Enough!
Great people worked very hard for the
liberation of the American Black Population, and for the creation of what is
today a great nation, their mind was set in building a true country of liberty,
freedom and justice for all.
…but today politicians, of the
mediocre one, don’t know the real history of this nation; they, today in the Congress
of the United States of America, are giving the erroneous service to this
extraordinary nation that in the past gave its life to serve all the people of
America as equal real citizens of this land …but those of today are covered
with a mediocre moral of cheap politic, with fake statement given to all
Americans, starting with actual President of the United States: Donald J. Trump
together with too many low quality politicians in both political parties of Republicans
and Democrats.
Here I reproduce some of the work of
a site called Wikipedia, which site present an extraordinary work of part of the
story of US. Here, just see one of the
greatest of many real politicians and military people that did work hard in the
building of USA in making America a great nation, not what todays some
politicians are making with the so called dirty word of “Let’s make America
Great Again”, a dirty word when said in their dirty mouth, for making America
Great Again is turned dirty when said by this horrendous nuts of politicians.
How I wish to be a politician to show
them what a “Let’s Make America Great Again” is. So here I present to the Congress of USA what
it is to be not a politician, but a hero of freedom, liberty and hope.
Union general William
Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton gathered a group of 20 black leaders
and asked them what is needed to build lives in freedom. Reverend Garrison Frazier, the leader of the
group, answered simply “The way we can best take of ourselves is to have land.”
As shown in Neflix.com in Explained
Serie 1: Episode1 “The Racial Wealth Gap”.
As it could be seen in Wikipedia.com historical finding and which I enclose in a few words:
...this general fought not for his own emotions, he fought following orders emanated to fulfill the known constitution, the Magna Carta, to the letter yet he had his own emotions closed as to not affect the Union of USA. Respecting liberty for all and imposing death to those who wanted to stop that liberty for all. He did make America Great, blacks freedom was feed by his acts of war against those who saw the black population as a tool to enrich themselves, their families and the very rich by drainning the blood of the minority made slave. This is a story, of the real one that some mediocre politicians never read or if so, don't care but just to fulfill their ambitions of using politics to make their pockets full of money with their dirty slogan: "Let's Make America Great Again"
William Tecumseh Sherman
From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
William
Sherman
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In
office
September 6, 1869 – October 25, 1869
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President
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Succeeded by
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In
office
March 8, 1869 – November 1, 1883
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President
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details
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Born
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William Tecumseh Sherman
(1820-02-08)February 8, 1820
Lancaster, Ohio, U.S.
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Died
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Nickname(s)
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"Cump"
"Uncle Billy"
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1840–1853
1861–1884
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Sherman was born in 1820 in Lancaster,
Ohio, near the banks of the Hocking
River. His father, Charles Robert Sherman, a successful lawyer who
sat on the Ohio Supreme Court, died unexpectedly in 1829.
He left his widow, Mary Hoyt Sherman, with eleven children and no inheritance.
After his father's death, the nine-year-old Sherman was raised by a Lancaster
neighbor and family friend, attorney Thomas
Ewing, Sr., a prominent member of the Whig Party who served as senator from Ohio and as the first Secretary of the Interior.
Sherman was distantly related to American founding father Roger
Sherman and grew to admire him.[4]
Sherman's older
brother Charles Taylor Sherman became a federal
judge. One of his younger brothers, John Sherman, served as a U.S. senator
and Cabinet secretary. Another younger brother, Hoyt Sherman,
was a successful banker. 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 would serve as defense
attorney in the military trials of the Lincoln conspirators. Sherman would
marry his foster sister, Ellen Boyle Ewing, at age 30 and have eight
children with her.[5]
Sherman's given names
Sherman's
unusual given name has always attracted considerable attention.[6]
Sherman reported that his middle name came from his father having "caught
a fancy for the great chief of the Shawnees,
'Tecumseh'".[7]
Since an account in a 1932 biography about Sherman, it has often been reported
that, as an infant, Sherman was named simply Tecumseh. According to these
accounts, Sherman only acquired the name "William" at age nine or
ten, after being taken into the Ewing household. His foster mother, Maria
Willis Boyle (Maria Ewing), was of Irish ancestry and a devout Roman
Catholic. Sherman was raised in a Roman Catholic household, although he
later left the church, citing the effect of the Civil War on his religious
views. According to a story that may be myth, Sherman was baptized in the Ewing
home by a Dominican priest, who named him William for the saint's
day: possibly June 25, the feast day of Saint William of Montevergine.[8]
The story is contested, however. Sherman wrote in his Memoirs that his
father named him William Tecumseh; Sherman was baptized by a Presbyterian
minister as an infant and given the name William at that time.[9]
As an adult, Sherman signed all his correspondence – including to his wife –
"W.T. Sherman".[10]
His friends and family always called him "Cump".
