Sherman's March

1

He believes in hard war

From a window of a brick house on the hill a bearded face peered across the burning heart of Atlanta. It was a face incredibly wrinkled and furrowed, dominated by a ruddy scimitar of a nose and a broad mouth that writhed about the stump of a cigar as the tall man spoke to those in the room behind him.

General William T. Sherman glanced restlessly about, squinting toward a setting sun now obscured by smoke, to the courthouse and Masonic hall, still undamaged, into an inferno of blazing railroad shops, depots and factories, and along streets patrolled by Federal sentries who were under Sherman’s orders to save churches and private homes.

Scorching heat pulsed against the columned mansion where Sherman made his headquarters, and in the growing darkness the glare lighted the countryside so brightly that soldiers in camps a mile from the city could read their letters from home. Exploding shells burst in the ruins of captured Confederate arsenals, shaking the house and rattling shrapnel against its walls.

It was November 15, 1864. Sherman’s troops, some 62,000 strong, had already begun to evacuate the burning city. By the next morning they would be off on a thousand-mile foray through the heart of the reeling Confederacy that would leave a path of destruction eighty miles wide, pillage three state capitals, and bring an end to the war that had racked the nation for three years.

The general rubbed the thinning thatch of his hair upward with both hands, tugged at his blouse buttons, drummed the window sill with his fingers, seized the cigar, snapped furiously at its ashes and replaced it, puffing in a fury, shooting smoke from his mouth like pistol fire, as if it were the last cigar in the world. His soldiers had often seen him in such a state, picking nervously at himself with fluttering fingers. One of them said, I never saw him but I thought of Lazarus.

The city that he had so recently captured seemed to Sherman a symbol of Confederate resistance. Atlanta, he said abruptly. I’ve been fighting Atlanta all this time. It’s done more to keep up the war than any—well, Richmond, perhaps. All the guns and wagons we’ve captured along the way—all marked ‘Atlanta.’ He was determined that the city would no longer serve as a major Confederate supply center. He had captured Atlanta on September 2, after one of the war’s most brilliant campaigns, and six weeks later was now to leave it behind, ungarrisoned, to lead his troops on a march that was to bring him military immortality.

Sherman turned into the room, gesturing to his officers with his cigar-stump baton. They’ve done so much to destroy us, we’ve got to destroy Atlanta—at least, enough to stop any more of that.

No one, not even the most devoted of his staff, could imagine that Sherman was on the threshold of fame tonight. He strode to the dining table and sank into a mahogany chair as awkwardly as if he were straddling a cracker box, his customary seat in the field. Sherman was a slight, almost frail figure of deceptively wiry strength.

He wore no badge of rank. His weather-stained blouse looked as if he had slept in it for three years of war; he wore a dirty dickey with wilted points, a faded gray flannel shirt, muddy brown trousers older than the memory of his most veteran staff officer, low-cut shoes rather than boots, and but one spur—the only general of either army who affected shoes and a single spur.

Sherman’s headquarters would have done justice to a bandit chief. It traveled in a single wagon, including baggage for all clerks, aides and orderlies. I think it’s as low down as we can get, he said. He scorned elaborate equipment hauled along by comfort-seeking officers as a farce—nothing but poverty will cure it. There had been only three aides, though two others had come recently, one of them Major Henry Hitchcock, a young Republican lawyer from St. Louis who was assigned to handle a correspondence that had begun to overwhelm the general: Just tell ’em something sweet, Hitchcock—you know, honey and molasses.

Hitchcock had been completely won over by Sherman at their first meeting. Despite the general’s eccentricities, the young lawyer found him straight-forward, simple, kind-hearted, nay, warmhearted … scrupulously just and careful of the rights of others. Above all, Hitchcock was impressed with Sherman’s competence: "You may be sure of one thing—what he says he can do, he can."

Tonight the general’s meal was as simple as those of his interminable marches—hardtack, sweet potatoes, bacon and coffee. Sherman gnawed at a flinty piece of hardtack and began his familiar lecture on its virtues, halted to greet a dispatch-bearer, ripped open a message and barked out a reply. He talked of the enemy, of Southern women, of U. S. Grant and President Lincoln, heedlessly gulping his food, then returning to the smoldering cigar, still talking and laughing, giving orders, dictating telegrams, bright and chipper, one of his generals noted. He cut short others who spoke and went on with his hurried comments, refusing to be interrupted. I’m too red-haired to be patient, he had said. A war correspondent described him as he was at this moment: He walked, talked or laughed all over. He perspired thought at every pore … pleasant and affable … engaging … with a mood that shifted like a barometer in a tropic sea.

