D.H. Dilbeck parses Robert L. O’Connell’s Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, an “effusive new biography” that “frequently offers an outright apologia” for the Civil War general sometimes accused of war crimes and even genocide. Part of O’Connell’s revisionist take is to emphasize Sherman’s achievements over his often overblown rhetoric, especially when it comes to his role in the making of modern America:
O’Connell devotes the majority of this first portrait [of Sherman as a strategist] to Sherman’s Civil War career. In the summer of 1863, midway through the war, Sherman’s strategic genius blossomed. From then until the war’s
end, he perfected a hard-edged strategy for defeating the Confederacy. Sherman realized defeat was “ultimately a state of mind,” which meant he had “to utterly demoralize the Confederacy by making it look helpless.” Only then would the resilient Confederate people abandon their bloody rebellion. This strategy culminated in Sherman’s march across Georgia and South Carolina in late 1864 and early 1865. Before embarking, Sherman assured a skeptical Ulysses S. Grant, “I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!” The second half of that cable, though less well known, is far more revealing: “This may not be war, but rather statesmanship.” That is, Sherman’s military strategy always had a political goal in mind: to woo Confederates back into the Union like a shrewd statesman. O’Connell also rightly notes that the deeds of Sherman’s army during the March did not match the most ominous words of their commander.
Susan Schulten details one fascinating aspect of Sherman’s war-time manuevering – his use of cutting-edge maps:
Whether we characterize Sherman’s campaign as excessive and brutal or necessary and swift, there is no question that it was among the most ambitious campaigns of the war, because to fulfill Grant’s directive, Sherman had to take his armies beyond the reach of Union supply lines. This was unthinkable to most contemporary generals, and required a superior body of cartographic intelligence. In short, Sherman needed maps.
Thanks to Capt. William Merrill, chief topographer of the Army of the Cumberland, Sherman got what he needed, and then some. By the summer of 1864 Merrill had assembled a crack team who continuously improved Union intelligence through fieldwork, traversing the land and collecting local knowledge. As a result they simply knew the terrain better than their counterparts, and mapped it with more detail, giving Sherman a decisive advantage as he closed in on Atlanta. These maps have been ably collected in the Sherman collection at the Library of Congress, and testify to the extraordinary work done by Merrill and his men, as well as by the Coast Survey, the primary federal mapping agency.
Sherman made extensive use of their work; he studied not just the physical topography of the region, but its material and human conditions. He pored over the 1860 census, asking where his troops might best forage and survive as they lived off the land. In fact, years earlier Sherman had asked the superintendent of the census, Joseph Kennedy, whether it was possible to design maps that represented not just the land, but its people and resources.
(Image: Matthew Brady’s 1864 photographic portrait of Sherman, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