Senator Ewing
secured an appointment for the 16-year-old Sherman as a cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point,[12]
where he roomed and became good friends with another important future Civil War
General, George H. Thomas. While there Sherman excelled academically,
but he treated the demerit system with indifference. Fellow cadet William
Rosecrans would later remember Sherman at West Point as "one of the
brightest and most popular fellows" and "a bright-eyed, red-headed
fellow, who was always prepared for a lark of any kind".[13]
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. Then, as now,
neatness in dress and form, with a strict conformity to the rules, were the
qualifications required for office, and I suppose I was found not to excel in any
of these. 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. My average demerits, per
annum, were about one hundred and fifty, which reduced my final class standing
from number four to six.[14]
While many of
his colleagues saw action in the Mexican–American War, Sherman performed
administrative duties in the captured territory of California. Along with
fellow Lieutenants Henry Halleck and Edward Ord,
Sherman embarked from New York on the 198-day journey around Cape Horn aboard
the converted sloop USS Lexington. Due to the confined
spaces aboard-ship, Sherman grew close to Halleck and Ord, and in his Memoirs
references a hike with Halleck to the summit of Corcovado
overlooking Rio de Janeiro in Brazil,
notable as the future spot of the Cristo Redentor statue. Sherman
and Ord reached the town of Yerba Buena, in California, two days before its
name was changed to San Francisco. In 1848, Sherman accompanied the
military governor of California, Col. Richard Barnes Mason, in the inspection that
officially confirmed that gold had been discovered in the region, thus
inaugurating the California Gold Rush.[16]
Sherman, along with Ord, assisted in surveys for the sub-divisions of the town that
would become Sacramento.
Sherman earned
a brevet promotion to captain for his "meritorious service",
but his lack of a combat assignment discouraged him and may have contributed to
his decision to resign his commission. He would eventually become one of the
few high-ranking officers during the Civil War who had not fought in Mexico.
In 1850,
Sherman was promoted to the substantive rank of Captain and married his foster
sister, Ellen Boyle Ewing, four years younger, in a
Washington ceremony attended by President Zachary
Taylor and other political luminaries. Thomas Ewing was serving as the
Secretary of the Interior at the time.[18]
Like her mother,
Ellen Ewing Sherman was a devout Roman
Catholic, and the Sherman’s eight children were reared in that faith. In 1864,
Ellen took up temporary residence in South Bend, Indiana, to have her young family
educated at the University of Notre Dame and St. Mary's College.[19]
In 1874, with Sherman having become world-famous, their eldest child, Marie
Ewing ("Minnie") Sherman, also had a politically prominent wedding,
attended by President Ulysses S. Grant and commemorated by a generous gift from
the Khedive of Egypt. (Eventually, one of Minnie's daughters
married a grandson of Confederate general Lewis Addison Armistead.)[20]
Another of the Sherman daughters, Eleanor, was married to Alexander Montgomery Thackara at
General Sherman's home in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 1880. To Sherman's great
displeasure and sorrow, his oldest surviving son, Thomas Ewing Sherman, joined the religious
order of the Jesuits in 1878 and was ordained as a priest in
1889.
The former
Lucas, Turner & Co. bank building (1854–57) at Jackson & Montgomery
Sts. in San Francisco
In 1853,
Sherman resigned his captaincy and became manager of the San Francisco branch
of the St. Louis-based bank Lucas, Turner & Co. He returned to San
Francisco at a time of great turmoil in the West. He survived two shipwrecks
and floated through the Golden Gate on the overturned hull of a foundering lumber
schooner.[22]
Sherman suffered from stress-related asthma because of
the city's aggressive business culture.[23]
Late in life, regarding his time in a San Francisco experiencing a frenzy of
real estate speculation, Sherman recalled: "I can handle a hundred thousand
men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in
the swamp of San Francisco."[24]
In 1856, during the vigilante period, he served briefly
as a major general of the California militia.[25]
Sherman's San
Francisco branch closed in May 1857, and he relocated to New York on behalf of
the same bank. When the bank failed during the financial Panic
of 1857, he closed the New York branch. In early 1858, he returned to
California to wrap up the bank's affairs there. Later in 1858, he moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he tried his hand at
law practice and other ventures without much success.[26]
Although his
brother John was well known as an antislavery congressman, Sherman did not oppose
slavery and was sympathetic to Southerners' defense of the institution. He
opposed, however, any attempt at dissolving the Union.[30]
On hearing of South Carolina's secession from the United States, Sherman
observed to a close friend, Professor David
F. Boyd of Virginia,
an enthusiastic secessionist:
You people of
the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in
blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime
against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're
talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the
North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight,
too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty
effort to save it... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend
against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car;
hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. 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. Only in your spirit and
determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared,
with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your
limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you
will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think,
they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
He thus very
accurately described the four years of war to come.
In January
1861, as more Southern states were seceding from the Union, Sherman was
required to accept receipt of arms surrendered to the State Militia by the U.S.
Arsenal at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Instead of
complying, he resigned his position as superintendent and returned to the
North, declaring to the governor of Louisiana, "On no earthly account will
I do any act or think any thought hostile ... to the ... United States."
St. Louis interlude
Immediately
following his departure from Louisiana, Sherman traveled to Washington, D.C.,
possibly in the hope of securing a position in the army, and met with Abraham
Lincoln in the White House during inauguration week. Sherman expressed concern
about the North's poor state of preparedness but found Lincoln unresponsive.
Thereafter, Sherman
became president of the St. Louis Railroad, a streetcar company,
a position he would hold for only a few months. Thus, he was living in
border-state Missouri as the secession crisis came to a climax. While trying to
hold himself aloof from controversy, he observed firsthand the efforts of
Congressman Frank Blair, who later served under
Sherman, to hold Missouri in the Union. In early April, he declined an offer
from the Lincoln administration to take a position in the War Department as a
prelude to his becoming Assistant Secretary of War.[36]
After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Sherman hesitated about committing to
military service and ridiculed Lincoln's call for 75,000 three-month volunteers to
quell secession, reportedly saying: "Why, you might as well attempt to put
out the flames of a burning house with a squirt-gun." However, in May, he
offered himself for service in the regular army, and his brother (Senator John
Sherman) and other connections maneuvered to get him a commission in the
regular army.[38]
On June 3, he wrote that "I still think it is to be a long war – very long
– much longer than any Politician thinks." He received a telegram
summoning him to Washington on June 7.
