Fierce Patriot : The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (9780679604693), page 1
Copyright © 2014 by Robert L. O’Connell
Maps copyright © 2014 by Hal Jespersen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Connell, Robert L.
Fierce patriot: the tangled lives of William Tecumseh Sherman / Robert L. O’Connell.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4000-6972-9
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-60469-3
1. Sherman, William T. (William Tecumseh), 1820–1891. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Biography. 3. Generals—United States—Biography. 4. United States. Army—Biography. I. Title.
E467.1.S55O25 2014 973.7092—dc23 2013028999
[B]
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: David G. Stevenson
Front-jacket photograph: © Kansas State Historical Society
v3.1_r1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Part I: The Military Strategist
Chapter I: Tyro
Chapter II: The Golden State
Chapter III: Into the Gloom
Chapter IV: The Black Hole
Chapter V: Swamped
Chapter VI: Atlanta
Chapter VII: The March
Chapter VIII: Bands of Steel
Part II: The General and His Army
Chapter IX: The Boys
Chapter X: Road Warriors
Part III: The Man and His Families
Chapter XI: Cump
Chapter XII: Big Time
Author’s Note: Visit to the General
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Introduction
NAME RECOGNITION would not be the problem. William Tecumseh Sherman—about as memorable a moniker as exists in American military history. “He and Grant won the Civil War.” “Named a tank after him.” Broad segments of the American public, albeit mostly male, can probably conjure up at least this much.
But from here on, the general reputation of the general takes a dive, caricatured by a T-shirt sold at the 1996 Olympics featuring Sherman’s image emblazoned on a penumbra of flames along with the motto “Atlanta’s Original Torchbearer.” This is mostly just darkly funny now, since it’s broadly understood that the satanic Sherman was an invention of the postwar South, specifically those intent on turning the Confederacy into a “Lost Cause”—a noble endeavor rather than an unmitigated disaster. Sherman as intruder and dark destroyer made a perfect foil for the South’s marble man, Robert E. Lee, the great defender. But if the myth of the Lost Cause was ripped to shreds in the civil rights era, it still hasn’t done Sherman’s reputation much good.
That’s because he still stands indicted as one of the originators of what is termed “modern war”—wholesale assaults on civilian populations as an integral part of military strategy. Thinking along these lines, we can easily draw a direct path from Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Carolinas to the superlethal industrial wars of the twentieth century, then on to holding entire populations hostage to nearly instant nuclear destruction. Not exactly a sunny consequence to drape over a legacy. Yet it too is about as flimsy and transparent as the Lost Cause. Sherman was not clairvoyant; he had only the foggiest notion of where military technology was heading. He was enveloped in his own time, intent upon accomplishing specific strategic objectives. He did what worked, and the idea of his being at the root of the future of war would have struck him as laughable. But there he remains, perhaps conceded a measure of absolution on these grounds, but still a resident of history’s darker side.
Actually, that’s part of the attraction. Initially, at least—until it becomes apparent that this was hardly Sherman’s image among contemporaries. Still, any attempt to capture or even approximate the actual Sherman is fraught with pitfalls. For one thing, the very nature of his personality makes it easy to lapse into caricature.
There is an undeniably daffy aspect to Sherman. Calling him a motormouth understates the case: he was a veritable volcano of verbiage, as borne out by a mountain of letters, memoranda, and other official papers, not to mention the uniformly gabby impression he left among contemporaries. If there were a contest for who spoke the most words in a lifetime, Sherman would have been a finalist—he lived a long time and slept very little; otherwise he was talking. He said exactly what was on his mind at that instant, until his quicksilver brain turned to an entirely different matter, then to a third, and perhaps to a fourth, then back to the first—unceasing—spewing orders, analysis, advice, and anecdotes in a random pattern that often left listeners stunned and amazed. One prominent Civil War historian, Gary Gallagher, described Sherman as lacking cognitive filters. It all came out. And this is a real problem in trying to resurrect the man’s nature.
One approach that seems to help is to draw a distinction between the Sherman of vast opinion and the walk-around, quotidian Sherman. The former said and wrote a great deal that could be used against him; the latter was an almost compulsively gregarious individual who normally treated other people, even adversaries, courteously and reasonably. He could even be a good listener. He almost never lost his temper. The worse the situation, the more clearheaded Sherman became. To contemporaries he was a jumble of sagacity, rectitude, shoot-from-the-hip sincerity, prepotency, and grumpiness—all rolled into a unique being known and beloved by Americans simply as “Uncle Billy”—the nickname originally bestowed upon him by his men during the Civil War. Other military heroes were similarly revered—Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower—but partially as politicians. Uncle Billy was always just a soldier, our only true celebrity general.
