Chapter One MY FATHER NAMED ME WILLIAM TECUMSEH
Tecumseh, who was a Shawnee warrior, became the most famous Indian leader of his age, widely known among both white settlers west of the Appalachians and Native Americans. Some said his name meant “Shooting Star”; others translated it as “Crouching Panther.” The son of a Shawnee father and a Creek mother whose parents once had lived in the region known as Tennessee, Tecumseh traveled south from the Ohio area in the early 1790s, at the urging of his older brother Cheeseekau. Bringing a band of Shawnee warriors to reinforce the group led by Cheeseekau, and in tandem with Chickamauga Indians, Tecumseh engaged in raiding the Cumberland River Valley settlements in the general vicinity of the fledgling, decade-old town of Nashville. When Cheeseekau was killed, Tecumseh, then only about twenty-four years old, was selected as the new leader. For several months he and his Shawnees continued raiding Tennessee settlements, before returning to the Ohio country upon learning that a United States Army, led by Revolutionary War hero General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, was advancing into that area.1
Tecumseh was greatly disturbed by the ever growing encroachment of white settlers. He sought to devise a plan that would protect all Indian peoples. Convinced that Native Americans could not live alongside whites without sacrificing their way of life, the chief envisioned a vast intertribal confederacy, encompassing Indians everywhere and dedicated to arresting the United States takeover of Indian lands. Indians, he believed, must renounce all white practices and possessions, and return to their old ways—the ways sanctioned by antiquity. Traveling extensively throughout the South—from Missouri and Kentucky to Mississippi, Florida and North Carolina—he urged Native Americans everywhere to make common cause with the Shawnees and their northern allies, in a great war of survival against the expanding whites. If not stopped, these whites, with their corrupting whiskey and gold, would seize all the land, and also enslave or exterminate the Indians.2
Wherever he spoke, the tall Tecumseh made converts as “his eyes burned with supernatural luster,” remarked a witness, “and his whole frame trembled with emotion,” and his “voice resounded over the multitude.” What Tecumseh apparently hoped to achieve was a kind of Indian holy war, in alliance with the king of England, to overthrow the new American nation. Presumably he foresaw a restoration of British colonial status as the fate of the Americans once they were defeated. But not all Indians responded, and probably their numbers would not have been sufficient for the task if the converts had reached 100 percent.3
Then the War of 1812 began and the Shawnee chief viewed the conflict as a great opportunity to achieve his vision of a vast, inviolate Indian territory. As an ally of the British, he commanded about 2,000 warriors, and contributed significantly to British successes early in the war. Ultimately however, he ran afoul of British Colonel Henry Proctor, who possessed neither the abilities nor the humane instincts of the Shawnee leader. Above all, the Englishman did not share the goals of his Indian ally. A discouraged Tecumseh attempted to persuade Proctor not to withdraw into Canada, but his arguments failed to convince the colonel.4
The end came in October 1813, when Tecumseh perished a short distance north of Lake Erie, at the Battle of the Thames. As the Shawnee chief and his warriors fought to cover the British retreat to eastern Ontario, Tecumseh reportedly was shot again and again while encouraging his men to stand and fight. Stories circulated that after the battle depraved whites, in quest of “souvenirs,” cut strips of skin from Tecumseh’s thighs. Another report alleged that a group of Kentuckians skinned the corpse of an Indian they thought to be Tecumseh. Others said the Indians hid his body to prevent just such a desecration. Several men claimed to have killed the great Shawnee, most notably Richard Johnson of Kentucky, who in later years became vice president of the United States under Martin Van Buren. Tecumseh’s death was an awful blow to the spirit of the eastern Indians, particularly the Shawnee, many of whom thought the charismatic leader possessed supernatural abilities.5
A little over six years after Tecumseh’s death, on February 8, 1820, a white woman in Ohio named Mary Sherman, gave birth to her sixth child, a son whom Charles Robert Sherman, husband of Mary, christened Tecumseh. Considering that many Americans despised Indians, one might suspect that Charles Sherman had played a cruel joke on his infant when he pinned “Tecumseh” on him. Charles Sherman had no such perverted goal in mind. He called his son Tecumseh because, however unlikely for a white man of that era, Charles Sherman deeply admired the Shawnee warrior. Years afterward the son would write, “I think my father . . . caught a fancy for the great chief.”6
