“If they had behaved differently; if they had come against us observing strict discipline, protecting women and children, respecting private property and proclaiming as their only object the putting down of the armed resistance to the Federal Government, we should have found it perhaps more difficult to prevail against them. 

But they could not help showing their cruelty and rapacity; they could not dissemble their true nature, which is the real cause of this war. If they had been capable of acting otherwise, they would not have been Yankees, and we should never have quarreled with them.” 

Judah P. Benjamin 1865, noting the depredation by the Union Army in Virginia.