Shortly after 7:00 A.M. on the morning of April 6, 1862, near the Shiloh Church on the banks of the Tennessee River, Brigadier General William T. Sherman was riding with his staff in front of his camp. Sherman’s orderly, the handsome young Illinois cavalryman Thomas D. Holliday, was riding beside the general. Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, a hidden group of Confederate pickets opened fire on the Union party, shooting Holliday right off his horse, killing him instantly. Massed enemy infantry then poured out of the woods, throwing themselves in a desperate assault first against Sherman’s division, and then against the whole Union army encamped around Shiloh.

Despite their later protestations to the contrary, both Grant and his subordinate Sherman were unprepared for this attack. Grant, who always thought far more offensively than defensively, had assumed that the Confederates, who were well entrenched twenty miles to the south, at Corinth, Mississippi, would stay within their lines awaiting his attack. Partly for this reason, and partly out of concern lest his untested troops lose their fighting nerve, Grant did not instruct his army to dig defensive trenches around their camps. He also left his forces divided by the Tennessee River, ignoring another obvious practice of battlefield organization. Sherman, encamped on the most exposed flank of the Union army, compounded Grant’s poor judgment by failing to post defensive pickets or to patrol with sufficient energy in the direction from which the enemy might come. He also ignored the evidence brought to him several times of increasing numbers of Confederate cavalrymen and pickets in the woods to the south, in part out of overcompensation for his panic five months earlier in Kentucky, when he had so vastly overestimated the enemy. On April 3, three days before the battle, he had written to Ellen, echoing Grant’s assumptions, “We are constantly in the presence of enemy pickets, but I am satisfied that they will wait our coming at Corinth.” The next day, he wrote to Grant that he expected nothing more than continued picket firing. “The enemy is saucy [but] I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.”¹

Though he had been surprised, Sherman had a great battle, as did Grant. His division helped blunt the Confederate attack, and on the next day contributed to the victorious counteroffensive that drove the badly mauled Confederates from the field. He rallied his troops with coolness and determination, riding everywhere among his eight thousand men, despite having three horses shot dead under him, and suffering a grazing wound to his shoulder, and another more serious buckshot wound to his right hand, which he wrapped with a handkerchief, without ceasing to observe the battle and to give clear orders. So frequently did he expose himself to enemy fire that there seems to have been a suicidal element in his behavior. He knew that he could redeem himself from the charge of insanity and implied cowardice that had followed him from Kentucky only by heroic performance in battle. Being ready to die is often synonymous with being brave, even unreasonably brave, in the face of the enemy. An intelligent commander does not expose himself heedlessly to enemy fire. A heroic commander places himself in harm’s way, often deliberately, thereby blurring the distinction between heroism and stupidity, in the name of honor. Civil War soldiers extended the chivalric tradition into the age of modern, mass warfare, which they helped to inaugurate. Men like Sherman reinforced the code of personal honor despite its increasing military counterproductiveness.

When he wrote his report on the battle, only three days after it had ended, Sherman discussed the behavior of the Union cohort in the heroic mode. On the second day of the battle, Sherman was marshaling his division for a movement into a Confederate-infested forest. He paused to watch some Kentucky Union troops attack. “Here I saw Willich’s regiment advance upon a point of water-oaks and thicket, behind which I know the enemy was in great strength, and enter it in beautiful style. Then arose the severest musketry fire I ever heard, which lasted some twenty minutes, when this splendid regiment had to fall back.” Later that afternoon, a brigade of another “splendid division” from Kentucky “advanced beautifully, deployed, and entered this dreaded woods”; while yet another Kentucky brigade, Colonel Rousseau’s, moved “in splendid order steadily to the front.” In his report, Sherman then commended the colonels who had led several regiments as “cool, judicious, intelligent,” as “brave and gallant,” as behaving with “great gallantry … leading handsomely,” showing “quick perception [and] great personal courage.”²

Coming from the warrior who is perhaps best remembered for his 1880 statement that “Boys … War is all hell,” such heroic romanticism seems out of place. But at Shiloh, Sherman grabbed at the chance to regain his honor, in full public view and in his own heart. In such romantic language, war remained an individual experience, a personal test for Sherman and for his fellow soldiers. Amid the carnage, Shiloh became, immediately on the retelling, a sublime experience for him—“beautiful and dreadful,” as he soon told John—a test of brave men who had stood the greatest trial of manhood. Sherman wrote that way of others and they perceived him likewise.