Civil War service
First commissions and Bull Run
Sherman was
first commissioned as colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry Regiment,
effective May 14, 1861. This was a new regiment yet to be raised, and Sherman's
first command was actually of a brigade of three-month volunteers,[41]
at the head of which he became one of the few Union officers to distinguish
himself at the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861,
where he was grazed by bullets in the knee and shoulder. The disastrous Union
defeat at Bull Run led Sherman to question his own judgment as an officer and
the capacities of his volunteer troops. President Lincoln, however, was impressed
by Sherman while visiting the troops on July 23 and promoted him to brigadier general of volunteers
(effective May 17, 1861, with seniority in rank to Ulysses
S. Grant, his future commander).[42]
He was assigned to serve under Robert Anderson in the Department of
the Cumberland in Louisville, Kentucky, and in October Sherman
succeeded Anderson in command of the department. Sherman considered that his
new assignment broke a promise from Lincoln that he would not be given such a
prominent position.[43]
Breakdown
Having
succeeded Anderson at Louisville, Sherman now had principal military
responsibility for Kentucky, a border state in which Confederate troops held
Columbus and Bowling Green and were present near the Cumberland Gap.[44]
He became exceedingly pessimistic about the outlook for his command and he
complained frequently to Washington, D.C. about shortages while providing
exaggerated estimates of the strength of the rebel forces. Critical press reports
appeared about him after an October visit to Louisville by the secretary of
war, Simon
Cameron, and in early November 1861 Sherman insisted that he be relieved.[45]
He was promptly replaced by Brigadier General Don
Carlos Buell and transferred to St. Louis, Missouri. In December, he was put on
leave by Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, commander of the Department of the Missouri, who considered
him unfit for duty. Sherman went to Lancaster, Ohio, to recuperate. While he
was at home, his wife Ellen wrote to his brother, Senator John Sherman, seeking
advice. She complained of "that melancholy insanity to which your family
is subject".[46]
Sherman later wrote that the concerns of command "broke me down", and
he admitted contemplating suicide.[47]
His problems were compounded when the Cincinnati Commercial described
him as "insane".[48]
By mid-December
1861 Sherman had recovered sufficiently to return to service under Halleck in
the Department of the Missouri. (In March, Halleck's command was redesignated
the Department of the
Mississippi and enlarged to unify command in the West). Sherman's initial
assignments were rear-echelon commands, first of an instructional barracks near
St. Louis and then in command of the District of Cairo.[49]
Operating from Paducah, Kentucky, he provided logistical support
for the operations of Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to capture Fort Donelson (February 1862). Grant, the
previous commander of the District of Cairo, had recently won a major victory at
Fort Henry (February 6, 1862) and been given
command of the ill-defined District of West Tennessee. Although
Sherman was technically the senior officer at this time, 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 Road, but [I] have faith in
you—Command me in any way."
After Grant
captured Fort Donelson, Sherman got his wish to serve under Grant when he was
assigned on March 1, 1862, to the Army of West Tennessee as commander of the
5th Division.[51]
His first major test under Grant was at the Battle
of Shiloh. The massive Confederate attack on the morning of April 6, 1862,
took most of the senior Union commanders by surprise. Sherman had dismissed the
intelligence reports received from militia officers, refusing to believe that
Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston would leave his base
at Corinth. He took no precautions beyond strengthening
his picket lines, and refused to entrench, build abatis, or push
out reconnaissance patrols. At Shiloh, he may have wished to avoid appearing overly
alarmed in order to escape the kind of criticism he had received in Kentucky.
He had written to his wife that, if he took more precautions, "they'd call
me crazy again".[52]
Despite being
caught unprepared by the attack, Sherman rallied his division and conducted an
orderly, fighting retreat that helped avert a disastrous Union rout. Finding Grant
at the end of the day sitting under an oak tree in the darkness and smoking a
cigar, Sherman felt, in his words, "some wise and sudden instinct not to
mention retreat". In what would become one of the most notable conversations
of the war, Sherman said simply: "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own
day, haven't we?" After a puff of his cigar, Grant replied calmly:
"Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though." Sherman proved instrumental to the
successful Union counterattack of April 7, 1862. At Shiloh, Sherman was wounded
twice—in the hand and shoulder—and had three horses shot out from under him.
His performance was praised by Grant and Halleck and after the battle, and he
was promoted to major general of volunteers, effective May 1, 1862.
Beginning in
late April, a Union force of 100,000 moved slowly against Corinth,
under Halleck's command with Grant relegated to second-in-command; Sherman commanded
the division on the extreme right of the Union's right wing (under George H.
Thomas). Shortly after the Union forces occupied Corinth on May 30, Sherman
persuaded Grant not to leave his command, despite the serious difficulties he
was having with Halleck. Sherman offered Grant an example from his own life,
"Before the battle of Shiloh, I was cast down by a mere newspaper assertion
of 'crazy', but that single battle gave me new life, and I'm now in high feather."
