EXPLANATORY NOTES
The following notes incorporate much of the work in the Library of America edition, prepared by Charles Royster. Notes within the text are Sherman’s own. For further identification of persons and events mentioned in the Memoirs, see Mark Mayo Boatner III, The Civil War Dictionary, revised edition (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1988); Stewart Sifakis, Who Was Who in the Civil War (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1988); and Patricia L. Faust, Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War (New York: Harper, 1986).
VOLUME I
1. Sir William Francis Napier (1785-1860), History of the War in the Peninsula (1828-40) and History of the Conquest of Scinde (1844-46); Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), History of Europe during the French Revolution (1833-42; 1852-59); and David Hume (1711-76), History of Great Britain (1754-62).
2. Orlando Metcalfe Poe (1832-95), a West Pointer, after serving in the eastern theater and in Tennessee, in the spring of 1864 joined Sherman as chief engineer, and remained with him through the war, and afterward as one of his chief aides.
3. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. (1880-1901).
4. William Cothern, History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut, 3 vols. (Waterbury, Conn.: Bronson Brothers, 1854-79).
5. Sherman is in error about his naming. His parents named him Tecumseh after the great Indian leader, but after his de facto adoption, in 1829, by Thomas Ewing, as family legend had it, a passing priest renamed the boy William Tecumseh when he baptized him (also without asking his opinion) because it was St. William’s day and William was a proper name for a civilized white man. Sherman’s nickname remained “Cump,” however.
6. Thomas Ewing (1789-1871) was born in Virginia but moved as a boy to frontier Lancaster, Ohio, where he became an enormously wealthy and well-connected lawyer and landholder. He was a Whig senator, 1831-37, 1850-51; secretary of the treasury, 1841; secretary of the interior, 1849-51.
7. Dennis Hart Mahan (1802-71) was professor of engineering at the Military Academy from 1832 to 1871 and wrote extensively on military subjects. His course offered the only instruction in strategy given during Sherman’s time at the Academy.
8. Many escaped slaves found refuge among the Seminoles in Florida and fought with them against the U.S. Army.
9. Henry Stanbery (1803-81) practiced law with Thomas Ewing in Lancaster, Ohio. He was attorney general under President Andrew Johnson, 1866-68, before resigning to represent Johnson at his Senate impeachment trial.
10. The lower rank of guns of Castle Pinckney were fired through loopholes or crenels—embrasures—while the top rank were placed on platforms—barbettes—to fire over the top of the parapets.
11. Counterscarps were walls or slopes in front of defensive ditches; scarps, on the rampart side of ditches, were sometimes strengthened by brick-scarp walls.
12. Dom Pedro II (1825-91) was emperor of Brazil from 1840 until he was overthrown in 1889. Together with his empress, Tereza Cristina, sister of Frederick I, king of the Two Sicilies, he ran a very prim Victorian court.
13. Henry A. Wise (1806-76). Lawyer, congressman from Virginia, 1833-44, where he jumped from the Democrats to the Whigs and back again; minister to Brazil, 1844-47; governor of Virginia, 1856-60; and, during the war, brigadier to major general.
14. Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition. During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, 5 vols. (1844); Richard Henry Dana (1815-82), Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840); Alexander Forbes (1778-1862), California: A History of Upper and Lower California from Their First Discovery to the Present Time (1839).
15. Mayor.
16. Vicente Gómez, who asserted in 1853 that the rich New Indria quicksilver mine, established in San Benito County in 1851, was on land granted to him by the Mexican governor of California in 1844. In 1857 Gómez sold his claim to William McGarrahan. The claim was repeatedly brought before the courts and Congress by McGarrahan and his heirs until 1900, but it was never confirmed. Accusations of corruption were leveled against both McGarrahan and his opponents in connection with their lobbying efforts.
17. Customs of the country. Sherman learned to speak passable Spanish during his stay in California.
18. Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) served as a colonel in the War of 1812 and was a Democratic senator from Missouri, 1821-51. His daughter Jessie had married Frémont in 1841.
