THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 22, 1995 TAG: 9510210497
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BARRETT R. RICHARDSON
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines
CITIZEN SHERMAN
A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman
MICHAEL FELLMAN
Random House. 486 pp. $30.
Robert E. Lee may have surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, but the South was actually defeated by another Union general: William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who brought total war to the Confederacy.
In his sweeping biography, Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, Michael Fellman leaves no doubt that it was Sherman who brought Old Dixie down by carrying the war to the populace and sowing the seeds for the sort of warfare that became a 20th-century trademark.
Sherman was to the Civil War what the atomic bomb was to World War II.
Fellman, a history professor in Vancouver, British Columbia, paints a fascinating portrait of a man who rose from the ashes of failure and despair as a civilian to find himself a smashing success, in a monstrous way, as a soldier. He was a man of many contradictions, a complex character deserving of analysis.
Citizen Sherman does not apologize for the controversial warrior; rather, Fellman examines in detail factors in the general's life that made him what he was.
Sherman's life was marked by ironies. The first involves his name. Tecumseh was a powerful American Indian chieftain both admired and feared by white settlers. Yet Sherman regarded Indians in general as pagan savages and as a young officer gained his first military experience waging guerrilla war against the Seminole Indians in Florida.
After the Civil War, he was dispatched to St. Louis to give military backing to the westward extension of the transcontinental railroad. In plain terms, this meant fighting Indians for whom he held contempt. When Sherman referred to ``the final solution of the Indian problem,'' he had in mind Hitler's approach to dealing with the Jews (whom Sherman also blamed for the war).
Another irony involved Sherman's attitude toward African Americans. As a military leader in a war to abolish slavery, the general opposed emancipation, stating in a letter to his boss, Gen. Grant: ``I do not think it to our interest to set loose negroes too fast.''
At a time when the Union was actively recruiting black soldiers, Sherman wrote to his wife, Ellen, ``I would prefer to have this a white man's war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed.'' So adamant was Sherman on this issue that he defied President Lincoln on black recruitment after Lincoln tried to coerce him on the issue.
Despite his feelings, Sherman orchestrated a revolutionary act rivaling emancipation in its impact on African Americans. Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 provided for a redistribution of land to newly freed slaves. Under its provisions, plantation land abandoned by slaveholders fleeing Sherman's advancing army would be handed out in parcels of ``not more than forty acres of tillable ground'' to heads of black families.
Perhaps the greatest irony in his life was his role as a peacemaker at the end of the war. In accepting the white flag from his longtime Confederate opponent Joseph Johnston, Sherman, who tore through Georgia and laid waste to South Carolina, did not demand unconditional surrender but offered blanket amnesty, military and civil, to all remaining Confederate armies. The proposal was summarily rejected by the administration of President Andrew Johnson.
The flamboyant, egotistical Sherman of war years was in sharp contrast to the man whose life had been in shambles earlier. As a youth, he had been traumatized by his father's death and thrust into the care of a neighboring family. Thomas Ewing, Sherman's adoptive father, was a wealthy and influential lawyer who became a U.S. senator and later secretary of the interior. Without consulting Sherman, Ewing obtained an appointment to West Point for his ward and set his course for life.
During his years at West Point, Sherman's feelings for his adoptive sister Ellen deepened, though there was little overt romance in their eight-year courtship. Their marriage in 1850 was marked by numerous issues of contention, including religion, career and money. Fellman devotes considerable space to the vicissitudes of ``these two willful and contentious partners'' who ``seemed to feed off animosity far more than affection or esteem.''
After graduating from West Point, Sherman found himself sidelined in California during the war with Mexico and slipped into the first of what would be a series of depressions. He left the Army in 1853 and spent more time in California seeking his fortune as a banker, though he knew very little about financial matters. Not surprisingly, his banking career was a failure.
In some significant ways, Sherman's life paralleled that of Robert E. Lee. Like Lee, Sherman headed an educational institution: Sherman, an Ohio native, was superintendent of Louisiana State Military College when the war broke out, whereas Virginian Lee was postwar president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). Lee was an officer in the U.S. Army who cast his lot with the Confederacy; Sherman, who applied West Point methods in building a southern leadership cadre that would be used against the Union, maintained his allegiance to the Union and left Louisiana, lingering long enough to collect a $500 paycheck.
Both Lee and Sherman had marriages far from idyllic and marked by long periods of separation. Whereas Lee enjoyed the company of women other than his wife with no evidence of unfaithfulness, Sherman, finding fame an aphrodisiac, eventually had affairs with other women, most notably sylphic sculptor-singer Vinnie Ream and Mary Audenreid, the young widow of his chief of staff.
Citizen Sherman is a monumental, yet sprightly work about arguably the most colorful, controversial character associated with the Civil War. Fellman's entertaining and informative biography captures both Sherman's rage and his eloquence.
- MEMO: Barrett R. Richardson is a retired staff editor who teaches English at
Old Dominion University and Tidewater Community College. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Michael Fellman
Perhaps the greatest irony in Sherman's life was his role as a
peacemaker at the end of the war. In accepting the white flag from
his longtime Confederate opponent Joseph Johnston, Sherman, who tore
through Georgia and laid waste to South Carolina, did not demand
unconditional surrender but offered blanket amnesty, military and
civil, to all remaining Confederate armies.
by CNB