He told Grant that, if he remained in the army, "some happy accident might
restore you to favor and your true place".[54]
In July, Grant's situation improved when Halleck left for the East to become
general-in-chief, and Sherman became the military governor of occupied Memphis.[55]
Vicksburg
The careers of
both officers ascended considerably after that time. In Sherman's case, this
was in part because he developed close personal ties to Grant during the two
years they served together in the West. During the long and complicated
campaign against Vicksburg, one newspaper complained that the "army was
being ruined in mud-turtle expeditions, under the leadership of a drunkard
[Grant], whose confidential adviser [Sherman] was a lunatic".
Sherman's
military record in 1862–63 was mixed. In December 1862, forces under his command
suffered a severe repulse at the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, just north of Vicksburg, Mississippi.[58]
Soon after, his XV Corps was ordered to join Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand in his successful assault on Arkansas Post, generally regarded as a
politically motivated distraction from the effort to capture Vicksburg. Before the
Vicksburg Campaign in the spring of 1863,
Sherman expressed serious reservations about the wisdom of Grant's unorthodox
strategy,[60]
but he went on to perform well in that campaign under Grant's supervision.
The historian John
D. Winters in The Civil War in Louisiana (1963) describes Sherman:
... He had yet
[before Vicksburg] to display any marked talents for leadership. Sherman, beset
by hallucinations and unreasonable fears and finally contemplating suicide, had
been relieved from command in Kentucky. He later began a new climb to success
at Shiloh and Corinth under Grant. Still, if he muffed his Vicksburg
assignment, which had begun unfavorably, he would rise no higher. As a man,
Sherman was an eccentric mixture of strength and weakness. Although he was
impatient, often irritable and depressed, petulant, headstrong, and
unreasonably gruff, he had solid soldierly qualities. His men swore by him, and
most of his fellow officers admired him.[61]
Chattanooga After the surrender of Vicksburg to the Union forces
under Grant on July 4, 1863, Sherman was given the rank of brigadier general in
the regular army, in addition to his rank
as a major general of volunteers. Sherman's family came from Ohio to visit his
camp near Vicksburg; his nine-year-old son, Willie, the Little Sergeant, died
from typhoid
fever contracted during the trip.[62]
During the Chattanooga Campaign in November, under Grant's
overall command, Sherman quickly took his assigned target of Billy Goat Hill at
the north end of Missionary Ridge, only to discover that it was not part of the
ridge at all, but rather a detached spur separated from the main spine by a
rock-strewn ravine. When he attempted to attack the main spine at Tunnel Hill,
his troops were repeatedly repulsed by Patrick
Cleburne's heavy division, the best unit in Bragg's army. Sherman's efforts
were assisted by George Henry Thomas's army's successful assault
on the center of the Confederate line, a movement originally intended as a
diversion.[63]
Subsequently, Sherman led a column to relieve Union forces under Ambrose
Burnside thought to be in peril at Knoxville. In February 1864, he led an expedition
to Meridian, Mississippi, to disrupt Confederate
infrastructure.[64]
Despite this mixed
record, Sherman enjoyed Grant's confidence and friendship. When Lincoln called
Grant east in the spring of 1864 to take command of all the Union armies, Grant
appointed Sherman (by then known to his soldiers as "Uncle Billy") to
succeed him as head of the Military Division of the
Mississippi, which entailed command of Union troops in the Western Theater of the
war. 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 concluding that
"if you can whip Lee and I can march to the Atlantic I think ol' Uncle
Abe will give us twenty days leave to see the young folks."[65]
Sherman
proceeded to invade the state of Georgia with three armies: the 60,000-strong Army of the Cumberland under George Henry Thomas, the 25,000-strong Army of the Tennessee under James B. McPherson, and the 13,000-strong Army
of the Ohio under John M. Schofield.[66]
He fought a lengthy campaign of maneuver
through mountainous terrain against Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston's Army
of Tennessee, attempting a direct assault only at the disastrous Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. In July,
the cautious Johnston was replaced by the more aggressive John
Bell Hood, who played to Sherman's strength by challenging him to direct
battles on open ground. Meanwhile, in August, Sherman "learned that I had
been commissioned a major-general in the regular army, which was unexpected,
and not desired until successful in the capture of Atlanta."
Sherman's Atlanta
Campaign concluded successfully on September 2, 1864, with the capture of
the city, which Hood had been forced to abandon. This success made Sherman a
household name and helped ensure Lincoln's presidential re-election
in November. In August, the Democratic Party had nominated as
its candidate George B. McClellan, the popular former Union
army commander, and it had seemed likely that Lincoln would lose to McClellan.
Lincoln's defeat could well have meant the victory of the Confederacy, as the
Democratic Party platform called for peace negotiations based on the
acknowledgment of the Confederacy's independence. Thus the capture of Atlanta,
coming when it did, may have been Sherman's greatest contribution to the Union
cause.
After ordering
almost all civilians to leave 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. This was to set a precedent for
future behavior by his armies.
Green-Meldrim
house, where Sherman stayed after taking Savannah in 1864
During
September and October, Sherman and Hood played cat-and-mouse in north Georgia
(and Alabama) as Hood threatened Sherman's communications to the north.
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". This created the threat that Hood would move
north into Tennessee. Trivializing that threat, Sherman reportedly said that he
would "give [Hood] his rations" to go in that direction as "my
business is down south". However, Sherman left forces under
Maj. Gens. George H. Thomas and John M. Schofield to deal with Hood; their
forces eventually smashed Hood's army in the battles of Franklin (November 30) and Nashville (December 15–16). Meanwhile, after
the November elections, Sherman began a march with 62,000 men to the port of Savannah,
Georgia, living off the land and causing, by his own estimate, more than $100
million in property damage. Sherman called this harsh tactic of material war
"hard war," often seen as a species of total war.
