The Scourge of War

William Tecumseh Sherman, a West Point graduate and veteran of the Seminole War, became one of the best-known generals in the Civil War. His March to the Sea, which resulted in a devastated swath of the South from Atlanta to Savannah, cemented his place in history as the pioneer of total war. This book offers a life and times account of Sherman. By examining his childhood and education, his business ventures in California, his antebellum leadership of a military college in Louisiana, and numerous career false starts, the book shows how unlikely his exceptional Civil War career would seem. It also demonstrates how crucial his family was to his professional path, particularly his wife’s intervention during the war. It analyzes Sherman’s development as a battlefield commander and especially his crucial friendships with Henry W. Halleck and Ulysses S. Grant. In doing so, the text details how Sherman overcame both his weaknesses as a leader and severe depression to mature as a military strategist. Central chapters narrate closely Sherman’s battlefield career and the gradual lifting of his pessimism that the Union would be defeated. After the war, Sherman became a popular figure in the North and the founder of the school for officers at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, known as the “intellectual center of the army.” The book argues that Sherman was not hostile to the South throughout his life and only in later years gained a reputation as a villain who practiced barbaric destruction, particularly as the neo-Confederate Lost Cause grew and he published one of the first personal accounts of the war.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the architects of the northern victory in the American Civil War in 1865. Sherman is often depicted as a ruthless, utterly heartless, and unprincipled destroyer. During his Marches across Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864–65, the Confederate press likened his armies to the pillaging hordes of barbarians that despoiled the Western Roman Empire during its death throes. Sherman’s campaigns appeared prophetic—but he seemed a prophet of doom. However, this diabolical image veers drastically from the reality of the historical Sherman. Sherman’s military career should be assessed within the context of his own time. Viewed in the longer stream of Western military history, Sherman was not prophetic and did not anticipate the methods used during the two World Wars of the twentieth century. He simply recognized with great clarity that warfare is cruel and pitiless—a veritable scourge—and does not provide ready-made protection for the weaker side. Historians have often considered the relationship between military thought and execution, the difference between theory and practice, as puzzling, even intractable or enigmatic. In reappraising Sherman’s military conduct, and the thinking that lay behind it, the main aim of this book is to show how these two sides of one of the most admired but also most condemned of American commanders, the thinker and the doer, intermesh.

Dying in the Last Ditch

This chapter examines Confederate surrenders east of the Mississippi after Appomattox Courthouse. It argues that these post-Appomattox surrenders were more complex and contingent than most historians imagine. It focuses on Johnston's surrender to William Tecumseh Sherman at Bennett Place, Jefferson Davis's flight, and why some Confederate soldiers refused to surrender.

Sherman’s Final March

Having taken Savannah in December 1864, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman convinces his superior and friend, Lt. Gen. U.S. Grant, to let him strike northward through the Carolinas towards Goldsboro, a railroad junction from where he can resupply and move north to join Grant in defeating Lee’s army. His force of 60,000 veterans moves north in two great parallel wings, forging corduroy roads through the swamps, to Columbia-which is burned. Entering North Carolina, Sherman modifies his “hard war” tactics, confident of finding many Unionists among the population. His troops occupy Fayetteville and destroy the Arsenal. He sends some 25,000 “contrabands”-liberated blacks-on steamboats and mule trains to Wilmington. After three days, his troops cross the Cape Fear and resume their march.

Introduction

Few people would challenge the assertion by presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns that “leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.”1 Yet, in the four decades since the publication of Burns’s seminal work Leadership, our understanding of the leadership process has improved tremendously. Among the most important developments is the widespread recognition that successful leaders, operating at any level of responsibility, are not simply endowed at birth with great leadership ability. As General William Tecumseh Sherman once observed, “I have read of men born as generals peculiarly endowed by nature but have never seen one.”...

Not to Destroy but to Make Good

Chapter two continues to trace the origins of the Union army’s “hard yet humane” just-war policies by investigating the Federal experience in occupied Memphis and New Orleans in 1862. Occupying two major Confederate cities forced Union officers and soldiers to come into direct and frequent contact with hostile Confederate civilians. In the process, Union officials further developed detailed military rules and policies for how best to wage a “hard yet humane’ just war. Particular attention in chapter two is paid to the ideas and actions of Benjmain F. Butler in New Orleans and William Tecumseh Sherman in New Orleans.

The Unfortunate Elite: Southern Women and Their Accounts of Sherman’s Army

This essay considers the actions of Union soldiers during their March to the Sea and through the Carolinas under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman. It does so this through the lens of personal diaries kept by southern women who experienced the March first or second-hand. This essay argues that the elite women of the south did not experience conditions as harsh as they described, and that their accounts amount to a misrepresentation of the experiences of most southerners during the March.