Tecumseh was not only an inspiring leader of his people. In a war often characterized by torture, mutilation, scalping and burning—sometimes involving the wounded and prisoners, sometimes even women and children—he had been known to show mercy. He reportedly denounced both Indians and his British allies for inhumane practices. Legends grew of his personal intervention to stop massacres. Charles Sherman was not the only white man who believed the reports of Tecumseh’s magnanimity. Those who did believe, a distinct minority to be sure, nevertheless constituted refreshing evidence that at least some white men were capable of being fair-minded about racial and cultural issues.7
For Charles Sherman, Tecumseh likely represented both a noble and a romanticized character. After the Shawnee chieftain’s death, Charles Sherman decided to name his next son after the legendary Indian leader. However, Charles’s wife, Mary, insisted that their new son, born in 1814, be named for her brother James. Already an earlier son had been named for her other brother, Charles. Their first girl had been named for the mother (but Mary Elizabeth Sherman was known as Elizabeth), and two more girls followed the birth of James. Thus the father had to wait a long time to realize his wish, but at last, in 1820 (Mary having no more brothers) Charles honored the admirable Shawnee by naming his new child, appropriately a red-haired boy, after Tecumseh. When someone thought the name unusual, even unbecoming for a white infant, the father responded, “Tecumseh was a great warrior.”8
That name, in view of the boy’s eventual role in Native American relations, proved to be packed with irony. Soon after graduation from West Point, young Tecumseh experienced his initial contact with Indians, and from the start was plagued by a conflicted attitude toward them. The stoic resignation of a band of Seminole captives in Florida impressed him, perhaps because he himself could be stoically inclined at times. “I wish you could see the group in its savage state,” he wrote his brother John. “Although many have lost their husbands and fathers and wives and children, yet they show no grief.” Several were badly wounded. “One little girl, with a ball through the back and coming out in the cheek scarce utters a murmur,” while a grown woman, suffering from buckshot “through and through, bears it with the fortitude of a veteran soldier.”9
About three years later, writing from near Marietta, Georgia, the young soldier spoke movingly of the Cherokees, “who used to live here but a few years ago. They had good homes, fields and orchards, and had made rapid advances to civilization, but a Christian people wanted their lands and must have them.” In disgust, Sherman vented his anger at the manner in which Americans had mistreated those Native Americans. “If ever a curse could fall upon a people or nation for pure and unalloyed villainy towards a part of God’s creatures,” he raged, “we deserve it for not protecting the Cherokees that lately lived and hunted in peace and plenty through the hills and in the valleys that stretch from the base of Kennesaw Mountain.”10
Yet, even as early as his sojourn in Florida, and despite a degree of sympathy both then and later for the plight of the Indians, Sherman generally viewed Native Americans as inferior beings. Talking with the Seminoles was a waste of time, he thought, for they “will break their word when it is to their interest,” and he concluded that the only way to smash their determined, unorthodox and unceasing resistance was “a war of extermination.” Years later, when dealing with the Plains Indians, he would come back to this brutal strategy.11
Occasionally, to be sure, Sherman would manifest a sympathy for those “poor devils, more to be pitied than dreaded,” as he wrote General Grant in August 1866. In essence, though, he continued to view Indians as tragic figures: a people doomed because they would not, perhaps could not, transform their way of life into that of the white man. From time to time, Sherman might speak harsh words against the despicable and lawless acts of Americans greedy for Indian land. In fact, he undoubtedly despised the whole dirty business, involving the U.S. Army, which he loved, with the clashes between Native Americans and frontiersmen. But in the final reckoning, he believed that the outnumbered red tribes, burdened by, as he viewed them, a more primitive way of life, would not survive the onrush of a superior people.12
“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux,” he told Grant, following the killing of a number of soldiers at the hands of those famous Indians, “even to their extermination, men, women and children.” When the Cheyennes and Arapahos took to the war path, Sherman wrote his wife, “Probably in the end it will be better to kill them all.” To brother John, he said, “We must not let up this time, . . . till they are killed or humbled.” Still again he wrote, “The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they will all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper.” Despite eventually implementing such ruthless strategy against the Indians, and becoming virtually a symbol of America’s destructive policy against the Plains tribes, there is no evidence that Sherman disliked his Indian name—or ever desired, for any reason, to change it.13