At the end of this campaign, known as Sherman's March to the Sea, his troops
captured Savannah on December 21, 1864. Sherman then dispatched a famous
message to Lincoln, offering him the city as a Christmas present.
Sherman's success
in Georgia received ample coverage in the Northern press at a time when Grant
seemed to be making little progress in his fight against Confederate General Robert
E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. A bill was
introduced in Congress to promote Sherman to Grant's rank of lieutenant general, probably
with a view towards having him replace Grant as commander of the Union Army.
Sherman wrote both to his brother, Senator John Sherman, and to General Grant
vehemently repudiating any such promotion.[77]
According to a war-time account, it was around this time that Sherman made his
memorable declaration of loyalty to Grant:
General Grant is
a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy, and I
stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always.
While in
Savannah, Sherman learned from a newspaper that his infant son Charles
Celestine had died during the Savannah
Campaign; the general had never seen the child.
Final campaigns in the Carolinas
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. He was particularly interested
in targeting South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, because of the effect
that it would have on Southern morale.[80]
His army proceeded north through South Carolina against light resistance from
the troops of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston. Upon hearing that Sherman's
men were advancing on corduroy roads through the Salkehatchie swamps at a rate of
a dozen miles per day, Johnston "made up his mind that there had been no
such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar."[81]
Sherman captured the state capital of Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17,
1865. Fires began that night and by next morning most of the central city was
destroyed. The burning of Columbia has engendered controversy ever since, with
some claiming the fires were accidental, others a deliberate act of vengeance,
and still others that the retreating Confederates burned bales of cotton on their
way out of town.
Local Native
American Lumbee
guides helped Sherman's army cross the Lumber
River, which was flooded by torrential rains, into North
Carolina. 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."[83]
Thereafter, his troops did little damage to the civilian infrastructure, as
North Carolina, unlike its southern neighbor, was regarded by his men as a
reluctant Confederate state, having been the second from last state to secede
from the Union, before Tennessee. Sherman's final significant military
engagement was a victory over Johnston's troops at the Battle of Bentonville, March 19–21. He soon
rendezvoused at Goldsborough, North Carolina, with Union
troops awaiting him there after the capture of Fort Fisher and Wilmington.
In late March,
Sherman briefly left his forces and traveled to City Point, Virginia to consult with Grant. Lincoln
happened to be at City Point at the same time, allowing the only three-way meetings
of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman during the war.[84]
Confederate surrender
Following Lee's
surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House
and the assassination of President Lincoln,
Sherman met with Johnston in mid-April at Bennett
Place in Durham, North Carolina, to negotiate a
Confederate surrender. At the insistence of Johnston and of Confederate President
Jefferson
Davis, Sherman conditionally agreed to generous terms that dealt with both
political and military issues. Sherman thought that those terms were consistent
with the views Lincoln had expressed at City Point, but the general had not
been given the authority, by General Grant, the newly installed President Andrew
Johnson, or the Cabinet, to offer those terms.
The government
in Washington, D.C., refused to approve Sherman's terms and the Secretary of War, Edwin
M. Stanton, denounced Sherman publicly, precipitating a long-lasting feud
between the two men. Confusion over this issue lasted until April 26, 1865,
when Johnston, ignoring instructions from President Davis, agreed to purely
military terms and formally surrendered his army and all the Confederate forces
in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, in what was the largest single
capitulation of the war.[85]
Sherman proceeded with 60,000 of his troops to Washington, D.C., where they
marched in the Grand Review of the Armies, on May 24,
1865, and were then disbanded. Having become the second most important general
in the Union army, he thus had come full circle to the city where he started
his war-time service as colonel of a non-existent infantry regiment.
Sherman was not
an abolitionist before the war and,
like others of his time and background, he did not believe in "Negro
equality".[86][87]
Before the war, Sherman at times even expressed some sympathy with the view of
Southern whites that the black race was benefiting from slavery, although he
opposed breaking up slave families and advocated teaching slaves to read and
write.[30]
During the Civil War, Sherman declined to employ black troops in his armies.[88]
Sherman's
military campaigns of 1864 and 1865 freed many slaves, who greeted him "as
a second Moses or
Aaron"[86]
and joined his marches through Georgia and the Carolinas by the tens of
thousands. The fate of these refugees became a pressing military and political
issue. Some abolitionists accused Sherman of doing little to alleviate the
precarious living conditions of the freed slaves.[89]
To address this issue, on January 12, 1865, Sherman met in Savannah with
Secretary of War Stanton and with twenty local black leaders. After Sherman's
departure, Garrison Frazier, a Baptist minister, declared in response to an inquiry about
the feelings of the black community:
We looked upon
General Sherman, prior to his arrival, as a man, in the providence of God,
specially set apart to accomplish this work, and we unanimously felt
inexpressible gratitude to him, looking upon him as a man that should be
honored for the faithful performance of his duty. Some of us called upon him
immediately upon his arrival, and it is probable he did not meet [Secretary
Stanton] with more courtesy than he met us. His conduct and deportment toward
us characterized him as a friend and a gentleman.[90]
Four days
later, Sherman issued his Special Field Orders, No. 15.
The orders provided for the settlement of 40,000 freed slaves and black
refugees on land expropriated from white landowners in South Carolina, Georgia,
and Florida. Sherman appointed Brig. Gen. Rufus
Saxton, an abolitionist from Massachusetts
who had previously directed the recruitment of black soldiers, to implement
that plan.[91]
Those orders, which became the basis of the claim that the Union government had
promised freed slaves "40 acres and a mule", were revoked later
that year by President Andrew Johnson.
