The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (17 page)

William Tecumseh Sherman’s Gift to
Abraham Lincoln—Summer 1864

Sherman was forty-four when he captured Atlanta in September 1864, a veteran who already had commanded in many of the worst battles of the Civil War—Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. He would fight in the war’s last major battle, at Bentonville, just as he had its first, at Bull Run. As he went into Georgia in May 1864, Sherman still remained an utter paradox—both an insider with valuable political connections and an outcast who had met only professional failure before the war. He was a scruffy, unkempt westerner who brought a wealth of book learning and innate genius to the art of war. Pictures taken during 1864 do not suggest a robust young man of forty-four, but instead a troubled, almost angry middle-aged warrior in his fifties—face creased, hair wild, and eyes fixed away from the camera.

Sherman graduated sixth in his class at West Point in 1840. He was then stationed in a variety of locales in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and California, with duties from engineering to logistics. He married his foster sister, Ellen Ewing, daughter of the powerful, rich, and well-connected Ohio lawyer Thomas Ewing, who had raised him following the death of his own father. Yet despite his family connections, after resigning his commission in 1853 to enter the highly speculative banking world of Gold Rush California, Sherman met nothing but failure—and was finally near bankruptcy. Unable to support his family, he subsequently tried law. Various business schemes followed before he won an appointment in January 1860 as the first superintendent of the new Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy—only to resign a year later after Louisiana seceded and joined the Confederacy. After his first and only successful employment, Sherman headed back home to the north. Five months later he enlisted in the Union Army at the rank of colonel.
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In this famous Mathew Brady photograph of May 1865, a triumphant forty-five-year-old General William Tecumseh Sherman appears characteristically unkempt, with furrowed brow and modest uniform. Note the black sash on Sherman’s folded left arm, in homage to the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

After gallant service at Bull Run, Colonel Sherman was promoted to brigadier general and deployed as a second in command for the military district of the entire state of Kentucky. There Sherman abruptly experienced some sort of mental breakdown—in part from constant sleeplessness, asthma aggravated by cigar smoking, separation from his family, and perhaps bipolar depression, of which there was a family history; in part from the prescient but bleak realization that the new war to defeat the Confederacy would take years to win and cost thousands of lives—and that few of his superiors recognized this awful truth.

Only the intervention of both his wife, Ellen Ewing, and an influential younger brother, Ohio senator John Sherman (now known mostly for authorship of the Sherman Antitrust Act), landed him a second chance out west as a military subordinate to the ascendant Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant. The latter, whom Sherman technically outranked, gave him a division command following his own successes at Forts Henry and Donaldson. Although Sherman’s Ohio division was surprised on the first day of Shiloh, he nevertheless held firm against the huge Confederate advance, was slightly wounded twice, and had three horses shot from under him—and emerged after the Northern victory a national hero.

Prior to Shiloh, Sherman had referred to himself as a Jonah and confessed to contemplating suicide. Afterward, he had the confidence to appreciate that his own unique ideas about conflict in the industrial age were far more sophisticated and apt than those of most of his fellow Union generals, who mostly failed throughout 1862–63 to defeat their Confederate counterparts. In short, the horrific battle of Shiloh saved the career of William Tecumseh Sherman.
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Sherman had left the army in 1853, after most of his own generation from West Point had seen service in the Mexican War—Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, James Longstreet, George McClellan—and would go on to win prominent positions on both sides on the eve of the Civil War. But had Sherman really failed at all? In terms of professional employment, financial success, and reputation, he most surely had. Indeed, he could not even support his growing family in a permanent residence, and he counted on family acquaintances for any job he could find. But in the larger scope of learning the diverse requisite skills necessary to lead a hundred thousand men into Georgia, a young Sherman had not stumbled at all.

Quite unknowingly, by taking on and losing job after job, he had been
engaged in a three-decade-long course of practical and formal preparation for generalship in a new age of mobile and total warfare. At one time or another, Sherman had refined his formal education at West Point with jobs as diverse as college administrator, banker, businessman, farmer, lawyer, and trader. He had visited and been deployed throughout much of the United States even as he was written off as a hopeless failure. At one point, Sherman confessed, “I was afraid of my own shadow.”
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Sherman knew what it was to be broke, disgraced, and ridiculed; the
Cincinnati Commercial
had declared him “insane” after he resigned his command in Kentucky. Yet in all of his setbacks and abbreviated careers, Sherman had conducted himself honorably and was often a victim of circumstance—a fiscal panic and his bank directors’ graft caused his financial demise in California. Secession and the looming war unexpectedly ended his bright career as a college administrator in Louisiana. By summer 1864, as commander in the west, he held no fear that either the public or his peers might not like him, much less think his ideas unconventional. Even in triumph at the war’s end, Sherman raised controversy. In the viewing stand of the victory parade in Washington, he refused to shake the hand of the secretary of war, in rebuke to Edwin Stanton, who had unfairly castigated him for supposedly tolerating racist conduct toward emancipated slaves. But what did Sherman—who long ago had felt that he had nothing to lose—care about court scandal?