19. William G. Marcy was the son of William Learned Marcy (1786-1857), Democratic senator from New York, 1831-33; governor, 1833-39; secretary of war under Polk, 1845-49; and secretary of state under Pierce, 1853-57.
20. Commodore John D. Sloat (1781-1867) landed a party at Monterey on July 7, 1846, that proclaimed California to be an American possession under American law.
21. John Bidwell (1819-1900), an early settler of the Sutter ranch in California in 1841, served as a Republican member of the House of Representatives, 1865-67, and later became a leader of the Prohibitionist Party.
22. The macadam roadway, made of layers of stone broken into uniform size, was invented by John McAdam (1756-1836). The roadway and materials used in making it were also called McAdam and MacAdam.
23. Fortress.
24. Saddle bags.
25. John C. Frémont’s reports to Congress on his explorations of California and the Oregon Country, 1842-44, widely reprinted in 1845 and later; made romantic national heroes out of Kit Carson and himself.
26. Wharf.
27. Spirits distilled from the agave plant, similar to tequila.
28. A long miner’s sluice box; also slang for penis.
29. Robert Baylor Semple (1806-54), from Kentucky, also was one of the leaders of the Bear Flag Revolt in California in 1846. He stood 6 feet 6 inches tall.
30. Sherman boarded with this well-born Spanish woman, whose husband was usually absent, and her charming little daughter. Some of his letters hint that he may have had an affair with Doña Augustias.
31. Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina died on March 31, 1850. Henry Clay would follow him to the grave on June 29, 1852, and Daniel Webster, on October 24, 1852, thus ending an era of dominating politicians capable of forging compromises. Webster delivered his last speech on July 17, 1850.
32. Bolinas Bay.
33. Henry Meiggs (1811-77), adventurer and the leading merchant of San Francisco until, in October 1854, he fled to Peru with over $1 million bilked out of bankers less skeptical than Sherman. Though Sherman escaped this round of stringency, his bank was taken down later by a deflationary cycle in effect begun by Meiggs.
34. Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) was a widely published British novelist best known for his book A Diary of Travels in America (New York: D. Appleton, 1839). The captain’s son, Francis Marryat (1826-55), from whom Sherman rented, was author of a popular book about early California, Mountains and Molehills (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855).
35. 1 Henry IV, 3.1.52-54, Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep / Hotspur: Why so can I, or so can any man / but will they come when you call for them?
36. Eugene Casserly (1811-77) was born in Ireland and came as a toddler to New York, where he later became a lawyer. He moved to California in 1850, practiced journalism as well as the law, and served in the U.S. Senate from 1869 to 1873, when he resigned.
37. In chapter 13 of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1836-37), the fictional borough of Eatanswill is the scene of a parliamentary election. Its partisan newspapers, the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent, engage in “spirited attacks” on each other, viz., “ ‘Our worthless contemporary, the Gazette—’ ‘That disgraceful and dastardly journal, the Independent —’ ‘That false and scurrilous print, the Independent—’ ‘That vile and slanderous calumniator, the Gazette.’ ”
38. Although Sherman does not mention it here, several of his old army comrades, on his word, had invested in San Francisco securities, and so, after the bonds collapsed, he took it upon himself to pay them back, which was not his legal obligation. Among those impressed by this moral staunchness was Braxton Bragg, who, in 1859, proved instrumental in securing Sherman the presidency of the Louisiana State Military College.
39. Founded in 1850 and named for the railroad builder William H. Aspinwall, the city, now called Colón, is located at what became the northern entrance to the Panama Canal.
40. Hugh Boyle Ewing (1826-1905) and Thomas Ewing, Jr. (1829-96) became Union brigadier generals during the Civil War, as did their brother Charles Ewing (1835-83).