Although the context is often
overlooked, and the quotation usually chopped off, one of Sherman's most famous
statements about his hard-war views arose in part from the racial attitudes
summarized above. In his Memoirs, Sherman noted political pressures in
1864–1865 to encourage the escape of slaves, in part to avoid the possibility
that "'able-bodied slaves will be called into the military service of the
rebels.'" Sherman thought concentration on such policies would have
delayed the "successful end" of the war and the "liberat[ion of]
all slaves". He went on to summarize vividly his hard-war
philosophy and to add, in effect, that he really did not want the help of
liberated slaves in subduing the South:
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. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." 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. But, as regards
kindness to the race ..., I assert that no army ever did more for that race
than the one I commanded at Savannah.
Strategies
Sherman's
record as a tactician was mixed, and his military legacy rests
primarily on his command of logistics and on his brilliance as a strategist.
The influential 20th-century British military historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart ranked Sherman as one of the
most important strategists in the annals of war, along with Scipio
Africanus, Belisarius, Napoleon Bonaparte, T.
E. Lawrence, and Erwin Rommel. Liddell Hart credited Sherman with
mastery of maneuver warfare (also known as the "indirect
approach"), as demonstrated by his series of turning movements against
Johnston during the Atlanta Campaign. Liddell Hart also stated that study of
Sherman's campaigns had contributed significantly to his own "theory of
strategy and tactics in mechanized warfare", which had in turn
influenced Heinz Guderian's doctrine of Blitzkrieg
and Rommel's use of tanks
during the Second World War.[95]
Another World War II-era student of Liddell Hart's writings about Sherman was George
S. Patton, 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'".[96]
Sherman's
greatest contribution to the war, the strategy of total warfare—endorsed
by General Grant and President Lincoln—has been the subject of controversy.
Sherman himself downplayed his role in conducting total war, often saying that
he was simply carrying out orders as best he could in order to fulfill his part
of Grant's master plan for ending the war.
Total warfare
Like Grant, Sherman
was convinced that the Confederacy's strategic, economic,
and psychological ability to wage further war needed to be definitively crushed
if the fighting were to end. Therefore, he believed that the North had to
conduct its campaign as a war of conquest and employ scorched
earth tactics to break the backbone of the rebellion. He called this
strategy "hard war".
Sherman's
advance through Georgia and South Carolina was characterized by widespread
destruction of civilian supplies and infrastructure. Although looting was
officially forbidden, historians disagree on how well this regulation was
enforced.[97]
Union soldiers who foraged from Southern homes became known as bummers. The
speed and efficiency of the destruction by Sherman's army was remarkable. The
practice of heating rails and bending them around trees, leaving behind what
came to be known as "Sherman's neckties," made repairs
difficult. Accusations that civilians were targeted and war crimes
were committed on the march have made Sherman a controversial figure to this
day, particularly in the American South.
The damage done
by Sherman was almost entirely limited to the destruction of property.
Though exact figures are not available, the loss of civilian life appears to
have been very small.[98]
Consuming supplies, wrecking infrastructure, and undermining morale were
Sherman's stated goals, and several of his Southern contemporaries noted this
and commented on it. For instance, Alabama-born
Major Henry Hitchcock, who served in Sherman's staff, declared that "it is
a terrible thing to consume and destroy the sustenance of thousands of
people," but if the scorched earth strategy served "to paralyze their
husbands and fathers who are fighting ... it is mercy in the end".[99]
The severity of
the destructive acts by Union troops was significantly greater in South Carolina
than in Georgia or North Carolina. This appears to have been a consequence of
the animosity among both Union soldiers and officers to the state that they
regarded as the "cockpit of secession".[100]
One of the most serious accusations against Sherman was that he allowed his
troops to burn the city of Columbia. In 1867, Gen. O. O. Howard, commander of Sherman's 15th Corps,
reportedly said, "It is useless to deny that our troops burnt Columbia,
for I saw them in the act."[101]
However, Sherman himself stated that "[i]f I had made up my mind to burn
Columbia I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common
prairie dog village; but I did not do it ..."[102]
Sherman's official report on the burning placed the blame on Confederate Lt.
Gen. Wade Hampton III, who Sherman said had ordered the
burning of cotton in the streets. In his memoirs, Sherman said, "In my
official report of this conflagration I distinctly charged it to General Wade
Hampton, and confess I did so pointedly to shake the faith of his people in
him, for he was in my opinion a braggart and professed to be the special champion
of South Carolina."[103]
Historian James M. McPherson has concluded that:
The fullest and
most dispassionate study of this controversy blames all parties in varying
proportions—including the Confederate authorities for the disorder that
characterized the evacuation of Columbia, leaving thousands of cotton bales on
the streets (some of them burning) and huge quantities of liquor undestroyed
... Sherman did not deliberately burn Columbia; a majority of Union soldiers,
including the general himself, worked through the night to put out the fires.[104]
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.
After the fall
of Atlanta in 1864, Sherman ordered the city's evacuation. When the city
council appealed to him to rescind that order, on the grounds that it would
cause great hardship to women, children, the elderly, and others who bore no responsibility
for the conduct of the war, Sherman sent a written response in which he sought
to articulate his conviction that a lasting peace would be possible only if the
Union were restored, and that he was therefore prepared to do all he could do
to quash the rebellion:
You cannot
qualify war in harsher terms than I will. 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. I know I had no hand in making this war,
and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.
