The Man Who Would Shape the Future of War
General Sherman's Destructive Path Blazed a New Strategy
Speaking at the 1880 reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union general best known for his destructive march through the Confederacy's heartland uttered the words that would be reshaped for posterity: "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys," the 60-year-old William Tecumseh Sherman declared, "it is all hell."
Remembered more pithily as "War is hell," the phrase distilled a sentiment that Sherman had voiced on many occasions, including once before the mayor and town council of Atlanta after he had brought that key Confederate city to its knees. The fact that this grand master of scorched-earth devastation abhorred war was, in his mind, neither an irony nor a contradiction. Sherman simply saw his approach to war as the best way of limiting its lethal potential.
Others, and not only partisans of the Confederacy, see it differently. To them, Sherman's devastating march through the South opened the way to the kind of warfare that culminated in World War II. Called total war, it goes beyond combat between opposing military forces to include attacks, both deliberate and indiscriminate, upon civilians and non-military targets. But was Sherman truly responsible for the strategic rationale that we now associate with the bombings of London, Dresden, and even Hiroshima? It is a question that historians continue to debate.
Sherman arrived on the world stage in much the same way his fellow officer and eventual commander, Ulysses S. Grant, did. Both were native Ohioans who went to West Point. Both served for several years before giving civilian life a try. Both had a hard time out of uniform, although Sherman ended up as the very able superintendent of a Louisiana military institute (forerunner of Louisiana State University) until that state's secession forced him to resign and go back north.
Unlike Grant, Sherman had not served in the Mexican War, where so many future Union and Confederate officers underwent their baptism by fire. Instead, he had been stationed in Florida (in the Second Seminole War) and several southern states, acquiring a knowledge of people and topography that would serve him well in the war to come. Sherman was a brave and inspiring leader, a brilliant strategist if not a great tactician, and one of the few Union officers who comported themselves well during the disastrous Battle of Bull Run. Yet he was prone to melancholy and could be carried away by his worst imaginings. Early in the war, he so exaggerated the size of Confederate forces in Kentucky that he had a nervous breakdown.
But Sherman knew his limitations and weaknesses. When he was offered commands above his friend Grant, he refused and insisted on serving under him. "Sherman looked at Grant and concluded that he was a better general, who had the whole package," says historian John Marszalak, a professor emeritus at Mississippi State University and author of several books on Sherman. "Grant only worried about what he saw in front of him, whereas Sherman worried about things over the next hill." After the first day of the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, Grant's reply to Sherman's evaluation of the nearly disastrous outcome was typical: "Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though."
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