Marching thousands of soldiers and their supply train through the woods of Georgia to Atlanta required formal training in artillery, engineering, and mathematics, as well as acquaintance with the nature and costs of transportation, both by wagon and rail. Sherman’s formal education allowed him to write clear letters and communiqués and to organize supplies and capital for his vast army. Dozens of menial jobs had given him firsthand familiarity with the resentments and anger of the common classes. There could have been no better résumé for leading a huge army into the woods of Georgia than that of the checkered career of William Tecumseh Sherman, bitterly though such requisite experiences had been earned.
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What a difference just a year and a half made. By late summer 1864, Northern excitement over the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had long vanished. Instead, angry Northern abolitionists were at
loggerheads with President Lincoln. Copperhead Confederate sympathizers in the North hated both their president and his radical abolitionist critics—and often each other.

Few in a divided North remembered why in spring 1864 the public had worshipped the brilliant newcomer Ulysses S. Grant—the superman Grant who on that wonderful July 4, 1863, more than a year earlier, had brought them the magnificent victory at Vicksburg that cut the Confederacy in half, after nonstop victories at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh. News of the taking of the key stronghold on the Mississippi at Vicksburg, along with the surrender of thirty thousand Confederates, had capped the celebration of the bloody repulse of General Lee a day earlier at Gettysburg.

Indeed, Grant’s appointment to come east to command the Army of the Potomac in March 1864 had at once enthralled the nation. The rough-looking westerner seemed invincible and would bring a new toughness to the defenders of Washington. He certainly would not back down from Robert E. Lee as had past Union generals, who sounded like lions before, but kittens after, battle. Given his reputation for victories in the west, in spring 1864 the quiet Grant enjoyed celebrity status anywhere he went in Washington. Yet all that Grant mania was months—and nearly a hundred thousand Union dead, wounded, and missing—in the past. Besides the daily attrition of the Army of the Potomac through skirmishing and illness, a series of catastrophic set battles and sieges had changed the reputation of Grant the savior into the butcher of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. By June, even First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln had lashed out to her husband, “Grant, I repeat, is an obstinate fool and a butcher.”
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By August 1864, consensus spread that Grant’s superior, Abraham Lincoln—who, after some initial doubt, had easily secured the Republican Party’s renomination in June—in little over four months would lose to the likely Democratic nominee in the fall election. That rival winner was most likely to be General George McClellan. President Lincoln had unceremoniously put him on ice after McClellan squandered numerous opportunities to move on Richmond following the marginally successful battle of Antietam in 1862. But the wily McClellan—removed from command of the Army of the Potomac in 1862 and given no subsequent important responsibility—had not resigned his commission. Instead, he had done his best to offer military credibility to the notion growing in the northern Democratic Party that an absolute defeat of the secessionists
was either impossible or not worth the ensuing costs. The prospect of McClellan, the military expert, running against Lincoln, the novice—during times of horrific Union casualties—was gaining public appeal, especially since McClellan’s losses of 1862 were ancient history and Lincoln’s mishaps current events. Former generals can usually give up on wars far more easily, and with far less criticism, than other politicians. More important in the new antiwar narrative, the relieved McClellan had once gotten far closer to Richmond in May 1862—within seven miles during the Peninsula Campaign—and at less cost than had Grant in 1864.

If McClellan were elected in November, the war might well end with a negotiated armistice. Ideally, the Confederacy would agree to stop fighting once it understood that it could rejoin the Union without further acrimony—and retain slavery. Issues such as the expansion of slavery into the new western states could be readjudicated at some future date. Americans could end their rancor and agree that whatever differences they had over slavery paled in comparison to the mass slaughter of the last three years. The entire bloody Civil War, in this growing Democratic view, could be written off as a horrific tragedy brought on by intransigent New England abolitionists and die-hard Southern plantationists. Both extremists had unnecessarily dragged the majority of Americans, North and South, into a pointless war over their own respective obsessions with slavery—an institution that no doubt in the century ahead would eventually have withered away and died. President McClellan would heal the wounds of his predecessor’s unnecessary war. The nation would become reconciled to the idea that, although millions of African slaves would have to continue their servitude for a while, at least there would be no more mass internecine killing. McClellan was too wise, at least initially, to be an open Copperhead who favored an immediate cessation of arms and the de facto granting of Confederate independence. But he seemed unaware that by 1864, the war had evolved into something far more than the original Northern effort to reunite the Union, but had come to be aimed also at ending slavery on all American soil. His early September acceptance letter to the Democratic Party that nominated him in late August 1864 is a textbook illustration of naïveté. McClellan promised simultaneously to reunite America, to increase the chances of ending the war, and to accept any Southern state back into the Union that wished to rejoin—without mentioning abolition as requisite for readmittance—as if, after three years of brutal fighting, most Northern
states would allow slavery or any Southern states would wish to reenter without it.
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Yet McClellan sounded hawkish in comparison with his new and often embarrassing allies, the Copperhead “Peace” Democrats whom he represented. They were championed, most notably, by the seditious former congressman and newspaper editor Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. The latter barnstormed the Midwest crying Lincolnism to be “defeat, debt, taxation and sepulchers.” By early 1864 a minority in some Midwestern states was at times thwarting the Union effort, encouraging draft resistance, sending out private emissaries to the Confederacy, and turning a blind eye to budding conspiracies to free Confederate prisoners. The word “miscegenation” first widely appeared in an American campaign as the Copperheads screamed that Lincoln favored not merely abolition, but a new mixing of the white and black races and permanent disenfranchisement of Southern whites.
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