The meal was ended by a regimental band from Massachusetts blaring beneath the windows in a serenade to the general, the brasses pealing incongruously above the explosions and roaring flames. Sherman listened briefly, lost interest and turned back to dispatch-bearers and officers who had come for orders. After a few lively military tunes the band played the Miserere from Il Trovatore, whose melancholy beauty, Henry Hitchcock thought, would forever remind him of this November night of roaring flames when Atlanta was destroyed and the army began its march to the sea.

Drunken Federal soldiers had been setting fires in the stricken city for several days, in defiance of Sherman’s orders, but the official work of destruction had begun only when two Michigan regiments knocked down the massive stone roundhouse with improvised battering rams, placed powder charges under large buildings, and piled mountains of worn-out wagons, tents and bedding in the railroad depot, ready for the torch.

Sherman had ordered the city’s destruction postponed until this night of November 15. A foundry, an oil refinery and a freight warehouse were burned first; the blazing depot square spread a storm of fire. The Atlanta Hotel, Washington Hall, dry-goods stores, theaters, the fire stations and jail, slave markets, went up in flames. A mine exploded in a stone warehouse. Old pine timbers burned with astonishing brilliance and flung brands in all directions. The sun shone blood red through a thickening cloud. The air for miles about was oppressive and intolerable.

By night the burning city was the grandest and most awful scene, with fires towering hundreds of feet into the sky. Hitchcock watched in fascination: First bursts of smoke, dense, black volumes, then tongues of flame, then huge waves of fire roll up into the sky: Presently the skeletons of great warehouses stand out in relief against … sheets of roaring, blazing, furious flames … as one fire sinks, another rises … lurid, angry, dreadful to look upon.

The fires died down before midnight and the glare began to fade. Hitchcock saw that the courthouse and Masonic hall still stood. No private homes within view of headquarters had been burned—but tomorrow, he thought, when the guards are gone, all would go up in smoke. Already bands of drunken Federal soldiers raced through the streets on foot and horseback, smashing plate-glass windows, bearing huge loads of uniforms from army warehouses and selling them on street corners for any price they could get. Sherman’s troops gathered before large buildings and shouted and danced and sang while pillar and roof and dome sank into one common ruin. A bitter stench filled the night—odors of pine, tar, gunpowder, oil, charred meat and cloth, leather, carpets, feather beds, hot metal, burned privies, hospital sheds, hotels, drugstores, and from the streets themselves the sickening smell of dead horses and mules.

Some of Sherman’s soldiers watched the sea of flames in dismay. Harvey Reid, a twenty-three-year-old Wisconsin schoolteacher in the XX Corps, wrote indignantly: This destruction of private property in Atlanta was entirely unnecessary and therefore a disgraceful piece of business … the cruelties practiced on this campaign toward citizens have been enough to blast a more sacred cause than ours. We hardly deserve success. And Major James Austin Connolly, who rode near the head of an Illinois regiment, blamed Sherman himself for the needless destruction of the city: He is somewhere nearby now, looking on at all this, and saying not one word to prevent it.

Major Connolly would have been surprised to learn that Sherman spent most of this night with his engineers in the streets trying to help save threatened houses. The general worked while his wagons, guns and troops were moving eastward from the city.

By dawn some two hundred acres of Atlanta lay in ashes. The only survivors were four hundred houses and a few larger buildings, most of them churches. Father Thomas O’Reilly of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, who had assembled a guard of Federal soldiers, saved his church and parsonage and nearby houses—as well as the city hall and St. Philip’s Episcopal, Trinity Methodist, Second Baptist and Central Presbyterian churches.

Atlanta Medical College was saved by another resolute Confederate, Dr. Peter Paul Noel D’Alvigny, a French army veteran who hoodwinked the enemy. When his last patients were evacuated, Federal soldiers spread straw on the floors of the buildings, ready for the torch. D’Alvigny bribed hospital attendants to pose as patients, and protested to a Federal officer that he must have time to move his wounded.

