At about the time of Sherman’s retirement from the army, he was hit by devastating news: His friend Grant, who had left the presidency seven years earlier, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. This was not the first misfortune that had beset Grant since the end of the Civil War. His presidency, while not so corrupt as his enemies like to picture, was no howling success. After leaving office, he had come on hard times in his personal civilian life, due to investing with crooks. By the summer of 1884 he was in dire financial straits.

Fortunately for Grant—and even more so for his family—a way to redeem his reputation and his fortune suddenly appeared. His friend Mark Twain offered him a highly lucrative contract to write two volumes of his memoirs. They would cover his life from birth through the Mexican War and then the Civil War, but omitting his presidency. At first things went well. The task seemed to restore the confidence that he appeared to have lost for twenty years, practically since the end of the Civil War. He had hardly begun his memoirs when the shocking diagnosis hit in late 1884. The thousands of cigars he had smoked over the years had taken their revenge. As the result of the throat cancer, the doctors prognosticated that his days were limited to only a few months. The little time left to him made the completion of his writing efforts all the more urgent. To stay out of public view and give himself a chance to concentrate, Grant retired to a cabin on Mount McGregor, in New York, and focused on his writing efforts.

Sherman, always his most loyal friend, went out of his way frequently to visit him. Grant appreciated this loyalty deeply. Sherman took a certain pride when he quoted Julia Grant’s statement that Sherman’s visits had done him more good than all the doctors.

Grant completed his work on the memoirs on July 19, 1885, and four days later he died. Newspapers offered Sherman large sums for articles on Grant, but he refused; he was not going to make money from the tragedy of his friend’s death. And he may have indulged in some hyperbole when he declared that it would take a thousand years for historians to appreciate Grant’s greatness.

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Sherman’s later years, even including those when he was still in the army, continued to be dominated by refighting the four years of war between 1861 and 1865. By and large his previous hostilities toward his former enemies, and even rivals both Union and Confederate, mellowed. When Henry Halleck died in 1872, for example, Sherman wrote kindly to his widow. On March 1, 1886, Sherman also wrote concerning Stanton, who had died in 1869:

We were good friends for years before his death. . . . Stanton had some magnificent qualities which I have ever recognized and applauded, but he had others which brought him into conflict with his best friends.¹

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His friendship with Joseph E. Johnston, which began during the last days of the Civil War, continued to flourish. The two men met in Washington from time to time.

The one man with whom Sherman never made peace was Jefferson Davis, who remained unwilling to accept the outcome of the war and promote Reconstruction. Davis held a special animosity toward Sherman, based largely on the passage in his memoir in which Davis is described as being “out of his mind” during the time that Sherman was occupying Atlanta. As part of his personal vendetta, Davis contended that Sherman, not the Confederate Hood, had ordered the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, on his march northward from Savannah. (Sherman denied that allegation.)² He pictured the tragedy as an act of revenge on Sherman’s part for the Palmetto State’s role in launching the war.

The two men also fought over such trivialities as the unanswerable question of the relative greatness of Grant and Lee as generals. Sherman always remained steadfastly loyal to Grant as the greatest of all generals. When he was asked to give a rating, he placed Grant at the top, then George Thomas, and Lee third. When enraged Southerners howled about Thomas, Sherman answered that at Nashville in December 1864, Thomas had annihilated Hood’s army. Lee had never, in the course of the war, won a victory of annihilation.

And of course there was the matter of Joe Johnston, whom Davis blamed for failure to attack when Sherman was driving from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The relations between Davis and Johnston had never healed, and Sherman’s friendship with Johnston was well established. The two men—Sherman and Davis—never reconciled up to Davis’s death in 1889.

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Sherman spent most of his last seven years in New York City, experiencing by and large what appears to have been a happy old age. He patronized the theater, attended veterans’ affairs, and luxuriated as the central figure at lavish parties. He carried on some flirtations with prominent actresses, but nothing to endanger his marriage to Ellen.

Ellen, afflicted by a weak heart, did not participate in Sherman’s social activities, insisting on staying at home while he covered the town. Their relationship was strange, because although their deep affection remained, they had grown apart from many years of separation. It sometimes appeared that they were held together only by the memory of their son Willie, who had died at Vicksburg. Religious differences also damaged their relationship. Ellen, like her mother, was a devout Roman Catholic, whereas Sherman did not hold religion as a matter of any importance. He had been baptized as a Catholic at the insistence of Ellen’s mother, and to humor Ellen he sometimes attended Roman Catholic Mass. But he was upset for a while when their son Tom became a priest, possibly because he had more earthly ambitions for the boy, although Sherman seems to have eventually reconciled himself.

