Perhaps the inventor and the first practitioner of what the twentieth century came to recognize as "total war," William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 authority the Union armies of the West in the important drive from Chattanooga to Atlanta and the renowned "march to the sea" across Georgia.
In these crusade and his later push northward from Savannah during the Carolinas, Sherman's troops approved the war to the Southern home front and blazed a wide path of demolition that delivered the death blow to the Confederacy's will and facility to fight. For the supplementary devastation, his name is still cursed in some parts of the South; but he is also renowned as a great strategist, a vigorous organizer, and mutually with Ulysses Grant the ablest Union universal of the war.
The careers of both men had been ordinary between the Mexican War and the American Civil War. When the South separate, Sherman West Point, 1840 was superintendent of a military college that is now Louisiana State University. Aided by his brother John, a associate of legislature from Ohio, he unwillingly left the South for a Union commission.
His military careers had not forever been so exceptional; as commanding general of the Department of the Cumberland, 1861-1862, he disputes with the press, displayed affecting problems, and suffer allegation of lunacy. Only after this suffering did he begin his long and fruitful organization with Ulysses Grant. Sherman's authority, for example, helped stop Grant from quit when the latter felt him constrained by guidelines from Washington.
For his military expertise, Sherman is justly celebrated; he do well Grant as commander in chief in 1869 and stay in that post until 1883. Two unforgettable remarks of his also have entered history. Having written to Mayor Calhoun of Atlanta in 1874 that "war is unkindness, and you cannot process it," he hones this description in a beginning address at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879 to the oft-quoted phrase "War is hell."
Perhaps the maximum tribute to William T. Sherman was paid by his old Civil War challenger Joe Johnston, who had fought him in Georgia and had indication with him and resolution after the Battle of Bentonville in April 1865. The two became associates. General Johnston focus Sherman's interment in New York in 1891, stood in the rain to watch the cortege pass, and trapped a cold. It origin Johnston's death two weeks afterward.
