Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
The Scourge of War: A Long March into Myth
Sherman was an erudite, complicated man, far from the monster created by Southern apologists after the Civil War.
[Book review] The Scourge of War: The Life of William Tecumseh Sherman by Brian Holden Reid
Review By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, May 2020.
WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN has mostly, if unjustly, been remembered in popular imagination as a "vandal," if not a war criminal, for the "atrocities" supposedly committed wholesale by his army during his 1864 March to the Sea. Period photographs of him posed by Matthew Brady lend a seeming veracity to such assumptions, showing a bristly-bearded, gimlet-eyed soldier with a steely chill suggested in his tight lips and set jaw. There is no question that Sherman was a man of great determination who projected the image of a tough-minded soldier, as did many of his fellow commanders. But the basic elements of this fearsome persona were crafted well after the Civil War by Southern apologists who portrayed him as a sort of "devilish antichrist, complementing the Christlike Robert E. Lee," as Brian Holden Reid, who teaches American History and Military Institutions at King's College London, puts it in this magisterial new biography. Such dark characterizations of one of the North's most brilliant commanders were burnished anew in the 20th century by some writers, such as James Reston, who believed that they could see in Sherman's campaigns the incipient pattern for modern "total war," including the ravaging of Vietnam.
Writing with impressive scholarship and an intimate grasp of Civil War tactics and strategy, Mr. Reid explodes these persistent fictions to deliver a subtle portrait of one of the most sophisticated military men in American history, who in addition to possessing a strategic mind of the first order was a multilingual, widely-read intellectual with a warmly gregarious personality and a lifelong taste for the arts. Perhaps no other senior officer on either side matched his erudition, with the possible exception of his longtime but lusterless friend Henry W. Halleck. Had he not become a soldier, Sherman might well have spent his life as a professor. He was, writes Mr. Reid, "a natural teacher," who was probably happiest when he served as a college president in Louisiana before the war.
Sherman was born in Ohio in 1820, at a time when that state was just emerging from the rough-cut lifeways of the frontier. His family, descended from a long line of New England churchmen and lawyers, though not affluent, was well-educated and genteel. Orphaned early, he was raised by the politically influential Ewing family who provided him with valuable connections in both Ohio and Washington well into his adult life. His younger brother John also benefited from the Ewings' support, rising to become a prominent U.S. Senator during and after the Civil War, and years later giving his name to the Sherman Anti-trust Act. William, who was always known to his friends as "Cump," was early recognized as intellectually gifted. Entering West Point in 1835, he studied there with numerous men with whom he would serve or face on the battlefield in the Civil War, including Halleck, Joseph Hooker, George Thomas, Braxton Bragg, and Pierre G.T. Beauregard, among others. As a cadet, he was known for his loquacity, wit, command of language, and cleverness, all qualities for which he was admired throughout his life.
Mr. Reid is often illuminating in his fine-grained treatment of Sherman's pre-war life, most particularly his significant but generally overlooked encounters with vigilante violence in San Francisco, where he briefly and not very happily worked as a bank executive in the 1850s, and which fostered a lasting suspicion of undisciplined populism. Mr. Reid focuses, however, on Sherman's wartime development as an officer, from an insecure and nerve-wracked brigadier thrust too soon into high command after the 1861 Battle of Bull Run, through his service as a subordinate to Ulysses S. Grant in the war's western theater, to his command and coordination of three armies during the Atlanta campaign of 1864, and the strategic masterpiece of his March to the Sea and equally decisive march north through the Carolinas in early 1865.
Mr. Reid's prose is studied and precise, but also, happily, free of academic jargon and consistently clear. Readers who are not overly interested in the exact disposition of brigades, divisions, and army corps may occasionally be tempted to skip certain sections, though a close reading accompanied by the book's maps will reward those who may have puzzled over just where Sherman was stuck in those swamps outside Vicksburg, or what difference the deployment of his corps commanders really made in the campaign against Atlanta. Regrettably, Mr. Reid does not indulge in colorful or panoramic descriptions of battle, and gives almost no attention to the experience of ordinary soldiers. For such things, one might turn to more dramatic but less scholarly works such as Lee B. Kennett's "Marching through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman's Campaign," or Steven E. Woodworth's "Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865." (Sherman was himself a talented writer: his memoirs are sometimes dense, but they are rich with detail, and available in a Library of America edition, while "The Sherman Letters," a fascinating compilation of his correspondence with his equally expressive brother John provides many windows into both men's thinking about wartime strategy, race and slavery, Washington politics, and many other subjects.)
Mr. Reid's real interest lies not in the blood-and-guts experience of war but in the nature of command. Sherman, Mr. Reid says, typically "outthought as well as outmaneuvered his Confederate opponents." For instance, he writes of the Atlanta campaign, "In the closing weeks of May 1864 Sherman encountered a problem that had perplexed all successful commanders: how to complete a devastating pursuit. In particular, he needed to figure out how to prevent the escape of an enemy that might seek refuge in another position as formidable as the one previously vacated." His plans were based as much on "intricate, hardheaded logistical calculation as on strategic and operational inspiration." In stark contrast to hyper-cautious generals such as George McClellan, Sherman placed his boldest commanders in the vanguard of his army, kept "a viselike grip" on the initiative, and courted battle even at the risk of beginning one with only a part of his forces, confident that he would be able to reinforce them quickly, as he repeatedly did. The campaign was a triumph of surprise that overmastered his Confederate opponents across a mountainous, densely wooded, ill-mapped landscape that was penetrated only by a single railway line and a few poor, meandering roads. The campaign climaxed with the fall of Atlanta in September, a strategic catastrophe that sealed the fate of the Confederacy, and ensured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, who only weeks earlier had expected to go down to defeat in that year's presidential election.