On the second day of battle, the soldiers of Rousseau’s brigade, who had despised Sherman when he was their commander in Kentucky, put their hats on their bayonets and cheered him as he rode by, with his wounded hand and powder-blackened face. “They recognized me and such shouting you never heard,” he wrote Ellen on April 11. “I have since visited their camps and never before received such marks of favor.”

If the men in the ranks cheered, so did Sherman’s superiors, noting in particular his personal bravery while under heavy fire. On April 9, in his report of the battle, Grant, who was Sherman’s immediate superior, wrote, “I feel it a duty … to a gallant and able officer, Brigadier General W. T. Sherman, to make a special mention. [Sherman] displayed great judgment and skill … although severely wounded in the hand the first day, his place was never vacant. He was again wounded and had three horses killed under him.” On April 13, Henry W. Halleck, overall Union commander in the West, wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, “It is the unanimous opinion here that … Sherman saved the fortune of the day on the 6th … and contributed largely to the glorious victory on the 7th. He was in the thickest of the fighting on both days, having three horses killed under him and being wounded twice.” Halleck then requested Sherman’s immediate promotion to major general, to date back to April 6, the first day of his glory.³ Clearly impressed by Sherman’s recovery, as witnessed by his brave performance, Halleck also gathered reflected glory to himself for having rescued the depressed failure from Kentucky and having eased him back into active command.

Grant’s praise meant the most to Sherman, who so much admired his cool and victorious leader. Grant returned the admiration on a human as much as on a military plane. He wrote his wife, Julia, three weeks after Shiloh, “In General Sherman the country has an able and gallant defender, and your husband a true friend.” Sherman earned Grant’s growing esteem not merely in battle but from his timely and heartfelt intervention when Grant’s career was in jeopardy. In mid-May, partly in response to public outcry over the defensive unpreparedness of the Union army at Shiloh, Halleck came to the field from St. Louis and took over active command, placing Grant on the shelf as his unused second in command. When Sherman heard that in response to this demotion Grant had asked to be relieved from command—in effect, to quit the war—he immediately rode over to Grant’s camp to talk him out of it. Essentially he told Grant to follow his own example. Before Shiloh, “I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of ‘crazy,’ but that single battle had given me new life, and that now I was in high feather.” Having moved through adversity, he now used his own difficult experience to give Grant solace. Sherman argued that Grant too should stick it out through bad days, because soon “some happy accident” would “restore him … to his true place.” Luck would reward he who persevered. Grant took Sherman’s advice, and five weeks later indeed was restored to his command, when Lincoln called Halleck to Washington to serve as chief of staff. Grant was understandably grateful to Sherman for this act of friendship. He assured Ellen Ewing Sherman on July 7 that “there is nothing he, or his friends for him, could do that I would not do if it were in my power. It is to him and some other brave men like himself that I have gained the little credit awarded me, and that our cause has triumphed to the extent it has.”⁴

Reinforcement from his brightest and most experienced subordinate was just the boost Grant had needed, and this augured well for their future relationship. Grant, who was not as politically obtuse as he often appeared, was fully aware that he was writing, through Ellen, to the powerful Ewing/Sherman political alliance. They might help him one day, and he, his star again on the rapid ascendancy, intended to help them. This was not cynicism on Grant’s part, but higher politics, grounded in genuine, battle-tested friendship. The two men would trust, like, and admire each other until the end of the war. In a real sense, Sherman had cemented their alliance, accepting his subordinate role, and using his own previous history of mental distress in a creative and generous fashion.