41. On February 1, 1860, William Pennington of New Jersey, a Whig recently turned Republican, was elected Speaker of the House on the forty-fourth ballot taken during the contest.
42. John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts, both former Whigs, were nominated for president and vice-president by the Constitutional Union convention in Baltimore on May 9, 1860. The convention adopted no platform, but pledged itself to uphold the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the laws. Bell and Everett carried Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee in the presidential election.
43. A secret organization, formed around 1855, that advocated the annexation of Mexico and the creation of a slaveholding “empire” extending in a “golden circle” from the tip of Florida around the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatán Peninsula. The name was later used in 1862-63 by a secret society of Confederate sympathizers in the Midwest.
44. Judah P. Benjamin (1811-84) served as a Whig senator from Louisiana, 1853-59, but switched to the Democrats and was reelected in 1860. Resigning in 1861, he served the Confederacy briefly as attorney general, secretary of war, and then as secretary of state, 1862-65, living out his postwar life as a high-priced barrister in London. John Slidell (1793-1871), who served as the other Democratic senator from Louisiana, 1853-59, and as a Confederate diplomat during the war, remained in Paris after the war. Thomas Overton Moore (1804-76), a large plantation owner and governor of Louisiana, 1860-64, was a close associate and supporter of Sherman when he served as founding president of the Louisiana State Military College. Joseph A. Haskin (1817-74) became a Union brigadier general in the Civil War, serving in the Washington, D.C., fortifications.
45. On September 28, 1859, a group of Mexican-Americans led by rancher Juan Cortina (1824-92) occupied Brownsville, Texas, and proclaimed a “Republic of the Rio Grande.” The rebellion dispersed after U.S. Army reinforcements reached the Rio Grande Valley, and Cortina went into exile in Mexico, where he later served as a military governor under President Benito Juárez.
46. Name commonly given to the first muzzle-loading, percussion-cap rifle widely issued to the U.S. Army, beginning in 1846. Jäger (“hunter”) troops were the skirmishing and scouting riflemen in German armies.
47. May it be perpetual.
48. Sherman had negotiated inconclusively for a banking job in London.
49. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.
50. When Lincoln told Sherman, “I guess we’ll manage to keep house,” reacting jocularly to Sherman’s warnings about the seriousness of secession, Lincoln was voicing his belief that the Southerners were bluffing and that a hidden Union majority would lead the section back to good sense. This was one of Lincoln’s most profound misjudgments.
51. At this juncture Sherman believed that democracy had gone off the rails, that the Union would not rally in a disciplined manner, and that, after chaos descended, a military government, run by someone along the lines of the French dictator turned emperor, Louis Napoleon, would then seize power and win the war. Such fantasies passed.
52. On April 19, 1861, secessionist sympathizers in Baltimore attacked Union volunteers en route to Washington. Sixteen people were killed in the ensuing riot.
53. Latrines.
54. Frémont represented California in the U.S. Senate from September 1850 to March 1851.
55. Muzzle-loading rifles made at the armory in Springfield, Massachusetts.
56. Samuel Wilkeson (1817-89), of the New York Tribune.
57. Burden of acting.
58. In the 1875 edition, this passage read: “Still, on a review of the only official documents before the War Department at the time, it was cruel for a Secretary of War to give a tacit credence to a rumor which probably started without his wish or intention, yet through his instrumentality.”
59. Murat Halstead (1829-1908). Later in the war Sherman would plant stories with Halstead, among a small and select group of journalists he cultivated while publicly reviling those who dared to criticize him.
60. A fortified island in the Mississippi River near New Madrid, Missouri.
61. This paragraph replaced one in the 1875 edition that read: “From the time I had left Kentucky, General Buell had really made no substantial progress, though strongly reënforced beyond even what I had asked for. General Albert Sidney Johnston had remained at Bowling Green until his line was broken at Henry and Donelson, when he let go Bowling Green and fell back hastily to Nashville; and, on Buell’s approach, he did not even tarry there, but continued his retreat southward.”
