Sherman, William Tecumseh

Sherman, William Tecumseh (1820–1891), Civil War general and commanding general of the U.S. Army.Born in Lancaster, Ohio, the sixth child of Charles R. and Mary Hoyt Sherman, Sherman was named for the Shawnee Indian leader Tecumseh. William was not added until 1830: after his father's sudden death and his mother's inability to provide for the family, he was baptized into the Catholic Church upon his entry into the home of a famous Whig politician, Thomas Ewing.

Sherman studied at the U.S. Military Academy, graduating sixth in the class of 1840. He would have ranked fourth except for demerits received because of his unwillingness to follow regulations. Instead of gaining a slot in the prestigious Army Corps of Engineers, therefore, he settled for the artillery, serving in Florida during the Second Seminole War (1840–42), in Alabama at Fort Morgan (1842), and in South Carolina at Fort Moultrie (1842–46).

With the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, Sherman sailed to California. He saw no combat, doing administrative work and policing the gold‐mining areas. Returning to the East (1850), he married his foster sister, Ellen Ewing, and served in the Commissary Corps in St. Louis and New Orleans. In 1853, he left the army to become a banker in San Francisco (1853–57) and New York (1857), a lawyer and real estate entrepreneur in Kansas (1858–59), and superintendent of the Louisiana Military Seminary (1859–61). When Louisiana seceded from the Union in 1861, Sherman reluctantly left the state, taking a position as president of a St. Louis street railway company.

After the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter, which began the Civil War, he rejoined the army as colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry Regiment. At age forty‐one, Sherman brought with him not only wide experience but also anxious concerns. The death of his father, his entry into the Ewing family as a young ward, and later his marriage had been crucial factors in his life. He carried a lifelong fear about family‐destroying financial failure and an equally important determination to impress his successful foster father. He had spent most of his adult life in the South and developed a genuine affection for its people; his successful tenure as a popular Louisiana educator made his departure wrenching. His lack of combat experience also played on his mind, as did his conviction that Northern political leaders and people did not understand the importance of the Southern threat of secession. To Sherman, the Union represented the order that both he and the nation needed to avoid the catastrophe of public anarchy and personal failure.

Though his leadership abilities stood out at the July 1861 First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), the Union failure there convinced him that his fears about Northern unpreparedness were accurate. Later, commanding in Kentucky, he was so overwhelmed by the dangers he saw around him that he fell into a deep depression that came close to incapacitating him. His subordinates believed he had lost his mind and supported his demand to be relieved of command. In early 1862, he was training recruits in a backwater of the war.

The beginning of Sherman's successful association with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his well‐praised performance at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 propelled him back into the mainstream of the conflict. From June to December 1862, he successfully governed Memphis, Tennessee, where the idea for another kind of warfare began to form in his mind. Confederate guerrillas and uncooperative civilians led him to realize that the war involved not just organized armies but supporting civilians as well. In retaliation for guerrilla sniping at Mississippi riverboats, he ordered the destruction of Randolph, Tennessee; he then issued Special Order Number 254 calling for the expulsion of ten families from Memphis for every boat fired on.

In December 1862, Sherman led a failed Union attack at Chickasaw Bayou, near Vicksburg, but he later helped Grant capture Vicksburg in July 1863. That November, Sherman became commander of the Army of the Tennessee and participated in Grant's victory at Chattanooga.

In early 1864, Sherman led 25,000 troops from Vicksburg, through Jackson, to Meridian, Mississippi, destroying property along the way in order to diminish civilian support for the war. When Grant moved east, Sherman became commander of the western theater. Using conventional warfare, he repeatedly outflanked Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. Defeating Gen. John Bell Hood, Sherman captured Atlanta in September, his victory helping to ensure Abraham Lincoln's reelection in November. He inflicted severe damage on the city, but he did not burn it to the ground.

Hoping to end the war quickly and with the least number of casualties, Sherman, with Grant's authority, decided he had to make another direct assault on civilian and material support for the war. He marched from Atlanta to the sea and then north through the Carolinas, inflicting severe property destruction but few casualties. He brought terror into the heart of the Confederacy while positioning his army to join Grant against Lee in Virginia. The Confederate will to continue the fight diminished and the inevitability of Union victory became clear. Demonstrating that he had been truthful in promising a soft peace once his hard war had overwhelmed his Southern friends, Sherman gave General Johnston such mild peace terms that his own government accused him of treason.

In the postwar years, Sherman used his office as commanding general to try to protect the army's place in American life by insisting on its professionalization. He had limited success, but he did establish the concept of service schools for what he hoped would be a more intelligently prepared officer corps. He supervised the hard war against the Indians, determined to make them productive members of society according to white standards. He was a leading Northern opponent of Republican Reconstruction. When Republicans regularly asked him to run for president, he always declined.

Sherman's impact on American military history was substantial. He pushed warfare away from the increasingly old‐fashioned approach of masses of soldiers attacking in gigantic frontal assaults and toward the concept of war between entire societies: total war.
[See also Atlanta, Battle of; Civil War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Civil War: Postwar Impact; Seminole Wars; Sherman's March to the Sea; Vicksburg, Siege of.]

Bibliography

Robert G. Athearn , William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West, 1956.
William T. Sherman , Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, 2 vols., 1875; repr. 1990.
Charles Royster , The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, 1991.
Albert Castel , Decision in the West. The Atlanta Campaign of 1964, 1992.
Lloyd Lewis , Sherman, Fighting Prophet, 1932; repr. 1993.
John F. Marszalek , Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order, 1993.

John F. Marszalek