Sherman shared his abrupt spiritual rebirth most fully with Ellen. Four days after Shiloh, in his letter of April 11, which can best be characterized as ecstatic, he first reassured Ellen that he was safe, despite his wounds, and briefly sketched his role in the battle. He then told Ellen that “they say that I accomplished some important results, and General Grant makes special mention of me in his report which he showed me.” Three days later he would add that “I noticed that when we were enveloped and death stared us all in the face my seniors in rank leaned on me.” In his first letter, written in the same oddly passive voice, he notified Ellen of his spiritual reversal. Whereas for months, and as recently as two days before the battle, he had proclaimed his desire to slip away (in his half-acknowledged dishonor) into some obscure corner, now he wrote, “I have worked hard to keep down, but somehow I am forced into prominence and might as well submit.” The first and most profound demonstration of the new esteem of others had been the huzzahs of those Kentucky troops on the second day of the battle. Not just his conduct, but their recognition of it, and then Grant’s, allowed him to feel that indeed he had reclaimed his honor and self-esteem. In a somewhat ironic manner, Sherman told his wife that he knew she would now commence reconstructing his personal history for their progeny, based on his reversal of fortune at Shiloh, through applying scissors and paste to the heretofore dreaded newspapers. “I know you will read all accounts, cut out paragraphs with my name for Willy’s future study, all slurs you will hide away, and gradually convince yourself that I am a soldier as famous as General [Nathanael] Greene,” of Revolutionary War renown. He added, three days later, that he was “not in search of honor or fame” on his own account, “and only court it for yours and childrens sake … and I know your father will be pleased.” And ten days after that he sent a box of cannonballs and bullets he had gathered from the field at Shiloh to his two boys. “I would like to see Willy’s eyes when he sees the dread missiles,” he told Ellen. These were relics of his triumphant battle for his boys to heft, markers of a reputation reversed in the maelstrom of battle.⁵

Sherman was somewhat disingenuous in projecting his desire for fame onto his loved ones. His performance at Shiloh had led to immediate rewards that had validated his own bruised ego; he felt vindicated. However, a gentleman refrains from bragging, and so, after receiving word of the promotion to major general, for example, which Halleck had offered him, and which he and his family had sought so avidly as the imprimatur of his redemption, he wrote to Ellen, “I don’t feel very solicitous on the point of promotion except they are making so many Brigadiers that the rank confers no honor.”⁶ In plain fact, he wanted his head higher than that of others, and well noticed. At the same time he wanted to pay back Ellen, his children, and his clan for all the grief he had caused them. As they had rallied behind him, so now should they share in his reward. Sherman’s urgent vanity was quite apparent; his attempts at dissembling his egotism were transparent.

Sherman had closed his account of Shiloh to Ellen with a brief acknowledgment of the “horrid nature of war,” but the single greatest impression his letter left was of an enormous mood swing, an emotional reversal. He did not mention that two thousand of his eight thousand men had been killed, wounded, or lost in the battle, nor did he make their suffering central to his account. The most vivid writing concerned his newly heroic self, barely concealed in the retelling. Pride replaced self-laceration. He would remain in this state of elation for the rest of the war. He had “seen the elephant” as the Civil War saying went—faced a death he almost courted in battle. Never again during the war would he return to depression. In the future he would confront personal reversals and attacks on him through explosions of rage rather than by swallowing them as had been his wont for the first forty-two years of his life. Verbally and in writing, he would attack, not retreat. His life would remain full of difficulties, but aggression would replace self-reproach when he met new conflicts.⁷

Ellen Sherman flowed with pride at her husband’s reversal of fortune. Of course, she told him, Shiloh only confirmed for others what she already knew. “I felt as certain before that you would display those qualities as I feel now you have shown them but it is nevertheless a gratification to know that others are disposed to do you justice.” The newspapers immediately published Grant’s and Halleck’s letters of commendation, which produced a response that had “astonished” Ellen, she told her husband, “a general interest” now was “felt by men, women & children of the town & the country.” After Sherman’s promotion Ellen wrote to John, noting that Stanton and Halleck—the very general whom a few weeks before she had named as an arch conspirator against her husband—“have certainly treated Cump nobly.” Ellen told John of her “relief.” “He is in fine spirits and has completely thrown aside those slanders now but he never did before.” She was “perfectly satisfied, since he feels that he is vindicated from the charge of insanity & has made his brother officers feel his worth & most of them, his superiority.” She then thanked John for having fought alongside her in Sherman’s dark days. The Shermans and the Ewings had truly joined forces. “I now feel more than I ever have before that his people are my people.” Thomas Ewing too was “exceedingly gratified,” she wrote John. So not merely Sherman, but Ellen and all the Ewings felt vindicated.⁸

