Chapter 24
Section 24 of Great Men and Famous Women, Volume 2. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Great Men and Famous Women, Volume 2, by Charles F. Horn. William Tecumseh Sherman. By Eldridge S. Brooks. 1820-1891.
Achievement wins applause, and when the steps towards achievement are tinged with mystery, romance, or daring, the applause is irresistible and continuous. So it has come to pass that by the side of Xenophon's masterly retreat of the 10,000, of Cortez's burning his ships at Veracruz, and of Marlborough's bold march through the heart of Germany to the victory at Blenheim, stands Sherman's March to the Sea and his Christmas gift of captured Savannah. And yet,
this brilliant leader of men had never seen a hostile shot fired until he was 41, and his first battle was the defeat at Bull Run. The March to the Sea, upon which Sherman's fame as a soldier so largely rests, was by no means the greatest or most significant of his many achievements. His record as a soldier is filled with examples of his courage, his shrewdness, and his tenacity, while his mingling of gentle ways and grim determination, of restlessness and calm,
of forethought, fearlessness and frankness, make him at once a unique and central figure in the decade of war and reconstruction that forms so important a chapter in the story of the United States of America. William Tecumseh Sherman was born on February 8, 1820, in the town of Lancaster, the county seat of that fair and fertile section known as Fairfield County, in the southern part of the state of Ohio. The busy commonwealth that furnished 300,000 men to the
armies of the Union and gave to the Civil War its three greatest generals. For Grant and Sherman were Ohio-born, and Sheridan's boyhood was spent in the same state. But Sherman's ancestors were of stout Puritan stock, dating back almost to the days of the Mayflower. His first American forebearer was a Puritan minister, Reverend John Sherman, an emigrant to the Connecticut colony from Essex in England. One of the collateral branches was Roger Sherman, drafter and signer
of the Declaration of Independence. The father of the soldier was Judge Sherman of the Ohio Supreme Court. His mother was a Hoyt of New England. William Tecumseh Sherman was the sixth of 11 children, a younger brother being the lad who, later, became Senator John Sherman of Ohio. Judge Sherman, the father of the boys, died in 1829, and William was adopted into the family of Senator Thomas Ewing of Ohio, a resident of Lancaster, and a notable figure in American history,
for he was senator and cabinet minister for nearly 40 years. Sherman's training was that of a soldier from boyhood. At 16, he was entered as a cadet at the Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1840, standing sixth in a class of 42. Engineering was his favorite study, but devotion to his books seems not to have kept him out of mischief. He was not, he himself admitted later, a Sunday school cadet, for his record for behavior being 124 in the Academy
Standard, not so very far from the foot. But Grant, it must be remembered, ranked even lower in his behavior record, standing at 149. The 20 years that followed, Sherman's graduation from West Point were variously spent. He was commissioned second lieutenant in the 3rd Artillery July 1, 1840, and ordered to Florida to face the hostile Seminoles. He was promoted to be first lieutenant November 30, 1841, and in 1842 was ordered to Fort Morgan in Alabama. From 1843 to 1846,
he was stationed at Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, where the afterward famous Major Robert Anderson was his superior officer at Bellefontaine, Alabama, and at Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania on recruiting service. When the war with Mexico was declared, Lieutenant Sherman was sent to California, then a debatable land. He reached Monterey Bay by way of the Horn in January 1847 and spent three years in California, returning east as bearer of dispatches to the War Department in 1850.
In May 1850, he married Miss Ellen Ewing, daughter of Senator Ewing, then Secretary of the Interior under President Taylor, and in September following, he was commissioned as captain and sent to St. Louis. It was at this time, so Sherman notes in his memoirs, that he felt a great disappointment to think that the war with Mexico was fought to a finish without his having been in it. And he adds, Of course, I thought it was the last and only chance in my day, and that my career as a soldier
was at an end. It was at an end for a time, for after garrison duty at St. Louis in New Orleans, he resigned from the Army and, in 1853, sought to make his fortune in business. He first went to California as a manager of the San Francisco branch of a St. Louis bank, but the ill success of the enterprise drove him east again in 1857, and he engaged in the banking business in New York City.
To this enterprise, however, the famous panic of 1857 put an early end, and in 1858, he was embarked in the law with an office at Leavenworth, Kansas. This, too, failing to supply sufficient bread and butter, he tried farming in Ohio for a while, and then applied for a government position in Washington.
