February 8, 1820–February 14, 1891
HIGHEST RANK:
Union General
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Aquarius
NICKNAMES:
Cump, Uncle Billy
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“Its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentation of distant families” (on war).
“War is all hell,” said William Tecumseh Sherman. And he oughtta know. Sherman’s Civil War truly was hell—for him, for those around him, and for the South he adored and crushed. His checkered career continues to inspire awe, respect, and hatred, virtually all at once, as if refracted through a prism into a spectrum of savageries. From his unbalancing intensity to his forward-looking strategy, from his searing eyes to the igneous hair atop his grizzled head, Sherman stands like a totem for the unprecedented destruction of America’s defining tragedy.
Blood and connections ensured him a place on the national stage. His father, an Ohio supreme court justice named Charles Robert Sherman, died when “Cump” was nine, forcing Mrs. Sherman to disperse her children for want of financial means. Red-headed Cump was informally adopted by Thomas Ewing, a prominent politician who ultimately gave much to the boy—including his daughter Ellen, whom Cump married in May of 1850. Ewing’s wealth and political clout (he would go on to become a senator and presidential cabinet member) did much for William in the chaotic years to come.
To begin with, Ewing was instrumental in getting him into West Point. There Cump proved especially adept at making his “midnight hash,” a potato-based concoction that was eagerly devoured by fellow cadets in Sherman’s room after lights-out to compensate for the academy’s dismal fare. And his talents didn’t stop there: He was sharp, animated, and popular, and he graduated sixth in his class.
In the years before the Civil War, William Sherman once suffered the misfortune of surviving two shipwrecks on the same day.
More culinary adventures followed in Florida, as Sherman spent much of his time catching turtles and spearing sharks during the Seminole “war.” His artillery unit was later posted to California during the war with Mexico, where Cump earned a brevet and made a valuable friend in Henry Halleck. Wary of supporting his family with a military salary, he resigned his commission in 1853 and embarked on a series of abortive ventures, proving that his decision to quit the Army was a bad one. Like Grant, Sherman was luckless in many fields: banking, finance, law. From San Francisco to Leavenworth, Kansas, Cump left a trail of frustrated dreams. Then in 1859 came a posting that seemed ideally suited to him: superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy. Since his posting in Alabama and Charleston as a young officer just after his stint in Florida, Sherman had warmly embraced the South and its cultural idiosyncrasies and come to look upon its people as his friends and neighbors. Now, ensconced in a position in Louisiana that took his learning and intellectual talents into account, he could make a home among the folks he had come to understand so well.
Or so he thought. If he understood Southerners, he certainly didn’t understand secession. In the wake of Lincoln’s electoral victory, as friends and associates in Louisiana bound their fates to a nascent Confederacy, Sherman felt like he had suddenly stumbled into an insane asylum. Worse, his decision to leave and go north was going to put him right back into the impecunious situation he had hoped was long behind him. But leave he did—into a future that frightened him.
Cump worried most about getting another job—which seems pretty silly now, given the fact that he had a West Point education and a war was breaking out. Moreover, he had better connections than most of the fellows pestering Lincoln for a battlefield commission. Two of Cump’s brothers were in a position to lobby on his behalf: Charles Taylor Sherman, who was organizing Ohio volunteers, and John Sherman, a prominent Ohio senator who would go on in later years to become a treasury secretary and secretary of state. They, in addition to brother-in-law Tom Ewing, a prominent lawyer and Washington insider, set the gears in motion (which included meeting personally with the president) to get their man a colonelcy in the infantry.
Voilà. If worrying over his profession seemed a little unwarranted, it was. But fretting had become one of his traits—and it would get much, much worse. Despite a lousy performance at First Bull Run, Cump was made a brigadier general of volunteers in the summer of 1861, bringing him up to the grade that many thought he should have had from the beginning. He was then sent west as part of the effort to keep Kentucky in the Union—a task so onerous that Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter and now his superior, felt compelled to resign, citing “the mental torture” of his command. Cump, who had intentionally asked Lincoln for a subordinate position, suddenly found himself in charge of the whole Department of the Cumberland. And if it had been hard on Anderson, it would be positively brutal on him.
