This appears to have been a consequence of the animosity felt by Union soldiers and officers for the state that they regarded as the "cockpit of secession". William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), American soldier, was a Union general during the Civil War. Mary Elizabeth Sherman (1852-1925) 2. "[73], Sherman was first commissioned as colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry Regiment, effective May 14, 1861. [26], Upon graduation in 1840, Sherman entered the army as a second lieutenant in the 3rd U.S. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. [225] Tasked with guarding a vast territory with limited forces, Sherman grew weary of the multitude of requests for military protection addressed to him. "[283][284], "Since the public mind has settled to the conclusion that the institution of slavery was so interwoven in our system that nothing but the interposition of Providence and horrid war could have eradicated it, and now that it is in the distant past, and that we as a nation, North and South, East and West, are the better for it, we believe that the war was worth to us all it cost in life and treasure." [53], Sherman's San Francisco branch closed in May 1857, and he relocated to New York City on behalf of the same bank, travelling on the steamer SS Central America. Critical press reports about Sherman began to appear after the U.S. Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, visited Louisville in October 1861. "[50], The failure of Page, Bacon & Co. triggered a panic surrounding the "Black Friday" of February 23, 1855, leading to the closure of several of San Francisco's principal banks and many other businesses. I did not want them to cast in our teeth what General Hood had once done at Atlanta, that we had to call on their slaves to help us to subdue them. Sherman had dismissed the intelligence reports from militia officers, refusing to believe that Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston would leave his base at Corinth. William T. Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, on Feb. 8, 1820. [305] Arlington National Cemetery features a smaller version of Saint-Gaudens's statue of Victory. As the foster son of a prominent Whig politician, in Charleston the popular Lieutenant Sherman moved within the upper circles of Old South society. [255], Sherman lived most of the rest of his life in New York City. [163], Grant then offered Johnston purely military terms, similar to those that he had negotiated with Lee at Appomattox. As long as resistance is made[,] death must be meted out, but the moment all resistance ceases, the firing will stop and all survivors turned over to the proper Indian agent". This message was put on a vessel on December 22, passed on by telegram from Fort Monroe, Virginia, and apparently received by Lincoln on Christmas Day itself. "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" Thousands of refugees, both black and white, joined Sherman's columns, which on February 20 finally withdrew towards Canton. What emerges is a landmark portrait of a brilliant but tormented soul, haunted by a family legacy of mental illness and relentlessly driven to . Thus, he was living in the border state of Missouri as the secession crisis reached its climax. Sherman commanded a brigade of volunteers at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 before being transferred to the Western Theater. [30] In his memoirs, Sherman relates a hike with Halleck to the summit of Corcovado, overlooking Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, in order to examine the city's aqueduct design. [277] Thomas's decision to abandon his career as a lawyer in 1878 to join the Jesuits and prepare for the Catholic priesthood caused Sherman profound distress, and he referred to it as a "great calamity". [63], In January 1861, as more Southern states seceded from the Union, Sherman was required to take receipt of arms surrendered to the Louisiana State Militia by the U.S. arsenal at Baton Rouge. "[275] In letters written in 1865 to Thomas, his eldest surviving son, General Sherman said "I don't want you to be a soldier or a priest, but a good useful man",[276] and complained that Thomas's mother Ellen "thinks religion is so important that everything else must give way to it". According to critic Edmund Wilson, Sherman: [H]ad a trained gift of self-expression and was, as Mark Twain says, a master of narrative. The severity of the destructive acts by Union troops was significantly greater in South Carolina than in Georgia or North Carolina. [185], Towards the end of the Civil War, some elements within the Republican Party regarded Sherman as being strongly prejudiced against black people. The army took 4,000 prisoners and commandeered many wagons and horses. Sherman was distantly related to US founding father Roger Sherman. After ordering almost all civilians to abandon the city in September, Sherman gave instructions that all military and government buildings in Atlanta be burned, although many private homes and shops were burned as well. William Tecumseh Sherman family tree Parents James Edgar Sherman 1839 - 1919 Joanna Williams 1836 - 1899 Spouse (s) Margaret E . Fires began that night and by next morning most of the central city was destroyed. He was one of eleven children of Ohio Supreme Court Justice Charles Robert Sherman and Mary Hoyt Sherman. Sherman observed but did not join in the religious ceremonies of the Ewing household. [119][120] Sherman's army captured the city of Meridian on February 14 and proceeded to destroy 105 miles