Instead of this, however, he secured an appointment as superintendent and professor of engineering in a new military college just started at Alexandria in Louisiana. He entered upon the duties of his position on the 1st of January, 1860, when the mutterings of rebellion were already abroad, and just as he had put the academy into good working order,
the war cloud became so black that Sherman, in a manly letter to Governor Moore of Louisiana, declared his intention of maintaining his allegiance to, quote, the old Constitution as long as a fragment of it survives, end quote, resigned his office and returned to Ohio. In April 1861, he accepted the presidency of a St. Louis street railway company. Then, Sumpter was fired on. The war fever filled the land. Troops were hurried to the front,
and Sherman signified to the Secretary of War his desire to serve his country, quote, in the capacity for which I was trained, end quote. On May 14, 1861, he was appointed Colonel of the 13th United States Infantry and assigned to inspection duty in Washington under General Scott, the commander-in-chief, and then the real story of his life began. At first, fate seemed to be against him. He was too outspoken and hard-headed to suit
the reckless and effusive boasters of those early days of the war, which he insisted would be long and bloody, unless the whole military power of the Republic was put into the field to crush the rebellion before it could grow into a revolution. He was as disgusted as Washington had been in revolutionary times with short service enlistments and refused point blank to go to Ohio to enlist quote, three months men, end quote, saying in his blunt way, quote, you might as well try to put out
fire with a squirt gun as expect to put down this rebellion with three months troops, end quote. He was assigned to the command of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Division of McDowell's Army and had his baptism of fire upon the disastrous field of Bull Run, which he has characterized as, quote, one of the best-planned and worst-fought battles of the war, end quote.
That famous skedaddle, as it was the fashion to call it, he frankly admitted in his official report, began among the men of his brigade, and the disorderly retreat speedily became a humiliating route, which only a few cool-headed officers, such as Colonel Sherman, could check or control. The chagrin over the stampede at Bull Run was so great that the more conscientious Union officers
expected to be held responsible for it and duly court-martialed. But to Colonel Sherman's surprise, his superiors saw beyond the demoralization of the moment, and in August 1861, he was made Brigadier General of Volunteers and transferred to the Department of the Cumberland with headquarters at Louisville, Kentucky. From thenceforth, all his fighting and all his fame was associated with the armies of the West. At once, he saw the desperate condition of affairs
in Kentucky, a border state, only to be held for the Union by prompt and decisive measures. He called for reinforcements frequently and emphatically, and when the Secretary of War visited him on a tour of inspection and asked his views of the situation, Sherman paralyzed him by asserting that for the defense of Kentucky, 60,000 men were needed at once and that 200,000 would be necessary there before the war in that state could be ended. This was so out of proportion
to the Secretary's estimate that Sherman was declared crazy. He was deprived of his command at the front and relegated to a camp of instruction near St. Louis. But so shrewd and correct an observer, so energetic a leader, and so determined a fighter could not long be left in retirement, and in February 1862, General Sherman was ordered to assume command of the forces at Paducah, Kentucky. Desperate fighting soon followed. The Battle of Shiloh, sometimes called Pittsburgh
Landing, showed of what stuff the crazy Sherman, as the newspapers had called him, was made. And from Shiloh's bloody field in 1862 to Johnston's surrender at Raleigh in 1865, Sherman's fame rose steadily until it left him one of the three greatest generals of the Civil War and one of the famous commanders of the century. From Shiloh to Raleigh, Sherman stood, in a measure, as Grant's right hand.
For, even when Grant was hammering away in Virginia, Sherman, by his strategy, shrewdness, and daring in the West, was giving him material support and help. In the three years of fighting from 1862 to 1865, these events stand prominently out in Sherman's military record. The tenacity with which he held the right of the line at Shiloh,
the faithful service he rendered as commander of the left before Vicksburg, his rapid relief of Knoxville, his brilliant capture of Atlanta, his daring and famous march to the sea, and the capture of Savannah, his equally daring march through the Carolinas to the help of Grant, and his final capture of Johnston's army, which was the real close of the war. In all these events, the peculiar traits of character that made Sherman so conspicuous a
success stood out in bold relief. His coolness in danger, his bravery in action, his daring in devices, his readiness of invention, his electric surprises, his scientific strategy, his ruthlessness in destruction, his courtesy to the conquered, his devotion to his soldiers, his loyalty to his superior in command, his restlessness, his energy, his determination to succeed. These all contributed to the result that made Sherman's army famous the world over and stamped him as the hero of a
campaign that, according to military critics, stands alone in the history of modern warfare. His scientific fencing with General Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate leader, was as masterly as it was effective. He forced his rival from the stand he had taken as warder of the gateways to the South Supply Land, fighting him step by step from Dalton backward to Atlanta and capturing that stronghold of the Confederacy by persistent and desperate fighting. Then, when Atlanta was one,
Sherman's ability to cut the Gordian knot as no other man dared was displayed with a special force. Instead of frittering away his precious time by simply holding Atlanta or wasting strength unnecessarily by hunting up a baffled and elusive foe or devoting all his energy to keeping open his long line of communication and supply, he determined to strike a disastrous blow at the Confederacy, swiftly and unexpectedly. Cutting loose from his connection with the West, he would
live on the enemy and lay waste the storehouse of the Confederacy, or, as he expressed it in outlining his plans to General Grant, quote, move through Georgia, smashing things to the sea, End quote. The boldness of this desperate measure at first attracted, as it afterward alarmed, the authorities at Washington. Consent was given and then recalled, but before the recall could reach him, Sherman had acted quickly, fearing the same countermand. Upon receipt of the order
consenting to his march, he cut the telegraph wires to the north. Then he burned his bridges, tore up the railroad that connected him with the West, and with his army reduced to its actual available fighting strength of 60,000 men, with banners streaming, gun barrels glistening in the sun, bands playing, and the men singing lustily, glory, glory, hallelujah, Atlanta was left behind, and Sherman's army set its face eastward and commenced its memorable march to the sea.