You have no patients. The place is empty, and it burns tonight with the rest of them. Those are my orders.

The doctor led him to an upper room where his hospital attendants lay groaning in a distressing display of helplessness. All right, the bewildered officer said. I’ll give you until sunrise to get ’em out of here.

The last of the army was moving out by dawn, and the medical college survived, overlooked in the haste of departure.

In the last hours Federal soldiers looted the city in company with Confederate deserters and a few civilians who hurried in to pillage. The bluecoats robbed warehouses of uniforms, tobacco and whiskey, put on Confederate gray, stuffed their pockets with foot-long plugs of tobacco and drank the whiskey.

The XIV Corps, last to leave the city, began to move at sunrise, marching past a vacant lot where civilians crouched among piles of household goods they had snatched from the flames. Chaplain John Hight of the 58th Indiana carried a memory of women wringing their hands in agony, some of them praying aloud. How far these people are deserving of pity, it is hard to tell.

Sherman left Atlanta at seven in the morning of November 16, riding his favorite mount, Sam, a blaze-faced little horse whose horribly fast walk was the dismay of his staff. The general was erect and vigorous in the saddle, like a gamecock, some of his men thought. His face was drawn with fatigue and half-concealed by a broad-brimmed hat jammed down over his ears, a formless black hat worn without braid or tassels. The sunlight revealed streaks of gray in the cinnamon beard. Sherman’s cigar rolled constantly across his mouth, even as he talked with staff officers and his bodyguard of Alabama cavalry, waving and gesturing with his slender, feminine hands. His nose twitched as if the general were snuffling out the trail ahead, a relic of his long bouts with asthma; he had burned niter papers in his room for years, until the Southern climate had cured him. The general was watchful as he rode among his troops, missing nothing as he passed:

Illinois artillerymen breaking camp, furiously discarding surplus equipment, squabbling over hatchets, stewpans and coffeepots to be taken, each officer reduced to a gripsack and blanket and canvas tent about the size of a large towel; a Minnesota regiment stuffing the stringy flesh of freshly killed beeves into knapsacks, bellowing in protest, Blue jerk! Thirteen dollars a month and blue jerk!; quartermasters snatching stores from flames that had freshly sprung up, flinging boots, coats and trousers onto the passing column; the 86th Illinois infantry, its men calling in unison as they marched, Split peas! Split peas!—victims of a commissary officer who had no other rations left to him, men who knew they must cook the peas three hours tonight.

Whiskey had been issued and many had drawn double rations. Hosea Rood of Wisconsin saw these men begin as if they would reach the sea by nightfall: They stepped high and long; they sang and made merry, and could not for the life of them see why the glorious march had not begun a long time before.

Every private seemed to know the army’s destination, though Sherman’s orders had told them little of what was to come: It is sufficient for you to know that it involves a departure from our present base, and a long and difficult march … They would carry few supplies, live off the country and forage liberally. Soldiers were forbidden to enter houses along the route—though they might take food they saw in the open, crops and livestock and all else—and should plunder hostile rich Southerners rather than the poor. Able-bodied Negroes could be taken along, but not so many as to burden the columns. Enemy country was to be devastated only where the army met resistance by Confederate guerrillas.

The general had reassured the army that its passage through enemy country could be made safely: All the chances of war have been considered and provided for, as far as human sagacity can. All he [Sherman] asks of you is to maintain that discipline, patience, and courage which have characterized you in the past; and he hopes, through you, to strike a blow at the enemy that will have a material effect in producing what we all so much desire, his complete overthrow …

Recruits who cheered the general on the first day’s march were quieted by veterans who had followed him for years: He don’t like it. But today, for some reason, Sherman seemed to welcome the cries of his troops. He waved and grinned when others called, Guess Grant’s waitin’ for us at Richmond, Uncle Billy! He passed within ten feet of a drunken soldier who scowled up at him, cursing the general with a steady vehemence. Sherman rode on as if he had heard nothing.