Something had gone awry in Sherman since the beginning of the war, as if the natural sensitivity that had made him so famously gregarious and cerebral in his brash youth had been twisted by awful truths. Life was a mean struggle to survive; friends he had once esteemed (still esteemed) were now embarked on a mad scheme to ruin the country and destroy his command; and, most significantly, the war that everyone thought was going to be brief was certainly going to be anything but. Indeed, it promised to be an interminable, gory, and consuming conflagration. Why didn’t anybody see that except him?
There were other things that only he saw in Kentucky: such as Confederate brigades beyond number. He felt all but abandoned to face a Rebel host that—in his imagination—grew to prodigious proportions. Always suspicious of the quality of volunteer soldiers (an opinion that intensified in the rout of Bull Run), he saw the useless humanity paraded before him for training and despaired. That so many of them simply deserted every day hardly helped. And he knew all those Southerners who faced him—knew that so many of the army’s finest had gone with Dixie and would be coming for him. They were good, and they were his enemy. It was a hopeless situation as he saw it, driving him to pace and chatter and smoke and fume like some caffeinated sociopath.
And then there were the newspapermen, scorned by Sherman as little better than swamp gas. When they were forbidden to enter his encampments, the feeling soon became mutual—and those few who did get in printed stories that he had gone insane, an opinion shared by some in the government who had read his frantic correspondence and heard the rumors. Sherman was finished.
Well, not quite. There seems no doubt that Cump suffered at least a nervous breakdown in the fall of 1861—hardly the sort of thing that draws encomiums from one’s superiors in a time of war. Nevertheless, Sherman had allies. And one of them was Henry Halleck, into whose care he was now shunted in the wake of the Kentucky humiliation. Sherman remained anything but stable, however, a fact that would’ve ended his career were it not for his connections in high places and a thoughtful, laconic fighter named Ulysses Grant.
Sherman was senior in rank, a fact that disappeared when the two generals got to know each other while serving in Halleck’s western command. Drawn to his fellow Ohioan, Cump offered to waive his higher grade and take a command under Grant, beginning one of the most extraordinary and fruitful relationships in military history. They were both outwardly flawed, a fact that seemed entirely at home with their mutual understanding that war had become—and must be—a hard business devoid of glory. Such realism brooked no illusions, and they could be nearly as hard on each other as they were on the Rebels. But respect flowed between them as if through a palpable connection—galvanized, perhaps, by a shared confusion over how on earth either of them had become lead players in one of history’s grandest martial epics.
Sherman needed a new beginning, and he got it—sort of—at a bloodbath called Shiloh in April 1862. On the first day of the battle, his lack of caution allowed General Albert Sidney Johnston’s Confederates to make a surprise assault that drove the bluecoats almost to destruction on the banks of the Tennessee River. Grant’s decision to counterattack the next morning, however, turned the battle into a Union victory, partially erasing Sherman’s carelessness. With this awkward Renaissance, and a promotion to major general of volunteers, Cump began his climb to military immortality.
It was to begin along the Mississippi River, in the drive to take the crucial stronghold of Vicksburg. Again, Sherman’s tactical sense failed him in a tragic frontal assault at Chickasaw Bluffs, which doomed Grant’s attempt to take Vicksburg by a direct approach. Placed under the command of Major General John McClernand, Sherman played a crucial role in taking the irritating Confederate strongpoint at Arkansas Post. And in Grant’s successful capture of Vicksburg, Sherman led the Fifteenth Corps, wrapping up the campaign with the siege of Jackson. Promoted a brigadier general in the regular army, he took part in the relief of Rosecrans’s forces at Chattanooga, and secured the relief of Knoxville. By then it was the winter of 1863, and Sherman—a capable commander at best with plenty of mistakes and mediocrities to ponder—made history mostly with his words, particularly those spoken to a lady who took issue with his soldiers for their pillaging in the Knoxville campaign. “War is cruelty,” he responded to the red-faced woman. “There is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
Of all the year’s casualties, the one that hit Sherman hardest was that of his son Willy, struck down by typhoid fever at the age of nine while campaigning with his father. His loss was the final layer of Sherman’s waxing hardness; violence, destruction, and the necessity of Herculean duties had turned him into a machine of war. Like one who had stared down the abyss of psychosis (or something like it) and understood how terrible it was, he mustered the wrath and direction needed to bring an end to the great national craziness around him.