Ellen preceded Sherman in death by two years. Her chronic heart condition worsened, but since she had always been something of a hypochondriac, Sherman attributed her bedridden condition to her imagination. On November 28, 1888, however, he was called upstairs to her bed in terms that alarmed him. Tom Ewing, Ellen’s nephew, described the scene:

The General was seated in his office when the nurse came to the head of the stairs and called to him that Mrs. Sherman was dying. Though he had known she was in danger, I think this was the first moment when he realized the imminence of her death. He ran upstairs calling out, “Wait for me, Ellen, no one ever loved you as I love you”; if she was alive when he reached her bedside it was only for a moment.³

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As time went on, Sherman’s distaste for war and politics grew. An extremely popular man, he was always being considered as a candidate for public office. Up until 1876, however, the possibility of a presidential candidacy had never become serious, because Grant, elected in 1868, was in office until then. When, during the last days of Grant’s term, Sherman was approached by Republicans seeking to run him as Grant’s successor, he uttered his most famous words: “If nominated I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.” The declaration has come to be known as “Shermanesque.” Many politicians have denied any interest in running for public office; Sherman meant it.

Sherman has often been characterized as the heartless brute who finally saw the light and became an avid pacifist. In fact he was neither. As a soldier, he showed no enjoyment in killing. His casualties in the Army of the West were minuscule compared with those of the Army of the Potomac. As to his allegedly harsh treatment of civilians, he gave orders for his soldiers when marching through Georgia to respect personal property that was of no potential use to the Confederacy or of value to his own army. His affection for his old friends in Charleston, whom he tried to visit at the end of the war, was genuine, so long as they were no longer capable of being of help to Jefferson Davis. But he was ahead of his time in recognizing that to bring down a proud and resourceful people such as the Southerners, one had to involve the civilian population as well as the armies. Hence the Hart description as “the first modern general.”

Much has been made of Sherman’s repeated statement that “war is hell,” and rightly so. The occasion most noted occurred at a meeting of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans’ organization, on August 11, 1880. It was a favorite theme, repeated more than once. And yet there is no sign that Sherman had his spirit broken more than that of the other generals, many of whom hated war as much as he did. It was principally his reputation for harsh measures, as contrasted with his peaceful professions, that caused the apparent dichotomy to be noticed. Sherman’s postwar friendship with Joe Johnston was a personal matter, though a happy one. The real Sherman—courageous physically and morally, warm, practical, loyal, and singularly devoted to the Union—was not the man of the Sherman legend.

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Sherman’s death, or at least the circumstances surrounding it, was nearly as controversial as his life. He died from an illness that lasted ten days, though during that time nobody really knew how dangerous his condition was.

On the evening of February 4, 1891, Sherman left his New York home to host a party for some army friends at the Casino Theater. The weather was foul, and he woke up the next morning with a cold. He apparently gave his condition little thought, because he wrote letters in the morning and attended a wedding later in the day. Three days later, his skin broke out in a rash. Two doctors were called in, and they were sufficiently concerned that they summoned all of Sherman’s children, including Father Tom, who was currently performing church duties in the Vatican.

By February 12, eight days after his first exposure, Sherman’s illness was made known to the public. He was strong enough, however, to climb out of bed and sit in a chair. He professed a desire to see his children but he emphasized Tom. “Tom,” he said. “I want to see Tom.”⁴

It was now generally assumed that Sherman’s death was imminent, although he rallied for a couple of days. As the end drew near, a controversy arose over his religious status. All of his children, in deference to Ellen Sherman’s fervid desires, had been baptized as Catholics, and the consensus among them was that, since their father had also been so baptized, he should receive extreme unction, the last rites. Apparently Sherman himself was never consulted; nor did he much care. He had never been a believer in the doctrine of the Church; nor had his brother John. However, his children argued that the rite could be administered to anyone known as “friendly to the Church,” and he had once been heard to say that he was now comfortable with Tom’s becoming a priest, and that statement sufficed. His brother John was not charitable; he protested that the newspapers had taken advantage of his own absence to interpret the comings and goings of priests to mean that extreme unction was to be administered.⁵

In any event, the children had their way, and on February 14, at one fifty p.m., Sherman died of the disease that had plagued him all his life: asthma. According to his wishes, his body lay at rest for a full five days awaiting Tom’s arrival from Rome, on the nineteenth. The funeral service was held that same afternoon, with Tom presiding.

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The service was a spectacular event. Thirty thousand soldiers, including the entire corps of cadets from nearby West Point, marched proudly by. President Benjamin Harrison and his cabinet were among the attendees, along with former presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland. The casket, according to military custom, was drawn by a team of horses with boots turned backward in the stirrups. It was taken from New York City across the Hudson River and transported by train to St. Louis, where Sherman was placed beside Ellen.

By his own wishes, the train bearing Sherman’s body avoided any large cities on the way to his final resting place. Of the cities to be avoided, at the top of the list was Washington.