The general was an enigma to most of his troops. One soldier declared him the most American-looking man I ever saw, but an Indiana officer who studied him closely said, There are no outward signs of greatness. He appears to be a very ordinary man. War correspondents wrote: All his features express determination, particularly the mouth … a very remarkable man such as could not be grown out of America—the concentrated quintessence of Yankeedom … He believes in hard war. And: His eyes had a half-wild expression, probably the result of excessive smoking … He looks rather like an anxious man of business than an ideal soldier. A more thoughtful reporter from Cincinnati who had followed Sherman for hundreds of miles on his Southern invasion wrote: Above all the men I have met, that strange face of his is the hardest to read. It is a sealed book even to his friends.

The general’s pursuit of modesty was almost an obsession. He had recently replied to a prospective biographer, Desire no notoriety. Have endeavored to escape the itching of fame. To a woman who requested a lock of his hair he replied that his hair was too short to plait and too thin to spare from its natural office. Still, he was not without vanity. He suppressed an unflattering photograph that revealed too many of his wrinkles.

Only a few months earlier a hostile Northern press had threatened Sherman’s career by charging that he was insane. Southern newspapers had begun to echo that theme in response to the general’s introduction of total warfare—a destructive attack upon civilians. Sherman had already declared that the most humane way to end the war was to destroy the South’s power to resist by cutting off supplies and manufacturing and by making the civilian’s lot so miserable as to break the morale of Confederates at home and in the field.

The general sensed a subtle form of intoxication in the troops as they left the city today, an exhilaration he shared: A feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and interest … a devil-may-care feeling pervading officers and men. He thought of the risks of his march: If he failed, the campaign would be condemned as the wild adventure of a crazy fool.

Army bands played an odd medley this morning—Farewell, Farewell, My Own True Love, Oh, Jenny, Come Tickle Me, When This Cruel War Is Over, and the general’s favorite, The Blue Juniata. Halts became frequent. Alonzo Brown of the 4th Minnesota said, Ten minutes march and twenty minutes standstill, weight on the left leg and head under wing. Officers fell asleep in their saddles.

The general passed men in new uniforms wincing at every step in tight boots, and then ragged brigades just as they had come from the Georgia mountains and Atlanta trenches—veteran infantry mingling odors of sweat and urine, unwashed bodies, tobacco, whiskey and old boots with those of horses, mules and sun-bleached wagon canvas. The column swarmed with pets: A squirrel named Bun sat on his master’s shoulder gnawing hardtack; Old Abe, the war eagle of a Wisconsin regiment, perched on a cannon; Minerva, the screech owl; a pet bear; scores of dogs, riding on saddles, wagons and caissons.

It was a lean army, stripped to the bone and ready for action. Sherman had sent his sick and wounded back to his old base in Tennessee. In the spare ranks remaining, many brigades had shrunk to regimental size. It was a rare regiment that could muster as many as three hundred of its original thousand men. The average company had only thirty men in ranks; files that had once been four abreast had become a single soldier. There were a few green recruits, including an overage victim in his fifties who had lied about his age to deceive a young woman and had been seized by draft officers—the butt of endless jokes by his companions.

Though there were many old men in the ranks, most of the soldiers were boys; thousands were under eighteen, too young to vote even in the recent election that had kept Abraham Lincoln in the White House. My little devils, Sherman called these teen-aged adventurers. Most of the army’s colonels were under thirty, captains and lieutenants were in their early twenties. The six commanders of armies, corps and divisions averaged thirty-one years of age.

These troops were taller and stronger than the bluecoats of the Eastern armies, and were bearded, long-haired and tattered, men who marched with a rolling stride, Midwesterners, most of them, sons and grandsons of pioneer settlers of the country from Kentucky to Minnesota, of English, Irish and Scotch descent, with a sprinkling of Germans and Swedes. (Two regiments took their orders and got their band music in German.) Several Chippewa Indians marched with the 3rd Wisconsin.

Many of the troops bore deep resentment toward Negroes and the agitators, whom they blamed for causing the war, for the virus of race prejudice was nationwide. They told rebel prisoners with grim earnestness, I’d sooner shoot an Abolitionist than a Johnny, any day.

In all there were 218 regiments, most of them from the West. Ohio had 52 regiments, Illinois 50, Indiana 27, but there were others from Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and Kentucky. Thirty-three regiments came from the East—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts. One regiment of white Alabama Unionists rode with the cavalry—hill countrymen of fiercely independent spirit who owned no slaves and refused to side with the arrogant plantation owners of the low country.

