It made Union soldiers look horrible

Fair enough. That has a level of truth that can not be argued.

You're an ignorant idiot.

But you're not doing anybody any favors by perpetuating such a black and white view of history. Atrocities are committed on both sides of wars. As somebody who cited the nuking of Japanese cities and the firebombing's of Germany, surely you can understand that atrocious acts are sometimes necessary evils in time of war, but are still atrocities, and still evils. Sherman's march (and the human toll it took), the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the firebombing of German cities...these were horrific acts that ultimately saved more lives than they took by preventing war from being prolonged, but are they any less horrific? Certainly not for the people who were there. History is not a comic book with moral absolutes, heroes who are pure good, villains who are pure evil. There are moral nuances to Southern slavery, Islamic terrorism, even Naziism that cannot possibly be understood by simplifying things into the clumsy but convenient terms of good guys and bad guys. The priority of a student of history should always be to seek out human realities, and truth free of bias...not to try to find moral justification, or categorize things based on modern ethical standards.

It is at least an oversimplification to say the the Civil war was about slavery. Many Southern people (confederates, not unionists) including members of the Lee family advocated a gradual abolition that would eventually phase out the morally problematic and archaic slave system without ruining the South's economy. Foreign powers, the British Empire most notable among them, were capable of sympathizing with the South economically, while favoring the Union morally. Britain, despite being vehemently antislavery, came close to entering the war on behalf of the Confederacy, before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made British Support impossible from a public relations standpoint. Lincoln deliberately turned the war from an economic into a moral war (a stroke of PR genius), and it is more palatable to modern sensibilities to continue to view it as such, than to grapple with uncomfortable moral ambiguities.

I believe that by "poor treatment" Sheepdog was not so much referring to acts committed during the war, but to the decades long policy of subjecting the South to exploitation and needless humiliation after the war. German and Japanese reconstruction were complete by the 1980s (though it must be acknowledged that a form of occupation still exists to this day, with US bases prevalent in both nations). As Sheepdog pointed out, the South was still scraping by in abject poverty until the Second World War, and even today, parts of the South are still feeling the effects of the Civl War. Despite the romanticized image presented famously by "Gone With The Wind" and other pop culture artifacts, there is still definitely a pervasive sense that not just Confederates, but "Southerners" are the bad guys. Movies like "Django Unchained" and "The Wild Wild West" are evidence of the sort of ahistorical anti-Southern propaganda that is still tainting the American public's perception of the Civil War. Any history in which there are "good guys" and "bad guys" is sloppy history in my opinion...at least where war is concerned.

"getting their rocks off on the way to Savannah..."

Civilian deaths are a tragic, but inevitable consequence of war. Rape will never be anything but a sadistic, vindictive act with no conceivable positive outcome. Millions of lives were ultimately saved by ruthless civilian bombings that forced the axis to end WWII before a land invasion in Asia, and further bombings of European and Asian cities became necessary. But were any lives saved because as many as 2 million women in Berlin were raped by soviet soldiers (10% of whom died as a result)? Sherman's march to the sea devastated the South to such an extent that no more of her son's could be sacrificed to a pointless cause. But did the Civil War end any sooner because some union soldiers "got their rocks off."

...That is one moral absolute I believe history does have room for.

That's fair, of course, but neither do you have much reason to like the North (historically speaking).

The emancipation was a wonderful, long term side affect of Union victory. But In the immediate, everyday reality of the War black people had almost as much reason to fear the Union army as white people, if not more so. Thousands of civilians died in the South as a result of starvation, malnutrition, disease or exposure. While I do not agree with some here who classify these as "Northern war crimes" (few of these deaths were directly inflicted by the Union army), it is nonetheless clear that the consequences of Northern invasion aggravated these factors. But the point is not so much that this is something the North did to the South (blame games are pretty historically useless), but that black and white people across the south both suffered these effects. Black and white noncombatants died side by side in famines and epidemics, as well as occasionally as a result of violence or military maneuvers. On some small farms and plantations, black and white also worked side by side, banding together in the darkest days for their mutual survival. An empty stomach doesn't particularly care which side is which.

More directly, while the sexual violence against slaves by Southern masters in antebellum times is infamous, few have acknowledged that rapes during the Civil War itself were overwhelmingly perpetrated against women of color by Union soldiers. White Southern women were also sexually assaulted, but enslaved and free women of color were considered an easy object of aggression. In some cases, Northern "troops and ruffians" even forced white mistresses to watch as they raped slave women...in essence a sexual terror tactic. (it should be noted that the Union Army didn't officially condone such acts). Please see the article below:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/rape-and-justice-in-th e-civil-war/

Furthermore, some of the worst racial atrocities in American history occurred in the New York City draft riots of 1863, in the heart of the North, in the middle of the Civil War. Rioting Northern city dwellers (largely immigrants of Irish decent) looted and burned the homes and businesses of free black citizens, beating, torturing, and lynching any black people they came across. The cherry on top of the cake was when the rioters set fire to an orphanage for black children (fortunately the children had been evacuated).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots

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