of railroad and 61 bridges, while burning at least 10 locomotives and 28 railcars. He never commanded in a major Union victory and his military career had repeated ups and downs, but William Tecumseh Sherman is the second best known of Northern commanders. Sherman's March to the Sea (also known as the Savannah campaign or simply Sherman's March) was a military campaign of the American Civil War conducted through Georgia from November 15 until December 21, 1864, by William Tecumseh Sherman, major general of the Union Army.The campaign began with Sherman's troops leaving the captured city of Atlanta on November 15 and ended with the capture of the . Boyd later recalled witnessing that, when news of South Carolina's secession from the United States reached them at the Seminary, "Sherman burst out crying, and began, in his nervous way, pacing the floor and deprecating the step which he feared might bring destruction on the whole country. [311], This is actually a re-printing of the second, revised edition of 1889, published by D. Appleton & Company, of New York City. ", Sherman to Grant, February 15, 1862, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant 4:216n, Sherman to Grant, December 28, 1866, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant 16:422. Eventually, Sherman won approval from his superiors for a plan to cut loose from his communications and march south, having advised Grant that he could "make Georgia howl". [69][70], After the April 1213 bombardment of Fort Sumter and its subsequent capture by the Confederacy, Sherman hesitated about committing to military service. Sherman served under Grant in 1862 and 1863 in the Battle of Fort Henry and the Battle of Fort Donelson, the Battle of Shiloh, the campaigns that led to the fall of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River, and the Chattanooga campaign, which culminated with the routing of the Confederate armies in the state of Tennessee. [227] In one instance, he was summoned to testify as a witness in Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial. Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate officer who had commanded the resistance to Sherman's troops in Georgia and the Carolinas, served as a pallbearer in New York City. There, Sherman had replaced his army comrade, the co-founder Henry Smith Turner when family matters forced the latter to return to St. Louis. Oftentimes the family trees listed as still in progress have derived from research into famous people who have a kinship to this person. [80], Having succeeded Anderson at Louisville, Sherman now had principal military responsibility for Kentucky, a border state in which the Confederates held Columbus and Bowling Green, and were also present near the Cumberland Gap. After his father's death, the nine-year-old Sherman was raised by a Lancaster neighbor and family friend, attorney Thomas Ewing. [281] In 1888, Sherman wrote publicly that "my immediate family are strongly Catholic. [256] Sherman stepped down as commanding general on November 1, 1883,[257] and retired from the army on February 8, 1884. Although Sherman was technically the senior officer, he wrote to Grant, "I feel anxious about you as I know the great facilities [the Confederates] have of concentration by means of the River and R[ail] Road, but [I] have faith in youCommand me in any way. He interrupted his military career in 1853 to pursue private business ventures, without much success. The resulting trial of Satanta and Big Tree marked the first occasion in which Native American chiefs were tried by a civilian court in the United States. [54][b] Later in 1858, he moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he worked as the office manager of the law firm established by his brothers-in-law Hugh Ewing and Thomas Ewing Jr. Sherman obtained a license to practice law, despite not having studied for the bar, but he met with little success as a lawyer. It was a bitterly cold day and a friend of Johnston, fearing that the general might become ill, asked him to put on his hat. Louis. Following the 1866 Fetterman Massacre, in which 81 U.S. soldiers were ambushed and killed by Native American warriors, Sherman telegraphed Grant that "we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Sherman was re-baptized as a Catholic, but Maria's husband, Senator Thomas Ewing, insisted that the young Sherman not be compelled to practice Catholicism. His father, Charles Robert Sherman, a lawyer who was a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court,[11] died unexpectedly of typhoid fever in 1829. [298] The admiration of scholars such as B. H. Liddell Hart,[299] Lloyd Lewis, Victor Davis Hanson,[300] John F. Marszalek,[301] and Brian Holden-Reid[302] for Sherman owes much to what they see as an approach to the exigencies of modern armed conflict that was both effective and principled. Sherman then succeeded Grant at the head of the Army of the Tennessee. Sheridan used hard-war tactics similar to those he and Sherman had employed in the Civil War. [10], Sherman was born in 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, near the banks of the Hocking River. When William Tecumseh Sherman Jr. was born on 8 June 1854, in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, United States, his father, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, was 34 and his mother, Eleanor Boyle Ewing, was 29. The General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument is an equestrian statue of American Civil War Major General William Tecumseh Sherman located in Sherman Plaza, which is