Sherman, William Tecumseh

Sherman, William Tecumseh (1820–91),after graduation from West Point served in the Mexican War, and was superintendent of a military academy that later became Louisiana State University when the Civil War erupted. He refused high rank in the Confederacy. Under Grant he distinguished himself at Shiloh and was soon promoted to major general. In a speech of 1880 he said, “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is just all hell.” His march from Atlanta to the sea is celebrated in the powerful song Marching Through Georgia (1865). His Memoirs (2 vols., 1875), full, crisp, and strong, were published as a single volume (1990) in the Library of America series, using the revised text of the 1886 edition. Sherman figures in Winston Churchill's The Crisis, Mary Johnston's Cease Firing, and John Brick's Jubilee, and his men figure as devilish forces in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.