Ulysses Grant
- Thread starter Sherman Sheridan & Grant
- Start date
SS & G--thanks for recommending the Grant series. Really enjoyed it (and so did my wife). I have not been a civil war buff; more concentrated on WW2 where Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy is the best that I have read. He is now writing a trilogy of the American Revolution which the first is out and I enjoyed. I wish he would follow up with a trilogy on the Civil War after seeing the Grant series.
The one thing that I came away with was an anger that Grant has not been more respected by history and that Lee is considered the "knight in shining armor" with monuments galore. I intend to visit Grant's tomb when the Covid eases.
The one thing that I came away with was an anger that Grant has not been more respected by history and that Lee is considered the "knight in shining armor" with monuments galore. I intend to visit Grant's tomb when the Covid eases.
not about Grant but another compelling man from the same time who bravely outsmarted the Confederates. So figured I'd post it here rather than start a new thread. I came across this article today about Robert Smalls:
[URL]https://www.mentalfloss.com/ar...le-confederate-warship-and-became-congressman[/URL]
[URL]https://www.mentalfloss.com/ar...le-confederate-warship-and-became-congressman[/URL]
[quote="BrooklynRed" post=388635]SS & G--thanks for recommending the Grant series. Really enjoyed it (and so did my wife). I have not been a civil war buff; more concentrated on WW2 where Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy is the best that I have read. He is now writing a trilogy of the American Revolution which the first is out and I enjoyed. I wish he would follow up with a trilogy on the Civil War after seeing the Grant series.
The one thing that I came away with was an anger that Grant has not been more respected by history and that Lee is considered the "knight in shining armor" with monuments galore. I intend to visit Grant's tomb when the Covid eases.[/quote]
His tomb is "cool" I suppose there is a better choice of words - just very solemn, special, stunning, unforgettable - remember he was the most popular man in the world when buried; and there are so many worthwhile books about Ulysses - some of which have already been mentioned in this post topic.
Thanks Brooklyn Red - I was born in Queens but raised in Borough Park and Flatbush!
The one thing that I came away with was an anger that Grant has not been more respected by history and that Lee is considered the "knight in shining armor" with monuments galore. I intend to visit Grant's tomb when the Covid eases.[/quote]
His tomb is "cool" I suppose there is a better choice of words - just very solemn, special, stunning, unforgettable - remember he was the most popular man in the world when buried; and there are so many worthwhile books about Ulysses - some of which have already been mentioned in this post topic.
Thanks Brooklyn Red - I was born in Queens but raised in Borough Park and Flatbush!
[quote="Sherman, Sheridan & Grant" post=388694][quote="BrooklynRed" post=388635]SS & G--thanks for recommending the Grant series. Really enjoyed it (and so did my wife). I have not been a civil war buff; more concentrated on WW2 where Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy is the best that I have read. He is now writing a trilogy of the American Revolution which the first is out and I enjoyed. I wish he would follow up with a trilogy on the Civil War after seeing the Grant series.
The one thing that I came away with was an anger that Grant has not been more respected by history and that Lee is considered the "knight in shining armor" with monuments galore. I intend to visit Grant's tomb when the Covid eases.[/quote]
His tomb is "cool" I suppose there is a better choice of words - just very solemn, special, stunning, unforgettable - remember he was the most popular man in the world when buried; and there are so many worthwhile books about Ulysses - some of which have already been mentioned in this post topic.
Thanks Brooklyn Red - I was born in Queens but raised in Borough Park and Flatbush![/quote]
General you just resurrected the age old question of who is buried in Grant's tomb?
The one thing that I came away with was an anger that Grant has not been more respected by history and that Lee is considered the "knight in shining armor" with monuments galore. I intend to visit Grant's tomb when the Covid eases.[/quote]
His tomb is "cool" I suppose there is a better choice of words - just very solemn, special, stunning, unforgettable - remember he was the most popular man in the world when buried; and there are so many worthwhile books about Ulysses - some of which have already been mentioned in this post topic.