CHARLES SHERMAN was descended from a Judge Samuel Sherman who had emigrated from England in the first half of the seventeenth century. Charles represented the fifth generation of his line in America. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather, like Samuel, were all judges. Also, all lived in Connecticut, where Charles was born in Norwalk in 1788. Charles attended Dartmouth College, then studied law and gained admission to the bar, apparently prepared to follow in the footsteps of his Connecticut ancestors. Instead, the young lawyer, recently wed to Mary Hoyt, a graduate of Poughkeepsie, New York’s prestigious Female Seminary, succumbed to the lure of the West.14
Charles and Mary, with their firstborn child, also christened Charles, bravely embarked upon a horseback ride for hundreds of miles through the wilderness, generally heading southwest, until they reached Lancaster in southeastern Ohio. Charles had previously scouted the little frontier town, situated on the Hocking River, and county seat of Fairfield County, where he opened a law office. Enamored by a sense of adventure, as well as perceptions of economic success, Charles convinced Mary that their future lay in Lancaster. The center of Lancaster rested on a hill, and the Shermans built a two-story, solid if unspectacular frame house on Main Street. Charles proved likable, hardworking, and was quickly recognized as a leading citizen. No other couple could match Charles and Mary for quality of education and their home became a social and cultural center in that small outpost of civilization. In 1823 Charles was named a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court, additional evidence of his steadily increasing prominence.15
Only a few years after the Shermans arrived, Lancaster had welcomed another talented newcomer, Thomas Ewing, who would quickly make his mark as one of Ohio’s most wealthy, influential and powerful men. A lawyer by profession, Ewing was a formidable character, both physically and intellectually. He and his wife, Maria Boyle, whom he married in 1820, built a fine home on Main Street. Atop Lancaster’s hill, the Ewing residence lay only a couple of houses up from the Shermans, with whom they soon became good friends. Sherman and Ewing grew especially close as the years passed, their legal work around the state often conducive to traveling together. The Sherman and Ewing children, increasing in numbers virtually every year, became friends too and played together much of the time.16
By 1829 there were eleven Sherman children, six boys and five girls. Charles Sherman’s mother, Betsy Stoddard Sherman, had also come to live with him after the death of his father, Taylor. Providing life’s necessities for such a large family proved a demanding task. Sherman worked long hours, often away from home, riding the circuit from 1817 to 1823 as a lawyer, and thereafter on the Ohio Supreme Court. Life must have seemed good for the Sherman family, prominent citizens of a growing town that some believed would likely become the state capital.17
However, as any thinking person knows, appearances are often deceptive. Charles still struggled to pay the debts from his unfortunate stint, soon after arriving in Lancaster, as tax collector for the Third District of Ohio—debts resulting from no fault of his own, and which, if his sense of ethical responsibility had not been keen, he could have avoided by declaring bankruptcy. Instead, he admirably chose to accept the debt, which, while further enhancing his enviable reputation as an honorable and trustworthy lawyer, saddled him with economic obligations for the rest of his life. Coupled with the demands of his ever growing family, Charles Sherman had the majority of his earnings committed before the money ever reached his hands. Perhaps—if life were fair—all would have been fine in the long view. But in June 1829 tragedy struck.18
Mary Sherman, shocked upon receiving news that her husband lay seriously ill one hundred miles away in Lebanon, Ohio, started at once for his bedside. But Charles passed before she could reach him. He was forty-one years old. Years later General Sherman declared typhoid was the likely cause of his father’s death. Mary was left with the house and furniture, a small amount of stock, eleven children (one an infant girl) and her strong-willed mother-in-law. Relatives and friends were sorely needed to step forward and help bear her burdens. To their credit, they did.19
The mental impact on nine-year-old Tecumseh (by then known as “Cump,” because his younger siblings found Tecumseh too difficult to pronounce) was far-reaching. A man might be impressive and competent, successful at his profession, and still die poor, leaving his family in desperate circumstances, dependent upon others for help. If it happened to his father, the same could be Cump’s fate as well. All his life, once he himself became a father, he would worry about debt and death, fearful of dying and leaving his family poverty-stricken.