But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States
submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate
of Mexico, which is eternal war [...] 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. But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me
for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you
to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.[106]
Literary critic
Edmund
Wilson found in Sherman's Memoirs a fascinating and disturbing
account of an "appetite for warfare" that "grows as it feeds on
the South".[107]
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara refers equivocally to the statement that "war is cruelty and
you cannot refine it" in both the book Wilson's Ghost[108]
and in his interview for the film The
Fog of War.
But when
comparing Sherman's scorched-earth campaigns to the actions of the British
Army during the Second Boer War (1899–1902)—another war in which
civilians were targeted because of their central role in sustaining an armed
resistance—South African historian Hermann Giliomee declares 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".[109]
The admiration of scholars such as Victor Davis Hanson, B. H. Liddell Hart, Lloyd Lewis, and John
F. Marszalek for General Sherman owes much to what they see as an approach
to the exigencies of modern armed conflict that was both effective and principled.
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 fighting—its 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.[110]
Departmental commander and Reconstruction
In June 1865,
two months after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, General Sherman
received his first postwar command, originally called the Military Division of
the Mississippi, later the Military Division of the Missouri,
which came to comprise the territory between the Mississippi River and the
Rocky Mountains. Sherman's efforts in that position were focused on protecting
the main wagon roads, such as the Oregon,
Bozeman
and Santa Fe Trails.[111]
Tasked with guarding a vast territory with a limited force, Sherman was wary of
the multitude of requests by territories and settlements for protection.[112]
One of
Sherman's main concerns in postwar commands was to protect the construction and
operation of the railroads from attack by hostile Indians. Sherman's views on
Indian matters were often strongly expressed. He regarded the railroads
"as the most important element now in progress to facilitate the military
interests of our Frontier". Hence, in 1867, he wrote to Grant that
"we are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the
progress of [the railroads]."[113]
After the 1866 Fetterman Massacre, Sherman wrote Grant that
"we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their
extermination, men, women and children."[114]
Despite this
language, there was little large-scale military action taken against the Indians
during the first three years of Sherman's tenure, as Sherman was willing to let
the process of negotiations play out in order to buy time to procure more
troops and allow the completion of the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific Railroads. During his time
as departmental commander, Sherman was a member of the Indian Peace Commission. Though the
commission was responsible for the negotiation of the Medicine Lodge Treaty and the Sioux Treaty of 1868, Sherman was not
particularly privy in either due to being called away to Washington during the
negotiations of both.[115]
In one such instance, he was called to testify in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson.
However, Sherman was successful in negotiating other treaties, such as the
removal of Navajos from the Bosque
Redondo to traditional lands in Western New Mexico.[116]
When the Medicine Lodge Treaty was broken in 1868, Sherman authorized his subordinate
in Missouri, Philip Sheridan, to conduct the Winter Campaign of
1868–69 (of which the Battle of Washita River was a part), where
Sheridan used hard-war tactics similar to those he and Sherman had employed in
the Civil War. Sherman was also involved with the trial of Satanta and Big Tree: he
ordered that the two chiefs should be tried as common criminals for their role
in the Warren Wagon Train Raid, a raid that came
dangerously close to killing Sherman himself.
On July 25, 1866, Congress created the rank of General of the Army for Grant
and then promoted Sherman to lieutenant general. When Grant
became president in 1869, Sherman was appointed
Commanding General of the
United States Army and promoted to General of the Army. After the death of John A. Rawlins, Sherman also served for one
month as interim Secretary of War. His tenure as
commanding general was marred by political difficulties, many of which stemmed
from disagreements with Secretaries of War Rawlins and William W. Belknap, whom Sherman felt had
usurped too much of the Commanding General's powers, reducing him to a sinecure
office.[112]
Sherman also clashed with Eastern humanitarians, who were critical of the
Army's killing of Indians and had apparently found an ally in President Grant.[112]
To escape these difficulties, from 1874 to 1876, he moved his headquarters to St. Louis, Missouri, returning to Washington
only upon the appointment of Alphonso
Taft as Secretary of War and the promise of more authority.[117]
Much of
Sherman's time as Commanding General was devoted to making the Western and
Plains states safe for settlement through the continuation of the Indian Wars,
which included three significant campaigns: the Modoc War,
the Great Sioux War of 1876, and the Nez
Perce War. The displacement of Indians was facilitated by the growth of the
railroad and the eradication of the buffalo. Sherman believed that the
intentional eradication of the buffalo should be encouraged as a means of
weakening Indian resistance to assimilation. He voiced this view in remarks to
a joint session of the Texas legislature in 1875. However he never engaged in
any program to actually eradicate the buffalo.[118][119]
During this time, Sherman reorganized frontier forts to reflect the shifting frontier.[120]
After George Armstrong Custer's defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sherman wrote
that "hostile savages like Sitting
Bull and his band of outlaw Sioux ... must feel the superior power of the
Government." [121]
He further wrote that "during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to
distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age."[122]
Despite his harsh treatment of the warring tribes, Sherman spoke out against
the unfair way speculators and government agents treated the natives within the
reservations.[123]
In 1875 Sherman
published his memoirs in two volumes. According to critic Edmund
Wilson, Sherman:
[H]ad a trained
gift of self-expression and was, as Mark Twain
says, a master of narrative. [In his Memoirs] the vigorous account of his
pre-war activities and his conduct of his military operations is varied in just
the right proportion and to just the right degree of vivacity with anecdotes
and personal experiences. We live through his campaigns [...] in the company of
Sherman himself. He tells us what he thought and what he felt, and he never
strikes any attitudes or pretends to feel anything he does not feel.[124]
During the election of 1876,
Southern Democrats who supported Wade
Hampton for governor used mob violence to attack and intimidate African
American voters in Charleston, South Carolina. Republican Governor Daniel Chamberlain appealed to President Ulysses
S. Grant for military assistance. In October 1876, Grant, after issuing a
proclamation, instructed Sherman to gather all available Atlantic region troops
and dispatch them to South Carolina to stop the mob violence.[125]
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".[126]
On April 11, 1880, he addressed a crowd of more than 10,000 at Columbus, Ohio:
"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys,
it is all hell."[127]
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman would say: "Sherman
was wrong. I'm telling you I find peace is hell."[128]
One of
Sherman's significant contributions as head of the Army was the establishment
of the Command School (now the Command and General Staff College)
at Fort Leavenworth in 1881. Sherman stepped down as
commanding general on November 1, 1883, and retired from the army on February
8, 1884.
