“In the complex and convoluted course of Civil War writing, everyone is liable to make a mistake sometime,” said Stephen Davis, the author of “What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta.”

“They’re bending over backward to give Sherman a whitewash that he does not deserve,” he said.

Jack Bridwell, a longtime leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter in Georgia, was more blunt: “How they can justify saying anything other than that he’s Billy the Torch, I don’t know.”

The reassessment of Sherman comes at a time when the South continues to weigh how to recognize its complex racial history. Earlier this year, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights opened in Atlanta, the same city where Gov. Nathan Deal last year ordered the removal of a statue of an avowed white supremacist from the grounds of the State Capitol. (Officials said that the relocation of Thomas E. Watson’s likeness was to accommodate a construction project and that the state could not afford to return the statue to its former position.)

But the Confederate battle emblem still flies on the grounds of the South Carolina State House, and there is a push underway in Mississippi to amend its Constitution to enshrine “Dixie” as the state song.

The new look at Sherman’s legacy, scholars of the Deep South readily acknowledge, challenges deeply held opinions of the general.

Image W. Todd Groce Credit Stephen Morton for The New York Times

“It has not been a legend that white Southerners have been particularly eager to surrender because it was all part of their sense of grievance, that they had been so severely wronged during the Civil War,” said James C. Cobb, a professor at the University of Georgia and a former president of the Southern Historical Association. “The old stereotype is a long way from disappearing. There’s this sort of instinctive sense of Sherman embodying the whole Yankee cause and the presumed vindictiveness and unrelenting harshness that the white South was subjected to.”