62. Benjamin Stanton (1809-72) published his attack on Grant on April 12 in the Bellefontaine, Ohio, newspaper. He was a Whig congressman from Ohio, 1851-53, who was later elected as a Republican, 1855-61, following which he returned to Ohio to serve as lieutenant governor. After the war, in political eclipse, he moved to West Virginia, where he practiced law.
63. John William Draper (1811-82), History of the American Civil War, 3 vols. (1867-1870); Adam Badeau (1831-95), Military History of Ulysses S. Grant, from April, 1861, to April, 1865, 3 vols. (1868-1881). Sherman assisted Draper in the preparation of his second and third volumes. Badeau was Grant’s military secretary, 1864-66, and drew on Grant’s records when writing his history.
64. Reverdy Johnson (1796-1876), brilliant lawyer, Whig senator from Maryland, 1845-49, attorney general under Zachary Taylor, 1849-50, democratic senator from Maryland, 1863-68 and 1868-69, minister to England.
65. Embankments raised for protection from enemy fire.
66. Howe was a 12-year-old drummer boy serving with the 55th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.
67. During the Crimean War the Russian garrison at Sevastopol was besieged by British and French armies from September 28, 1854, until September 9, 1855. The Russians abandoned the city after the fall of the Malakov, an important part of the defensive fortifications. Sherman toured the Crimean battlefields in 1872.
68. In an August 26, 1863, letter to a meeting of Union supporters in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln wrote: “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
69. Third estate or class; in pre-revolutionary France, the commons (in practice, the burghers) as distinct from the nobility and the higher clergy.
70. Major General J. E. B. Stuart (1833-64); Brigadier General William H. (Red) Jackson (1835-1903).
71. Antiwar Northern Democrats who favored a negotiated settlement. Some of them became active Confederate supporters and even spies, and many of them were suppressed and arrested when Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and imposed censorship.
72. Muzzle-loading artillery pieces, in this case a 4.2-inch gun, designed to throw a thirty-pound shell up to forty-four hundred yards. More accurate and with twice the range of smoothbore Napoleons. Invented by R. H. Parrott.
73. French troops captured Mexico City in June 1863. Napoleon III then arranged for Mexican conservatives to offer the Austrian archduke Ferdi nand Maximilian the imperial throne of Mexico in July 1863.
74. Hamlet, 1.3.65-67.
75. The battle of Perryville was fought on October 8, 1862.
76. The battle of Stones River (also known as Murfreesboro) was fought from December 31, 1862, to January 2, 1863.
77. Nathaniel Greene Foster (1809-69), lawyer and lay Baptist preacher, was a Know-Nothing member of the House of Representatives from Georgia, 1855-57.
78. Pontoon bridges.
79. Balks are beams laid lengthwise along a pontoon bridge, and chesses are planks laid across them.
80. Bridgehead.
81. An assembly point for troops.
82. The Napoleon was a smoothbore, muzzle-loading cannon, developed in France under Napoleon III. It was the most commonly used artillery piece on both sides of the Civil War. Most Napoleons fired a 12-pound projectile.
83. Joseph C. Audenreid (1840-81), a West Pointer, would serve as one of Sherman’s chief aides both during and after the war. After his death, Sherman would conduct a long affair with his widow, Mary.
84. Leonidas Polk (1806-64) graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1827 and then resigned from the army to become an Episcopal minister. He became Bishop of Louisiana in 1841 and joined the Confederate army in 1861.
85. Opening chorus in Act II of the opera II Trovatore (1853) by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901).
VOLUME II
1. Major General Alexander M. McCook (1831-1903), brother of Sherman’s former law partner Daniel McCook, Major General James S. Negley (1826-1901), and Major General Thomas L. Crittenden (1815-93) all lost control of their commands during the rout of the Union right wing on the second day of the battle of Chickamauga, September 20, 1863.