Later years
He lived most
of the rest of his life in New York City. He was devoted to the theater and to
amateur painting and was much in demand as a colorful speaker at dinners and
banquets, in which he indulged a fondness for quoting Shakespeare.[129]
During this period, he stayed in contact with war veterans, and through them
accepted honorary membership into the Phi Kappa
Psi Fraternity and the Irving Literary
Society. Sherman was proposed as a Republican candidate for the presidential election of 1884,
but declined as emphatically as possible, saying, "I will not accept if
nominated and will not serve if elected."[130]
Such a categorical rejection of a candidacy is now referred to as a "Shermanesque statement".
Sherman died of
pneumonia in New York City at 1:50 PM on February 14, 1891. President Benjamin
Harrison sent a telegram to General Sherman's family and ordered all national
flags to be flown at half mast. Harrison, in a message to the Senate and the
House of Representatives, wrote that:
He was an ideal
soldier, and shared to the fullest the esprit du corps of the army, but he
cherished the civil institutions organized under the Constitution, and was only
a soldier that these might be perpetuated in undiminished usefulness and honor.[132]
Religious views
Sherman's birth
family was Presbyterian and he was originally baptized as such. His foster family,
including his future wife Ellen, were devout Catholics, and Sherman was
re-baptized and later married in the Catholic rite. According to his son Thomas,
who became a Catholic priest, Sherman attended the Catholic Church until the
outbreak of the Civil War, but not thereafter.[133]
In 1888, Sherman wrote publicly that "my immediate family are strongly
Catholic. I am not and cannot be."[134]
A memoirist reports that Sherman told him in 1887 that "my family is
strongly Roman Catholic, but I am not."[135]
Funeral procession
in New York
On 19 February,
a funeral service was held at his home, followed by a military procession.
General 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. 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. Johnston famously replied: "If I were in [Sherman's]
place, and he were standing in mine, he would not put on his hat."
Johnston did catch a serious cold and died one month later of pneumonia.[136]
General Sherman's
body was then transported to St. Louis, where another service was conducted on
21 February 1891 at a local Catholic church. His son, Thomas Ewing Sherman, a Jesuit priest,
presided over his father's funeral mass. Sherman is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.
Monuments
Historiography
In the years
immediately after the war, Sherman's conservative politics was attractive to
white Southerners. By the 1880s, however, Southern "Lost Cause" writers began to
demonize Sherman for his attacks on civilians in the "March". The
magazine Confederate Veteran, based in Nashville,
gave Sherman more attention than anyone else, in part to enhance the visibility
of the western theater. His devastation of railroads and plantations mattered
less than the March's insult to southern dignity, especially its unprotected
womanhood. Moody criticizes English historians Field Marshal Viscount Garnet
Wolseley, Maj. Gen. John F. C. Fuller, and especially Capt. Basil H. Liddell
Hart, who built up Sherman's reputation by exaggerating his
"atrocities" and filtering his actions through their ideas about
modern warfare.[140]
By contrast Sherman
was a popular hero in the North and well regarded by his soldiers. Military
historians have paid special attention to his Atlanta campaign and the March to
the Sea, generally giving him high marks as an innovative strategist and
quick-witted tactician.
Around 1868,
Sherman began to write a "private" recollection for his children
about his life before the Civil War, identified now as his unpublished
"Autobiography, 1828–1861". This manuscript is held by the Ohio Historical Society. Much of the
material in it would eventually be incorporated in revised form in his memoirs.
In 1875, ten
years after the end of the Civil War, Sherman became one of the first Civil War
generals to publish a memoir.[142]
His Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. By Himself, published by D. Appleton & Co., in two volumes,
began with the year 1846 (when the Mexican War began) and ended with a chapter
about the "military lessons of the [civil] war" (1875 edition: Volume I; Volume
II ). The memoirs were controversial, and sparked complaints from many
quarters.[143]
Grant (serving as President when Sherman's memoirs first 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
companions—to myself particularly so—just such a book as I expected Sherman
would write."[144]
In 1886, after
the publication of Grant's memoirs, Sherman produced a "second edition,
revised and corrected" of his memoirs with Appleton. The new edition added
a second preface, a chapter about his life up to 1846, a chapter concerning the
post-war period (ending with his 1884 retirement from the army), several appendices,
portraits, improved maps, and an index (1886 edition: Volume I, Volume II).
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." However, Sherman did add
the appendices, in which he published the views of some others
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