American General: The Life and Times of William Tecumseh Sherman - Softcover

Eisenhower, John S.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451471369 ISBN 13: 9780451471369

Publisher: Dutton Caliber, 2015

Synopsis

Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman earned a place in history as “the first modern general,” yet behind his reputation as a fierce warrior was a sympathetic man of complex character.

A century and a half after the Civil War, Sherman remains one of its most controversial figures—the soldier who brought the fight not only to the Confederate Army, but to Confederate civilians as well. Yet Eisenhower, a West Point graduate and a retired brigadier general (Army Reserves), finds in Sherman a man of startling contrasts, not at all defined by the implications of “total war.” His scruffy, disheveled appearance belied an unconventional and unyielding intellect. Intensely loyal to superior officers, especially Ulysses S. Grant, he was also a stalwart individualist. Dubbed “no soldier” during his years at West Point, Sherman later rose to the rank of General of the Army, and he had great affection for the people of the South despite his commitment to the Union cause.

In this remarkable reassessment of Sherman’s life and career, Eisenhower takes readers from Sherman’s Ohio origins and his fledgling first stint in the Army to his years as a businessman in California and his hurried return to uniform at the outbreak of the war. From Bull Run through Sherman’s epic March to the Sea, Eisenhower offers up a fascinating narrative of a military genius whose influence helped preserve the Union.
 

About this title

About the Author:

John S. D. Eisenhower was a brigadier general (Army Reserves), a U.S. ambassador to Belgium during the Nixon administration, and the author of numerous works of military history and biography. The son of Dwight D. Eisenhower, he lived in Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

FOREWORD

It is hard to articulate the sum of a life. But my father, John S. D. Eisenhower, who died before the publication of this book, produced a loving family and accomplished his professional goals. The only surviving son of Mamie and General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Eisenhower wore his father’s fame with dignity and resolve. By midcareer, he had gotten into “the writing game” to fulfill his desire to be an author. He also knew it would help him create an identity of his own. In the succeeding decades he made an independent reputation for himself, becoming what the Washington Post called “a soldier, diplomat and acclaimed historian.”

John Eisenhower’s life was utterly shaped by the military. As a young man, he moved with his parents from army assignment to assignment, in places like Panama and the Philippines. After high school he sought an appointment to West Point. After three years he graduated from the Academy coincidentally on June 6, 1944, just hours after the invasion of Normandy had begun. He served in intelligence posts in Europe before the war ended, and later in combat operations in Korea. He left the Army in 1963 to pursue his love of writing.

Becoming a military historian was, for John Eisenhower, more than a vocation. “Putting pen to paper” is not just what he did; being a writer is who he was. He knew this even before he graduated from West Point. After VE Day he got a master’s degree at Columbia University and was assigned to the English Department at West Point. Between 1948 and 1951, he was, in his own words, “able to learn much of what he and the Class of 1944 had missed because of West Point’s [foreshortened graduation schedule] during the war.” His master’s thesis was on the role of the military in William Shakespeare’s work. In addition to military histories, he loved humorists like Mark Twain and P. G. Wodehouse and appreciated the lean, evocative style of Ernest Hemingway.

In the late 1960s, after serving as an editor on Ike’s two-volume White House memoirs, my father wrote his first book, The Bitter Woods, on the Battle of the Bulge. He undertook extensive research on the subject, which included doing interviews at all echelons in the chain of command, including those who fought on the German side. I remember vividly dining with the 5th Panzer Army General Hasso von Manteuffel after his interview with my father at our house in Pennsylvania. The German general had played a significant role in the Battle of the Bulge.

After The Bitter Woods appeared on bestseller lists, my father was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, and he served in that capacity from 1969 to 1971. During his tenure my parents rented a small cottage in the Ardennes forest, and on my visits “home” he would take me out on battlefield excursions, much like he did with my other siblings.

As my father’s career developed, he and I made trips to a number of Civil War battlefields, family landmarks and other points of historic interest. There he would try to learn more, all the while he told me stories and explained the significance or the strategic importance of the place.