Thanks Brooklyn Red - I was born in Queens but raised in Borough Park and Flatbush![/quote]
General you just resurrected the age old question of who is buried in Grant's tomb?
jerseyshorejohnny
Well-known member
BOOKS
‘The Scourge of War’ Review: A Long March Into Myth
Sherman was an erudite, complicated man, far from the monster created by Southern apologists after the Civil War.
By Fergus M. Bordewich / Wall Street Journal
Updated May 29, 2020
William Tecumseh Sherman is mostly, if unjustly, remembered as a vandal, if not a war criminal, for the supposed “atrocities” committed wholesale by his army during his 1864 March to the Sea. Period photographs of him lend a seeming veracity to such assumptions, showing a bristly-bearded, gimlet-eyed soldier with tight lips and a set jaw.
There is no question that Sherman was a man of great determination who projected the image of a tough-minded soldier. But the basic elements of this fearsome persona were crafted well after the Civil War by Southern apologists who portrayed him as a sort of “devilish anti-Christ, complementing the Christlike Robert E. Lee,” as Brian Holden Reid puts it in “The Scourge of War,” his magisterial biography. Such dark characterizations of Sherman were burnished anew in the 20th century by writers such as James Reston Jr., who saw in Sherman’s campaigns the incipient pattern for modern “total war,” including the ravaging of Vietnam.
Writing with impressive scholarship and an intimate grasp of Civil War tactics and strategy, Mr. Reid, who teaches history at King’s College London, explodes these persistent fictions and delivers a subtle portrait of one of the most sophisticated military men in U.S. history. In addition to possessing a strategic mind of the first order, Sherman was a multilingual, widely read intellectual with a warmly gregarious personality and a lifelong taste for the arts. Perhaps no other senior officer, Union or Confederate, matched his erudition, with the possible exception of his longtime but lusterless friend Henry W. Halleck. Had Sherman not become a soldier, he might have spent his life as a professor. He was, writes Mr. Reid, “a natural teacher,” who was probably happiest when he served as a college president in Louisiana before the war.
Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820, when the state was just emerging from the rough-cut lifeways of the frontier. His family, descended from New England churchmen and lawyers, though not affluent, was well-educated and genteel. Orphaned early, he was raised by the politically influential Ewing family, who provided him with valuable connections well into his adult life. His younger brother, John, also benefited from the Ewings’ support, rising to become a U.S. senator and, years later, giving his name to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Early on, William was recognized as intellectually gifted. Entering West Point in 1836, he studied there with men he would face, or serve with, on the battlefield, including Halleck, Joseph Hooker and Pierre G.T. Beauregard. As a cadet, he was known for his loquacity, wit and cleverness, qualities he displayed throughout his life.
Mr. Reid illuminates Sherman’s prewar years, particularly his encounters with vigilante violence in San Francisco, where he briefly worked as a bank executive in the 1850s. The experience, Mr. Reid says, fostered in Sherman a lasting suspicion of undisciplined populism. But the author focuses on Sherman in the Civil War years, from his time as a nerve-racked brigadier thrust too soon into high command after the 1861 Battle of Bull Run, through his service as a subordinate to Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War’s western theater, to his command and coordination of three armies during the Atlanta campaign of 1864, culminating in the March to the Sea and the march north through the Carolinas in early 1865.
Mr. Reid’s prose is studied and precise but also, happily, free of academic jargon. Readers who are not overly interested in the exact disposition of brigades, divisions and corps may be tempted to skip a few sections, though a close reading accompanied by the book’s maps will reward those who may have puzzled, say, over just where Sherman was stuck in those swamps outside Vicksburg. Regrettably, Mr. Reid doesn’t offer many vivid descriptions of battle and gives almost no attention to the experience of ordinary soldiers. For such matters, one might turn to more dramatic but less scholarly works, such as Lee Kennett’s “Marching Through Georgia” (1995) or Steven E. Woodworth’s “Nothing but Victory” (2005). Sherman was himself a talented writer: His memoirs are sometimes dense, but they are rich with detail and available in a Library of America edition, while “The Sherman Letters,” a fascinating compilation of his correspondence with his brother, provides a window into the thinking of both men about wartime strategy, race and slavery, and Washington politics.