When Grant was appointed commander in chief, Sherman succeeded him to overall command in the West. Now at long last he would be afforded the stage and circumstances to which his peculiar talents were truly suited. Never a great tactician, Sherman’s assets lay in the organization and sweep of armies across vast distances, a mission appropriate not only to the scale of his calculations but also to the scope of his harsh vision. From here on out, he would essentially march the South to death.
Atlanta was first, arrived at by using superior numbers to outmaneuver his Confederate opponents. Despite a bloody repulse in late June at Kennesaw Mountain, Sherman repeatedly flanked his opponent’s positions, forcing them farther and farther back. Taking Atlanta in one of the most significant turning points of the war, he turned it into a pyre that burned for days. And then he made the most important decision of his life. Leaving enough men under George Thomas to deal with the remaining Rebel resistance to his rear, he divided his 62,000-man army into two columns and struck east, burrowing through Georgia’s vitals like a pair of parasitic worms. Unlike every Civil War general up to that point, he sought no enemy army, anticipated no climactic battle. He meant to cut his supply lines and feed his troops off the fat of the foe, turning them loose in the great expanse of home front that was feeding and arming the Rebel armies. He would eat the enemy’s chickens, tear up his railroads, steal his livestock, and burn his crops—and he would do it without butchering hordes of young men, which was more than his buddy Grant could say up in Virginia. Sherman would make the civilians of Georgia understand the privations that afflicted the soldiers that they were so eager to send to the front. And this, he was sure, would bring peace to a broken populace.
Like a prophet, Cump was unleashing the future—a horrifying future of total war. But in 1864, his decision seemed a rejection of the ritualized killing that was extending the nation’s agony into a dark, perpetual Iliad. The men under his command, however, held no such notions. Called “bummers,” his blue-coated foragers fanned out before the army like harbingers of hell, searching for provisions and securing them for the army that followed. And it doesn’t take an extraordinary mind to imagine what 62,000 young veterans on a juggernaut through the Confederate candy store might have been capable of. Indignant Confederates retaliated brutally, leading to an ongoing and sometimes ugly guerrilla conflict, all along Sherman’s “march to the sea.”
Sherman’s march through Georgia also marked a dramatic meeting of the races. It is ironic that Sherman, far from being an abolitionist, should become one of the great black saviors of the Civil War. Indeed, he maintained a callous opinion of slavery until late in the conflict, by which time it seems as if circumstances had wrought a change upon him (though he would later argue fervently against black suffrage). As Sherman’s columns made their way east, whole communities of freed slaves gathered about the rear of the army, a situation Sherman tolerated and then welcomed. To his soldiers he had become “Uncle Billy.” But to the ex-slaves whose lives seemed reborn, he was something much greater.
Not all of his officers, of course, approved. On December 9, General Jeff C. Davis, one of Sherman’s principal lieutenants, ordered the pontoon bridge that had carried his men across Ebenezer Creek to be taken up before five hundred fleeing slaves on the opposite bank were allowed to cross. In full view of Northern witnesses, many were slaughtered by Confederate cavalry. It was a horrible reminder that many men in blue were still fighting for the Union exclusively, rather than for the freedom of others—and that Sherman had unleashed a maelstrom in Dixie that often raged beyond his control.
Cump wheeled his army north, gutting the Carolinas as he had Georgia, and ended up wrapping up the war with a series of controversies. In April 1865, roughly a week after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox and just days after Lincoln’s assassination, Sherman secured the surrender of Joseph Johnston’s army. Or so he thought, anyway. The terms he ended up giving his Confederate archrival, however, were outrageous. In addition to allowing Johnston’s troops to momentarily keep their arms (they were to be surrendered later at their state capitals), Sherman “waded into the turbulent waters of Reconstruction,” as biographer Stanley P. Hirshson put it, and essentially agreed to allow the Confederate states to rejoin the Union with their present governments. Inherently preposterous, the surrender was flatly rejected by the Johnson administration. But to war secretary Edwin Stanton, the document was an excuse to heap infamy on Sherman, whom he and others in government considered dangerous—a Copperhead who was soft on slavery and sympathetic to Southerners and who meant to run for president in ’68 if he hadn’t already taken over the government by then with his army. Stuff like this, as well as the administration’s acrimonious rejection of the Johnston surrender terms, hit the rumor circuit and the press, casting Cump in the role of a fool and a traitor.
