Prologue
1 Boyd, David French. “General W. T. Sherman as a College President.” Louisiana State University, University Bulletin, 1910.
Chapter One | Early Life
1 Sherman, Memoirs, Vol. I, p. 2.
2 Howe, Home Letters of General Sherman, p. 7.
3 Sherman, Memoirs, p. 12.
4 “I remember seeing his name on the bulletin board when the names of all the newcomers were posted. I ran my eyes down the columns and saw there ‘U.S. Grant.’ A lot of us began to make up names to fit the initials. One said, ‘United States Grant.’ Another, ‘Uncle Sam Grant’; another said ‘Sam Grant.’ That name stuck to him.” Flood, Grant and Sherman, p. 23.
Chapter Two | California
1 Brigadier General Roger Jones.
2 Howe, p. 45.
3 In a letter to Ellen Ewing, Sherman mentioned Washington Irving, Shakespeare, a history of the Reformation, and the Wandering Jew, among others. Howe, p. 68.
4 Howe, p. 63.
5 One report has it that the official name of San Francisco was still Yerba Buena, and that the name was changed to San Francisco within a couple of days of Sherman’s arrival. However, he refers to the place as San Francisco in all his correspondence previously, and it is possible that he was referring to the mission rather than the small town of Yerba Buena.
6 Howe, p. 105.
7 Ibid., p. 88.
8 By convention, the spelling Monterrey is used for the capital of Nuevo León, in Mexico. The city in Northern California is spelled Monterey.
9 For details of this trip, see Sherman, Memoirs, pp. 47–51.
10 Thorndike, The Sherman Letters, p. 40.
11 Ibid., p. 42.
12 Sherman, pp. 66–67.
Chapter Three | The Bleak Years—1850–1861
1 Vetter, p. 52.
2 Flood, p. 26.
3 Vetter, p. 55.
4 Ibid., p. 55.
5 Sherman, p. 125.
6 Ibid., p. 130.
7 Flood, p. 34.
Chapter Four | The Union Above All
1 Later named Louisiana State University (LSU).
2 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, February 13, 1860, quoted in Howe, p. 177.
3 Vetter, p. 61.
4 Boyd, Sherman as college president, cited in Vetter, p. 71.
5 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, February 1, 1861. Cited in Vetter, p. 69.
6 Sherman, pp. 167–68.
7 Thorndike, pp. 112–13.
8 Ibid., pp. 117–18.
Chapter Five | Bull Run
1 Sherman, pp. 181–82.
2 Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet, p. 169, gives some startling statistics. He points out that of McDowell’s other two division commanders, Heintzelman was the only one who had ever seen battle. Hunter had been only a paymaster during the Mexican War. Of the brigade commanders, R. C. Schenck, a political appointee, had never worn any kind of uniform. The secessionist army, on the other hand, was commanded by such luminaries as Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, Nathan “Shanks” Evans, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and E. Kirby Smith, among others.
3 Sherman, pp. 185–86.
4 Howe, p, 209.
5 Sherman, pp. 188–89.
6 Ibid., p. 189.
7 Ibid., p. 190.
8 Ibid., pp. 190–91.
9 Ibid., p. 193.
Chapter Six | Sherman Finds His Niche—with Grant
1 Sherman does not specify the date in his Memoirs.
2 Sherman, p. 197.
3 Vetter, p. 92.
4 Ibid., p. 93.
5 Ibid., p. 94.
6 Ibid.
7 Sherman, pp. 214–15.
8 Ibid., pp. 216–17.
9 Flood, p. 78.
10 Grant, Memoirs, I, pp. 74–75.
11 Ibid., p. 311.
12 Ibid., p. 312.
13 Sherman, pp. 219–20.
14 Grant, p. 315.
Chapter Seven | Shiloh Restores Sherman’s Reputation
1 Johnston held detachments on the Columbus, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers, including Island Number Ten, a strong bastion located on a narrow, twisting part of the Mississippi, heavily garrisoned.