part of President's Park in Washington, D.C., in the United States.The selection of an artist in 1896 to design the monument was highly controversial. "[27] Sherman was later stationed in Georgia and South Carolina. [41], On May 1, 1850, Sherman married his foster sister, Ellen Boyle Ewing, who was four years his junior. [188][189][190] In that essay, Sherman called upon the South to "let the negro vote, and count his vote honestly", adding that "otherwise, so sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions". [55], In 1859, Sherman accepted a job as the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy in Pineville, Louisiana, a position he sought at the suggestion of Major Don Carlos Buell and obtained through the support of General George Mason Graham. Two of his foster brothers served as major generals in the Union Army during the Civil War: Hugh Boyle Ewing, later an ambassador and author, and Thomas Ewing Jr., who was a defense attorney in the military trials of the Lincoln conspirators. [247][i] Grant, who was president when Sherman's memoirs appeared, later remarked that others had told him that Sherman treated Grant unfairly but "when I finished the book, I found I approved every word; that it was a true book, an honorable book, creditable to Sherman, just to his companionsto myself particularly sojust such a book as I expected Sherman would write."[250]. At Shiloh, he may have wished to avoid appearing overly alarmed in order to escape the kind of criticism he had received in Kentucky. [117], At Chattanooga, Grant instructed Sherman to attack the right flank of Bragg's forces, which were entrenched along Missionary Ridge overlooking the city. William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) 2. [306], The General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument (1903) by Carl Rohl-Smith[307] stands near President's Park in Washington, D.C.[308] The bronze monument consists of an equestrian statue of Sherman and a platform with a soldier at each corner, representing the infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineer branches of the U.S. Army. [15] However, Lloyd Lewis's 1932 biography claimed that Sherman was originally named only "Tecumseh" and that he acquired the name "William" at the age of nine or ten, when he was baptized as a Catholic at the behest of his foster family. [29] During that voyage, Sherman grew close to Ord and especially to the intellectually distinguished Halleck. Looting was officially forbidden, but historians disagree on how rigorously this regulation was enforced. [161] The U.S. Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, leaked Sherman's memorandum to The New York Times, intimating that Sherman might have been bribed to allow Davis to escape capture by the Union troops. [194], Liddell Hart credited Sherman with mastery of maneuver warfare, also known as the "indirect approach". [176] Their fate soon became a pressing military and political issue. He was Promoted to general (lieutenant general), 4 Mar 1869. This letter was to James E. Yeatman, May 21, 1865, and is excerpted more extensively (and with slight variations) in Bowman and Irwin. [173] Sherman's views on race evolved significantly over time. [14], Sherman's unusual given name has always attracted attention. According to Lewis's account, which was repeated by later authors, Sherman was baptized in the Ewing home by a Dominican priest who found the pagan name "Tecumseh" unsuitable and instead named the child "William" after the saint on whose feast day the baptism took place. In October, Sherman succeeded Anderson in command of that department. [229] He was successful in negotiating other treaties, such as the removal of Navajos from the Bosque Redondo to traditional lands in Western New Mexico. According to British military historian Brian Holden-Reid, "if Sherman had committed tactical errors during the attack, he more than compensated for these during the subsequent retreat". When Grant was promoted and took over the armies in the east, Sherman was put in charge of those in the west. [225] Sherman also clashed with Eastern humanitarians who were critical of the army's harsh treatment of the Indians and who had apparently found an ally in President Grant. In studies I always held a respectable reputation with the professors, and generally ranked among the best, especially in drawing, chemistry, mathematics, and natural philosophy. The family tree for General William Tecumseh Sherman should not be considered exhaustive or authoritative. When comparing Sherman's scorched-earth campaigns to the actions of the British Army during the Second Boer War (18991902) another war in which civilians were targeted because of their central role in sustaining a belligerent power South African historian Hermann Giliomee claims that it "looks as if Sherman struck a better balance than the British commanders between severity and restraint in taking actions proportional to legitimate needs". [83] While he was at home, his wife Ellen wrote to his brother, Senator John Sherman, seeking advice and complaining of "that melancholy insanity to which your family is subject". [106], The failure of the first phase of the campaign against Vicksburg led Grant to formulate an unorthodox new strategy, which called for the invading Union army to separate from its supply train and subsist by foraging. At the insistence of Johnston, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, Sherman conditionally agreed to generous terms that dealt with both military and political issues. His father died when