My father was a cerebral man—a quiet observer of the many things to which he’d been exposed. He had done a lot of living. During the war in Europe, he’d been to Buchenwald and seen the Holocaust firsthand. He was a combat officer in the Korean War, and that conflict also left a deep imprint on him. Perhaps, notably, he may have been the last person alive who had dined with both Churchill and Stalin—and he went with his father to Normandy just after the invasion. He wrote several books on World War II, but on subjects he later tackled—from General Winfield Scott and the War of 1812 to the United States’ intervention in Mexico and World War I—he used his love of writing as a gateway to a lifetime of intellectual discovery. He had an instinct for detail and an eye for spotting uncommon capabilities, historic ironies, and the elements of a good story.

What impressed me the most was his extraordinary ability to connect the intellectual dots across centuries of history and articulate them as simple principles, often associating them with the events of the day. He had a striking ability to identify the exceptional qualities in people that made them leaders, as well as the ones that made others fall short.

With respect to our society, it was the changing mores and attitudes that fascinated him. In this, he saw the hand of time as a mysterious “fourth dimension,” which altered things as no physical change ever could.

My father also liked colorful characters—he knew a few in his day. Perhaps this is what drew him to General Sherman in the first place. It was Sherman who famously said: “War is hell.” Indeed, fact and lore reveal a quick-witted Sherman who didn’t hesitate to speak his mind. One such example relates to Sherman’s disdain for journalists, whom the General deemed as nothing better than battlefield spies and gossipmongers. On hearing that three correspondents had been killed near Vicksburg, Sherman is said to have quipped, “Good! Now we shall have news from Hell before breakfast.”   

In the course of his lifetime, John Eisenhower edited three books and wrote thirteen others. American General was his fourteenth. It was under way in the last two years of his life. Just as my father was preparing this book for the editor, he died on December 21, 2013, at age ninety-one. In fact, the manuscript was the subject of my last conversation with him, shortly before he passed away. He asked that I serve as his “stand-in” for getting the book ready for publication.

While no one could ever hope to substitute for John Eisenhower, I have been privileged to play a small role in helping to bring this project to fruition, an important piece of his body of work.

My father’s legacy will become clearer with the fullness of time. But it was gratifying to read the many articles written about his life and to receive countless letters from people who’d read his books. The field of military and leadership history, many observers wrote, is richer today because John Eisenhower devoted himself to the writing craft.

Sage insights on world leaders, observations about strategy and its impact, and sensitivity to the fighting man’s condition are part of what my father leaves behind. His determination to be his own man, to pursue his talents and to forge his own identity, is also how he will be remembered—and another reason for why he will be missed.

INTRODUCTION

The Tactical Department at the United States Military Academy, West Point, in evaluating the Class of 1840, dubbed the sixth-highest-ranking cadet in the class, William Tecumseh Sherman, as “no soldier.” A century later, General George S. Patton would use the same term in describing Terry Allen and Teddy Roosevelt Jr., two of the most pugnacious infantrymen of World War II. Both the West Point tacs and “Old Blood and Guts” made the same error; they equated spit and polish with “soldiering.” Sherman’s appearance was rough-hewn, with scraggly red hair. His uniforms were always rumpled. Using that criterion, of course, they were both right.

Sherman was not concerned with that evaluation. Indeed, in later years he reveled in it. Even at the time, it seemed to cause him no grief. Actually, if required to summarize this otherwise complex man, I for one would be inclined to call him a “soldier’s soldier.”

Sherman’s basic attitudes were typically military. He was physically fearless—or appeared so. He distrusted politicians and the press, considering the latter to be licensed spies. He was loyal to a fault, both to the office of his superiors and certainly to Ulysses S. Grant personally. But Sherman could never be put in a mold. He was one of the most colorful figures of the American Civil War, or any other American war. To many people he is best remembered for his answer to the suggestion that he run for the presidency: “If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve. If given the choice between four years in the presidency or four years in prison, I will choose prison, thank you.” He put a new word in our language: “Shermanesque.”

These idiosyncrasies, however, are not the reason we remember Sherman. The military historian B. H. Liddell Hart called him “the first of the modern generals.” If that evaluation seems to be a bit of an exaggeration, it must be admitted that Sherman was a truly independent thinker. Conventionality was not part of his makeup. And part of his original thinking was the concept that to conquer a nation determined to resist, the attacking force cannot limit its efforts to that people’s armed forces; the war must be waged against the will of the civilian populace as well. Hence the term “total war.” Only one other Civil War general, the venerable Winfield Scott, also realized what has become a truism. But not until Sherman made his vaunted march from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864 did it come to be universally acknowledged. The victims of this concept, the American Confederacy, have never forgiven him for it.