2 Grant, p. 126. Halleck started out with C. F. Smith, not Grant, in command. It was a foolish move on Halleck’s part, and it is widely accepted as having been motivated partly by personal jealousy but also justified to some extent by Grant’s independence of action. In any event, the arrangement was short-lived. Halleck soon reinstated Grant, it is also widely assumed, by pressure from President Lincoln himself.
3 C. F. Smith, a true hero of the Mexican War, had contracted a fatal illness.
4 Sherman, brigadier generals Benjamin M. Prentiss, W. H. L. Wallace, and Stephen A. Hurlbut. Another division, that of Major General Lew Wallace, was at Crump’s Landing, five miles down the river.
5 In his Memoirs, pp. 138–39, Grant excuses the fact that his men had not dug defensive positions by insisting that they needed drill and training more than picks and shovels—a lame excuse.
6 In the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, fought in early March 1862, the Confederate force under Major General Earl Van Dorn was shattered. Many of the survivors were expected to make their way across the Mississippi and join Albert Johnston’s force at Corinth.
7 Major generals Braxton Bragg, William Hardee, Leonidas Polk, and Brigadier General John Breckenridge.
8 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, April 11, 1862. Howe, pp. 230–31.
9 Flood, p. 114.
10 Ibid., pp. 222–23.
11 Howe, p. 222.
12 Prominent among the reporters was the twenty-three-year-old Whitelaw Reid, of the Cincinnati Gazette. Lewis, p. 233.
13 Ibid., p. 234.
Chapter Eight | A Hard Winter at Vicksburg
1 Sherman, pp. 254–56.
2 Flood, pp. 127–28.
3 Flood, pp. 132–33.
4 Grant described McClernand as “unmanageable and incompetent,” based on experiences at Fort Donelson and later at Shiloh.
5 Grant offered his appraisal of the fortified riverfront city that had a peacetime population of forty-five hundred, the second-largest city in Mississippi next to Natchez: “Admirable for defense. On the north it is about two hundred feet above the Mississippi River at the highest point and very grown up with cane and underbrush by the washing rains; the ravines were much cut up with cane and underbrush while the sides and tops were covered with a dense forest.” Flood, p. 149. Grant, p. 212.
Federal forces had tried to take Vicksburg before, in the summer of 1862. After Admiral David G. Farragut’s seizure of New Orleans in April of that year, he had attempted to open the Mississippi by the use of some twenty-three mortar boats, finally reaching Vicksburg. There he found the bluffs too steep, and on July 18 he gave up the effort, returning to New Orleans.
6 Flood, p. 141.
7 Porter journal, p. 436. Cited in Glatthaar, Partners in Command, p. 168.
8 Howe, p. 235.
9 Ibid., p. 140.
10 XIII Corps, McClernand; XIV Corps, George H. Thomas; X Corps, Sherman; XVI Corps, Hurlbut; XVII Corps, McPherson.
11 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, January 28, 1863. Howe, p. 238.
12 Flood, pp. 151–52.
13 A similar effort against Fort Pemberton, at Yazoo Pass, had been launched earlier, but it had failed and the force had not yet been extricated; in fact it was still in peril.
14 Grant, pp. 177–78. Sherman, pp. 308–11.
Chapter Nine | The Guns of Vicksburg
1 In the East, Lee had defeated Ambrose Burnside at Fredericksburg the previous December. Chancellorsville was yet to be fought. Halleck’s “siege” of Corinth could hardly be called a battle.
2 Flood, pp. 154–56.
3 Ibid., p. 156.
4 Glatthaar, p. 174.
5 Sherman, p. 316.
6 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, April 17, 1863, quoted in Howe, pp. 249–53.