But he was also one with a sardonic, at times even self-mocking, sense of humor. Consider Sherman answering the door in the middle of the night for an important dispatch with a cheery, “I have seen the devil. Have you?” Or imagine him in the middle of a battle coming upon a soldier cowering behind a tree and loudly proclaiming his intention to desert—prompting Sherman to shower the tree with rocks, convincing the reluctant warrior he was under even heavier fire. Crazy Billy—that too was part of the image.
We have no analogue today. If you wanted to point to an individual in recent memory who most resembles Sherman, one choice might be Katharine Hepburn—a supermasculine version, but with the same prickly combination of irrepressible self-righteousness, good sense, and charisma.
If nothing else, this comparison calls attention to an aspect not much noted: Sherman was, to an extraordinary degree, theatrical. This quality is useful militarily, especially when convincing others to risk their lives. But Sherman took it well beyond that. The theater was his favorite form of recreation, and players (often female players) would one day occupy a large portion of his social life.
More to the point, Sherman was instinctively theatrical in much that he did. His famously disheveled Civil War uniforms—tailored by Brooks Brothers, incidentally—were absolutely on the mark for the democratic volunteers manning the Army of the West. Later in his career, there is little of that. Photographs capture a sartorially appropriate, even dapper, Sherman acting out his role as commanding general of the United States Army. His life was undeniably dramatic, but you also have the feeling he framed it as such, the central character in his personal production. All the controversies, his endless battles with the press, his famous feuds—it seems apparent he would have had it no other way.
Yet we will never actually see him in character. For we are separated by an electronic divide that precludes hearing the voice and cadence of this most talkative of men. Similarly, the few images we have freeze a figure who was almost never at rest and reduce his famously spiky red hair and grizzled beard to a kind of black-and-white mediocrity. So Uncle Billy must remain largely a creature of our imagination. We are left to deal with what has been preserved—his words; the Sherman of vast opinion.
Words are a problem along a number of dimensions. Sheer volume, for instance. Studying Sherman means becoming conversant with the Civil War, one of the most heavily documented conflicts in history.
The process began shortly after the last shots were fired, when Sherman’s sometime friend and full-time rival Henry Halleck sponsored a huge gathering and collation of operational evidence, resulting in the monumental War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (OR), a true blockbuster at 128 volumes. Since then it’s been followed by an avalanche of memoirs, regimental histories, diaries, collections of letters, and reminiscences from all manner of perspectives and localities, not to mention the secondary literature that has formed around it at the rate of hundreds of volumes a year.
Not surprisingly, William Tecumseh Sherman proved a significant contributor to this process. At this stage of his career, he and his machine-gun mouth were increasingly surrounded by staff aides armed with notepads, all struggling to capture his stream of words and convert them into orders, official correspondence, a
Studying Sherman in detail can be compared to a really bad day at the beach. At first you are merely intrigued, getting your feet wet with a biography or two. Next, you are hit with the equivalent of a rogue wave and sucked in over your head, caught in a riptide drawing you inexorably into a sea of Sherman. The far shore is nowhere apparent, the beach is barely visible. So you plod on until finally you come to understand you will never get through all of Sherman, that you are drowning in Sherman.
But there is a lifesaver. Sherman was a general, and almost by definition generals are judged by their deeds, not their words. He did a great deal, but it’s all been well documented and amounts to a finite body of evidence, something to cling to. Gradually, you realize that an accurate Sherman could potentially be made to float on such a basis. It’s not walking on water, but it does promise a realistic strategy that parallels the split between the Sherman of vast opinion and the walk-around Sherman. Focus on what he did, not what he said.
Still, there will always be the temptation to do the opposite. The words are all there—Sherman’s words—to build and document several extremely unflattering portraits.
Sherman as war criminal? Certainly not impossible. He not only bulldozed the Plains Indians aside, but wrote repeatedly of exterminating them (not to mention the buffalo). During the Civil War, his view of collective responsibility clearly exceeded what are now the standards of international law—he banished several hundred civilians from Memphis and Atlanta and burned some hamlets that harbored guerrilla sharpshooters along the Mississippi. He even threatened to hang a respected journalist.
But he never came close to doing so. Nor did his operations against the Indians actually approach genocide. Sherman was a hard and determined man, but not a cruel one. He got the big things right. His March through Georgia and the Carolinas was accompanied by none of the rape and slaughter that all too often have been an integral part of such foraging-based campaigns. The peace he offered Joseph E. Johnston and the last of the Confederate armies was so generous, it was summarily rejected in Washington. Sherman waged war to win, never simply to destroy.