2. In his Personal Memoirs (1885-86) Grant wrote that when he explained to Lincoln his reasons for ordering several simultaneous Union advances in the spring campaign, the President replied: “Oh, yes! I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does.” Lincoln’s personal secretary, John Hay, recorded the remark (as retold to him by the President) in his diary on April 30, 1864, as: “Those not skinning, can hold a leg.”
3. The second letter approved command changes Sherman had recommended (see page 381 in this volume).
4. Andrew Jackson campaigned in northern Alabama against the Creek Indians in 1813-14.
5. Outlet of a pass or gorge.
6. In the 1875 edition, this passage read: “McPherson seems to have been a little timid.”
7. Oostanaula.
8. Sherman visited New Orleans en route to Texas in 1871.
9. Invented by French army captain Minie and appearing in the United States in 1849, this hollow-based, bullet-shaped lead projectile expanded upon firing into the rifling of the barrel, giving it a spin that vastly increased the rifle’s range and accuracy, thus vastly upping the killing power of the infantry.
10. Moved back, away from the enemy line.
11. Joseph E. Johnston (1807-91), Narrative of Military Operations Directed During the Late War Between the States (1874).
12. A fortification with two faces and an open or partially closed entrance, or “gorge.”
13. The name popularly given to the fighting on Lookout Mountain on November 24, 1863, during which the battlefield was covered by mist.
14. Bridgehead.
15. Brig. Gen. Edward Follansbee Noyes (1832-90) had his left foot amputated at Nickajack Creek, Georgia, on July 4, 1864. After the war he was a judge; Republican governor of Ohio, 1871-75; and minister to France, 1877-81.
16. Major General Lovell H. Rousseau (1818-69) was from Kentucky, as were many men in the Confederate army.
17. A fraise is a defense consisting of pointed stakes projecting from the ramparts in a horizontal or inclined position; chevaux-de-frise are logs or barrels with protruding spikes, used in front of fortified positions; and an abatis is an obstruction made of felled trees with sharpened branches.
18. Howard was junior to Hooker and had served as a corps commander under him in the Army of the Potomac.
19. Relations between Slocum and Hooker had been strained since Slocum’s bitter criticism of Hooker’s leadership during the Union defeat at Chan cellorsville, May 1-4, 1863.
20. This passage replaced one in the 1875 edition that read: “I am told that he says that Thomas and I were jealous of him; but this is hardly probable, for we on the spot did not rate his fighting qualities as high as he did, and I am, moreover, convinced that both he and General Butterfield went to the rear for personal reasons.” Major General Daniel Butterfield (1831-1901) served as Hooker’s chief of staff in the Army of the Potomac, January-June 1863, and in the Army of the Cumberland, October 1863-April 1864. He commanded a division in Hooker’s corps from April 14 to June 29, 1864, when he left the field because of illness.
21. At this point in the 1875 edition there was a sentence that read: “General Hooker, moreover, when he got back to Cincinnati, reported (I was told) that we had run up against a rock at Atlanta, and that the country ought to be prepared to hear of disaster from that quarter.”
22. Trenches cut in the ground before a fortress, parallel to its defenses, for the purpose of covering a besieging force.
23. Sherman’s telegram to Halleck announcing the city’s capture contained the phrase “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Sherman was fully aware, as was Abraham Lincoln, that with Grant bogged down in costly trench warfare, it was the victory of Atlanta that would secure Republican re-election in November 1864.
24. Sherman wrote a widely published letter to John Spooner, a Massachusetts recruiting agent, on July 30, 1864, criticizing the recruitment of Southern blacks by Northern states as a means of fulfilling their enlistment quotas. In September, Sherman would write to a St. Louis friend, “I never thought my negro letter would get into the papers, but since it takes I lay low—I like niggers well enough as niggers, but when fools & idiots try & make niggers better than ourselves I have an opinion.”
