William Tecumseh Sherman

American military leader

• Born: February 8, 1820
• Birthplace: Lancaster, Ohio
• Died: February 14, 1891
• Place of death: New York, New York

Sherman was one of the architects of the Union victory in the Civil War and a significant contributor to the development of modern warfare. He was also a leader in the late nineteenth century Indian wars in the American West.

Early Life

William Tecumseh Sherman was born Tecumseh Sherman. His father, Charles R. Sherman, was a lawyer and Ohio supreme court justice. His mother, Mary Hoyt, was a graduate of an eastern school for women. They migrated from Connecticut to Ohio in 1811 and produced there a family of eleven children, including later senator and federal cabinet member John Sherman. Tecumseh (Cump) was their sixth child.

When Tecumseh was nine years old, his father died suddenly, and his family was broken up. He was taken up the street to live with the family of Thomas Ewing, later a U.S. senator and a cabinet member. There he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church and received the Christian name William to go with his Indian one. From that moment he was William Tecumseh Sherman. Ewing never adopted him but always treated him like a son.

Sherman had a happy childhood, enjoying his friends and relatives and often participating in innocent pranks. He received the best education Lancaster had to offer and, at the age of sixteen, Ewing arranged a West Point appointment for him. Sherman endured the military academy boredom and was graduated sixth in his 1840 class.

During these early years, Sherman came to admire his foster father and adopt many of his Whig Party attitudes. At the same time, he always felt a need to prove himself capable of survival without Ewing’s help. At West Point, he accepted the aristocratic concept of the superiority of the professional soldier over the volunteer. Sherman came to view his military friends as his family and throughout his life always felt most comfortable around them.

Upon his graduation, Sherman received a commission in the artillery and assignment to Florida, where he participated in the Second Seminole War. Though combat was rare, he came to see the Indians at first hand and developed the mixture of admiration and repugnance toward them that he was to hold all of his life. In March, 1842, he was sent to Fort Morgan, in Mobile Bay, where he first experienced the pleasures of polite society. His June 1, 1842, transfer to Fort Moultrie, near Charleston, allowed him to continue his socializing, of which he soon tired. For four years, he lived a boring existence, brightened only by his passion for painting, a furlough back to Ohio highlighted by his first trip down the Mississippi River, and investigative duty in the area of his later march on Atlanta. He also became engaged to Ellen Ewing, his foster sister, with whom he had corresponded since his 1836 departure for West Point. Sherman never painted much after he left Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, but all these other experiences were to have a profound effect on his later life.

When the Mexican War erupted, Sherman hoped to participate in the fighting. He was instead sent to Pittsburgh on recruiting duty. He chafed under his bad luck and jumped at the chance to travel around the Horn to California. By the time he arrived, however, the war there was over, and he found himself adjutant to Colonel Richard B. Mason, spending long hours battling correspondence, not Mexicans. He became depressed. The 1849 discovery of gold provided him with new excitement, and he absorbed all he could of the gold fever, though the inflation almost ruined him. In 1850, he was sent East with messages for General Winfield Scott, and on May 1 he married Ellen Ewing. Their wedding was an important Washington social event, as Thomas Ewing was then a member of President Zachary Taylor’s cabinet.

During the decade of the 1850’s, Sherman fathered six children and tried unsuccessfully to support them. From 1850 to 1853, he served in the Army Commissary Service in St. Louis and New Orleans, at which time he resigned his commission to open a branch bank in San Francisco for some St. Louis friends. The pressures of banking in the boom and bust California economy, his chronic asthma, and a homesick wife who wanted to return to her father’s house caused Sherman to spend the years from 1853 to 1857 in recurring depression. When the bank closed in 1857, he took on as personal debts the unsuccessful investments he had made for army friends.

Sherman carried that financial burden to New York, where he opened another branch bank only to see it fail during the Panic of 1857. He was crushed; no matter what he tried, he met failure. Instead of establishing independence from his foster father, he repeatedly had to look to him for support. Thomas Ewing continued to hope that Sherman would agree to manage his salt interests in Ohio, but Sherman refused. Instead, he went to Kansas as part of a law and real estate business, along with two Ewing sons.

The business failed, and Sherman desperately tried to return to the army for his economic (and psychological) salvation. There were no openings, but an officer friend told him about a new Louisiana military seminary looking for a superintendent. Sherman applied and became founder of what became modern Louisiana State University. When secession came, duty persuaded him he had to leave the job and the people he had come to love. He believed that he had to sacrifice his economic well-being for the sake of the Union.

