In June 1859, while visiting the Ewings, Sherman received a message from his old friend Don Carlos Buell, currently the adjutant general of the army. The message was disappointing, in a way, because no vacancy existed for Sherman in the army. But Buell had an intriguing suggestion: The state of Louisiana, he disclosed, was about to open up a new military school near present-day Baton Rouge, carrying the impressive name of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy.1 Sherman might apply for the position of superintendent.
At first glance, Sherman’s prospects for gaining the position might have seemed to be unlikely, since he was from Ohio, not Louisiana, but actually they were not. Despite his hard luck in business and law, Sherman was known as a capable man with a creditable military record. He was known to have spent a great deal of time in the South and to be fond of the residents of that region. And there was always the prominence of his father-in-law. His application was accepted on November 12, 1859.
A cloud, however, loomed on the horizon. At the time of Sherman’s appointment the newspapers were full of an event that had occurred at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16. An abolitionist by the name of John Brown, leading a small band of fanatic abolitionists, had seized the federal arsenal in the town and held it for a while, unrealistically expecting a surge of slaves from all over the South to escape their plantations and join him. Brown and his group had been quickly captured and subsequently put on trial. Brown himself was hanged for treason. The long-term consequences of this seemingly small incident were incalculable, but they were probably not much on Sherman’s mind at that moment.
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Though Buell was the man who had suggested Sherman’s application for his new position, the official who had made the appointment was General Thomas O. Moore, the head of the education department of Louisiana, soon to become governor of the state. He and Sherman made something of an odd couple. Their views on the troubles between North and South, centered on slavery, were far apart, and yet the two men developed a personal friendship that survived the war.* It was at a dinner given by Governor Moore that Sherman had the opportunity to explain his political position to the guests, many of whom suspected that he was an abolitionist, possibly a spy. Those who had doubts about the new superintendent were uncomfortable that Sherman was the foster son of Thomas Ewing, an antislavery man, and worse, the brother of John Sherman, a man known to be of the same persuasion.
Sherman, in the address he made, assured the dinner guests that neither of his relatives was an abolitionist, which he defined as a man ambitious to enforce his antislavery views on the South. He also clarified his own position. Personally, he admitted, he disapproved of slavery as a human institution, but he strongly rejected the use of force to settle the problem. The audience largely accepted his words.
Sherman was happy with his new situation. His salary of $5,000 a year was generous for the time, and it was totally independent of any connection with Thomas Ewing. Still, Ellen, who never wanted to be far from her family, persisted in coming up with other ideas. From Lancaster she wrote a letter suggesting a banking position in London. Once again Cump refused. He made it quite clear that as soon as possible he would bring her and the children to live in Alexandria, a town near the seminary. He intended to spend the rest of his active life at the school. In one letter, he added a bit of ironic humor:
I suppose I was the Jonah that blew up San Francisco, and it took only two months’ residence in Wall Street to bust up New York, and I think my arrival in London will be the signal of the downfall of that mighty empire.2
Sherman gave his new job his all. He was devoted to the seminary, and he was careful to care for both the faculty and the fifty-three cadets who were his charges. He made a point of speaking to each cadet every day, and he did everything possible to make them all feel happy with his tutelage, while still insisting on very high standards. He brooked no foolishness, though his discipline was far from autocratic. He was not dealing with people who were necessarily docile; in one letter to Ellen, for example, he described a fight between two cadets in which one boy threatened the other with a knife. Sherman actually enjoyed the company of the cadets socially. He was known to enjoy telling them stories of the army in the West, all of which they ate up. But he was still utterly in charge.
Sherman’s most intimate friend at the seminary was the professor of modern languages, Dr. David French Boyd, whose observations of Sherman have been invaluable to anyone attempting to understand the man. Impressed with Sherman’s ability to play the role of the father to the cadets and to mingle with them without lowering standards, Boyd observed that the superintendent was “no scholar” and lacked any “literary and scientific acquirements.” Nor was he much of a reader. But, he continued,
He was rather a tough, unpolished diamond made great by nature of deep discernment, needing little the ideas of other men. But brilliant and original as he was in thought, he had not the usual accompaniment of genius—want of practicality. Sherman was eminently practical.
“It was this combination of brilliance, originality, and practicality,” a Sherman biographer has written, “that set Sherman apart from many other people of his day.”3
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But clouds continued to gather above this congenial scene. Relations between North and South degenerated daily, and though the gathering storm did not affect Sherman’s situation for the moment, they caused him anguish. At Christmas dinner in 1860, he received a telegraph message from the East that the legislature of South Carolina had seceded from the Union in protest against the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. According to his host, Boyd, the news brought tears to Sherman’s eyes. Boyd recorded how Sherman stomped up and down the floor for a period of about an hour. In the course of his orating, he came up with ideas that, in hindsight, predicted the dire future of the South with remarkable accuracy. As quoted by Boyd, he declared that the people of the South “didn’t know what they were doing.” He predicted that the country “would be drenched in blood.” He depicted the overpowering strength of the North compared to that of the South. Sherman may have been located far from the seats of power, but he knew whereof he spoke. He had been in contact with Tom Ewing, John Sherman, and others.
