Conservative web site The New York Sun says that a new social media trend called “Sherman Posting” is catching on at Tic Tok and other sites where NeoConfederate posts are met with memes and short videos trumpeting the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 and predicting the downfall of 21st Century Confederate-aligned “AltRight” groups. According to reporter Russell Payne, Shrman posting:
involves text, videos, and images evoking nostalgia for the Union during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The trend, which is particularly popular on reddit and TikTok, is intended as counter-programming to the romanticization of a Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, in some corners of the internet, and is intended to show support for the Union’s cause.
Posts range widely in terms of content, with some being outright comedic and others being slightly more serious. Some glorify the Union victory, while others prod at potential future conflict….
It’s common for Sherman posts to feature images of Sherman or of President Grant…. “Sherman didn’t go far enough,” is a common line featured in the posts.
Other common features of Sherman posts include young people dancing in “Union blues” to remixes of “Union Dixie” or edits of people “dunking,” as one user put it, on Confederate sympathizers on the internet.
The Sherman posts are popping up across every major social media platform, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Most of the posts are concentrated on reddit and TikTok. A Sherman posting subreddit on reddit has nearly 70,000 members.
On TikTok, most posts are tagged as “Sherman’s March.” Videos with the tag have been viewed more than 120 million times on the platform.
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When I think of Sherman’s March I think of the novel written by E. L. Doctorow simply called The March. It’s not an easy read because it follows the activities on the march of about a dozen or so different characters and slowly braids their individual strands into an overarching narrative. One pair of characters is a white photographer and his African-American assistant who are tracking Sherman and it’s not until well along into the novel that you realize the photographer’s purpose is to gain sufficient proximity for an attempt to assassinate Sherman while recording the event for posterity. It never occurred to me until recently to check the historical record to verify if any such attempt on Sherman’s life was ever made. I suppose it could have happened without attracting notice, but Wikipedia certainly seems to have overlooked it. Apparently it was all simply a literary device employed by Doctorow to unify an otherwise sprawling narrative.
I like E. L. Doctorow, but I never read that novel.