“According to Cothren, in his ‘History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut,’ the Sherman family came from Dedham, Essex County, England.”
I read the Ulysses S Grant memoirs not that long ago, which he wrote while he was dying of mouth cancer as a way to secure a financial legacy for his family. Those memoirs were almost exclusively war-centered, as you’d guess for them, and were heavily researched and documented as much as possible. One of the most interesting takeaways I had with them was that Grant was insistent to put on record a response to some of the rumors and misconceptions about the war, but especially to fight against what was a recasting of the war as a “Lost Cause” which we are desperately familiar with now. He tells us in no uncertain terms what we all know, that slavery was the cause of the war. And while the war began as a way to reform the Union, ending slavery did eventually become of the primary motives late in the war.
Sherman often finds himself in the same position in his memoirs, also specifically being sure to establish slavery as the cause of the war and to never let us forget that. His came out about a decade before Grant’s and he was not dying. He was a couple years older than Grant, but lived until his eighties just on this side of the 20th century. He was responding to a number of things. He tells us that no full accounting of the war can happen until the war department issues a full rendering of all the documents associated it, but that’s not what he is doing here. Instead, he is concerned with making sure his position, his data, and his recollections are in print. He is also partially responding the memoirs of several Southern figures that were published recently, namely Joe Johnston, who is usually cast as the immediate foil to Sherman. He’s also responding to the increased efforts to demonize the March to the Sea as a war crime, something that we would recognize in 20th century books like Gone with the Wind, and polemics against Sherman by pro-Confederate hacks like Burke Davis. Even in a book like The Civil War by Shelby Foote, the Lost Cause narrative finds its way into unthinking criticisms of Sherman and Grant.
The book begins with a short history of his family history and childhood, moves on to marriage and early family-rearing. The books spends some considerable time with his early military career with a focus, like many Civil War figures, his experiences during the Mexican-American War, and lastly with his appointment to a fledgling military college that he leaves at the outbreak of war. The rest of the first volume takes us up to the March to the Sea (covering Vicksburg, Shiloh, Murfreesburo, and the rest the early Western theater battles). The second volume spends much of its time in the time away from Grant in Georgia and beyond before being called up to Virginia to help finish the war. He constantly justifies his actions through two ways: he did what he could to avoid the worst offences and punish those in his command who broke laws, and that the civilian population of the war contributed much to the war effort, couldn’t fully be distinguished from the army, and needed to feel the sting of war. He was not a hearts and minds kind of leader, but he also wasn’t committing mass war crimes — as is his argument. The writing is clear, researched, and documented. He comes through as a very authoritative source on the material. What is most beneficial, which histories often fail at, is understanding, in clear detail, the thinking of the day, from someone who was charged with doing a large share of the thinking.