25. The manuscript of the letter reads: “Belmont, Vallandigham, Wood, Seymour,” referring to August Belmont (1816-90), New York financier and chairman of the Democratic national committee; Clement L. Vallandigham (1820-71), former Ohio congressman and leader of the Peace Democrats; Fernando Wood (1812-81), Democratic congressman from New York and an opponent of the war; and Horatio Seymour (1810-86), Democratic governor of New York and chairman of the Chicago convention.
26. The Democratic national convention adopted a platform on August 30, 1864, that denounced the war as “four years of failure” and called for the immediate cessation of hostilities and negotiations to restore the Union. McClellan accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on September 8 in a letter that repudiated the platform’s description of the war as a failure and its call for an immediate end to the fighting, but which endorsed the restoration of the Union through a negotiated peace.
27. The manuscript of the letter reads: “Wilkes, Butterfield, & such wor thies.” George Wilkes (1817-85) was the publisher of Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, where he supported Hooker. For Butterfield, see note 20.
28. Hooker had been relieved as commander of the Army of the Potomac on June 28, 1863.
29. Major General Edward Richard Sprigg Canby (1817-73) was not able to take Mobile until April 12, 1865, and thus was ineffective during Sherman’s campaign through Georgia. In a similar fashion, Major General Nathaniel Prentiss Banks (1816-94), a Republican wheelhorse, failed miserably, during the summer of 1864, to occupy northwestern Louisiana during his Red River campaign. This allowed Confederate major general Sterling Price (1809-67) to mount a spectacular raid all the way to north-west Missouri, which ultimately failed but prevented sizable numbers of Union troops from reinforcing Sherman.
30. Major General David Hunter (1802-86) ordered the burning of Confederate public buildings and private property in the Shenandoah Valley while commanding Union forces in western Virginia, May 21-August 8, 1864.
31. Recruited from among Alabama Unionists, most of whom lived in the northern hill counties.
32. A projecting portion of a rampart that forms an irregular pentagon attached at the base to the main work, usually designed to defend an adjacent curtain; the part of a rampart bordered by a parapet that connected the flanks of two bastions.
33. An imaginary line bisecting the salient angle of a fortification, while torpedoes were land mines.
34. Brigadier General Rufus Saxton (1824-1908) commanded Union forces on the South Carolina Sea Islands, where freed slaves were farming abandoned plantations under army supervision. Also see p. 611.
35. On October 21, 1861, a Union brigade crossed the Potomac at Ball’s Bluff, near Leesburg, Virginia, while another brigade crossed nearby at Edward’s Ferry. The Confederates were able to reinforce their Ball’s Bluff position from a central location between the two crossings without being detected, and launched a counterattack that drove the Union troops back across the Potomac with heavy losses.
36. At the close of the Third Punic War (149-146 B.C.), the Romans burned and razed Carthage, then plowed and salted the ground on which it had stood to prevent the site from ever being resettled.
37. In the 1875 edition: “these false publications.”
38. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalms 111:10). A militant agnostic, Sherman rang with Old Testament prophetic zeal, King James Version, when it came to denouncing Confederates during and after the war.
39. In the fall of 1865 President Andrew Johnson ordered almost all of the land set aside under Special Field Order No. 15 restored to its former owners. Sherman, whose purpose had been unclear, offered no protest when Johnson drove the freed black farmers off the land of their former masters.
40. Testifying before the Alabama Claims Commission on December 12, 1872, Sherman dismissed out of hand the considerable role of Union troops in spreading the fires in Columbia begun by the departing Confederates when they lit their cotton. He argued that he had not given orders to burn, which was legally true, but added: “If I made up my mind to burn Columbia I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village.”
41. Macbeth, 3.4.118-19. Lady Macbeth to Lennox: Stand not upon the order of your going / But go at once.
42. The original of this letter, now in the Library of Congress, is dated “Feb.y 1865.” Sherman assigned it the date of February 7, but its contents better support the date of February 1.
