SHERMAN, WILLIAM TECUMSEH
1820-1891, Civil War general. Second in importance only to Ulysses S. Grant among Union generals of the Civil War, Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio. Orphaned by the death of his father in 1829, he was raised in the home of a neighbor, Thomas Ewing. After graduating from West Point in 1840, he was assigned to various garrisons in the South before serving in the Mexican War. He resigned from the army in 1853 to pursue a banking career in San Francisco, but the collapse of his bank in the commercial panic of 1857 and an unsatisfactory stint as a lawyer in Kansas convinced Sherman to return to the military. He became the superintendent of the state military academy in Alexandria, Louisiana. When that state seceded from the Union in January 1861, Sherman resigned and rejoined the U.S. Army as a colonel.
Appointed a brigadier general of volunteers after Bull Run in July 1861, Sherman's first command in Kentucky did not go well. Amid allegations that he had exaggerated the weakness of his position, he was relieved as head of the Department of the Cumberland in November 1861. Struggling with the apparent symptoms of manic depression and stung by criticism in the press that he was "crazy," Sherman redeemed himself at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862. Although caught badly off guard at the beginning of the battle, he rallied his troops and thereby regained his confidence. Now promoted to major general, he commanded the Union occupying forces in Memphis during the summer and fall of 1862. As Grant's most trusted corps commander, he played a key role in the Union campaign that secured the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863, after which he was promoted to brigadier general in the Regular Army and placed in command of the Army of the Tennessee. Sherman led the Union forces at Missionary Ridge in the rout of the Confederates at Chattanooga in November 1863, and when Grant was called east as commander in chief, Sherman took over the top command in the West.
Sherman's Atlanta campaign in May to September 1864 won the Confederate prize that ensured Lincoln's reelection that year. Sherman ordered a civilian evacuation of Atlanta, burned everything of any military value, and in November headed out of the city on his famous "march to the sea." More than any other Civil War commander, Sherman grasped the brutal logic of total war. In such a war, civilian morale and economic resources are just as much military targets as the enemy's armies. For Sherman, war unleashed the fury of hell, and he refused to sentimentalize the killing and pillaging required for victory. After capturing Savannah on December 21, 1864, he swung his army north and led another devastating march through the Carolinas. On April 26, 1865, Gen. Joseph Johnston, the commander of the last major Confederate army in the East after Lee's capitulation at Appomattox, surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina.
Although radical in his concept of total war, Sherman was quite conservative in racial matters. He believed that blacks were incapable of becoming good combat soldiers, and he consistently opposed the Union policy of enlisting black troops in the last half of the war. Wishing to free his army of the encumbrance of several thousand refugee blacks, he issued Special Field Order No. 15 in January 1865. This order set aside for the exclusive use of freed slaves a coastal strip of land from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. Blacks quickly settled on this land, but before they could secure legal title President Andrew Johnson returned that land to its former rebel owners in the fall of 1865.
In 1869 Sherman succeeded Grant as commander of the U.S. Army. He now applied precepts of total war to the military subjugation of the Plains Indians. After retiring in 1883, he refused to be drawn into politics as the Republican presidential nominee in 1884. His memoirs, published in 1875, rank with those of Grant's as classics of military literature.
B. H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (1960); William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, reprint ed. (1984). |