he was nine years old, and Sherman was raised by Senator Thomas Ewing and eventually married into the fam Eleanor Mary Sherman (1859-1915) 2. Instead of complying, he resigned his position as superintendent, declaring to the governor of Louisiana that "on no earthly account will I do any act or think any thought hostile to or in defiance of the old Government of the United States. You mistake, too, the people of the North. [232] One of the main concerns of his postbellum service was, therefore, to protect the construction and operation of the railroads from hostile Indians. [77] Holden-Reid also concluded that Sherman "might have been as unseasoned as the men he commanded, but he had not fallen prey to the nave illusions nursed by so many on the field of First Bull Run. In 1859, he became superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy (now Louisiana State University), a position from which he resigned when Louisiana seceded from the Union. He passed away on 5 August 1939 in Greenwood County, Kansas, United States of America. When William Tecumseh Sherman was born on 17 May 1880, in Page, Iowa, United States, his father, Franklin Sherman, was 32 and his mother, Mary Elizabeth Van Sant, was 21. In early November, Sherman asked to be relieved of his command. [35][36] Sherman unwittingly helped to launch the California Gold Rush by drafting the official documents in which Governor Mason confirmed that gold had been discovered in the region. [156][157] Also present at the City Point conference was Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. [160], Sherman believed that the terms that he had agreed to were consistent with the views that Lincoln had expressed at City Point, and that they offered the best way to prevent Johnston from ordering his men to go into the wilderness and conduct a destructive guerrilla campaign. You are bound to fail. Artillery and saw action in Florida in the Second Seminole War. One 19th-century source, for example, states that "General Sherman, we believe, is the only eminent American named from an Indian chief". [252], On June 19, 1879, Sherman delivered an address to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy, in which he may have uttered the famous phrase "War is Hell". In May 1865, after the major Confederate armies had surrendered, Sherman wrote in a personal letter: I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fightingits glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Sherman's subsequent march through Georgia and the Carolinas involved little fighting but large-scale destruction of cotton plantations and other infrastructure, a systematic policy intended to undermine the ability and willingness of the Confederacy to continue fighting. Research genealogy for William Tecumseh Sherman Merchant of North Bend, Coos, Oregon, as well as other members of the Merchant family, on Ancestry. In maneuver warfare, a commander seeks to defeat the enemy on the battleground through shock, disruption, and surprise, while minimizing frontal attacks on well-defended positions. William Tecumseh Sherman was born on February 8, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio. [25] About his time at West Point, Sherman says only the following in his Memoirs: At the Academy I was not considered a good soldier, for at no time was I selected for any office, but remained a private throughout the whole four years. The site was chosen because Sherman was reported to have stood there while reviewing returning Civil War troops in May 1865. In The White Tecumseh, Stanley Hirshson has crafted a beautiful and rigorous work of scholarship, the only life of Sherman to draw on regimental histories and testimonies by the general's own men. [114][115], Ordered to relieve the Union forces besieged in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Sherman departed from Memphis on October 11, 1863, aboard a train bound for Chattanooga. [81][82] He was promptly replaced by Don Carlos Buell and transferred to St. Louis. [147], Grant then ordered Sherman to embark his army on steamers and join the Union forces confronting Lee in Virginia, but Sherman instead persuaded Grant to allow him to march north through the Carolinas, destroying everything of military value along the way, as he had done in Georgia. Though the commission was responsible for the negotiation of the Medicine Lodge Treaty and the Treaty of Fort Laramie, Sherman did not play a significant role in the drafting of those treaties because in both cases he was called away to Washington during the negotiations. [133] According to Holden-Reid, "Sherman did more than any other man apart from the president in creating [the] climate of opinion" that afforded Lincoln a comfortable victory over McClellan at the polls. In March, Halleck's command was redesignated the Department of the Mississippi and enlarged to unify command in the West. He was the son of John Cagle and Mary Owen. William Tecumseh Sherman, c. 1860-65. [239], When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman was appointed Commanding General of the United States Army and promoted to the rank of full general. The William Tecumseh Sherman Family Papers, as they were deposited in the University of Notre Dame Archives by Miss Eleanor Sherman Fitch, the granddaughter of General Sherman, prior to her death in 1959, consisted of correspondence, clippings, photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, various legal papers and documents, cancelled checks, bankbooks . The massive Confederate attack on the morning of April 6, 1862, took most of