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Even though South Carolina had seceded, Sherman still held hopes that the secession movement might stop with that single state. After all, South Carolina had threatened a similar action back in 1832, withdrawing the threat only when faced down by a forceful Andrew Jackson. Perhaps, since he was so convinced that war between the sections would be utterly destructive to the South, Sherman hoped that those south of the Mason-Dixon Line might see the light.
Sherman’s future was here put to the test. On the one hand, his loyalty to the Union and to the rule of law was fierce, due partly to the influence of Thomas Ewing, and partly to his experiences in California, where he saw anarchy at its worst. On the other hand, he dearly hoped to stay at the seminary.
In the end, of course, Sherman would inevitably stick with the Union, which meant the North. A breakup of the Union, even though the Constitution contained no objection to such an eventuality, was to Sherman’s mind a form of anarchy, and he would have none of it.
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Still Sherman watched with dismay as the Union disintegrated. He was angry at the halfhearted measures being taken by President James Buchanan to halt it. When General Winfield Scott attempted to resupply Fort Sumter at Charleston by use of the SS Star of the West, Sherman was disgusted. He wrote to Ellen that this was the ship on which they had made a trip to California—they should have sent a warship that could defend herself against the Charleston shore batteries. Sherman’s fears came to pass. The Star of the West was turned back.
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Faced with this stark reality, Sherman soberly and methodically laid his plans. As long as Louisiana remained in the Union, he would be able to stay in his present position. But if Louisiana should secede, Sherman’s duty was to resign it. Even if the seceded states agreed not to use his military talents directly against the United States, his activities at the seminary would be contributing indirectly to the Southern cause.
On January 26, 1861, the worst happened: Louisiana seceded from the Union. Despite his grief—and the urgings of Governor Moore—Sherman submitted his resignation as superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary, effective that date. He did not leave immediately, however; he was determined to be meticulous in his accountings for property and other odds and ends. Then, in Boyd’s words,
When the day for his departure arrived, the cadets were formed up in his honor on the parade ground. He passed down the line bidding each officer and cadet goodbye. At the end of the last column Sherman attempted to deliver the speech he had prepared, but emotion choked his efforts. Finally, after a long silence, he simply placed his hand over his heart and said, “You are here.” Turning on his heel, he quickly disappeared.4
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From Alexandria, Louisiana, Sherman made his way home to Lancaster, where Ellen and their five children were still living with the Ewings. As he traveled north, his frame of mind began to shift from grief at leaving the South to a deep concern for the welfare of the North. The people of Louisiana were talking war and making preparations for it, accumulating arms and mobilizing volunteers. In contrast, Sherman saw no sense of urgency as he surveyed the countryside of the North. It was all business as usual.
Sherman was keenly conscious of what was happening between Washington and the authorities in the South. Kept up-to-date primarily by his brother John, he was well aware that a focus of conflict was now the future of the Union forces located at Charleston, South Carolina. He knew that the presence of Union troops would be intolerable to the people of that city if secession became an established reality. He also had a personal concern as to the fate of Fort Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, who, at fifteen years his senior, had been a sort of mentor to him. Sherman had felt great pride some weeks earlier when Anderson had boldly transferred the Union garrison from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter out in Charleston Harbor. Now he wrote to Ellen with vehemence, “Let them hurt a hair of [Anderson’s] head in the execution of his duty, and I say Charleston must [be] blotted from existence.” The Union garrison at Charleston must be reinforced, he added, “if it cost ten thousand lives.”5
Yet Sherman had no desire to participate in what he foresaw as an inevitable conflict. He was too emotionally torn between his veneration for the Union and his affection for the people of the South to want to take sides. Therefore, while staying temporarily with his family at the Ewing home, he decided that he would once again cast his lot with the ever-faithful Major Turner in St. Louis, who had already secured a position for him as president of the Fifth Street Railroad. It was not a spectacular job, but it was adequate, and it promised to pay enough to support his growing family. He determined to go there soon.
In the meantime, however, Sherman received a letter from his brother John, who had just been elected a United States senator from Ohio. John was urging him to visit Washington, a thinly disguised effort to bring his older brother into governmental service. Open to anything at the moment, Sherman rationalized that loyalty to John required him to accept the invitation.
