General Sherman and the Civil War
General Sherman and the Civil WarWilliam 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,...
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