I'm like my grandfather, I get emotional when I hear certain music. The Band's version gets to me, I think it's the lead singers emotion he puts into it. The man who wrote it, Robbie Robertson, (half-Mohawk Indian and half Jewish Canadian) said about the song...

"The song's central lament—"You take what you need and you leave the rest / But they should never have taken the very best"—is an apparent commentary on the utter destruction of the Southern homes, cities and infrastructure that was the result of a war that lasted over four years and in which there were approximately 600,000 fatalities.

Robertson claimed that he had the music to the song in his head but had no idea what it was to be about. "At some point [the concept] blurted out to me. Then I went and I did some research and I wrote the lyrics to the song." Robertson continued, "When I first went down South, I remember that a quite common expression would be, 'Well don't worry, the South's gonna rise again.' At one point when I heard it I thought it was kind of a funny statement and then I heard it another time and I was really touched by it. I thought, 'God, because I keep hearing this, there's pain here, there is a sadness here.' In Americana land, it's a kind of a beautiful sadness."

Wikipedia...

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On a whim I looked up a bio on General Stoneman. I found this...

"Stoneman assumed command of the Cavalry Corps of what would be known as the Army of the Ohio. As the army fought in the Atlanta Campaign under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, Stoneman and his aide were humiliated to be captured by Confederate soldiers outside Macon, Georgia, becoming the highest ranking Union prisoner of war. He was a prisoner for three months."

He went on to command cavalry in Virginia again later in the war and committed several successful raids.
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David Upton