In two parallel columns, the army of invasion and destruction moved through the fertile land, cutting a swath of desolation 40 miles wide and crippling the Confederacy by dissipating its most cherished resources. For fully a month, the army was practically lost so far as communication with the North was concerned. Then it struck the sea at Savannah, captured that beautiful city, and in the celebrated dispatch, which actually reached President Lincoln on Christmas Eve,
General Sherman presented to the president and the country the city of Savannah as a Christmas gift. Savannah taken, the more difficult march northward was determined upon, so as to make a junction with Grant before Richmond and end the war by one final and tremendous stroke. The campaign of the Carolinas, as this northward march was called, was a really greater achievement than the march to the sea,
for it was against more formidable natural odds and was done in midwinter. The distance covered from Savannah to Goldsboro in North Carolina was 425 miles. Five large rivers were crossed, three important cities were captured, and the stars and stripes were once more flung to the breeze above the ruins of Fort Sumter. And yet, in 50 days from the start, the army reached Goldsboro, in superb order, and concluded
what Sherman himself designates as, quote, one of the longest and most important marches ever made by an organized army in a civilized country, end quote. It was a great achievement, but it was without the novelty, the mystery, and the dramatic qualities of the earlier cross-country campaign, and so it has come to pass that the first has been the most famous, and Sherman's March to the Sea has gone into history as one of the romances
and glories of the War of the Rebellion. The Campaign of the Carolinas fitly ended as the March to the Sea in victory, and the successes at Averysboro and Burtonville culminated on April 26, 1865, in the surrender near Raleigh of Johnston, and the last organized army of the Confederacy. The war was over. Sherman's army marched northward to Washington, where, on May 24, 1865, on the second day of the famous Grand Review, General Sherman and his victorious army marched past
the presidential reviewing stand. 65,000 men, says General Sherman, in splendid physique, who had just completed a march of nearly 2,000 miles in a hostile country. Then came the disbandment. Sherman bade his boys goodbye in a ringing farewell order. The men departed to their waiting homes, and the splendid Army of the West was a thing of the past. After the conclusion of the war, General Sherman was, for four years, stationed at St. Louis as commander of the
military division of the Mississippi. He was a notable public character with a reputation for bravery that none dare assail, and a record as a soldier that made him one of the nation's heroes. He stood next to Grant in position, merit, and popularity, and when, in 1869, General Grant was elected to the presidency, Sherman, who had been named lieutenant general in 1866, was promoted to the vacant post as general of the army with headquarters at Washington. He visited Europe
in 1871 to 1872, and both because of his own brilliant record and his official position as head of the American army, he was everywhere received with honor and distinction. Returning home, he wrote his memoirs. They were published in 1875 and stamped him, in the opinion of his critics, as, by far, the ablest writer among America's military men. On February 8, 1884, he was placed on the retired list, quote, turned out to grass, end quote, as he expressed it,
quote, and told I could spend the rest of my days in peace and retirement, end quote. Quote, so much to end, end quote. It was a fitting tribute to the man who had worn the uniform of his country for 40 years, faithful to every trust and equal to every emergency, and who had risen through every grade from a cadetship and a lieutenancy to the proud eminence of General
of the Armies of the United States. The 26 years that were his after the close of the great struggle in which he had been one of the central figures, were filled with a quiet enjoyment of life and a wide personal popularity. Wherever he went, he was a living hero, welcome and honored as such by the people who owed so much to his wise brain and his unsheathed sword. He could have been President of the United States had he been willing to accept the nomination that was offered him. Instead,
he declined with preemptory and characteristic bluntness, and he is, it is believed, the only man who ever did refuse that high office. After his retirement, he made his home, first in St. Louis, and then in New York, where the last five years of his life were passed, and where he speedily became one of the great city's familiar, honored, and notable figures. Here, too, the final call came to him. On February 14, 1891, when he had just passed his 71st birthday, sounded the
order, parade is dismissed, and Sherman died in his own home, in West 71st Street, mourned by an entire nation. He was buried in St. Louis by the side of his wife, who had died in 1890. William Tecumseh Sherman was, in the strictest sense of the word, a soldier. His bearing and presence told of camp and uniform. With a military education and military environments, he could not understand and could not calmly brook the cautious conservatism of the civilian,
which would often temporize when swift, determined action seemed necessary, and which was often boastful at home and timorous in the field. Able in action, fierce in assault, unerring in judgment, watchful in detail. With a sagacity and foresight that amounted almost to genius and a memory that was marvelous, General Sherman was a great military leader and one who, when the opportunity came, rode straight into fame and reputation. As determined as he was daring, as magnanimous
as he was impulsive, as clear-headed as he was energetic, and as gentle-hearted in peace as he was ruthless in war, he was indeed a unique figure in America's history, and, as time goes on, his name will stand as that of one of the great republic's most famous men and most cherished memories. End of Section 24.