The March to the Sea that ended in Savannah two months later was another tour de force of flexible planning. The plan's success was virtually assured when the Confederates sent their main western army on a risky invasion of Tennessee, which ended in devastating defeat at Nashville, leaving the heartland of Georgia completely open to Sherman's 60,000 men. Southern newspapers propagandistically announced that Sherman had been trounced in battle, retreated in chaos, or had surrendered his army, when in fact he conducted the march without having to fight a single significant battle, and with slight loss of life on either side. Railroads, armories, munitions, and the property of many wealthy plantation owners - who Sherman blamed for starting the war -- were systematically destroyed, but the reality was far from the "scorched earth" that Confederate apologists claimed. What more random depredations occurred, and there were some, took place within the three narrow corridors that formed his lines of march. Sherman set out to make the South suffer severely, but "the means he sought to create such conditions were altogether more subtle, based increasingly on the demonstration of superior military force rather than on its naked and brutal application," says Mr. Reid.
The psychological impact of the march was even more important than its strategic achievements. Writes Mr. Reid, Sherman "was correct in divining that the solution to winning lay in breaking Southern resistance" and its will to fight on. "His method, then, was to grasp war's true nature rather than to play at it." Faced at one point with how to respond to the murder of captured federal soldiers by Confederate forces, some with their throats cut and heads smashed in, Sherman publicized his willingness to execute the same number of Confederate prisoners. None were, but the murders instantly stopped. As Sherman put it, he wanted the people of the South "to realize the fact that they shall not dictate the laws of war or peace to us."
The destruction of South Carolina's capital city was probably the single most frequently offered "proof" of Sherman's alleged "barbarism," epitomized by the diarist Mary Chesnut, who described the event as an orgy of "fire and sword and rapine and plunder." Mr. Reid, who doesn't hesitate to criticize Sherman when there is reason, observes that the "Burning of Columbia," as it has always been called, was really a misnomer for a series of fires by different parties - including departing Southern forces -- not a premeditated act, though Sherman shed no tears for what happened. Most of the limited violence that occurred was inflicted on rioters, with two soldiers killed and thirty wounded, and 370 people arrested, including civilians, blacks, and federal soldiers. About one-third of the city's structures went up in flames. Although some soldiers participated in looting, many eyewitnesses saw federal troops protecting private houses and fighting the flames. The real significance of Columbia's partial destruction, Mr. Reid says, lay in its demoralizing shock to previously complacent South Carolinians' sense of invulnerability.
To his assessments of Sherman's policies, Mr. Reid brings a useful European perspective, enabling him to offer insightful comparisons to comparable military campaigns fought on the continent in the early 19th century, which provided most of the models for military education for Sherman's generation in the United States. He asserts for example that both the physical destruction and the suffering of civilians in Georgia and the Carolinas was "comparatively mild" when set next to far worse horrors of the Napoleonic Wars. He writes, "By comparison with the citizens of Belgium in 1795, occupied by French revolutionary armies and subject to violence, and the seizure of numerous hostages-'organized anarchy'-the citizens of South Carolina got off lightly." He similarly notes that Napoleon's burning of Moscow, in 1812, resulted in 12,000 deaths and the destruction of many thousands of private homes, a horrendous toll when posed against the damage done at Columbia. Mr. Reid does not suggest that Sherman's war-making was exceptionally restrained, but rather that it was well within the accepted boundaries of the laws of war as they were understood at that time, by Confederates and well as Unionists.
Mr. Reid's portrait of Sherman beyond the battlefield is textured and sensitive, with subtle attention to his fluctuating moods, including bouts of depression, intense anxiety, and sometimes self-subverting bluntness, as well as to his clearly loving relationship with his wife and children. In the 1870s and 1880s, he was repeatedly mentioned as a prospective candidate, as was his brother John. In contrast to John, however, William detested politics. Like more than a few military men both before and after, he found the rough-and-tumble disorder of democracy inefficient and distasteful, a sentiment that was also reflected in his disparagement of volunteer citizen-soldiers early in the war. Similarly, he despised newspaper reporters, whose stories in that freewheeling era not infrequently divulged information about troop movements; he repeatedly banned them from his camps, and once threatened to execute a reporter from the New York Herald as a spy.
Mr. Reid is forthright in acknowledging Sherman's ingrained prejudices, some of them offensive to modern sensibilities. Unlike his more liberal brother John, he was a racist, who frequently disparaged African Americans in casually rude language. Before the war, he did not oppose slavery, and never had any use for abolitionists. In contrast to other commanders, including Grant, he refused to accept black troops in his armies. Nonetheless, in the course of his marches he probably liberated more slaves than any other federal general. In religion, on the other hand, he was much more open-minded in his views than many of his contemporaries. Though personally a hard-shelled agnostic, if not an atheist, he was remarkably tolerant of Catholicism, the religion of his wife.
Sherman was, in the end, a paradoxical figure. Despite his racism, after his capture of Savannah and Charleston he ordered the distribution of land to former slaves, a radical measure that set the pattern for later (though never completed) land reforms championed by the postwar Freedmen's Bureau. A man of authoritarian instincts, no officer contributed more to the preservation of American democracy. In Mr. Reid's words, "he was a conservative figure, yet he sought to create havoc psychologically and break the bonds of a cohesive white society that he had in many respects admired." His most lasting if under-appreciated influence may have been in the 1870s during his tenure as commander of the army under then-President Grant, when, as Mr. Reid neatly puts it, he enlarged the U.S. Army's "brain and capacity to expand itself in time for the next war and avoid the confusion, muddle, and waste he had witnessed in 1861-1862." In this fine rendering of a bold and complicated life, Mr. Reid has, in short, given us a remarkable man whose name has long been a household word but whom we may never have really known before.