The Tactical Department at the United States Military Academy, West Point, in evaluating the Class of 1840, dubbed the sixth-highest-ranking cadet in the class, William Tecumseh Sherman, as “no soldier.” A century later, General George S. Patton would use the same term in describing Terry Allen and Teddy Roosevelt Jr., two of the most pugnacious infantrymen of World War II. Both the West Point tacs and “Old Blood and Guts” made the same error; they equated spit and polish with “soldiering.” Sherman’s appearance was rough-hewn, with scraggly red hair. His uniforms were always rumpled. Using that criterion, of course, they were both right.
Sherman was not concerned with that evaluation. Indeed, in later years he reveled in it. Even at the time, it seemed to cause him no grief. Actually, if required to summarize this otherwise complex man, I for one would be inclined to call him a “soldier’s soldier.”
Sherman’s basic attitudes were typically military. He was physically fearless—or appeared so. He distrusted politicians and the press, considering the latter to be licensed spies. He was loyal to a fault, both to the office of his superiors and certainly to Ulysses S. Grant personally. But Sherman could never be put in a mold. He was one of the most colorful figures of the American Civil War, or any other American war. To many people he is best remembered for his answer to the suggestion that he run for the presidency: “If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve. If given the choice between four years in the presidency or four years in prison, I will choose prison, thank you.” He put a new word in our language: “Shermanesque.”
These idiosyncrasies, however, are not the reason we remember Sherman. The military historian B. H. Liddell Hart called him “the first of the modern generals.” If that evaluation seems to be a bit of an exaggeration, it must be admitted that Sherman was a truly independent thinker. Conventionality was not part of his makeup. And part of his original thinking was the concept that to conquer a nation determined to resist, the attacking force cannot limit its efforts to that people’s armed forces; the war must be waged against the will of the civilian populace as well. Hence the term “total war.” Only one other Civil War general, the venerable Winfield Scott, also realized what has become a truism. But not until Sherman made his vaunted march from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864 did it come to be universally acknowledged. The victims of this concept, the American Confederacy, have never forgiven him for it.
Actually, it is too much to give Sherman credit for discovering the feasibility of an army’s living off the land of the enemy, free of its own supply lines. He seems to have learned that lesson from U. S. Grant at Vicksburg, when Grant, having secured a foothold on the lands south of the city, attacked Jackson, Mississippi, without a supply line. In fact, the discovery was not even Grant’s. Henry W. Halleck, in 1862, lived off the land in his large-scale movement from Shiloh to Corinth. But Sherman was the first to adopt the policy for purposes beyond feeding his troops: that of depriving the enemy of all matériel necessary to war as well as making use of it himself.
In writing this short book I found his personality even more interesting than his deeds. The contrast between Sherman’s true affection for the people of the South and his actions toward them is to me mind-boggling. (Of course, unreconstructed Southerners hardly return that affection.) When the military phase of the Civil War was finished, he made a sentimental trip to Charleston, South Carolina, to check on the welfare of the friends of twenty years earlier. (He found almost none.)
It is the combination of military genius and complexity of character that has made this book a joy to write. Sherman’s major role in bringing about the ultimate Union triumph in the Civil War, along with being the most unlikely general, is unique in American military history.