William Tecumseh Sherman

William Tecumseh Sherman was born on February 8, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio, one of eleven children of Charles Sherman, a lawyer and judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, and Mary Hoyt Sherman ^[1]. His unusual middle name honored the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, whom his father admired. When Charles Sherman died suddenly in 1829, the family's finances collapsed, and nine-year-old William was taken in by a neighbor, the attorney and future senator Thomas Ewing, who raised him alongside his own children ^[2].

Ewing's political connections shaped the boy's future. In 1836 he secured an appointment for his foster son to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Sherman proved an able student, graduating sixth in the class of 1840, though his record was marred by demerits for untidiness and minor infractions ^[1]. Anyone asking who was William Tecumseh Sherman before the Civil War finds a young officer of promise but no obvious destiny.

His early army service took him to Florida during the later stages of the Second Seminole War and then to posts in Georgia and South Carolina, where he came to know the Southern society he would one day march against ^[3]. During the Mexican-American War he served in California as an administrative officer, missing the combat that made the reputations of many of his contemporaries, a fact that frustrated him at the time ^[2].

Sherman resigned his commission in 1853 and spent the following years searching for a civilian career. He managed the San Francisco branch of a St. Louis bank until the financial panics of the 1850s destroyed it, then tried banking in New York and law in Leavenworth, Kansas, with little success ^[2]. In 1859 he found work that suited him: superintendent of the new Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, the institution that later became Louisiana State University ^[4].

He was respected in Louisiana, but secession forced a choice. In January 1861, after the state seized the federal arsenal at Baton Rouge, Sherman resigned and went north, warning Southern friends that war would bring ruin upon them ^[3]. He was commissioned a colonel in the regular army in May 1861 and commanded a brigade at the First Battle of Bull Run that July, one of the few Union units to leave the field in reasonable order ^[1].

His early war service nearly ended his career. Sent to Kentucky, he became convinced the Union effort there was dangerously undermanned, and his blunt estimates of the troops required struck superiors and newspapers as alarmist. Some papers openly questioned his sanity, and he was relieved late in 1861 ^[2]. Redemption came through Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman supported Grant's operations against Forts Henry and Donelson, then commanded a division at Shiloh in April 1862, where he was wounded, had horses shot from under him, and helped hold the Union line on the first desperate day ^[1]. The partnership between the two men became one of the decisive relationships of the war.

Any account of William Tecumseh Sherman achievements begins with the campaigns of 1864 and 1865. After serving under Grant at Vicksburg and Chattanooga in 1863, Sherman took command of the principal Union armies in the Western Theater when Grant went east in March 1864 ^[3]. That spring he led roughly 100,000 men south from Chattanooga against Joseph E. Johnston's Confederate army, maneuvering through the mountains of northern Georgia in a campaign of flanking movements punctuated by battles such as Kennesaw Mountain ^[1].

Atlanta fell on September 2, 1864. Sherman's telegram announcing that the city was won arrived at a moment when Northern war weariness threatened Abraham Lincoln's reelection, and the victory transformed the political landscape of the Union ^[5]. Historians have long ranked the capture of Atlanta among the most consequential military events of the war precisely because of its effect on the November election ^[3].

What followed made Sherman famous and infamous at once. In November 1864 he cut loose from his supply lines and marched some 60,000 men from Atlanta to Savannah, a distance of about 285 miles, ordering his troops to live off the land and to destroy railroads, mills, and other resources that sustained the Confederate war effort ^[1]. The March to the Sea ended with the capture of Savannah in late December, which Sherman presented to Lincoln as a Christmas gift. In early 1865 he turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina, a harder campaign across flooded winter terrain that his soldiers regarded as a greater feat than the Georgia march ^[3]. Johnston surrendered the last major Confederate army in the Carolinas to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, in April 1865, days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox ^[5].

Sherman's method, often described as hard war, aimed to break the Confederacy's capacity and will to fight while limiting pitched battle. His remark that war is cruelty and cannot be refined, made in correspondence with the city officials of Atlanta in 1864, summarized a philosophy that later generations of military thinkers studied closely ^[4].

In 1850 Sherman married Ellen Ewing, the daughter of his foster father Thomas Ewing, in a Washington ceremony attended by President Zachary Taylor and much of the capital's political establishment ^[2]. Ellen was a devout Catholic who worked throughout the marriage to draw her husband toward her faith. Sherman, skeptical in religious matters, resisted, and the difference remained a source of tension between two strong-willed people who nonetheless stayed devoted to each other for four decades ^[2].

The couple had eight children. The death of their nine-year-old son Willy from typhoid fever in 1863, during a family visit to Sherman's camp near Vicksburg, devastated the general, who called the boy the child on whom he had set his hopes ^[2]. Another son, Thomas, later became a Jesuit priest over his father's objections.

Contemporaries described Sherman as restless, talkative, and sharp-minded, a chain smoker of cigars with red hair, a grizzled beard, and a face that photographers found unforgettable ^[1]. He read widely, wrote constantly, and distrusted newspaper reporters, whom he blamed for the insanity stories of 1861 and often barred from his camps ^[3].

When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as commanding general of the United States Army, a post he held until 1883 ^[1]. His long tenure coincided with the army's campaigns against the Plains Indians, and Sherman directed a strategy that pressed Native nations onto reservations, in part by supporting the destruction of the buffalo herds on which they depended. That record remains among the most criticized aspects of his career ^[3].

He also left institutional marks on the peacetime army. In 1881 he established the School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the ancestor of the modern Command and General Staff College, reflecting his belief that officers needed formal professional education ^[4].

Sherman published his two-volume Memoirs in 1875, a candid and vigorously written account that provoked controversy among fellow veterans but earned lasting praise as one of the finest military autobiographies in the English language ^[2]. Repeatedly urged to run for president, he refused in terms so absolute that his 1884 statement, reported as a declaration that he would not accept if nominated and would not serve if elected, entered American political vocabulary as a Sherman statement ^[5]. He retired to St. Louis and later New York City, a popular figure at veterans' reunions and public dinners. Sherman died of pneumonia in New York on February 14, 1891, six days after his seventy-first birthday, and his funeral procession drew enormous crowds; Joseph E. Johnston, his old adversary, served as an honorary pallbearer and himself died weeks later after standing bareheaded in the cold ^[5].

Sherman's reputation has always carried two faces. In the North he was remembered as the general whose relentless campaigns shortened the war and saved lives that further years of fighting would have cost. In much of the South, the March to the Sea and the burning that accompanied the fall of Atlanta and Columbia made his name a byword for destruction, a memory kept alive in regional lore for generations ^[3]. Modern scholars continue to argue over how much devastation his armies actually caused and how deliberate it was, with studies noting that his targets were chiefly economic and military rather than civilian lives ^[4].

Military theorists in the twentieth century, including the British writer B. H. Liddell Hart, treated Sherman as a forerunner of modern strategic thought, pointing to his use of maneuver, deception, and attacks on an enemy's economy and morale ^[6]. His campaigns are still taught at staff colleges, and the Sherman tank of the Second World War carried his name into another era of American warfare.

Among the enduring William Tecumseh Sherman facts is the range of his life outside command: banker, lawyer, college superintendent, memoirist, and administrator. Monuments to him include Augustus Saint-Gaudens's gilded equestrian statue at the corner of Central Park in Manhattan, completed in 1903 ^[5]. Readers of any William Tecumseh Sherman biography encounter a man who hated war's cruelty, practiced it with cold efficiency because he believed it would end the conflict sooner, and spent his later decades explaining that paradox to the country he had helped hold together ^[1].