Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea

by Noah Andre Trudeau

  CHAPTER 3

  The Stormbringer

  William Tecumseh Sherman lived with a ghost. It was the spirit of his first son, William Jr., who had been the receptacle for every hope and aspiration of his inordinately proud father. “You must continue to write me and tell me everything—how tall in feet and inches—how heavy—can you ride and swim—how many feet and inches you can jump. Everything,” wrote Sherman in early 1863. His desire to be with his wife and oldest boy was so powerful that he arranged for them to join him near Vicksburg during a rare slow period in the western war. Little Willy (he was just nine) showed his winning ways by becoming an honorary sergeant in one of his father’s regiments. Then tragedy struck. Willy grew ill, an army surgeon diagnosed typhoid, and the failing child was rushed to Memphis, where specialists informed Sherman the case was hopeless. The beloved boy departed this world on the afternoon of October 3, 1863.

  To his great friend and mentor, Ulysses S. Grant, Sherman revealed that “this is the only death I have ever had in my family and falling as it has so suddenly and unexpectedly on the one I most prised on earth has affected me more than any other misfortune could.” Sherman knew who to blame. “Why, oh why, should that child be taken from us, leaving us full of trembling and reproaches? Though I know we did all human beings could do to arrest the ebbing tide of life, still I will always deplore my want of judgment in taking my family to so fatal a climate at so critical a period of life.” To his wife he also confessed that “sleeping, waking, everywhere I see poor Willy. His face and form are as deeply imprinted on my memory as were deep-seated the hopes I had in his future.” Yet out of this great loss was forged a grim determination. “On, on I must go till I meet a soldier’s fate, or see my country rise…till its flag is adored by ourselves and all the powers of the earth,” he vowed.

  The emotional blow of Willy’s death would be followed in slightly more than a year by professional triumphs that would make Sherman one of the North’s most celebrated military heroes. It was typical of a life charted in great lows and grand highs, and of a serpentine personal odyssey that carried Sherman from an intense contemplation of suicide to the stern rejection of influential friends bearing presidential aspirations. While Sherman would later protest that it was the powerful flux of national events that caused him to be “forced into prominence,” he nevertheless relished the spotlight. He was a private man who wielded the written word in public forums like a rapier. He dedicated his life’s energies to protecting the uniquely American democracy, but his vision of this blessed society also embraced racial bias as part of the natural order of things as well as pragmatic limits to some freedoms. He was a person of profound ethical and spiritual contradictions, and possessed of many faces. Speaking to a gathering of veterans in 1866, Sherman revealed, “I am full of passion and sometimes act wildly.”

  William Tecumseh Sherman (the middle name was his father’s homage to the Shawnee warrior chief) was born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820. His father died when he was nine, forcing his financially pressed mother to scatter her children out to relatives and friends for upbringing. Young William became surrogate son to Thomas Ewing, a politician with enough clout to have the boy admitted to West Point, where he graduated sixth in the class of 1840. Sherman knocked around in military assignments for thirteen years (he was posted to California during the Mexican-American War) before trying and failing in a banking career. Subsequent efforts to succeed in law and real estate went bust as well. “I would feel rejoiced to hide myself in any obscure corner,” he told a friend. On another low occasion he anguished, “I look on myself as a dead cock in the pit and will take the chances as they come.” At last Sherman found a job that suited his talents, that of superintendent of the Louisiana Military Seminary in Alexandria. He took the position in 1859.

  Events beyond the seminary’s walls cut short the superintendent’s tenure. On January 26, 1861, Louisiana joined five other states in declaring itself independent of the United States. Sherman remained at his post for one more month (to collect his last paycheck) and then went north. (But not before warning his colleagues, “You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth.”) Following a brief stint as president of a Saint Louis streetcar company, he rejoined the army bearing the rank of colonel, commanding a regiment of U.S. regulars. After a good showing in a badly managed battle at Bull Run, Sherman was made second in command in Kentucky, an assignment which soon became first in command once his superior abruptly stepped down. It was a disastrous promotion.

  Kentucky was a volatile border state, with passions running high on both sides. Sherman had yet to find his equipoise—the balancing point where training and personality merge into a self-confident leader. He reacted badly to the pressures, made some unwise public statements, and came near enough to a breakdown that several newspapers labeled him insane. He was bounced from Kentucky to Missouri, then sent home to rest. It seemed that his return to the army would be chalked up as another failure in his life.

  His wife (Thomas Ewing’s daughter) used all the family leverage she could muster to have Sherman returned to a field command. He led a division at the battle of Shiloh, where he served under U. S. Grant, a man he greatly admired. The two became an effective team through the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns, victories that propelled both men into the national spotlight. When Grant was brought east in early 1864 to command all Union armies in the war effort, Sherman was given responsibility for the key operation in the west.

