augured a coming grim reality. The last remnant of Randolph foretold how the war would fundamentally change, and how hundreds of thousands of civilians across the South would suffer terror, destruction and deprivation before the fighting ended. Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook. Sources: Michael Fellman, "Citizen Sherman"; Charles Bracelen Flood, "Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War"; Mark Grimsley, "The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865"; John F. Marszalek, "Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order"; William Tecumseh Sherman, "Memoirs"; Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, "Sherman's Civil War: Selected Correspondences of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865"; The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Vol. 17, Parts 1 and 2. Thom Bassett is writing a novel about William Tecumseh Sherman. He lives in Providence, R.I., and teaches at Bryant University.