On Sherman’s arrival in Washington, John immediately took him to the White House to meet the new president, Abraham Lincoln. According to Sherman’s account, he and John entered the president’s office to find the room filled with crowds of men milling around. Lincoln was sitting at the end of a long table, talking casually with three or four men, who quickly disappeared on John’s arrival. John Sherman and Lincoln shook hands. John produced some papers, perhaps from the Ohio legislature, and Lincoln looked them over briefly and promised to take care of them. John then introduced his brother and announced grandly, as if expecting Lincoln to be impressed, that he had just returned from Louisiana. “Mr. President, this is my brother Colonel Sherman, who is just up from Louisiana; he may give you some information you want.”
“Ah,” said the president, “how are they coming along down there?”
Sherman spoke eagerly. “They think they are coming along swimmingly,” he said. “They are preparing for war.”
“Oh, well,” said Lincoln. “I guess we’ll manage to keep house.”
Sherman was shocked by this noncommittal, disinterested response and said no more. Once outside the building, however, he turned on John. As he quoted himself in his memoir, he damned all politicians, saying, “You have got things in a hell of a fix, and you may get them out as best you can.”6 Despite John’s efforts to keep him around a bit longer, Sherman would have none of it.
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After his disappointing visit with President Lincoln—and his outburst at his brother John—Sherman lost no time in returning to Lancaster and picking up his family for the journey to St. Louis. This time Ellen, though pregnant with their sixth child, accompanied him with the rest of the family. They settled down in a comfortable house, where they could live satisfactorily, though Sherman’s yearly salary was only half that which he had enjoyed at the seminary.
Sherman’s letters from that period indicate that he still hoped, perhaps unconsciously, to return to the army. He was not, however, willing to do so on any terms except his own. He would not, for example, be involved with the militia, so when Frank Blair Jr.,* a prominent local citizen, proposed to secure an appointment for him as a brigadier general in the Missouri militia, he flatly refused. Missouri, an important slave state, was going through the throes of deciding whether or not to secede from the Union, and the outcome of the matter would be of much consequence. But Sherman showed little interest in the local situation; his mind was focused on much broader issues.
Despite his temporary disillusionment with the government in Washington, Sherman remained in close contact with John, who agreed that he should be choosy as to the nature of his participation in the war that all now knew was inevitable. Perhaps because of John’s promotion of his cause, Cump received an offer in early April 1861 to be chief clerk of the War Department, with the promise of appointment as assistant secretary when Congress came back into session. Sherman did not specify the reason for his flat refusal, but John knew his brother well enough to surmise that he desired active duty in the field, not in the bureaucracy. John agreed with his brother’s action.
Three days after Sherman’s letter of refusal, on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces at Charleston demanded that Major Anderson surrender Fort Sumter to Confederate forces under the command of Sherman’s old friend Pierre Beauregard. Eventually Anderson had to comply. That incident triggered the secession of the upper South* and, depending on President Lincoln’s actions, a major war. Under these circumstances Sherman’s participation as a soldier was now inevitable. And yet he was still particular in his selection of a position.
A letter came from John on April 14, the day that Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter. Men in Washington, he wrote, were well aware of Sherman’s capabilities, and if he wanted a position in the War Department, it was his for the asking. But John had another suggestion: Sherman could return to Ohio—safe Union territory—and raise a regiment of volunteers; he could do so without difficulty.7 Sherman again refused; he did not trust volunteers.
In the meantime, the correspondence between the brothers covered many other aspects of the war besides Sherman’s personal career. Sherman’s letters were not confined to military matters; he trespassed into broad aspects of the war. It would be fought, he advised, on two premises, the “national integrity” (union) and slavery. He was adamant that the Union must be the issue. If the issue were slavery, the South would fight to the last man, creating a war of attrition. If negotiations could be conducted on the basis of the Union and set the slavery issue aside, a major war might be averted. Sherman had only a secondary sympathy with the slaves themselves, and he held Lincoln responsible for much of the crisis by failing adequately to court the border states while there was still time.
Finally Sherman swallowed his pride. On May 8, 1861, he wrote Secretary of War Simon Cameron virtually asking for a command:
Dear Sir: I hold myself now as always, prepared to serve my country in the capacity for which I was trained. I cannot and will not volunteer for three months because I cannot throw my family on the cold support of charity, but for the three years’ call made by the President an officer could prepare his command and do good service. I will not volunteer because, rightfully or wrongfully, I feel myself unwilling to take a mere private’s place, and having for many years lived in California and Louisiana, the men are not well enough acquainted with me to elect me to my appropriate place. Should my services be needed, the Record or the War Department will enable you to designate the station in which I can render best service.8
Cameron’s answer was not long in coming. The authorities in Washington were willing to give Sherman the choice between appointment as a colonel of the regular army or as a major general of volunteers. He chose the former and was given command of the 13th Infantry, a regular regiment that would be recruited in St. Louis. Before assuming command, however, he was ordered to report to Washington. He left St. Louis for that destination in the middle of May 1861.