By James Lee McDonough
Illustrated. 816 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $39.95 USD.
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Historians cannot get enough of William Tecumseh Sherman, and no wonder. As multiple biographies have noted over the last 30 years, he is a particularly modern figure — high-strung, quotable, irritable, irreligious, prone to bouts of anxiety and depression. One earlier Sherman biographer, the British military writer Basil Liddell Hart, called him "the first modern general."
But Sherman was also very much a man of his time. He managed to witness a good part of the key events of the 19th century in the United States, from the gold rush to the building of the transcontinental railroad to the near extermination of the Native American tribes. A lifelong lover of good theater (he once stomped out of a poor performance of "Hamlet" in occupied Nashville), he became a New Yorker at the end of his life, purchasing a house at 75 West 71st Street.
Most of all, he played a major and strategic role in the Civil War. In looking back at that conflict, Sherman uttered one of the most memorable phrases in American history — "War is all hell." Alone among American generals, his name is enshrined in an adjective in our political vocabulary. That word, "Shermanesque," remains today the best summary of an absolute and nonnegotiable refusal to run for president.
Of course, his 1864 movement across central Georgia also is remembered by his name — Sherman's march. Yet this most famous of his actions is probably his least understood, or perhaps most misrepresented. He did not conduct "total war." Nor did he use violence indiscriminately. To the contrary, his march across Georgia and then into South Carolina was a targeted use of violence against wealthy Confederate die-hards in the rural South who had been largely untouched by the war. It was to these plantation owners that Sherman intended to bring "the hard hand of war," and he did so with audacity and courage.