The whole sordid affair abruptly and absolutely ended Sherman’s friendship with Halleck, one of those who had suspected him of selling out to the enemy. But it was Stanton who earned the Ohioan’s fiercest ire. His “revenge,” however, was rather less than glorious: At the Grand Review of the Armies in May 1865, Sherman pointedly refused the hand of Stanton while greeting President Johnson and his cabinet, causing a scandal that made Sherman feel as if he’d smitten another foe.
Having twice received the Thanks of Congress during the war, Sherman had made it as a soldier, and a soldier he would stay. Promoted to lieutenant general in 1866 and full general in 1869, he assumed the role of commander in chief of the army when Grant became president. Throughout much of that time he would visit upon the Plains Indians the same ferocity and remorselessness that had characterized his war against the South, considering them little more than oddities whose resistance against the inevitability of white expansion was idiotic. As he once wrote to his wife, “My solution is that war is popular with them, and they only look at it from the stand point wherein it is easier to starve than work. Probably in the end it will be better to kill them all off.” He built upon his legacy by founding the School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, and by repeatedly and emphatically turning down requests that he run for president, a prospect he found nauseating. Retired in 1884, he later moved to New York City, where he died of pneumonia in 1891. Even in death the old warrior was lethal: Joseph Johnston, Cump’s wiliest opponent, attended the funeral and refused to don his hat in the wet weather out of respect. He soon took ill and died a month later.
HOLY %&*@!
Sherman was named Tecumseh in honor of the admired Shawnee leader who proved so formidable until his death in the War of 1812. It was preempted by “William” only after the boy had moved in with the Ewing family, when he was baptized by a Catholic priest. William was his baptismal name, and it stuck.
What certainly did not stick was an appreciation for Catholicism—or, for that matter, any other religion you can think of. Sherman’s wife, Ellen, pursued the possibility that he would make a sincere conversion to her Roman faith, and did so more imploringly as the Civil War’s carnage—and Cump’s role in it—stretched on and on. He never did, and he maintained a suspicion of religion that seemed only to increase with time.
And so, when his son Tom announced that he would use his expensive law school education to become a Catholic priest, Sherman called down a little fire and brimstone of his own: “Death—suicide on his part could have been borne, but deliberately to abandon us all, and shut himself up in a Catholic Cloister as the slave of Religion, his very existence instead of being a support will be an enduring nightmare …” (A chilling choice of words, considering the fact that Tom would indeed attempt suicide in 1911.) The break virtually destroyed any closeness that remained between father and son.
WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?
Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah has gone down as one of the most controversial campaigns in American history. Though his intent was to curb any wanton destruction or thievery on the part of his foraging “bummers,” he soon began to worry his lieutenants by turning a blind eye a little too often, allowing plunderers to rage out of control.
Interestingly, it was four-legged Confederates who had the most to fear. As Sherman’s columns advanced through the countryside, word of their approach inspired slaves and Union prisoners of war alike to make escape attempts. Knowing that Rebel authorities were in the habit of using dogs to chase down fugitives, Sherman’s troops acquired the habit of shooting every canine they came across, littering the army’s line of march with their carcasses.
GOIN’ TO CALIFORNIA—THE HARD WAY
In 1853, Sherman sailed for San Francisco to assume a new position in his friend’s firm. But it soon appeared as if the fates had decided against the idea and were trying to thwart his journey. After taking a ship to Nicaragua and crossing over to the Pacific, he boarded a vessel for California that enjoyed a smooth journey until less than one day’s sailing from San Francisco, when it caught up on a reef. He and the rest of the passengers and crew got safely ashore via lifeboats, whereupon he commenced looking for another ship. The crew of a schooner hauling lumber offered to give him a ride. But as the vessel approached San Francisco Bay it capsized, making it two marine disasters in one day. Sherman did in fact make it to his destination, though he was soaked when he got there.
Hard Bargain
“Indians are funny things to do business with,” Sherman once said, and he was speaking from personal experience. On one occasion, he offered a box of cigars to a chieftain who had stopped in to visit while in Washington. The fellow kindly accepted the gift, then offered it back to Sherman in exchange for Minnie, Cump’s fetching daughter. No deal.