William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country, a Life |
By James Lee McDonough, W.W. Norton & Company, 832 pages, $40 |
Historians cannot get enough of William Tecumseh Sherman, and no wonder. As multiple biographies have noted over the last 30 years, he is a particularly modern figure — high-strung, quotable, irritable, irreligious, prone to bouts of anxiety and depression. One earlier Sherman biographer, the British military writer Basil Liddell Hart, called him “the first modern general”.
But Sherman was also very much a man of his time. He managed to witness a good part of the key events of the 19th century in the United States, from the gold rush to the building of the transcontinental railroad to the near extermination of the Native American tribes. A lifelong lover of good theatre (he once stomped out of a poor performance of “Hamlet” in occupied Nashville), he became a New Yorker at the end of his life, purchasing a house at 75 West 71st Street.
Most of all, he played a major and strategic role in the Civil War. In looking back at that conflict, Sherman uttered one of the most memorable phrases in American history — “War is all hell”. Alone among American generals, his name is enshrined in an adjective in American political vocabulary. That word, “Shermanesque”, remains today the best summary of an absolute and non-negotiable refusal to run for president.
Of course, his 1864 movement across central Georgia also is remembered by his name — Sherman’s march. Yet this most famous of his actions is probably his least understood, or perhaps most misrepresented. He did not conduct “total war”. Nor did he use violence indiscriminately. To the contrary, his march across Georgia and then into South Carolina was a targeted use of violence against wealthy Confederate die-hards in the rural South who had been largely untouched by the war. It was to these plantation owners that Sherman intended to bring “the hard hand of war”, and he did so with audacity and courage.
The surprise now, in 2016, is that this soldier, portrayed to generations of children as the father of the American style of scorched-earth warfare, was actually a politically shrewd general, probably more so than 99 per cent of America’s top officers today. He grew up in a political atmosphere. His foster father and one of his brothers were United States senators from Ohio and also became secretaries of the Treasury.
Though Sherman disliked the political world, he understood it well. He knew how Washington worked and how events there were affected by military operations. He understood, for example, that Union soldiers randomly stealing from the farmers of Kentucky would “turn the people against us”. This concerned him especially because he believed that holding Kentucky and Tennessee, and their rivers, was the key to winning the war. Another example: he knew that taking Atlanta at a time when Grant was stalemated in Virginia would help Abraham Lincoln win re-election in 1864.
James Lee McDonough’s biography, “William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country”, tells this story well. McDonough, an emeritus professor of history at Auburn University, shows how Sherman’s first experience of war, fighting the Seminoles in Florida in the early 1840s, gave him a holistic sense of how to win. More than most officers, Sherman understood that attacking the enemy’s supplies is often the best way to undermine his morale and will to fight.
Perhaps because of this understanding of the role of logistics and economics in supporting war, Sherman had a better sense than most of his contemporaries of what an American civil war would entail. In 1860-61, as war approached, he was living in Louisiana, where he was the first superintendent of what is now Louisiana State University. McDonough quotes him telling Southern friends that they did not understand what they were getting into: “You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know what you are talking about.” The people of the North, he continued, “are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it ... In the end you will surely fail.”
As that comment indicates, there was also a bit of the visionary to Sherman. Early in the war, when other officers were clamouring for command, he surprised President Lincoln by saying he did not want a senior position until he better understood the conflict. “Not till I see daylight ahead do I want to lead,” he explained to his wife. Even so, Lincoln named him commander of Union operations in Kentucky. In the autumn of 1861, as he came to realise that the war would be longer and harder than almost anyone thought, and might well consume a generation of men, he plunged into a deep depression.
A major newspaper in his home state of Ohio reported that he was “insane” and “stark mad”. One reason for that accusation was his view that far greater numbers of soldiers were needed than officials recognised. He was relieved of the Kentucky post and for a time contemplated suicide.
Yet he bounced back in 1862, and was given command of the crucial area around the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. There he began to work closely with Grant. McDonough is especially good in showing the role that Sherman played that year and the next in supporting Grant both militarily and emotionally. The deep trust that grew between the two became a major asset to the Union, especially when they were conducting the two major campaigns of 1864-65, with Sherman in the southeast and Grant in Virginia.
McDonough is at his best in portraying Sherman’s military qualities, as in the brilliant campaign from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta, where he repeatedly sideslipped Confederate defences. Oddly, for a book of epic scale, McDonough’s recounting of Sherman’s march in November and December 1864 is a bit flat, less colourful than his lively earlier depictions of Sherman’s emergence as a leader at the battle of Shiloh and in battles for Atlanta. There is more to say here about the march than he does, as was demonstrated a few years ago by Anne Sarah Rubin’s “Through the Heart of Dixie”, a powerful exploration of how Sherman’s march has been perceived by Northerners, Southerners and historians. That said, the best account of the march probably remains the version offered in Sherman’s own memoirs.
Simply in military terms, Sherman’s march remains breathtaking. He abandoned his supply bases and indeed was cut off from communication with the outside world until he reached Savannah on the coast in late December. Grant and Lincoln were nervous about it. General George McClellan, running for president against Lincoln, believed “Sherman will come to grief”.
But Sherman had studied the 1860 census data, McDonough notes, and so he knew where the biggest and richest farms lay in Georgia. In many places his soldiers feasted on meat and corn. His march was most of all a political effort, designed to show Southerners that those who were with the Union would be untouched, and those who persisted in opposing it would suffer. In areas where his troops were “unmolested”, he stated in an order issued on November 9, 1864, as the march began, no property would be destroyed. But when resistance was encountered, he continued, his forces should react with “a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility”.
The campaign from Atlanta to the Atlantic actually involved very few battles or casualties. In fact, of about 60,000 troops, only 103 were killed in combat. Yet the campaign had a devastating effect on the South’s determination to continue fighting.
If only our generals today were as astute.
–New York Times News Service
Thomas E. Ricks is the author of “The Generals” and four other books about the United States military. He is currently writing a book about Winston Churchill and George Orwell.