  Outwardly, the man accepting these important new duties looked nothing like a warrior-chief. Sherman, recollected one of his soldiers, usually “wore very common looking clothes. He generally looked like some old farmer; his hat all slouched down and an old brown overcoat.” Yet those with the perception to look beyond external appearances saw a man prepared to wage relentless warfare. “With his large frame, tall, gaunt form, restless hazel eyes, aquiline nose, bronzed face, and crisp beard,” wrote one of Grant’s aides, “he looked the picture of ‘grim-visaged war.’”

  Sherman was in perpetual motion. “He is a very nervous man and can’t keep still a moment,” a soldier observed. Even while he was continuing an unbroken discussion of the war situation with Grant’s aide, Sherman constantly fidgeted. “He twice rose from his chair, and sat down again, twisted the newspaper into every conceivable shape, and from time to time drew first one foot and then the other out of its slipper and followed up the movement by shoving out his leg so that the foot could recapture the slipper and thrust itself into it again.” Sherman’s way of talking at such times was stream-of-consciousness. Bold ideas couched in epigrammatic phrases were rattled off with the hammering intensity of a Gatling gun. Sherman’s explanation: “I’m too red-haired to be patient.”

  “To the casual observer, his quick and nervous manner, the flash of his eagle eye, the brusque command, might give token of hasty conclusions, of disregard of details, of eager, and impatient habits of thought,” added a member of Sherman’s staff. “There could be no greater error. Nothing was more characteristic of his plans, nothing more noteworthy in the general orders which outlined their execution, than the marvelous foresight, itself the fruit of patient thought, which included and took into account each probable contingency, each necessary detail, every other being brushed aside as an encumbrance.”

  It wasn’t luck that brought Sherman to the mountaintop, though luck had played its part in his journey. Sherman’s success began with a solid foundation in the military arts. “Sherman was the professional and practical soldier,” wrote one admirer. “He studied topography, knew roads, mastered the details of a campaign in advance as no other general did.” The smallest matters received his attention, and no aspect of a planned campaign, however trivial, escaped his attention. His men respected his thoroughness, something Sherman used to his advantage. “Without being aware of it, I seem to possess a knowledge into men & things, of rivers, roads, capacity of trains, wagons, e
tc., that no one near me professes to have,” he noted. “All naturally & by habit come to me for orders and instructions.”

  By the latter part of the war Sherman exuded leadership. “Gen. Sherman is the ablest General in the United States Service I believe,” declared a Pennsylvania soldier. “Every man under Sherman has the greatest confidence in him,” seconded a New Yorker, “and make up their minds that when he strikes it is sure death to all rebs within his range.” To this a Minnesota artilleryman added, “we felt as though Sherman could be trusted in every time of trial.” Speaking with a civilian clergyman, Sherman confided his secret. “The true way to be popular with troops is not to be free and familiar with them, but to make them believe you know more than they do. My men believe I know everything; they are much mistaken, but it gives them confidence in me.”

  Largely because of his West Point training, Sherman (as did most of his peers) believed that order could be imposed on the chaos of war. “War is the conflict of arms between people for some real or fancied object,” he wrote. “It has existed from the beginning. The Bible is full of it. Homer immortalized the siege and destruction of Troy. Grecian, Roman, and European history is chiefly made up of wars and the deeds of soldiers; out of their experience arose certain rules, certain principles, which made the ‘art of war’ as practiced by Alexander, by Caesar, by Gustavus Adolphus, and by Frederick the Great. These principles are as true as the multiplication table, the law of gravitation, of virtual velocities, or of any other invariable rule of natural philosophy.” Late in the conflict Sherman ended a debate with a Rebel general regarding his interpretation of the “laws of war” with the exhortation: “See the books.”

  When the Civil War began, Sherman tried to apply the rules he had been taught. He railed against soldiers under his command who preyed on civilian populations. “No goths or vandals ever had less respect for the lives and property of friends and foes,” he fumed at one point. Even in 1862 Sherman was complaining to his superiors that “too much looseness exists on the subject of foraging.” By 1863 Sherman found himself forced to reexamine his convictions. He was an eminently rational being (“My idea of God is that he has given man reason, and he has no right to disregard it,” he said). Too much of what Sherman had observed in the war up to that point did not fit the rules as he had learned them. Too many lines were being blurred, especially regarding civilians and the war. The labor of Southern farmers fed Southern armies, the eyes of Southern civilians informed Southern strategy, the actions of Southern civilians fighting as guerrillas made them a foe almost impossible to confront in any conventional manner.

  Sherman’s battlefield successes and increasing national prominence gave him the confidence to analyze the problem and provided the authority to act on his conclusions. His response was not to discard the rules of war, but to imbue them with a great elasticity. “[The] northern people have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth,” he wrote. Almost every military action Sherman took after 1862 would be justified in reference to the rules of war, but what some of his equally well-schooled opponents never understood was that these were Sherman’s rules of war.