Life’s Work

After leaving Louisiana in February, 1861, Sherman became angry over alleged northern nonchalance toward southern secession. He found a position with a St. Louis street railway company, determined to remain aloof from the national crisis until he could see a change. Thomas Ewing and John Sherman urged him to reenter the Union army, and, through their efforts, he was named a colonel of the Thirteenth Infantry Regiment in May, 1861. He stood over six feet tall, with long legs and arms, piercing blue eyes, sandy red hair that seemed always to be mussed, a grizzly reddish beard, and a generally unkempt appearance. He spoke rapidly and often, his mind able to reach conclusions before his charmed listeners understood his premises.

Before he could serve with the Thirteenth Infantry, he was appointed to a staff position under Winfield Scott and, in July, 1861, commanded a brigade at Bull Run. He saw that fiasco as further proof that the North was not taking the war seriously enough.

Sherman was happy to leave chaotic Washington for Kentucky to help Fort Sumter hero Robert Anderson organize the Union war effort there. Upon arrival, he quickly convinced himself that the Confederate forces were much larger than his were and that it was only a matter of time before they would overrun him. He sank into depression and lashed out at newspaper reporters for allegedly publicizing his weaknesses. At his own request, he was transferred to Missouri in November, 1861, where his outspoken negativity convinced many that he was unbalanced. He took a twenty-day leave in December, 1861, and was mortified to see his sanity unfairly questioned in the press. When he returned to duty and was given command over a training facility in Missouri, his depression deepened and he even contemplated suicide. The Union war effort and his own career seemed hopeless.

Sherman’s transfer to Paducah, Kentucky, in February, 1862, and his association with the successful Ulysses S. Grant slowly lifted his spirits. He distinguished himself as a division commander in the bloody Battle of Shiloh in April, 1862, and he then defended Grant and other generals against press and political criticism of their roles in the battle. When he was promoted to major general of volunteers and took part in Henry W. Halleck’s capture of Corinth in May, 1862, he began to believe that the Union effort had hope and he could play an important role in any success.

In July, 1862, Grant appointed Sherman to the post of military governor of recently captured Memphis. Sherman was able to use both his banking and military experience to govern that hotbed of secession sentiment. It was there that the activities of Confederate guerrillas caused him to see at first hand that the war was not simply a contest between professional soldiers. The general populace had to be controlled if the Union effort was to be successful. When guerrillas fired on a boat in the Mississippi River, Sherman leveled a nearby town. He had long recognized the determination of the Southern populace, and he now began to see that only a destruction of this stubborn intensity would resolve the conflict in the Union’s favor. He would utilize this insight at the appropriate time.

In December, 1862, Sherman led an unsuccessful assault on the heights above Vicksburg. When the press resuscitated the insanity charge against him, he court-martialed a reporter, the only such event in American history. The trial, though it might have been an excellent exposition of the almost inevitable conflict between the military and the press in wartime, proved to be little more than a conflict of personality. It settled little.

Sherman was part of Grant’s enormous army that captured Vicksburg in July, 1863, and he was made brigadier general in the regular army as a reward. He became commander of the Army of the Tennessee when Grant became supreme commander in the West; he participated in the successful November lifting of the Confederate siege at Chattanooga. In January, 1864, he commanded the Meridian, Mississippi, expedition, which showed him yet again the effectiveness of the destructive activity he was later to use during his March to the Sea.

In the spring of 1864, Grant moved East to become general-in-chief of all Union armies, and Sherman took command over Western forces. On May 5, 1864, Grant attacked Lee in Virginia, and Sherman took on Joseph E. Johnston in Georgia. After first organizing railroads to supply his troops, Sherman battled Johnston throughout the spring and summer of 1864, slowly but inexorably pushing the Confederates from the Chattanooga region toward Atlanta. Jefferson Davis became nervous at Johnston’s constant retreat and replaced him with offensive-minded John Bell Hood. The new Confederate commander attacked Sherman and was defeated. Atlanta fell in September, in time to influence the reelection of Abraham Lincoln that November.

Sherman then showed the Confederates that war had indeed become total. He ordered the civilian evacuation of Atlanta. When his order was met with shocked protests, he responded: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” He did not: In November, he began his March to the Sea, revolutionizing warfare by cutting himself off from his base of supplies, living off the countryside, and destroying goods and property. His aim was to convince the Confederates that their war effort was doomed. He became the founder of psychological warfare. On December 21, 1864, his army reached Savannah and made contact with the Atlantic fleet. His presentation of the Georgia city to Lincoln as a Christmas present electrified the North.

On February 1, 1865, Sherman began his march through the Carolinas. On April 17, Johnston and his Confederate forces surrendered at Durham Station, North Carolina. Sherman, who had retained his affection for Southerners throughout the war and had only conducted his total warfare as the most efficient way to end the hostilities quickly, demonstrated his feelings in the peace agreement he made with Johnston. He negotiated political matters, neglected to insist that slavery was over, and, in general, wrote an agreement favorable to the South. In Washington, the administration, just then reeling from the assassination of Lincoln, was shocked. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General Henry W. Halleck led the opposition to the agreement, and Sherman was forced to change it, suffering sharp criticism from both the public and the press.