7 Grant’s force at Grand Gulf consisted of McClernand’s XIII Corps.
8 Sherman, p. 319.
Chapter Ten | The Bastion Falls
1 Grant, p. 192.
2 Grierson’s regiments were the 6th and 7th Volunteer Illinois cavalries and the 2d Iowa.
3 Sherman, p. 327.
4 Meyers, pp. 147–49. Fiske, pp. 240–42.
5 Grant, p. 216.
Chapter Eleven | Chattanooga
1 Sherman, p. 346.
2 Ibid., p. 349. See Appendix D for the entire text.
3 Tower, p. 119.
4 Sherman, pp. 364–65.
Chapter Twelve | Commander in the West
1 Despite its modest-sounding name, the Military Division of the Mississippi was a tremendous command, both in terms of territory and the number of troops involved. It included the Departments of the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, and Arkansas, commanded respectively by major generals Schofield, Thomas, McPherson, and Steele. Sherman, II, p. 5.
2 Sherman, pp. 399–400.
3 Sherman, II, p. 15.
4 Watson, p. 111.
5 Grant, p. 278.
6 Sherman, II, pp. 27–29.
7 Ibid., p. 29.
Chapter Thirteen | The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain
1 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, May 4, 1864. Howe, pp. 287–88.
2 Sherman, II, p. 34. The memoirs were written much after the fact, and by then McPherson had been killed and was considered a great national hero. Given the magnitude of the failure, it is safe to assume that Sherman, at the moment, was not so mild.
3 The name can be confusing. McPherson commanded the Union Army of the Tennessee. Johnston omitted the article, thus calling his force “The Army of Tennessee.”
4 Cooper was the adjutant general, not a commander.
5 Eicher, John, and David Eicher, Civil War High Commands, p. 69.
6 Sherman, II, p. 59.
7 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, June 26, 1864. Howe, p. 298.
8 W. T. Sherman to Ellen Sherman, June 30, 1864. Howe, p. 299. The reference to Kilkenny cats comes from indefinite sources. Apparently British soldiers at Kilkenny, Ireland, in the last of the eighteenth century reported two cats who fought so fiercely that they ate each other up except for their respective tails, all that remained.
9 Johnston claimed the loss of only 808. Sherman, p. 61.
Chapter Fourteen | The Fall of Atlanta
1 Castel, pp. 379–82.
2 Sherman, II, pp. 82–83.
3 Vetter, p. 213.
4 Sherman, II, p. 96.
5 Ibid., p. 105.
Chapter Fifteen | Marching Through Georgia
1 Vetter, p. 217.
2 Sherman, II, pp. 141–42.
3 Ibid., p. 141.
4 Vetter, p. 233. At least some of this is in Sherman’s Memoirs.
5 Grant, p. 378.
6 Sherman, II, p. 179.
7 Ibid., p. 182.
8 Ibid., p. 186.
9 Ibid., p. 189.
10 Hardee was the author of a drill manual used by both sides in the Civil War. He had been commandant of cadets at West Point.
11 It was incidentally the division that Sherman had commanded at Shiloh and Vicksburg, a matter of pride and confidence on his part.
12 Sherman, II, p. 231.
Chapter Sixteen | Savannah
1 W. T. Sherman to Ellen, January 15, 1865. Quoted in Howe, p. 329.
2 Sherman, II, p. 236.
3 “. . . its streets perfectly regular, crossing each other at right angles; and at many of the intersections were small inclosures in the nature of parks. These streets and parks were lined with the handsomest shade-trees of which I have knowledge, viz., the willow-leaf live-oak, evergreens of exquisite beauty; and these certainly entitled Savannah to its reputation as a handsome town more than the houses, which, though comfortable, would hardly make a display on Fifth Avenue or the Boulevard Haussmann of Paris.” Sherman, II, p. 230.