Sherman had made no effort to reform these troops. He left them as he found them upon taking command, coolly efficient in battle and of free-and-easy discipline, inclined to treat their officers as if they were schoolteachers, bedeviling them with pranks and practical jokes. The affection of these soldiers for Sherman dated from the beginning of his command when he canceled dress reviews and reduced formality to a minimum, and it grew after he had led them in the slashing campaign into Georgia with a minimum of head-on fighting.

The troops traveled lightly, as if they were on an overnight reconnaissance rather than a march through the heart of the South. Each man carried a blanket wrapped in a rubber poncho slung over his shoulder, a haversack, a tin cup hung at the waist, a musket and a cartridge box with forty rounds of ammunition. I doubt, said Private Theodore Upson, an Indiana farm boy, if such an army as we have ever was got together before … all the boys are ready for a meal or a fight and don’t seem to care which it is.

In this they were like most citizen soldiers, eager to escape discipline and control of officers, seeking adventure where they found it. Their families back home, like the nation at large, conceived of them as moral, honorable young Americans, ideal products of the world’s most enlightened system of government. In fact, they were potentially cruel and heartless pillagers, many of whom awaited only the opportunity to plunder, burn and rape.

Sherman climbed a steep hill crowned by old entrenchments that encircled the city and overlooked a stark, scarred landscape as barren as the face of the moon, a vista of rifle pits hacked into red clay, earthworks bristling with rows of sharpened sticks and piled brush. Irregular ranks of graves marked the tides of Federal advances during the siege of Atlanta, with headboards made from cracker or ammunition boxes, the names of soldiers crudely scratched on one side and on the other Pilot Bread or Watervliet Arsenal.

The general wheeled for a final glimpse of the city, where a black pall still rose from the ruins. He looked toward the distant village of McDonough and caught sight of a column of Howard’s right wing, the gun barrels glistening in the sun, the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south; and right before us the Fourteenth Corps, marching steadily and rapidly, with a cheery look and swinging past with a stride that made light of the thousand miles between us and Richmond. A passing band struck up The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the troops joined the chorus, their echo rolling through the hills: Gloree; gloreee, halle-lujah!, a triumphant roar that Sherman was to remember for the rest of his life.

The general was moved by his departure: We turned our horses’ heads to the east. Atlanta was soon lost behind the screen of trees, and became a thing of the past. Around it clings many a thought of desperate battle, of hope and fear, that now seem like the memory of a dream. He was off on his march to fame.

Elsewhere, the war that had dragged on for three and a half years seemed to have degenerated into a stalemate. Far to the north, in trenches about Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia, the weary armies of U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee faced each other in siege warfare that promised to be interminable. The Confederacy’s strength was being sapped by the blockade of her ports and the effort to meet superior force on far-flung fronts, but her armies still in the field remained fiercely defiant.

The last Federal soldiers were still within sight when a growing horde of Confederate scavengers invaded Atlanta. Men, women and children swarmed among the smoking ruins, some from as far as a hundred miles away. They loaded iron, salt, bacon, sugar, coffee, and hides into wagons, carts and carriages.

The Augusta Constitutionalist reported that our country cousins also ransacked vacant houses. One woman who tugged at a rope tied to a piano leg explained, I found a mity nice table in thar and I’m trying to git it in my keart.

The Georgia militia general, W. P. Howard, on an inspection tour for Governor Joseph Brown, found two hundred and fifty loot-filled wagons in the city. Howard also reported the crowning act of villainy by Sherman’s men, who had broken gravestones in the city cemetery, dragged bodies from vaults and replaced them with Federal dead.

But Atlanta’s revival began with the bizarre scenes of pillage; within a month there would be an election for a new mayor and aldermen, who were to begin with $1.64 in the treasury. The post office, a newspaper, a grocery, a bar and a salt factory would open, and trains would be running again.

The irony of Confederates looting their ruined city on the heels of Sherman’s departure seems to have escaped contemporary observers—but the universality of the impulse to vandalism under such circumstances was to become familiar to Americans in generations to come. The instinct to pillage when pillage was possible was not limited to Sherman’s troops nor to the impoverished Southern civilians who scrabbled in the ruins to find the means for a new life.