Actually, as the children found foster homes, Cump fared well. In some ways, better than any of his siblings. His father’s friend Thomas Ewing was the man who assumed responsibility for Cump. Reportedly, Ewing had one request. He preferred the smartest of the Sherman boys, to which Cump’s oldest sister, Elizabeth, is said to have replied: “Take Cump; he’s the brightest.” Whether or not Elizabeth’s advice proved decisive, Cump was the one Ewing selected. “I took him home,” said Ewing of the redhead, “and he became, thereafter, my boy.”20
The evidence supports the claim. Cump was fully integrated into the Ewing household, where seven other children lived, at least so far as Thomas Ewing could control the matter. He did not adopt Cump, perhaps respecting the wishes of the boy’s mother. In addition to Thomas and Maria’s four children, they were also raising a nephew and two nieces. Among the boys was Philemon Ewing, known as Phil, only slightly younger than Cump, and probably Cump’s best friend. Cump already knew all the children of course; most notable among them in the years to come was five-year-old Ellen Ewing, the girl he would marry.21
Thomas Ewing had gained fame as a criminal lawyer and become a very wealthy man; he was also a well-read man, whose excellent memory and understanding made him one of the best-informed persons of his era. In 1831 he was chosen by the state legislature for the United States Senate. Obviously the wealth, knowledge, power and influence of Thomas Ewing might open some doors of opportunity for young Tecumseh, which Charles Sherman, despite all of his good qualities, could never have done.22
That is, if Cump desired that such doors be opened. Actually, the nine-year-old’s development revealed an independent-minded lad, one strongly inclined to achieve on his own merit whatever he might, or might not, accomplish in life. Some men prove readily receptive to the influence and connections of relatives and friends who—for whatever reasons, and varied those motivations certainly may be—assure for them economic comfort, even great wealth; men who, after the fact, often somehow convince themselves they are rugged individualists, self-made persons, forever praising their maker. Cump would be too independent, and realistic, for any such delusions of grandeur. He would have considered it nonsense.
This is not to say that Thomas Ewing had little impact on Cump’s life. Quite the contrary. The young Sherman respected his foster father. He admired Ewing’s intellect, once calling him “an intellectual giant,” and respected his financial accomplishments. And he deeply desired the approval of Thomas Ewing. Being a part of the Ewing household ensured, too, that he would hear the English language spoken with grammatical correctness—and sometimes with enviable style. From time to time prominent people were guests in the Ewing home, another of those benefits, impossible to measure precisely, but unquestionably of advantage. Later in life, Sherman became an excellent public speaker as well as an engaging conversationalist. The associations of his childhood and teen years surely nurtured those talents.23
Sherman’s political views, virtually down the line, came to be those of Thomas Ewing. He generally favored the Whigs, who were supportive of protective tariffs and internal improvements at government expense—in essence, Henry Clay’s “American System.” (He did, however, develop serious misgivings about a national bank.) The Constitution of the United States, in Sherman’s view, stood as one of the most admirable documents of Western civilization and was to be defended without qualification. A staunch nationalist, he thought nearly anything contributing to the nation’s growth, strength, stability and general progress desirable and justified. While slavery did concern him, he believed the institution should be supported, fearing dire consequences for the nation if Northerners turned against the South’s “peculiar institution.” Abolitionists potentially posed a greater problem for the nation than did slave owners. How much of this came from Ewing, and how much Sherman embraced on his own, are questions impossible to answer. At the least, his respect for “Mr. Ewing,” as he called him (the Ewings were not “father” and “mother,” only “Mr.” and “Mrs.”), particularly Ewing’s intellect, would have paved a comfortable path, conducive to the acceptance of Ewing’s Whiggery.24
