The hell General Sherman made.(William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country)

• Published in: American Conservative Vol. 15; no. 6; pp. 48 - 51
• Main Author: Donoghue, Steve
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Arlington The American Conservative LLC 01.11.2016; American Conservative LLC
• Subjects: American Civil War; McDonough, James Lee; Military history; Military service; Nonfiction; United States > US
• ISSN: 1540-966X

Civil War historian [James Lee McDonough]'s big new biography, [William Tecumseh Sherman]: In the Service of My Country, tells the "all hell" story smoothly and well, as it tells all the famous stories of Sherman's life and times. At some 800 pages, this book is far more generous, if less astringently insightful, than Robert O'Connell's 2014 Fierce Patriot: Vie Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman. And like that earlier book-and Michael Fellman's excellent 1995 biography, Citizen Sherman-it reflects our ongoing fascination with this strange and brutal figure, one of the few Union generals to approximate anything like the dash and charisma that was so common among the military leaders of the Confederacy. Sherman was in his life a soldier, a banker, a college president, a firebrand battlefield commander, a scourge to the Plains Indians, an Army figurehead during his friend Ulysses Grant's presidential administration, a sought-after public speaker, and a popular man-about-town in New York City. Those depredations weren't inevitable until Sherman made them that way, and the definition of "military value" was from the onset stretched so far as to lose any meaning. Whole towns were put to the torch, despite pleas not to dispossess their women, children, elderly, and infirm. Whole populations were uprooted and put on forced marches. Assaults, rapes, and murders, absent from the general's recollections, were liberally reported by Southerners; reading accounts less accommodating than McDonough's leads to the inescapable conclusion that war was "all hell" largely because William Tecumseh Sherman made it that way. In Sherman's March was born No Gun Ri, My Lai, and a dozen other massacres perpetrated on a helpless and innocent civilian population by U.S. forces allowed to conduct "war with the lid off." It was an attitude that went hand-in-hand with a brace of snarling bigotries. He affected admiration of the bravery of tribes like the Navajo or Arapaho but considered them subhuman, writing and saying often that the cleaner solution to the problem of "civilizing" such savages might be to wipe them out entirely. Likewise his contempt for blacks-"A nigger as such is a most excellent fellow, but he is not fit to marry, to associate, or vote with me, or mine"-which he showed not only during the war, when he fought vigorously against the Union's creating units of black soldiers, but also after it, when he fought just as vigorously against any kind of civil rights for the Union's newest citizens. McDonough knows very well his subject's stance on such issues, but he reflexively softens the picture whenever he can, often starting sentences with "Whatever precisely his racial mindset" or "Regardless of what Sherman thought of blacks serving in combat roles"-creating a thin fog of doubt about things that are in fact well-established.