At the end of his April 11 letter, Sherman had added, almost as an afterthought, “the piles of dead and wounded and maimed make me more anxious than ever for some hope of an end, but I know such a thing cannot be for a long, long time. Indeed I never expect … to survive it.” With this statement, Sherman entered the Civil War intellectually and emotionally, where before he had hesitated to commit himself. At the same time that he had to generalize from all those deaths to his own probable death, he had to gird himself for the long haul, for many possible future Shilohs, and so he had to deaden himself to the suffering around him in order to go on committing more men to battle, where many were sure to die in a war with no end in sight. Without a turning off to the suffering of his men in battle, necessary as part of turning on to responsible, fully engaged generalship, the emotional problems of military leadership would otherwise have been overwhelming. Perhaps an intuitive understanding of this necessity for extreme detachment had been one of the reasons Sherman had balked at his role prior to Shiloh. On the other hand, nine months earlier, after Bull Run, Sherman had already written Ellen that “the carnage of battle, men lying in every conceivable shape, and mangled in a horrible way … did not make a particle of impression on me, but horses running about riderless with blood streaming from their nostrils, lying on the ground hitched to guns, gnawing their sides in death” had given him a feeling of distinct horror. In this depiction of his first battle, Sherman had transferred horror suffered by fellow humans onto horses. Bull Run had been a much smaller battle, out of sync with Sherman’s continuing career. Shiloh was huge, and it came at the commencement of what Sherman realized would be his possibly endless participation in the war-long campaign in the West. Now, writing to Ellen, he focused his horror at Shiloh, which marked the beginning of his true military vocation, on one soldier’s death—Holliday’s—the young, handsome orderly “who carried his carbine ever ready to defend me.… The shot that killed him was meant for me. After the battle was over I had him brought to my camp and buried by a tree scarred with balls and its top carried off by a cannon ball.” Youth, whom Holliday represented, was killed, not age; the old tree had its greenest branches lopped off; and the older man felt survivor’s guilt.⁹

When she received this letter, Ellen immediately joined in her husband’s grieving for Holliday, deepening it further by taking it into the women’s sphere of ritualized mourning. “Poor young Holliday,” she wrote by return post, “Where do his friends live? Tell me that I may write to them: his parents, his wife or his sisters.” In addition to extending condolences, she would pray for him: “Poor young Holliday. I hope God has had mercy on his soul.” Ellen also instantly participated in her husband’s fantasy that Holliday had replaced Sherman in the grave, which had given Sherman his vicarious emotional interpretation of the meaning of his orderly’s death from the volley that ought to have killed him instead. “Truly your escape from death seems miraculous,” she wrote him. Then, as might be expected from this fervent Christian wife writing to her unbelieving husband, she reminded Sherman of her deepest fears for him. “Do not go into the battle as a heathen would with no prayer for another world to which you may be hurried.” For Ellen, the underlying vicarious moral meaning of Holliday’s death was that her husband’s final spiritual ascendency to heaven was at risk.¹⁰

Sherman, the deist, could not join his wife in this interpretation of Holliday’s death, and of Shiloh in general, as a personal victory that would lead directly to spiritual redemption. In replying to her analysis, he wrote that, even if she did, he did not feel “charitable” with himself, because he had for so long “felt anxious … held back” in the war. Because he had refused “to attempt to lead when all appeared so dark,” he was somehow disqualified both from his own charity and, implicitly, that of God. Despite his sense of worldly and emotional resurrection at Shiloh, he did not feel the need to press on into a spiritual, Christian rebirth. Where she had such enviable faith, he continued to experience only spiritual blankness. “[I] confess my only hope is in a Providence that is inscrutable to me.”¹¹