43. Sherman had written Grant on January 21, 1865, expressing his disapproval of attempts in Congress to create a second lieutenant general in the U.S. Army.
44. North Carolina Unionists commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George W. Kirk.
45. Admiral Dahlgren’s son, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren (1842-64), lost a leg while serving on General George G. Meade’s staff during the Gettysburg campaign. In February 1864 he volunteered to accompany Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick on a cavalry raid designed to free Union prisoners held in Richmond. The raid failed and Dahlgren was killed on March 1. The Confederates claimed to have found on his body documents proving that Dahlgren planned to burn Richmond and kill Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet. Dahlgren’s body was stripped, his artificial leg was stolen, and one of his fingers was cut off.
46. United States Colored Troops. See note 49.
47. George Nicholas Sanders (1812-73) was a loudmouthed political gadfly who stirred up European revolutionary activity when U.S. counsel to London, 1853-54, and served as a Confederate agent in Europe during the war. He was initially considered a conspirator after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. As late as 1871 he was on the barricades of the Commune in Paris, still fighting for liberty.
48. Johnston wrote in his Narrative of Military Operations that he suggested to Sherman “that, instead of a partial suspension of hostilities, we might, as other generals had done, arrange the terms of a permanent peace, and among other precedents reminded him of the preliminaries of Leoben, and the terms in which Napoleon, then victorious, proposed negotiation to the Archduke Charles; and the sentiment he expressed, that the civic crown earned by preserving the life of one citizen confers truer glory than the highest achievement merely military. General Sherman replied, with heightened color, that he appreciated such a sentiment and that to put an end to further devastation and bloodshed, and restore the Union, and with it the prosperity of the country, were to him objects of ambition.” In 1797 Napoleon led his army over the Alps from Italy into Austria and on April 7 reached Leoben, about 80 miles southwest of Vienna, where he entered into negotiations. On April 18 he ratified an armistice and signed preliminary peace terms, acting without instructions or authority from the Directory in Paris. The territorial concessions made by the Austrians at Leoben were confirmed by the treaty of Campo Formio, signed on October 17, 1797.
49. Here Sherman praises the one division of black troops that he begrudg ingly permitted to join his army at the very end of the war.
50. On April 6, 1865, Lincoln gave permission for “the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature of Virginia” to assemble in Richmond for the purpose of withdrawing Virginia troops from the Confederate armies. However, Lincoln withdrew his permission on April 12 after learning that the legislature planned to seek peace terms from the United States.
51. German regiments, excluding those in the guard-corps, recruited men from specific geographic districts. Each regiment maintained a depot battalion in its home district, which in wartime would train new recruits and send them to the regiment in the field as replacements for casualties.
52. The site of a decisive German victory in the Franco-Prussian War on September 1, 1870.
53. Emory Upton (1839-81), A New System of Infantry Tactics, Double and Single Rank, Adapted to American Topography and Improved Firearms (1867, revised edition 1874). Upton, the most aggressive modernizer in the stodgy postwar army, who wanted to introduce a general staff along Prussian lines, was tepidly supported by Sherman and soundly rebuked by Congress. In great frustration, he committed suicide.
54. A drafted bill or proposed law.
55. 1 Henry IV, 1.3.63-64. Sherman had it reversed; it was Hotspur who said to the King, “and but for these vile guns/He would himself have been a soldier.”
56. The legislature of France under the Second Empire, 1852-70. In 1874 the legislature was the Assemblée nationale.
57. Edward Dickinson Baker (1811-61) was a Whig congressman from Illinois, 1845-47, 1849-51, and a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. In 1850 he moved to San Francisco, and in 1860 to Oregon, from where he served in 1860-61 as a senator. When the war started, he resigned to become colonel of the 71st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the “First California” in his honor.
