March to the Sea

I’m finishing up the memoirs of Civil War General William T. Sherman. The book was recommended by Broschat (see link to Montlake Blog at the right), who discovered that Sherman began his career in California before and shortly after the start of the gold rush. Since we grew up in the Bay Area, much of Sherman’s early adventures took place on ground familiar to us.

I thought I’d only read until he went back East, but I found the book to be very compelling. There are lots of Sherman’s thoughts about the war itself and many fascinating incidents, some of them involving clashes of gigantic egos. Sherman, for example, was dispatched to Southern California to get Fremont to knock it off with the undeclared war on Mexico. The declared war came a little later, and Sherman lamented that he couldn’t be there for the action.

In addition to the events themselves, Sherman was a good writer, able to capture a lot of detail, and in a readable style at a time when rhetorical flourish was a virtue and more was generally considered better.

But it’s Sherman himself who is so fascinating. A few years into the war when the South was on the run, some newspapers and politicians were arguing for a peace settlement. Sherman would settle for nothing short of complete defeat of the South and complete surrender:

“I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it—that we will do it in our own time and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be in one year, or two, or ten, or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, every thing that to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are enemies, and that we will not account to them for our acts. If the people of the South oppose, they do so at their peril; and if they stand by, mere lookers-on in this domestic tragedy, they have no right to immunity, protection, or share in the final results.”

This was his advice to Grant and Lincoln, and this was the outcome. For his own part, after every battle Sherman dispassonately records his own army's deaths, wounded and missing, sometimes numbering in the thousands.