General William Tecumseh Sherman

 

Bill Sherman reflects upon the Ukraine.

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was born on this day in 1820. Alongside President Abraham Lincoln and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Sherman was one of the three most significant players in insuring Union victory during the American Civil War. Demonized by some, his “total war” approach was motivated by a desire to bring the war to a rapid and decisive end, believing “the more awful you can make war the sooner it will be over.”

Sherman was born in frontier Ohio to a family descended from New England pastors and lawyers. Orphaned as a boy, he was raised by the politically influential Thomas Ewing family. His wedding at Blair House in Washington D.C. was attended by President Zachary Taylor and his entire cabinet. Wall Street Journal reporter, Fergus Bordewich, described him as “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.”

William T. Sherman died in New York on February 14, 1891, at age 71. Former foe, Joseph E. Johnston, served as a pallbearer. Johnston refused to wear a hat as a sign of respect, and he caught a cold which developed into pneumonia. He died a few weeks later.