2

I can make Georgia howl!

William Tecumseh Sherman, who was now on the brink of fame at forty-four, had been born February 8, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio, the son of a State Supreme Court judge who died when the boy was nine and left him to be brought up by Thomas Ewing, a wealthy neighbor who was to become his father-in-law and an influential senator.

Through Ewing’s influence Sherman went to West Point, where he graduated sixth in the class of 1840, despite so many demerits that he narrowly escaped expulsion. After thirteen years in the army, he married Thomas Ewing’s daughter Ellen, left the service, failed at banking, real estate and law, and finally became superintendent of Louisiana Military Academy, where the approach of war found him at Christmas, 1860. The intensely patriotic Sherman loved the South, where he had formed many friendships, but was emotionally wracked by the collapse of the Union. His wife and five children were away for the holidays, and he was lonely and depressed, watching the country melting away like a snowball in the sun.

Though he wished slavery did not exist, Sherman said, he would not abolish or modify it if he could—an opinion widely held at the time by whites both north and south. All the Congresses on earth can’t make the Negro anything else than what he is, Sherman said, remembering only the illiterate and repressed black slaves he had known in the South; there is no evidence that he had come in contact with educated Negroes. But though he believed in the right of revolution, and had been a Southern sympathizer, Sherman felt that secession was absurd. He said firmly, I will do no act, breathe no word, think no thought hostile to the government of the United States.

One night after South Carolina’s secession from the Union, Sherman paced the floor of his Louisiana home, literally sobbing with anxiety, regaling his friend Professor David Boyd with an impassioned warning and prophecy:

This country will be drenched in blood. God knows how it will end … Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing. You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are peaceable but earnest and will fight too … you are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail.

When Louisiana seceded, Sherman parted from his cadets in an emotional scene. Unable to say more, he placed his hand over his heart, blurted, You are all here, and left. He was soon in Washington, where his brother John, a senator from Ohio, introduced him to Abraham Lincoln as a military expert recently arrived from the South.

Ah. How are they getting along down there? Lincoln asked.

They think they’re getting along swimmingly, Sherman said. They’re preparing for war.

Oh, well, Lincoln said mildly. I guess we’ll manage to keep house.

Sherman was disgusted. He dismissed Lincoln as an unimaginative, provincial and partisan politician who lacked the vision to foresee approaching war. He railed at his brother and all Republican leaders: You have got things in a hell of a fix, and you may get them out as best you can. He went to St. Louis, where he became president of a streetcar company at a salary of forty dollars per month. When war was declared, Sherman returned to the White House to volunteer, but to Lincoln’s astonishment the intense Ohioan refused a commission as brigadier general and began as a colonel of regular infantry—so that he could win his stars without becoming a political general beholden to Lincoln’s administration.

Sherman first saw battle at Bull Run, where he fell back in the Federal retreat with his regiment and shielded the army on its panic-stricken flight into Washington. He was one of the last Union officers to leave the Virginia field. A day or so later, when Lincoln came out to visit the army, a disgruntled captain called out, Mr. President, I have a grievance. This morning I went to speak with Colonel Sherman and he threatened to shoot me.

Lincoln glanced at the grim-faced Sherman. Threatened to shoot you? He leaned forward and said in a stage whisper, Well, if I were you I wouldn’t trust him, for I believe he’d do it. The President’s carriage rolled away amid the laughter of the troops.

Sherman had serious disciplinary problems; he found it impossible to halt the pillaging of his troops: No curse could be greater than invasion by a volunteer army. No Goths or Vandals ever had less respect for the lives and property of friends and foes, and henceforth we ought never to hope for any friends, in Virginia.

These were problems that would haunt him until the war’s end, that he would never bring himself to resolve. Sherman’s ambivalence in the matter of troop discipline stemmed from his conflicting beliefs that war must be made so terrible as to demoralize the enemy—and that troops should never be permitted to victimize the innocent and helpless.

