Originally aired on August 01, 1997 -In part 148 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the stern and fiery William Tecumseh Sherman.
#153 – General William T. Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman: a name that struck terror among Southern civilians in the last year of the Civil War. Bitterness still surrounds the memory of this man whom a wag labelled “the father of America’s urban renewal program”.
One of eleven children, Sherman was born in 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio. His father died when he was nine. Sherman was raised by Ohio Senator Thomas Ewing, whose daughter he later married.
Sherman graduated sixth in the West Point Class of 1840. Thirteen uneventful years in the U. S. Army followed. Sherman left the service and was successively a banker in San Francisco, superintendent of a Louisiana military academy, and head of the St. Louis streetcar system. In May, 1861, he answered his country’s call and re-entered the Army as a colonel.
After seeing action at First Manassas, Sherman became the seventh ranking brigadier general on duty. Yet the knowledge that the Civil War was going to be long and bloody, the thought of taking unprepared volunteers into battle against excessive odds, and the constant meddling into military affairs by newspaper correspondents whom he loathed as a class, all combined to cause Sherman to suffer the equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
Following several months in Ohio, he returned to duty early in 1862. Thereafter, Sherman saw action under Grant at Shiloh, Arkansas Post, Chickasaw Bluffs, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. Throughout these campaigns, Sherman was Grant’s second-in-command and the most trusted of the army general’s subordinates.
This is a bit strange; because while Sherman was a great strategist, he was only a mediocre tactician. He found solutions to military problems better than most contemporaries, but in battle he displayed limited talents at best.
When Grant took charge of all Union armies in 1864, he appointed Sherman to lead Federal forces in the Western theatre. What followed is considered by many to be the advent of modern warfare. Sherman left Chattanooga with a powerful Union army and moved relentlessly toward the Confederate transportation center at Atlanta. Following the fall of that city in September, Sherman then resolved to do more than defeat Southern armies. He would wage war on helpless civilians in order to break the Southern will to resist.
He thereupon cut his traces and made a forty-mile-wide swath of destruction across Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean. Then Sherman turned north, burning as he went, and swept through the Carolinas until what was left of the Confederate army in his front surrendered late April, 1865, near Durham, North Carolina.
Grant’s 1868 election as President of the United States opened the door for Sherman’s elevation to lieutenant general and general-in-chief of the armies. His tenure was stormy. On the positive side, it was Sherman who established the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Conversely, his hostile treatment of American Indians was a disgrace.
In 1884 the white-haired warrior retired from the Army. He lived in New York City until his death in 1891. Sherman is buried in St. Louis.
A certain contradiction about the man remains. He was a hard man to great anger who applied the torch to his enemies. At the same time, he took no part in the hatred and revenge that rose to the top in the North as the Civil War drew to a close. Indeed, his first peace terms to the beaten Southern army were so lenient that the Union administration in Washington rejected them.
It is the stern and fiery portrait that remains. In the postwar years, Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady was asked what he thought of Sherman. The tactful Grady replied that Sherman “was a good general but sorta careless with matches”.