A more credible case can certainly be built against Sherman as racist—again with Sherman’s own words serving as the chief witness for the prosecution. Morally, he was never much troubled by slavery, and he adopted emancipation reluctantly and only as a means of punishing the planter class he believed had spearheaded secession. On paper, he plainly thought blacks were inferior to whites, and plenty of disparaging comments to that effect can be found in his writings, along with a liberal use of the word nigger. He wanted nothing, or as little as possible, to do with black freedmen as troops and sent off a stream of blistering memos to that effect. It all builds toward an airtight, open-and-shut case—except for the testimony of the sole witness for the defense: the record of what Sherman actually did.
The fact remains that Sherman and his army catalyzed the liberation of countless slaves—and did so in the most spectacular fashion. The March across Georgia became a road show for emancipation, putting to rest the notion that slaves were somehow satisfied with their condition. You could say it broke the back of slavery and brought to fruition the Emancipation Proclamation. Granted, Sherman was not exactly overjoyed. As a military man seeking to move as quickly as possible, he viewed the freedmen who attached themselves to his army like so many barnacles on a racing hull. But he also knew from experience that they were his best source of intelligence on the Confederates.
It is in these interrogations, some of which have been preserved, that another aspect of Sherman becomes apparent: He invariably treated these people respectfully and without condescension. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton discovered the same thing when he raced to Savannah, worried that Sherman might jeopardize the positive racial atmosphere the March had created. He quizzed a number of black leaders about this, and to a man, they maintained that Sherman had treated them simply as fellow human beings.
It has been argued that it was in their best interest to say this, so it’s worth mentioning an incident where nothing was at stake. Years later, at a Yale University commencement, Sherman became bored and, Sherman-like, walked out—only to be found afterward on a park bench, happily sharing cigars with a black man with whom he had struck up a conversation. Mere anecdotes, perhaps, but also telling and consistent ones contradicting the portrait of a virulent racist.
Sherman craved crowds and ceremonies; both were basic to his personality and life pattern, beginning with West Point. Invite him and he’d be there—troop reunions, conventions, expositions, professional gatherings, testimonials, parties, and weddings (especially weddings: he literally expired as the result of attending one too many), not to mention as many theatrical performances as he could manage. Basically, he enjoyed being anywhere he could mix and mingle. Of course, he was perfectly capable of blowing a fuse should the crowds press too close or the handshakes become painful. “Out of my way, damn you!” he might bellow. Folks took little offense and kept showing up—and so did Uncle Billy; he needed them.
Without doubt, Sherman was a product of the upper crust; but his sheer gregariousness seems to have overwhelmed class consciousness. In person, he appeared perfectly comfortable with the egalitarian enthusiasm that defined mid-nineteenth-century America. Yet you would never know it from his correspondence: brimming with antidemocratic diatribes, dark forebodings over social and labor unrest, and an apparent willingness to use decisive force to suppress them. Sherman as authoritarian, Sherman as capitalist enforcer. Yet again, the words exist to build such a case.
But yet again, the real Sherman undermines it through his abhorrence of politics and marked disinclination to get personally involved with strikebreaking, knowing full well that many of “his boys”—veterans of the Army of the West—were part of the labor movement.
This could go on—a male chauvinist Sherman is a possibility, as is a postmodernist critique of virtually his entire mind-set. But both are likely blind alleys to a better understanding of the man.
The fruitlessness of this sort of analysis results from trying to apply contemporary standards to a nineteenth-century person, something historians deplore but can never fully avoid. Each generation looks to the past with a perspective colored (and influenced) by contemporary problems and interests, so it’s inherently difficult to predict where Sherman’s reputation will head. One day he may stand accused or be praised from angles not now apparent. Good Sherman, Bad Sherman, it’s a flip of the coin. Yet some kind of Sherman, a continuing historical presence, seems likely. For underlying all is the man’s importance.
Beneath those four individuals without whom America would be a very different place—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR—resides a second tier of epic overachievers with substantial roles in furthering the national extravaganza. Sherman’s place here is secure, his significance in transcontinental consolidation being no small matter. America was built just once, so his achievements in this regard are almost guaranteed to remain unique. As long as we live here, Sherman will be remembered.
Not unexpectedly, he has already sired a string of biographies. All deserve some credit simply for having attempted to capture such a lollapalooza of a life. Yet many share a staccato, even frantic, quality as they jump from topic to topic, racing to keep up with one frenetic life story. A corporate cry can almost be heard: “So much Sherman, so little time!” Granted, this hectic approach mirrors the man’s scattered nature, but it’s also distracting.
The more I studied the secondary literature and recalled my exhausting swim through the primary documents, the more I became convinced that any attempt to confine Sherman to a single chronological track was bound to create confusion. Instead, it seemed to me that three separate story lines, each deserving independent development, emerged out of the man’s life.
I. If Jefferson was the architect of continental expansion, Sherman would become the general contractor. It took decades after the end of his formal military education for him to become a master strategist, but Sherman was on the job site almost from the beginning of his career.