Mr. Reid’s real interest lies not in the blood-and-guts experience of war but in the nature of command. Sherman, Mr. Reid says, “outthought as well as outmaneuvered his Confederate opponents,” as he did, for instance, during a critical phrase of the Atlanta campaign, when he wrestled with and brilliantly solved a problem that has perplexed all successful commanders: “how to prevent the escape of an enemy that might seek refuge in another position as formidable as the one previously vacated.” In contrast to hyper-cautious generals such as George McClellan, Sherman placed his boldest commanders in the vanguard of his army and courted battle even with only a part of his forces, confident that he could reinforce them quickly, as he routinely did. The campaign was a triumph of surprise that repeatedly overmastered his Confederate opponents across a mountainous, densely wooded, ill-mapped landscape. The campaign climaxed with the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, an event that sealed the fate of the Confederacy and ensured the re-election of Abraham Lincoln, who only weeks before had expected to go down to defeat in that year’s presidential election.
The five-week March to the Sea that ended in Savannah, Ga., just before Christmas was another tour de force. Success was virtually assured when the Confederates sent their main western army into Tennessee and met defeat at Nashville, leaving the heartland of Georgia open to Sherman’s 60,000 men. Southern newspapers announced that Sherman had retreated in chaos when in fact he had conducted the march without having to fight a significant battle and with slight loss of life on each side. Railroads, armories and the property of many plantation owners—whom Sherman blamed for starting the war—were systematically destroyed, but the reality was far from the “scorched earth” that Confederate apologists claimed. Sherman set out to make the South suffer, but “the means he sought to create such conditions,” Mr. Reid says, “were altogether more subtle, based increasingly on the demonstration of superior military force rather than on its naked and brutal application.”
The psychological effect of the march was even more important than its strategic achievements, Mr. Reid notes. Sherman “was correct in divining that the solution to winning lay in breaking Southern resistance” and its will to fight on. “His method, then, was to grasp war’s true nature rather than to play at it.” Faced at one point with how to respond to the murder of captured federal soldiers by Confederate forces, some with their throats cut and heads smashed in, Sherman publicized his willingness to execute the same number of Confederate prisoners. None were executed, but the murders instantly stopped. Sherman wanted the people of the South to realize that, as he said, “they shall not dictate the laws of war or peace to us.”
The destruction of South Carolina’s capital city is probably the most frequently offered “proof” of Sherman’s alleged barbarism. The diarist Mary Chesnut described the event as an orgy of “fire and sword and rapine and plunder.” But Mr. Reid, who doesn’t hesitate to criticize Sherman when there is reason, observes that the “Burning of Columbia,” as it is called, was really a misnomer for a series of fires set by different parties—including departing Southern forces. It was not a premeditated act, though Sherman shed no tears for what happened. Although some soldiers participated in looting, many eyewitnesses saw federal troops protecting private houses and fighting the flames. Only a handful of civilians and soldiers died. The significance of Columbia’s partial destruction, Mr. Reid says, lay in its shock to previously complacent South Carolinians.
To his assessments of Sherman’s policies, Mr. Reid brings a useful European perspective, describing military campaigns on the continent that had served as models for Sherman’s generation of military leaders. He asserts, for example, that both the physical destruction and the suffering of civilians in Georgia and the Carolinas was “comparatively mild” when set next to the horrors of the French Revolutionary Wars. By comparison with what the Belgians experienced at the hands of the French in 1795, “the citizens of South Carolina got off lightly.” He notes that the burning of Moscow in 1812, during Napoleon’s occupation, resulted in 12,000 deaths and the destruction of many thousands of private homes, an outsize toll when posed against the damage done at Columbia. Mr. Reid doesn’t suggest that Sherman’s war-making was exceptionally restrained but rather that it was well within the laws of war as they were understood at that time.