There was another significant way in which Tecumseh’s life would be changed by his new relationship with the Ewing family—although only the passage of time could reveal the full impact of that transformation. It involved religion. Cump’s mother adhered to the Presbyterian faith, while his father had been a Congregationalist. Charles Sherman’s Masonic associations, however, seemed to be of greater importance to him than Congregationalism. Thomas Ewing, born into a Presbyterian family, did not appear to consider religion significant, but apparently to humor his wife, Maria, a staunch Catholic, and perhaps because he was a good family man, he occasionally attended Catholic services with the family. Thus Maria Ewing, devout Irish Catholic to the core, determined the family’s religious observances. She decided that Cump must be baptized a Catholic if he were going to be a part of the Ewing family.25
Cump’s mother gave her permission for the baptism but failed to attend the ceremony even though she was close at hand. When the priest, a Father Dominic Young who was visiting from a nearby monastery (according to Ellen Sherman’s 1880 recollection), agreed to perform the sacrament, he inquired about the boy’s name. Taken by surprise, he was probably appalled. Tecumseh would not do. The “pagan” name must, at the least, be balanced by one more suitable, he said: “a Scriptural or Saint’s name must be used in the ceremony.” The month was June, near the day, if not actually the day of the feast of Saint William. Hence Tecumseh was christened “William”—neither for a relative nor for a friend of the family, but after a saint! The red-haired boy, whether he then indicated the fact or not, did not like what had occurred. Decades later he would write: “My father named me William Tecumseh.”
Possibly he was right. John Sherman, his younger brother, claimed all the Sherman children had been baptized as Presbyterians by the Reverend John Wright. Ellen Sherman had heard the story of Cump’s Presbyterian baptism, and also that the Presbyterian parson gave him the name William. If the reverend did apply the name William, it seems highly unlikely that he would have done so without the approval of the infant’s father. Thus, in a real sense, Tecumseh’s father truly would have named him William Tecumseh. Ellen did not believe the story of the alleged Presbyterian baptism, both because she remembered as a five-year-old watching Father Young baptize Cump and also because, intensely Catholic like her mother, she wanted to believe her husband’s baptism had been Catholic. Whatever the facts about the Presbyterian baptism and the origin of the name William, Sherman was clearly baptized by a priest when he was nine or ten years old. But he would accept neither Catholic dogma nor ritual. “I am not a Catholic,” he wrote John in 1875, “and could not be because they exact a blind obedience and subordination that is entirely foreign to my nature.”26
In his early twenties, in a letter to Ellen written from Florida, Sherman declared that in the years since leaving the Ewing home for West Point he had adhered to “no particular creed.” The purity of Christian morals he did acknowledge but, beyond that, he considered inconsequential the importance usually attached to “minor points of doctrine or form.” While believing “in good works rather than faith,” not only “as revealed in scripture,” but also, he noted, as “taught by the experience of all ages and common sense,” nevertheless the Catholic creed was not for him. As a grown man he would have little time for any organized religion.27
That fact would present an ongoing problem with his wife, a dedicated Catholic, “working like a beaver to spread the faith,” as he remarked. Although Sherman was remarkably tolerant about her religion and influence on their children’s religion, her never-ceasing efforts to persuade him to practice the Catholic faith became tiresome, occasionally quite annoying. Once, in the midst of a row about religion, she reminded him, “You knew when you married me that I was a Catholic,” to which he rejoined: “Of course I did, but I didn’t know that you would get worse every year.” When his son Tom decided to become a Catholic priest, Sherman was beside himself, becoming more anti-Catholic than ever before. “Not only am I not a Catholic,” he raged, “but an enemy so bitter that written words can convey no meaning.”28
Late in life, when an old army associate from Civil War days was visiting with him, Sherman warned the man “not to talk religion with [his wife].” As to himself, Sherman said, “It makes no difference. Why, I guess I don’t believe in anything, so in this room talk as you please.” And as Sherman was dying, his Catholic children (their mother already deceased), knowing that their father would never accept the last rites of the Catholic Church, brought in a priest for that purpose while the General lay unconscious. Thus for Sherman, “William,” in its own peculiar manner, proved a name as permeated with irony as was “Tecumseh.”29