u/From-Yuri-With-Love

It should be noted the historical marker he tries to use as proof says the town was largely deserted. No rape. No gunfire on civilians. Nothing in it resembles the caption sitting above it.

The History is on June 11, 1863, an expedition under Colonel James Montgomery—acting on orders from General David Hunter—landed at Darien and found it nearly empty. Two soldiers who were there wrote it down independently. Sergeant George Stephens counted one old woman and two white residents who’d asked to be left behind. Corporal James Gooding counted fewer than twenty people, mostly enslaved. No resistance. No engagement. Montgomery gave the order to burn it regardless—an empty town put to the torch on principle, not provocation.

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, for his part, did not quietly comply. He told Montgomery directly he wanted no part of it; Montgomery took full responsibility himself. Later, Shaw wrote to his wife calling the whole ordeal a “dirty piece of business” and “as abominable a job as I ever had to share in.”

Shaw was disgusted, but he complied with the order to have a company assist only because Montgomery was his superior officer and refusing would mean facing a court-martial for mutiny during wartime. Shaw lamented, “after going through the hard campaigning and hard fighting in Virginia, this makes me very much ashamed of myself.”

Sergeant Stephens wrote home that “the men of this regiment have a distaste for this sort of warfare—we want to enter the field honorably—to fight a legitimate warfare.”

Credit to Sarah Pioggia on the History of the event.