the senior Union commanders by surprise. Sherman wrote both to his brother, Senator John Sherman, and to General Grant vehemently repudiating any such promotion. [164] Sherman proceeded with some of his troops to Washington, where they marched in the Grand Review of the Armies on May 24, 1865. [124] As Grant took overall command of the armies of the United States, Sherman wrote to him outlining his strategy to bring the war to an end: "If you can whip Lee and I can march to the Atlantic I think ol' Uncle Abe [Lincoln] will give us twenty days leave to see the young folks. The Confederate victory at Kennesaw Mountain did little to halt Sherman's advance towards Atlanta. [304] Sherman is represented astride his horse Ontario and led by a winged female figure of Victory. [133] Sherman's success caused the collapse of the once powerful "Copperhead" faction within the Democratic Party, which had advocated immediate peace negotiations with the Confederacy. [175] According to Sherman, My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. [112], After the surrender of Vicksburg and the re-capture of Jackson, Sherman was given the rank of brigadier general in the regular army, in addition to his rank as a major general of volunteers. The Sherman's were well educated and highly cultured by Lancaster standards at this time. Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. However, Sherman impressed Lincoln during the President's visit to the troops on July 23, and Lincoln promoted Sherman to brigadier general of volunteers effective May 17, 1861. "[94], In late April a Union force of 100,000 men under Halleck's leadership, with Grant relegated to second-in-command, began advancing slowly against Corinth. The family tree for General William Tecumseh Sherman is still in progress. William Tecumseh Sherman achieved the rank of Major General during the Civil War. Along with fellow Lieutenants Henry Halleck and Edward Ord, Sherman embarked from New York City on the 198-day journey around Cape Horn, aboard the converted sloop USS Lexington. Sherman survived two shipwrecks and floated through the Golden Gate on the overturned hull of a foundering lumber schooner. [97], On November 1862, U. S. Grant, acting as commander of the Union forces in the state of Mississippi, launched a campaign to capture the city of Vicksburg, the principal Confederate stronghold along the Mississippi River. He took no precautions beyond strengthening his picket lines, and refused to entrench, build abatis, or push out reconnaissance patrols. William Tecumseh Sherman was one of the most famous military leaders of the Civil War, perhaps third after General Ulysses Grant and General Robert E. Lee. Ewing was a prominent member of the Whig Party who became U.S. senator for Ohio and the first Secretary of the Interior. [74] It was one of the four brigades in the division commanded by General Daniel Tyler, which was in turn one of the five divisions in the Army of Northeastern Virginia under General Irvin McDowell (see First Bull Run Union order of battle). On April 9, Sherman relayed to his troops the news that Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and that the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had ceased to exist. [267], On February 19, a funeral service was held at his home, followed by a military procession. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success. According to Sherman, the trek across the Lumber River, and through the swamps, pocosins, and creeks of Robeson County was "the damnedest marching I ever saw". [87] Operating from Paducah, Kentucky, he provided logistical support for the operations of Grant to capture Fort Donelson in February 1862. W. T. Sherman (1887)[285], In the years immediately after the war, Sherman was popular in the North and well regarded by his own soldiers. He captured Atlanta and Savannah and wrought great destruction in marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. [196][197][f] Another World War II-era student of Liddell Hart's writings on Sherman was General George S. Patton,[198] who "spent a long vacation studying Sherman's campaigns on the ground in Georgia and the Carolinas, with the aid of [Liddell Hart's] book" and later "carried out his [bold] plans, in super-Sherman style". His men swore by him, and most of his fellow officers admired him. [138], After November elections, Sherman began marching on November 15 with 62,000 men in the direction of the port city of Savannah, Georgia,[139] living off the land and causing, by his own estimate, more than $100million in property damage. He had at least 2 daughters with Elizabeth Bell Dyer. [220], In this general connection, it is also noteworthy that Sherman and his subordinates (particularly John A. Logan) took steps to protect Raleigh, North Carolina, from acts of revenge after the assassination of President Lincoln.[221][222]. For the most part, Sherman refused to revise his original text on the ground that "I disclaim the character of historian, but assume to be a witness on the stand before the great tribunal of history" and "any witness who may disagree with me should publish his own version of [the] facts in the truthful narration of which he is interested". Yet he did not want to run the family salt works near Lancaster. [34] In June 1848, Sherman accompanied the military governor of California, Col. Richard Barnes Mason, to inspect the gold mines at Sutter's Fort. [294] More recently, historians such as Brian Holden-Reid have challenged such readings of Sherman's record and of his contributions to modern warfare.