Bummers

Often highly destructive in nature, bummers became notorious among Southerners for looting and vandalism, and they did much to shatter the illusion that the Confederate Army was successfully defending its territory on all fronts.

The bummers' activities in Georgia and the Carolinas helped ensure that the South would be unable to sustain its war effort; additionally, bummers' destruction of industrial property rendered the garrisoning of southern cities largely unnecessary by destroying most, if not all, of those facilities in their path that replenished the Confederate war effort (such as cotton gins, farms, foundries, lumber mills, etc.).

Sherman’s army reached Fayetteville the day before, and at 9 o’clock Sunday morning, a party of raiders rushed in upon our peaceful home.

"[6] Union General Edward Follansbee Noyes said that in "this rollicking picnic expedition there was just enough of fighting for variety, enough of hardship to give zest to the repose which followed it, and enough of ludicrous adventure to make its memory a constant source of gratification.

"[9]In American cartoonist John L. Magee's 1865 cartoon Jeff Davis Caught at Last: Hoop Skirts and Southern Chivalry, a Union soldier threatens the disguised Jefferson Davis, "[Drop] that bucket and hood or I'll drop you quicker than a Duch lunch [sic] can slide down a Bummer's windpipe.