be." Upon Sherman's death, his son Thomas publicly declared: "My father was baptized in the Catholic Church, married in the Catholic Church, and attended the Catholic Church until the outbreak of the civil war. Since that time he has not been a communicant of any church." Historical reputation In the years immediately after the war, Sherman was popular in the North and well regarded by his own soldiers. At the same time, he was generally respected in the South as a military man, while his conservative politics were attractive to many white Southerners. By the 1880s, however, Southern "Lost Cause" writers began to demonize Sherman for his attacks on civilians in Georgia and South Carolina. The magazine Confederate Veteran, based in Nashville, dedicated more attention to Sherman than to any other Union general, in part to enhance the visibility of the Civil War's western theater. In this new discourse, Sherman's devastation of railroads and plantations mattered less than his perceived insults to southern dignity and especially to its unprotected white womanhood. Sherman was thus presented by Lost-Cause authors as the antithesis of the Southern ideals of chivalry supposedly embodied by General Lee. In the early 20th century, Sherman's role in the Civil War attracted attention from influential British military intellectuals, including Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, Maj. Gen. J. F. C. Fuller, and especially Capt. Liddell Hart. American historian Wesley Moody has argued that these commentators tended to filter Sherman's actions and his hard-war strategy through their own ideas about modern warfare, thereby contributing to the exaggeration of his "atrocities" and unintentionally feeding into the negative assessment of Sherman's moral character associated with the "Lost Cause" school of Southern historiography. This led to the publication of several works, notably John B. Walters's Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War (1973), that presented Sherman as responsible for "a mode of warfare which transgressed all ethical rules and showed an utter disregard for human rights and dignity." Following Walters, James Reston Jr. argued in 1984 that Sherman had planted the "seed for the Agent Orange and Agent Blue programs of food deprivation in Vietnam". More recently, historians such as Brian Holden-Reid have challenged such readings of Sherman's record and of his contributions to modern warfare. The influential literary critic Edmund Wilson found in Sherman's Memoirs a fascinating and disturbing account of an "appetite for warfare" that "grows as it feeds on the