  Sherman was an adept problem solver thanks to the way he approached matters. From the data and assumptions before him he would select those that fitted best with his sense of what was right, endow those conclusions with the qualities of absolute fact, and act upon them—seldom, if ever, reconsidering the matter. The driving and defining force behind everything he did was his personal faith, a highly individualized amalgam of patriotism and national destiny. He believed that the United States, in the years just prior to the commencement of the war, had achieved a divine balance. The nation, as Sherman later wrote, had “prospered beyond precedence,” and its citizens “realized perfectly the advantages they possessed over the inhabitants of other lands.” God—Sherman’s, that is—intended the United States “for a long and prosperous nation[al] life, & not for destruction in the bloom of its youth.”

  By the tenets of his faith, the South had forfeited any consideration for a gentle application of the rules of war. “On earth, as in heaven, man must submit to an arbiter,” Sherman wrote, as if penning a prayer. “He must not throw off his allegiance to his government or his God without just reason and cause. The South had no cause.” Sherman’s cold reasoning led him inexorably forward. “Satan and the rebellious saints of Heaven,” he continued, “were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their just punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equally would not be unjust.” Some twenty-three years after the fighting had ended, Sherman would still insist: “We veterans believe that in 1861–5 we fought a holy war, with absolute right on our side, with pure patriotism, with reasonable skill, and that we achieved a result which enabled the United States of America to resume her glorious career in the interest of all mankind, after an interruption of four years by as needless a war as ever afflicted a people.”

  In applying his rules of war to the rebellious South, Sherman used a number of refining corollaries. He believed very much in collective responsibility. If a band of irregulars ambushed some of his transports from the riverbank, then everyone within an area along the waterway who could have known about the action were coconspirators. His instructions in such cases were that “army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.” To take the issue to a larger scale, until the people of the South demanded that their leaders stop the war, they were a part of the equation that kept the war going. “Even yet, my heart bleeds when I see the carnage of battle, the desolation of homes, the bitter anguish of families;” Sherman wrote, “but the very moment the men of the South say that instead of appealing to war they should have appealed to reason, to our Congress, to our courts, to religion, and to the experience of history, then will I say peace, peace.”

  Sherman reserved a special hatred for the Southern intelligentsia who had been seduced by the hollow god of secession. Of one such man, Sherman wrote that he was “endowed with intellect, wealth, power and experience—He chose war, and for him I have no mercy. He should drink the cup of poisoned venom to its bitterest dregs.” Speaking of this leadership class to his wife, Sherman was no less vengeful. “We must Kill those three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.”

  Another corollary was the supremacy of law as an antidote to the progressive fragmentation of civil society. “The law is or should be our king; we should obey it, not because it meets our approval but because it is the law and because obedience in some shape is necessary in every system of civilized government. For years this tendency to anarchy had gone on till now every state and county and town…makes and enforces the local prejudices as the law of the land. This is the real trouble, it is not slavery, it is the democratic spirit which substitutes mere opinions for law.” The end game here was chaos. “If the United States submits to a division now,” Sherman warned, “it will not stop, but will go on till we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.”

  Speaking to a trusted aide, Sherman made it plain that the “war is on our part a war against anarchy.” God, Sherman was certain, simply wouldn’t allow “this fair land and this Brave People” to slide into the abyss of social chaos. On another occasion he declared himself the sworn enemy of “mobs, vigilance Committees and all the other phases of sedition and anarchy which have threatened and still endanger the Country which our Children must inherit.” Such havoc challenged the natural order of leadership that was part and parcel of Sherman’s idealized society. The war, he told a clergyman in 1864, “is intensifying the greatest fault and danger in our social system. It daily increases the influences of the masses, already too great for safety. The man of intelligence and education is depressed in value far below the man of mere physical strength. These common so
ldiers will feel their value and seek to control affairs hereafter to the prejudice of the intelligent classes.”

  The great and important objects of the war that was being waged, Sherman believed, were order and peace. Those goals were so important that anything impeding their most efficient and rapid prosecution was subject to serious scrutiny and even suppression. That included the fourth estate. A “free press…,” Sherman snapped, “rarely comprehended the necessities of battle.” He was convinced that while Southern newspapers were kept on a tight leash, those in the North operated without controls, irresponsibly providing the enemy with accurate strength estimates and often informed speculation concerning future movements.

  “I say with the press unfettered as now we are defeated to the end of time,” Sherman grumbled. He issued orders promising arrest as a spy for any reporter whose coverage “might reach the enemy, giving them information, aid, and comfort.” When the newspapers pushed back, Sherman dug in his heels. “If the press can govern the country, let them fight the battles,” he declared. “I am no enemy to freedom of thought, freedom of press and speech,” he insisted, “but in all controversies there is a time when discussion must cease and action begin.” Sherman was eager to use his newfound popularity to take the lead on limiting press access to events under his control. “As the press has now more power than the Congress that makes our laws…,” he declared, “and it is probable it will produce the result which history demonstrates in other singular cases that the people will discover that it is better to curtail the liberty of the press as well as the liberty of speech.”