William Tecumseh Sherman

Sherman's father, an Ohio Supreme Court justice, died of typhoid in 1829, when the boy was nine, leaving eleven children with no money. Thomas Ewing, a family friend and future senator, took the sixth child into his household without ever formally adopting him, though everyone in Lancaster called him Ewing's son. Sherman went to West Point on Ewing's recommendation, graduated sixth in a class he tormented with roughly 150 demerits a year, and in 1850 married Ewing's daughter Ellen — his foster sister. Nothing after that went smoothly. A San Francisco bank he managed failed in 1857, a Kansas law practice failed the next year, and by 1859 he was running a new Louisiana military academy, a job he was good at and lost the moment the state seceded.

He rose fast after 1861 — division command at Shiloh, corps command at Vicksburg, army command at Atlanta. In November 1864 he cut loose from his supply lines and marched sixty thousand men from Atlanta to the sea and on through the Carolinas, aiming at the Confederacy's capacity to make war rather than its armies, and it worked. He later ran the peacetime army and turned down a presidential nomination flatly enough that the refusal became a category of its own. BriefHistory has the campaign and the doctrine in full — what follows is the rest of the man.

Command nearly broke him before it made him famous. Posted to Kentucky in the war's first autumn, Sherman spiraled into a pessimism severe enough that Henry Halleck ruled him unfit for duty and sent him home to Ohio; the Cincinnati Commercial called him insane in print, and Sherman later admitted privately that the strain had broken him down and that he had thought about killing himself. He recovered within weeks and rarely spoke of it again. His racial politics never resolved so neatly. He declined to put Black soldiers in his own armies and told colleagues he had some sympathy for the South's old order — yet in January 1865 he signed Special Field Orders No. 15, setting aside 400,000 acres for freed families, the origin of forty acres and a mule, and the first thing Andrew Johnson took back.

Sherman died at his home in New York City on February 14, 1891. Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate general he had chased through Georgia and the Carolinas, served as a pallbearer at the funeral and refused to cover his head in the bitter cold as a mark of respect for the man he had fought; he caught a cold there that turned to pneumonia, and died a month later. Sherman was buried beside Ellen in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. His flat refusal of the presidency outlived the century as a phrase in its own right — a Shermanesque statement is still what political reporters call it when a candidate closes the door for good.

William Tecumseh Sherman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman book
  Written in his own hand — a bestselling and unusually candid account 1875
• Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy company
  Now Louisiana State University — he resigned when the state seceded 1859
• Special Field Orders No. 15 law
  The "forty acres" order, reversed by Andrew Johnson within the year 1865
• Savannah Campaign mission
  300 miles of deliberate destruction aimed at Confederate supply lines 1864

• 1829 aged ~9 His father dies of typhoid, leaving eleven children with no money
• 1840 aged ~20 Graduates sixth in his class at West Point
• May 1, 1850 aged 30 Marries his foster sister, Ellen Ewing
• 1859 aged ~39 Becomes superintendent of a new Louisiana military academy He lost the post when the state seceded in 1861.
• December 1861 aged 41 Removed from command in Kentucky and sent home exhausted Newspapers called him insane. He later admitted he had thought of suicide.
• November 1864 aged 44 Marches from Atlanta to Savannah
• January 16, 1865 aged 44 Issues Special Field Orders No. 15 Set aside roughly 400,000 acres for freed families — the origin of "forty acres and a mule."
• 1884 aged ~64 Declines the Republican presidential nomination in a single sentence "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."
• February 14, 1891 aged 71 Dies in New York City Buried in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis. Pallbearer Joseph Johnston caught the fatal cold at the funeral.

• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. served under
• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. opposing commander
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. commander in chief
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. diverged on emancipation's aftermath
• Augustus Saint-Gaudens 1848–1907
  Sculptor whose public monuments, including the Shaw Memorial, are among America's finest. sculpted his memorial