General Sherman And The Civil War Essay

, Research Paper

William Tecumseh Sherman was born on May 8, 1820 in Lancaster,

Ohio. He was educated at the U.S. Military Academy and later went on

to become a Union General in the U.S. civil war. Sherman resigned from

the army in 1853 and became a partner in a banking firm in San

Francisco. He became the president of the Military College in

Louisiana(now Louisiana state University) from 1859-1861. Sherman

offered his services at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and was

put in command of a volunteer infantry regiment, becoming a brigadier

general of volunteers after the first Battle of bull run. He led his

division at the Battle of Shiloh and was then promoted to major

general of volunteers. Soon after Sherman fought in the battle of

Chattanooga he was made supreme commander of the armies in the west.

Sherman fought many battles with such people as Ulysses S. Grant, and

against people such as Robert E. Lee before he was commissioned

lieutenant general of the regular army. Following Grants election to

presidency he was promoted to the rank of full general and given

command of the entire U.S. Army. William Sherman published his

personal memoirs in 1875, retired in 1883, and died in 1891.

William Tecumseh Sherman, as you have read, was a very

talented and very successful man. He is remembered by many

accomplishments, but probably most remembered by his famous March to

the sea. Sherman’s march to the sea was probably the most celebrated

military action, in which about sixty thousand men marched with

Sherman from Atlanta to the Atlantic ocean, then north through South

Carolina destroying the last of the souths economic resources.

Bedford Forrest was in Tennessee, and with Atlanta secured,

Sherman dispatched George H. Thomas to Nashville to restore the order

there. John B. Hood threatened Thomas’s supply line, and for about a

month, they both fought north of Atlanta. Sherman decided to do the

complete opposite of what the strategic plan laid down by Grant six

months earlier had proposed to do. In that plan Grant had insisted

that Confederate armies were the first and foremost objectives for

Union strategy. What Sherman decided now was that he would completely

ignore the Confederate armies and go for the “spirit that sustained

the Confederate nation itself”, the homes, the property, the families,

and the food of the Southern heartland. He would march for Savannah,

Georgia and the seacoast, abandoning his own line of supply, and live

off the land and harvests of the Georgia Country. Grant finally

approved Sherman’s plan, so Sherman set off on his march eastward,

“smashing things to the sea.” On November 15, 1864, Sherman began his

march to the sea. “I can make . . . Georgia howl!” he promised.

Sherman left Atlanta, setting it up in flames as they left,

with 62,000 men, 55,000 of them on foot, 5,000 on cavalry horses,

and about 2,000 riding artillery horses. It was an army of 218

regiments, 184 of them from the West, and of these 155 were from the

old Northwest Territory. This army was remembered as a lean and strong

one. The bulk of the army was made up of Germans, Irish, Scotch, and

English. Sherman and his army arrived in Georgia where there was no

opposition, and the march was very leisurely. The army fanned out

widely, covering a sixty mile span from one side to the other. The

army destroyed, demolished and crushed whatever got in their way, the

land, homes, buildings, and people. Bridges, railroads, machine shops,

warehouses- anything of this nature that was in Shaman’s path was

burned and destroyed. As a result of this march eliminating

a lot of the food to feed the Confederate army and its animals, the

whole Confederate war effort would become weaker and weaker and

weaker. Sherman went on toward the sea while the Confederacy could do

nothing.

Sherman’s march to the sea was a demonstration that the

Confederacy could not protect its own. Many agree that Sherman was too

brutal and cruel during the march to the sea, but Sherman and his men

were effectively demolishing the Confederate homeland, and that was

all that mattered to Sherman. Because Sherman “waged an economic war

against civilians”, he has been called the first modern general.

Sherman is remembered by some as one of the best generals of the U.S.

Civil War, and by others(mainly whom live in the south) as a cruel,

brutal, horrible, and evil man. William Tecumseh Sherman is believed

to have coined the phrase, “War is hell.” “There is many a boy here

who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear

this warning voice to generations to come.”

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RESOURCES

1. SHERMAN FIGHTING PROPHET By LLOYD LEWIS HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD,

INC. NEW YORK

2. The AMERICAN HERITAGE Picture History of THE CIVIL WAR VOLUME TWO

By the Editors of AMERICAN HERITAGE

3. Peoples Chronology, License from Henry Holt and Company, Inc

4. The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press