Although Ellen had been unable to obtain spiritual closure with her husband as the final reward of Shiloh, she could still rejoice in his success. She also allowed herself to express pride in the way she had pulled him up from destruction, thereby setting him on the path to glory. Two months after Shiloh, she wrote her husband with manifest pride at having acted, really acted, where she had always been passive. In her letter she went right back to her first memories of bold nine-year-old Cump and shy four-year-old Ellen, when he first moved into the Ewing home on Main Street in Lancaster. “Willy is on the tops of the trees after cherries.… How well I remember seeing you climbing the cherry trees when not much larger than him. Little did I think when I looked at you there, timid thinking and wondering at your boldness that in later years my courage would be called up to enable you to bear the bitter trials of life. But so it has been.” Ellen did not suggest that this role reversal be made permanent. She had acted forcefully and publicly in response to the emergency situation created by his depressive passivity. Now he was whole and could once again act strenuously in the world, while she would return home and do honor to him. Indeed, she suggested that her activities on his behalf had always remained a form of tribute, albeit by unusual means. “I thank God that in our day of trouble my heart did homage to your peerless virtue.… You have nobly weathered the storm & you are thrice dear to me on account of the troubles you have had & the danger you have braved.”¹²

If Shiloh had turned Sherman, in the eyes of others and in his own eyes, into a heroic general marching forward through war, it left Ellen, after her hugely successful foray into public life, back at home in Lancaster, tending house, servants, and children as always, fretful and passive as ever. On his next birthday, ten months after Shiloh, Ellen wrote Sherman that “sadly but secretly do I ponder … your every act of virtue & heroism.” She wrote that in her state of inactive and melancholy pridefulness he was dear to her, but she also wrote that it was hard to be the quiescent woman, the wife of a man in the distant and noisy world of action, even if he was now a hero. “Could you know how I long to have you with us … you would feel what the trial of staying at home and quietly enduring is. As it is you know only the boisterous & stormy side of heroism, whilst I often have a dreary monotony, with nothing to divert me from the inevitable heartaches & pangs, fear dread regret and longing.”¹³ He could act, while she could only stay and brood. Memories of her assault on Washington and the reflected glory of Shiloh could only go so far; beneath her rather too-grand admiration for her hero lurked the old resentments about her daily life, her actual husband.

There is no doubt, however, that for the Union public Shiloh transformed Sherman the crazy alarmist into Sherman the hero. Even in certain reaches of the press, this image of the renewed Sherman flew up from the ashes of the old. Franc Wilkie, war correspondent for the Chicago Times, recalled meeting both Grant and Sherman soon after the battle. In an extended literary conceit, he compared the two newly minted heroes, mainly to Sherman’s advantage. Where Grant was “broad and deep in the chest,” Sherman was “narrow and almost effeminate”; where Grant was “taciturn,” Sherman was “voluble, smiling”; where Grant’s eyes were “almost fishy in their immobility,” Sherman’s were “light gray and penetrating, flashing incessantly in every direction”; where Grant moved rigidly as a “piece of marble,” Sherman, “whether walking, talking or laughing, walked, talked and laughed all over … perspiring thought from every pore, and every agitation of the inner man produced a corresponding agitation of his outer one.” Wilkie found the sum total of this soaring personality to be enormously attractive. Sherman was “pleasant and affable to his inferiors and engaging to his equals, with a mood that shifted like a barometer in a tropic sea. With an utterance so rapid at times to be almost incoherent, he at one instance related some laughable incident, and the next criticized the plans of one of Napoleon’s campaigns, and a moment later occupied himself in hurling imprecations on some officers.”¹⁴

The repellent and morbid loser in Kentucky of November 1861 had been transformed both in self-conception and in appearance, into the attractive and witty, energetic and explosive hero of April 1862. This sweeping mood change unleashed an enormous creativity and an equally enormous destructive rage. Formerly, Sherman had turned that rage against himself in terribly damaging self-reproach, and had fallen into ever-deepening depression. Now he would sublimate those extreme self-doubts into a fatalistic, almost transcendent commitment to battle. He would assault, verbally and militarily, all his enemies, one after the other, with mounting ferocity. His first target was the press, against whom he felt an enormous grudge that he intended to settle on his own punishing terms.