With the war over, Sherman became commander of troops in the West. He fought the Indians and helped construct the transcontinental railroad. When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman became commanding general, a position he held until his retirement in 1883. His tenure was filled with controversy as he battled secretaries of war and Congress over his authority, his salary, and sufficient appropriation for the troops. When he published his memoirs in 1875, the blunt directness of those two volumes created a controversy, including a bitter exchange with Jefferson Davis.

From his retirement in 1883 until his death in 1891, Sherman kept busy attending veterans’ reunions and the theater, while also becoming a popular after-dinner speaker. In 1884, he categorically refused to run for the presidency, establishing a standard that allegedly reluctant office seekers have been measured against ever since. In 1886, he and his family moved from St. Louis to New York. On February 14, 1891, he died from pneumonia.

Significance

William Tecumseh Sherman was one of the leaders of the successful Union war effort that prevented the disruption of the United States. He helped introduce the nation and the world to the concept of total war, his Civil War activities serving as a harbinger of the kind of conflict to be fought in the twentieth century. He devised his mode of warfare as a way to end the hostilities quickly, but it helped prolong southern animosity toward the North into the twentieth century. However, when Sherman toured the South in 1879, he received a friendly greeting.

Sherman’s life, apart from his Civil War years, is important in itself. Before the war, he attended West Point with many of the other military leaders of the Mexican and Civil wars. He served in the army in Florida during the Second Seminole War. In California, he composed a report to President James K. Polk that announced the discovery of gold and helped set off the famous gold rush of 1849. During the 1850’s, as a banker, he was one of San Francisco’s leading businesspeople during its formative years. In 1860, he helped found what is modern Louisiana State University. After the war, Sherman’s tenure as general-in-chief of the United States Army from 1869 to 1883 allowed him to influence the direction of such events as the Indian Wars, Reconstruction, and the disputed election of 1876. Thus, Sherman influenced the development of American society throughout his life. He was one of the major figures of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Athearn, Robert G. William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956. A thorough study of Sherman’s participation in the postwar Indian troubles and his role in the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Sherman was neither as harsh toward the Indians as the West desired nor as lenient as the East wished. He believed that the completion of the railroad would force the hostile Indians onto reservations.

Bailey, Anne J. War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Chronicles Sherman’s March to the Sea, from its inception in Atlanta to its culmination in Savannah, describing its impact upon Georgians. Bailey contends that the physical damage was less severe than the psychological horror inflicted by the march; the campaign depleted Southerners’ morale and spurred Confederate defeat.

Barrett, John G. Sherman’s March Through the Carolinas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956. A detailed military history of Sherman’s final campaign through North and South Carolina. Sherman reluctantly put his concept of total war into practice during this march from Savannah, Georgia, to Raleigh, North Carolina. His army inflicted special punishment on South Carolina because the soldiers blamed the Palmetto State for starting the war.

Glatthaar, Joseph T. The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns. New York: New York University Press, 1985. An excellent analysis of the makeup and attitudes of the common soldier in Sherman’s army during his marches. The author analyzes the soldiers’ views about their cause, black Southerners, white Southerners, camp life, and pillaging.

Kennett, Lee. Sherman: A Soldier’s Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Generally sympathetic biography, focusing on Sherman’s military career, including descriptions of his military training and Civil War battles.

Lewis, Lloyd. Sherman: Fighting Prophet. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. Though dated and written without the benefit of all the now available Sherman documentation, this is still a valuable and very readable biography. It puts special emphasis on Thomas Ewing’s influence on his foster son. The vast bulk of the book details the Civil War years; coverage of the postwar years is brief.

Liddell Hart, Basil H. Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958. A fine study of Sherman’s Civil War military activities by a leading military historian. The author states that Sherman was far ahead of his time and that later generations of military men might have profited from his example had they paid attention.

Marszalek, John F. Sherman’s Other War: The General and the Civil War Press. Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press, 1981. A thorough account of Sherman’s battles with reporters during the war, this study also contains an extended analysis of his personality during this period. Argues that Sherman fought the press in a constitutional battle formed more by personality than by First Amendment principles.

Merrill, James M. William Tecumseh Sherman. Skokie, Ill.: Rand McNally, 1971. A detailed popular biography that has the benefit of the major Sherman manuscript collections. It discusses all aspects of Sherman’s life but is especially valuable for its coverage of his postwar years.

Sherman, William T. Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1875. Reprint. Introduction by William S. McFeely. New York: Da Capo Press, 1984. Sherman’s controversial and absorbing account of his life from 1846 to the end of the Civil War, originally published in 1875. This is an essential source for gaining an understanding of Sherman’s perception of the battles in which he participated and the leaders with and against whom he fought.