58. During the Franco-Prussian War the fortress of Metz was besieged by the Prussians from August 19 to October 29, 1870, when Marshal Achille François Bazaine (1811-88) surrendered it with 150,000 men. Denounced as a traitor, Bazaine later asked for a committee of inquiry into his actions, resulting in his censure in the spring of 1872. He then asked to be tried before a military court and was convicted of treason in 1873. His death sentence was commuted to confinement for 20 years. In 1874 he escaped to Italy and lived in exile for the remainder of his life.
59. His French troops withdrawn, Maximilian was captured by the forces of the Mexican nationalist leader Benito Juarez at Quaretaro on May 15, 1867, court-martialed, and executed on June 19.
60. Edward Davis Townsend (1817-93), Anecdotes of the Civil War in the United States (1884).
61. Maryland governor Thomas Swann replaced two Republican police commissioners, who were responsible for enforcing voter registration laws, with two conservatives shortly before the November 1866 election. The ousted commissioners then obtained a writ from a federal circuit judge arresting their replacements. Election-day violence was averted when Grant went to Baltimore at Swann and Johnson’s request and negotiated an agreement between the rival parties on poll-watching procedures.
62. A post in the Powder River country of northern Wyoming Territory, abandoned in the summer of 1868 as part of a treaty with the Sioux. Sherman went in May 1868 to Fort Laramie in southeastern Wyoming, where the treaty was being signed.
63. Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch, Postmaster General Alexander W. Randall, Secretary of the Interior Orville H. Browning, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles.
64. Protagonist of Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” (first published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 1819-20), who sleeps for 20 years, awakening to find the changes brought by the American Revolution.
65. Passed over President Johnson’s veto on March 2, 1867, the act divided the former Confederate states (excluding Tennessee) into five military districts and placed them under the administration of the district commanders.
66. Contractors and inventors made allegations of improper conduct against Brigadier General Alexander B. Dyer (1815-74), who then requested a court of inquiry. It exonerated him, and Dyer continued to serve as chief of ordnance until his death.
67. Meade died on November 6, 1872, at the age of 56.
68. William L. Marcy (1786-1857) served as secretary of war, 1845-49, under President James K. Polk. Jefferson Davis was secretary of war from 1853 to 1857 under President Franklin Pierce.
69. James W. Smith was the first black cadet at the United States Military Academy. His continual harassment by fellow cadets led to a court of inquiry in the summer of 1870, which issued several reprimands. Smith withstood further harassment and survived several disciplinary proceedings brought against him, but left the Academy after failing an unfairly administered examination. In 1880, Sherman would countenance the dismissal of Johnson C. Whittaker, another black cadet hounded out of West Point essentially on grounds of race. See Citizen Sherman, 296-98.
70. Frederick Dent Grant (1850-1912), Ulysses S. Grant’s oldest son, who had graduated from the Military Academy in 1871. Sherman resented taking along the younger Grant, whom he disliked, in the place of one or another of his favorite junior aides. Grant must have felt the chill, because after several months he left the Sherman party for his own tour of Denmark.
71. Canvas-sided wagons, with seats that could be converted into beds, pulled by four-mule teams.
72. After Don Quixote, Alain Rene le Sage wrote the second Spanish comic masterpiece, albeit in French, L’Historire de Gil Blas de Santillane, published as stories over the period 1715-35. Sherman would have chuckled over Gil Blas in its fine translation by the eighteenth-century English writer Tobias Smollett. The archbishop of Granada had hired the youthful adventurer Gil Blas to be his scribe and had requested that if “my pen smack of old age, and my genius flag, do not fail to tell me. I do not trust to my own judgment, which may be seduced by self-love.” Following the archbishop’s stroke, Gil Blas told him his writing days were fading, at which time the archbishop fired him summarily. In The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane (London: Frederick Warne, 1877), 261-65.
73. As You Like It, 2.7.139-40. In retirement, Sherman grew bored with St. Louis, where he settled in 1883, and so, in 1886, he moved his family to New York, in part to be near theaters and actresses, whom he adored.