Mr. Reid’s portrait of Sherman beyond the battlefield is textured and sensitive, with attention paid to his fluctuating moods, including bouts of depression and intense anxiety. In the 1870s and 1880s, he was mentioned as a prospective political candidate, but like more than a few military men before and after, he found the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics distasteful. He also despised newspaper reporters, whose stories in that freewheeling era not infrequently divulged information about troop movements; he once threatened to execute a reporter from the New York Herald as a spy.
Mr. Reid forthrightly acknowledges Sherman’s prejudices. Unlike his more liberal brother, he was a racist who frequently disparaged African-Americans in rude language. Before the war, he didn’t oppose slavery and never had any use for abolitionists. In contrast to other commanders, including Grant, he refused to accept black troops in his armies. Nonetheless, in the course of his marches he probably liberated more slaves than any other federal general. In religion, on the other hand, he was more open-minded than his contemporaries. Though personally a hard-shelled agnostic, if not an atheist, he was remarkably tolerant of Catholicism, the religion of his wife.
Sherman was, in the end, a paradoxical figure. Despite his racism, after his capture of Savannah and Charleston he ordered the distribution of land to former slaves, a radical measure that set the pattern for later (though never completed) land reforms championed by the postwar Freedmen’s Bureau. In Mr. Reid’s words, “he was a conservative figure, yet he sought to . . . break the bonds of a cohesive white society that he had in many respects admired.” His most lasting influence may have come in the 1870s, during his tenure as commander of the Army under President Grant, when, as Mr. Reid neatly puts it, he enlarged the U.S. Army’s “ ‘brain’ and capacity to expand itself in time for the next war and avoid the confusion, muddle, and waste he had witnessed in 1861-1862.” In this fine rendering of a bold and complicated life, Mr. Reid has, in short, given us a remarkable man whose name has long been a household word but whom we may never have really known before.
—Mr. Bordewich’s most recent book is “Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America.”
‘The Scourge of War’ Review: A Long March Into Myth
Sherman was an erudite, complicated man, far from the monster created by Southern apologists after the Civil War.
By Fergus M. Bordewich / Wall Street Journal
Updated May 29, 2020
William Tecumseh Sherman is mostly, if unjustly, remembered as a vandal, if not a war criminal, for the supposed “atrocities” committed wholesale by his army during his 1864 March to the Sea. Period photographs of him lend a seeming veracity to such assumptions, showing a bristly-bearded, gimlet-eyed soldier with tight lips and a set jaw.
There is no question that Sherman was a man of great determination who projected the image of a tough-minded soldier. But the basic elements of this fearsome persona were crafted well after the Civil War by Southern apologists who portrayed him as a sort of “devilish anti-Christ, complementing the Christlike Robert E. Lee,” as Brian Holden Reid puts it in “The Scourge of War,” his magisterial biography. Such dark characterizations of Sherman were burnished anew in the 20th century by writers such as James Reston Jr., who saw in Sherman’s campaigns the incipient pattern for modern “total war,” including the ravaging of Vietnam.
Writing with impressive scholarship and an intimate grasp of Civil War tactics and strategy, Mr. Reid, who teaches history at King’s College London, explodes these persistent fictions and delivers a subtle portrait of one of the most sophisticated military men in U.S. history. In addition to possessing a strategic mind of the first order, Sherman was a multilingual, widely read intellectual with a warmly gregarious personality and a lifelong taste for the arts. Perhaps no other senior officer, Union or Confederate, matched his erudition, with the possible exception of his longtime but lusterless friend Henry W. Halleck. Had Sherman not become a soldier, he might have spent his life as a professor. He was, writes Mr. Reid, “a natural teacher,” who was probably happiest when he served as a college president in Louisiana before the war.
Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820, when the state was just emerging from the rough-cut lifeways of the frontier. His family, descended from New England churchmen and lawyers, though not affluent, was well-educated and genteel. Orphaned early, he was raised by the politically influential Ewing family, who provided him with valuable connections well into his adult life. His younger brother, John, also benefited from the Ewings’ support, rising to become a U.S. senator and, years later, giving his name to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Early on, William was recognized as intellectually gifted. Entering West Point in 1836, he studied there with men he would face, or serve with, on the battlefield, including Halleck, Joseph Hooker and Pierre G.T. Beauregard. As a cadet, he was known for his loquacity, wit and cleverness, qualities he displayed throughout his life.
Mr. Reid illuminates Sherman’s prewar years, particularly his encounters with vigilante violence in San Francisco, where he briefly worked as a bank executive in the 1850s. The experience, Mr. Reid says, fostered in Sherman a lasting suspicion of undisciplined populism. But the author focuses on Sherman in the Civil War years, from his time as a nerve-racked brigadier thrust too soon into high command after the 1861 Battle of Bull Run, through his service as a subordinate to Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War’s western theater, to his command and coordination of three armies during the Atlanta campaign of 1864, culminating in the March to the Sea and the march north through the Carolinas in early 1865.
Mr. Reid’s prose is studied and precise but also, happily, free of academic jargon. Readers who are not overly interested in the exact disposition of brigades, divisions and corps may be tempted to skip a few sections, though a close reading accompanied by the book’s maps will reward those who may have puzzled, say, over just where Sherman was stuck in those swamps outside Vicksburg. Regrettably, Mr. Reid doesn’t offer many vivid descriptions of battle and gives almost no attention to the experience of ordinary soldiers. For such matters, one might turn to more dramatic but less scholarly works, such as Lee Kennett’s “Marching Through Georgia” (1995) or Steven E. Woodworth’s “Nothing but Victory” (2005). Sherman was himself a talented writer: His memoirs are sometimes dense, but they are rich with detail and available in a Library of America edition, while “The Sherman Letters,” a fascinating compilation of his correspondence with his brother, provides a window into the thinking of both men about wartime strategy, race and slavery, and Washington politics.
Mr. Reid’s real interest lies not in the blood-and-guts experience of war but in the nature of command. Sherman, Mr. Reid says, “outthought as well as outmaneuvered his Confederate opponents,” as he did, for instance, during a critical phrase of the Atlanta campaign, when he wrestled with and brilliantly solved a problem that has perplexed all successful commanders: “how to prevent the escape of an enemy that might seek refuge in another position as formidable as the one previously vacated.” In contrast to hyper-cautious generals such as George McClellan, Sherman placed his boldest commanders in the vanguard of his army and courted battle even with only a part of his forces, confident that he could reinforce them quickly, as he routinely did. The campaign was a triumph of surprise that repeatedly overmastered his Confederate opponents across a mountainous, densely wooded, ill-mapped landscape. The campaign climaxed with the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, an event that sealed the fate of the Confederacy and ensured the re-election of Abraham Lincoln, who only weeks before had expected to go down to defeat in that year’s presidential election.
The five-week March to the Sea that ended in Savannah, Ga., just before Christmas was another tour de force. Success was virtually assured when the Confederates sent their main western army into Tennessee and met defeat at Nashville, leaving the heartland of Georgia open to Sherman’s 60,000 men. Southern newspapers announced that Sherman had retreated in chaos when in fact he had conducted the march without having to fight a significant battle and with slight loss of life on each side. Railroads, armories and the property of many plantation owners—whom Sherman blamed for starting the war—were systematically destroyed, but the reality was far from the “scorched earth” that Confederate apologists claimed. Sherman set out to make the South suffer, but “the means he sought to create such conditions,” Mr. Reid says, “were altogether more subtle, based increasingly on the demonstration of superior military force rather than on its naked and brutal application.”