Actually, it is too much to give Sherman credit for discovering the feasibility of an army’s living off the land of the enemy, free of its own supply lines. He seems to have learned that lesson from U. S. Grant at Vicksburg, when Grant, having secured a foothold on the lands south of the city, attacked Jackson, Mississippi, without a supply line. In fact, the discovery was not even Grant’s. Henry W. Halleck, in 1862, lived off the land in his large-scale movement from Shiloh to Corinth. But Sherman was the first to adopt the policy for purposes beyond feeding his troops: that of depriving the enemy of all matériel necessary to war as well as making use of it himself.

In writing this short book I found his personality even more interesting than his deeds. The contrast between Sherman’s true affection for the people of the South and his actions toward them is to me mind-boggling. (Of course, unreconstructed Southerners hardly return that affection.) When the military phase of the Civil War was finished, he made a sentimental trip to Charleston, South Carolina, to check on the welfare of the friends of twenty years earlier. (He found almost none.)

It is the combination of military genius and complexity of character that has made this book a joy to write. Sherman’s major role in bringing about the ultimate Union triumph in the Civil War, along with being the most unlikely general, is unique in American military history.

PROLOGUE

In early 1861, a forty-one-year-old ex-soldier named William Tecumseh Sherman, then president of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy (later Louisiana State University), was dining with Professor David F. Boyd, a dear friend from Virginia, a state contemplating secession from the Union. As recalled by Boyd, Sherman minced no words:

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.1

Sherman knew whereof he spoke. With remarkable prescience, he described as concisely as can be imagined the tragedy that was about to befall the United States, the American Civil War. He had no inkling of the major role he would play in this drama, something that seemed to come about almost by chance. There was little in his background that would presage it.

Book I

CHAPTER ONE

On a cold and windy day in mid-February 1891, an elaborate funeral was held in New York City for general of the army William Tecumseh Sherman. All the important people were there: Among them were President Benjamin Harrison, former presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland, and thirty thousand troops, including the entire corps of cadets from West Point. One of the honorary pallbearers, present at Sherman’s previous request, was an unlikely member: Joseph Eggleston Johnston, a onetime general of the Confederate States of America and Sherman’s fierce antagonist. The two men—with a fourteen-year difference in their ages—had fought hard against each other during the Civil War, but in later years they had developed a warm friendship, working together to repair the Union that had been rent asunder between the years 1861 and 1865.

Johnston’s friends were worried about him, for despite the icy winds, his eighty-four years of age, and frail health, he insisted on remaining bareheaded throughout the ceremony. Johnston would have none of his friends’ protests. “If I were in [Sherman’s] place, and he were standing in mine, he would not put on his hat.” A month later Johnston died of pneumonia, presumably the result of exposure at Sherman’s funeral.

Johnston’s affection for Sherman, expressed at risk to himself, was contrary to the feelings of his fellow Southerners; Sherman’s name, in fact, still stands as a symbol of the destruction he visited on their lands while marching from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864. The contrast between those who knew him as a warm and somewhat sensitive man and those who knew him only by the measures he took in war characterizes the contrasts of Sherman’s life. He was a man who hated war and all it stood for, but whose duty, as he saw it, called for measures designed to finish off a failing enemy.

—

Sherman came from a prominent family, but little in his ancestry indicated that one day he would be recognized as one of the nation’s most brilliant generals. If anything, his background should have led him to the legal profession. He was born in 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, to Charles Sherman, Esq., and his wife, Mary Sherman. Charles Sherman was a distinguished lawyer, a member of the Ohio Supreme Court. The Sherman family had come from Essex County, England, in two groups; William Sherman’s family came to Connecticut in 1636. A cousin, Roger Sherman, had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The boy’s grandfather, Taylor Sherman, had moved out to the west and settled in Ohio. Charles R. Sherman, William’s father, had moved his family...

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Caliber
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0451471369
• ISBN 13: 9780451471369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352