Though he had protested that he wished to avoid high rank, Sherman found himself commanding general in Kentucky three months later, in direct violation of Lincoln’s promise. It was perhaps a result of this bizarre attitude that Sherman was soon contending fiercely with Midwestern politicians who sought to interfere in his command, with his undisciplined troops, and with newspaper reporters he regarded as enemy spies. The general’s behavior was so unpredictable that vengeful newspaper correspondents, smarting under his rigid censorship, published false reports that the quixotic general was insane. General Henry Halleck, the popeyed commander of the Department of Missouri, sent Sherman home as unfit for duty. The despondent Sherman said he would have committed suicide except for his children. One newspaper reported: General Sherman, who lately commanded in Kentucky, is said to be insane. It is charitable to think so. Mrs. Sherman wrote Lincoln insisting that the sensitive and nervous general found the cruel attacks of the press unbearable and begging the President to transfer her husband to the East.

Instead, Sherman was rescued by Halleck himself, who sent him to Paducah, Kentucky, to serve under U. S. Grant, another obscure army veteran and refugee from civilian life whose reputation was under a cloud. Grant was said to be a hopeless alcoholic, but he won the first great Union victories in the West at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson and then commanded at Shiloh, where 100,000 men clashed in the first major battle between the Western armies. Grant won victory by the narrowest of margins, and Sherman’s division played a decisive role on the bloody field, standing its ground stubbornly against waves of Confederate attacks while thousands of other Union troops huddled in fright beneath the bluffs of the Tennessee River.

Within a few days Sherman wore the twin stars of a major general, and high command became more palatable to him. He wrote his wife, Ellen: I have worked hard to keep down, but somehow I am forced into prominence and might as well submit.

Sherman was in the field on the Western front when he was stricken by the death of his young son Willy, who had come with his mother to visit the general. Willy succumbed to typhoid fever and left his father grieving for that child on whose future I based all the ambition I ever had. He resolved, he said, to cherish the boy’s memory as the cure for the defects which have sullied my character. A major reorganization of the Federal high command soon thrust Sherman into the eminence he had professed to dread: Lincoln called Henry Halleck, a born staff officer, to Washington as Chief of Staff. Grant, suddenly famous as the North’s only victorious general, was transferred to Virginia as Commander in Chief of the armies—his first assignment to overcome Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

Sherman was now left in command in the West, and with a burst of energy that revitalized his army, he organized an offensive against Atlanta from the Federal base at Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was beginning to develop his theory of total warfare that involved civilians as well as armies, resolved to make war so terrible that the rebels would never again take up arms. The Southern people, he said, though they cannot be made to love us, can be made to fear us, and dread the passage of troops through their country.

This theme became almost an obsession with the compulsive Sherman. He declared that the people of the South bore a collective responsibility, and that the war was not merely an armed uprising. It is about time the North understood the truth, he wrote. The entire South, man, woman and child, is against us. Even so, the complex man whose name was to symbolize the terrors of total warfare had a keen realization of the sufferings he was to impose upon the Southern people. He wrote his daughter Minnie, who was in school in Notre Dame, Indiana, lamenting his role: Think of how cruel men become in war, when even your Papa has to do such acts. Pray every night that the war may end. Hundreds of children like yourself are daily taught to curse my name, and every night thousands kneel in prayer and beseech the Almighty to consign me to perdition.

In early May 1864, Sherman moved his army against General Joseph E. Johnston’s strongly entrenched Confederates in mountainous terrain at Dalton, Georgia. Though Johnston was a master of defensive strategy, Sherman slipped past the rebel force, maneuvering his army of 100,000 with a mobility new to modern warfare, constantly enveloping the enemy, threatening Johnston’s rear, artfully flanking and countermarching over a broad front, using roads as a network—shielding all the while the railroad in his rear that was his lifeline. He feinted and flanked his way southward, attacking only when a collision was unavoidable, and fought only one pitched battle, at Kenesaw Mountain, Georgia, where he lost 2,500 men in less than an hour. Within a week Sherman had flanked the position and was on his way to Atlanta. He drove his army relentlessly. To a quartermaster who was not sure he could keep the pace, Sherman barked, If you don’t have my army supplied, and keep it supplied, we’ll eat your mules up, sir—eat your mules up! He shocked a methodical engineer who asked for four days to replace a burned bridge: Sir, I give you forty-eight hours or a position in the front ranks. It was not only