4 Sherman, II, pp. 233–34.
5 Yet Sherman was prescient in what he feared for the future of the freed slaves. On January 15 he wrote Ellen, “I have said that slavery was dead and the Negro free, and want him treated as free, and not hunted and badgered to make a soldier of, when his family is left back on the plantations. I am right and won’t change.” Howe, p. 328.
Chapter Seventeen | Meeting at City Point
1 Grant claimed that he had always favored Sherman’s plan to come overland but had doubted its feasibility. Sherman, II, 237–38.
2 Sherman, II, pp. 237–38.
3 Admiral Dahlgren and many of his army colleagues had blamed General Franklin Butler’s lack of aggressiveness for the latest failure.
4 Throughout most of the war Lee had been in command of a single army, the Army of Northern Virginia. On January 31, 1865, however, President Jefferson Davis appointed him as commander of all the Confederate armies. By that time Lee was located under siege in Richmond.
5 Once Sherman’s reinforcement arrived (Schofield’s Army of the Ohio), he would have eighty thousand men.
6 Glatthaar, p. 131.
7 Sherman, II, pp. 326–27.
8 Sherman later made some changes to allow him to fight Lee and Johnston at the same time.
9 Sherman, II, p. 328.
10 Ibid., p. 326.
Chapter Eighteen | Surrender
1 To the modern reader, the designation of “army” for a formation about the size of a corps can be explained by the type of function that headquarters was to perform. The army, an administrative unit, could convene courts-martial and perform many other administrative function denied the corps.
2 The Neuse was a significant waterway that flowed from the Piedmont of the Alleghenies past Raleigh, Durham, Smithfield, and Goldsboro, and emptied into the Pamlico Sound at New Bern.
3 Sherman, II, p. 343.
4 Ibid., pp. 356–57.
Chapter Nineteen | Troubled Peace
1 Tenney, pp. 700–1.
2 Ibid., 701.
3 Sherman, p. 359.
4 Flood, p. 351. Grant described the entire situation clearly and succinctly: “Halleck had been sent to Richmond to command Virginia, and had issued orders prohibiting even Sherman’s own troops from obeying his, Sherman’s, orders. Sherman met the papers on his return, containing this order of Halleck, and very justly felt indignant at the outrage. On his arrival at Fortress Monroe returning from Savannah, Sherman received an invitation from Halleck to come to Richmond and be his guest. This he indignantly refused, and informed Halleck, furthermore, that he had seen his order. He also stated that he was coming up to take command of his troops, and as he marched through it would probably be as well for Halleck not to show himself, because he (Sherman) would not be responsible for what some rash person might do through indignation for the treatment he had received. Very soon after that, Sherman received orders from me to proceed to Washington City, and to go into camp on the south side of the city pending the mustering-out of the troops.” Grant, p. 453.
5 Grant, p. 447.
6 Sherman, p. 374.
7 Flood, p. 353.
8 Howard had been ordered to Washington to make preparations for the army’s arrival.
9 So obvious was the gesture that Grant mentions it approvingly in his Memoirs.
10 Sherman II, pp. 377–78.
Chapter Twenty | General of the Army
1 The other members were Major General Philip Sheridan and Brigadier General C. C. Augur.
2 The first war in which the United States had had a single army chief.
3 “. . . he acted like a boy turned loose—threw off reserve—asked 1,000 questions of everybody—never at a loss for a story or joke—a comic twinkle in his eye—a toss of his head—a serio-comic twitch to his wrinkled features—with a long stride he passed up and down constantly, never weary—a prodigious smoker and talker—stretched in blankets before the fire in the shadow of mountains, he talked the night half away.” Lewis, p. 596.
4 Ibid., p. 599.
5 Ibid., pp. 597–98.
6 Keegan, pp. 284–85.
7 Ibid., p. 282.
Chapter Twenty-one | Taps
1 Lewis, pp. 637–38.
2 See Sherman and Howard, Who Burnt Columbia.
3 Lewis, p. 645.
4 Ibid., p. 650.
5 Ibid., p. 651.