The psychological effect of the march was even more important than its strategic achievements, Mr. Reid notes. Sherman “was correct in divining that the solution to winning lay in breaking Southern resistance” and its will to fight on. “His method, then, was to grasp war’s true nature rather than to play at it.” Faced at one point with how to respond to the murder of captured federal soldiers by Confederate forces, some with their throats cut and heads smashed in, Sherman publicized his willingness to execute the same number of Confederate prisoners. None were executed, but the murders instantly stopped. Sherman wanted the people of the South to realize that, as he said, “they shall not dictate the laws of war or peace to us.”
The destruction of South Carolina’s capital city is probably the most frequently offered “proof” of Sherman’s alleged barbarism. The diarist Mary Chesnut described the event as an orgy of “fire and sword and rapine and plunder.” But Mr. Reid, who doesn’t hesitate to criticize Sherman when there is reason, observes that the “Burning of Columbia,” as it is called, was really a misnomer for a series of fires set by different parties—including departing Southern forces. It was not a premeditated act, though Sherman shed no tears for what happened. Although some soldiers participated in looting, many eyewitnesses saw federal troops protecting private houses and fighting the flames. Only a handful of civilians and soldiers died. The significance of Columbia’s partial destruction, Mr. Reid says, lay in its shock to previously complacent South Carolinians.
To his assessments of Sherman’s policies, Mr. Reid brings a useful European perspective, describing military campaigns on the continent that had served as models for Sherman’s generation of military leaders. He asserts, for example, that both the physical destruction and the suffering of civilians in Georgia and the Carolinas was “comparatively mild” when set next to the horrors of the French Revolutionary Wars. By comparison with what the Belgians experienced at the hands of the French in 1795, “the citizens of South Carolina got off lightly.” He notes that the burning of Moscow in 1812, during Napoleon’s occupation, resulted in 12,000 deaths and the destruction of many thousands of private homes, an outsize toll when posed against the damage done at Columbia. Mr. Reid doesn’t suggest that Sherman’s war-making was exceptionally restrained but rather that it was well within the laws of war as they were understood at that time.
Mr. Reid’s portrait of Sherman beyond the battlefield is textured and sensitive, with attention paid to his fluctuating moods, including bouts of depression and intense anxiety. In the 1870s and 1880s, he was mentioned as a prospective political candidate, but like more than a few military men before and after, he found the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics distasteful. He also despised newspaper reporters, whose stories in that freewheeling era not infrequently divulged information about troop movements; he once threatened to execute a reporter from the New York Herald as a spy.
Mr. Reid forthrightly acknowledges Sherman’s prejudices. Unlike his more liberal brother, he was a racist who frequently disparaged African-Americans in rude language. Before the war, he didn’t oppose slavery and never had any use for abolitionists. In contrast to other commanders, including Grant, he refused to accept black troops in his armies. Nonetheless, in the course of his marches he probably liberated more slaves than any other federal general. In religion, on the other hand, he was more open-minded than his contemporaries. Though personally a hard-shelled agnostic, if not an atheist, he was remarkably tolerant of Catholicism, the religion of his wife.
Sherman was, in the end, a paradoxical figure. Despite his racism, after his capture of Savannah and Charleston he ordered the distribution of land to former slaves, a radical measure that set the pattern for later (though never completed) land reforms championed by the postwar Freedmen’s Bureau. In Mr. Reid’s words, “he was a conservative figure, yet he sought to . . . break the bonds of a cohesive white society that he had in many respects admired.” His most lasting influence may have come in the 1870s, during his tenure as commander of the Army under President Grant, when, as Mr. Reid neatly puts it, he enlarged the U.S. Army’s “ ‘brain’ and capacity to expand itself in time for the next war and avoid the confusion, muddle, and waste he had witnessed in 1861-1862.” In this fine rendering of a bold and complicated life, Mr. Reid has, in short, given us a remarkable man whose name has long been a household word but whom we may never have really known before.
—Mr. Bordewich’s most recent book is “Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America.”