Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman (review)

248CIVIL WAR HISTORY (99) and elaborates on these qualities in him and on how they shaped his career. The book concludes with a chapter on Lee's postwar life. The overview of Lee in the first two-thirds of the book is probably the best available very short biography of the great Confederate leader. The evaluation is necessarily controversial. Many will disagree with some of the conclusions offered, but those who seek a better understanding of Lee should not neglect a careful reading of this short book, which provides a valuable counterweight to the writings of Lee's more strident critics. Steven E. Woodworth Toccoa Falls College Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman. By Michael Fellman. (New York: Random House, 1995. Pp. xiv, 486. $30.00.) Michael Fellman's Citizen Sherman, a tract for our times, is filled with revulsion for warfare and distaste for William Tecumseh Sherman and his era. As the title proclaims, this biography focuses on the man rather than the soldier, on his character rather than his military career. This famed Civil War commander, whose campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas has become proverbial, here receives attention for words more than deeds, for attitudes more than actions. Fellman assails the familiar "merchant of terror" who sliced through the Confederacy , but this is merely one count of a comprehensive indictment. The word "racism," which peppers the pages, appropriately receives a separate index entry with subheadings for blacks, Indians, and Mexicans. Does Sherman deserve this? Perhaps. Sherman is an American original, a virtually orphaned boy named for an Indian chief until a priest insisted that he be given a Christian name. A miserable childhood, Fellman argues, filled him with lifelong rage. An unobservant Christian (whom Fellman calls a deist), Sherman apparently concocted a pragmatic faith to suit his instincts before stumbling on a rock of piety, whom he married. Raised a Catholic and buried as a Catholic, Sherman maintained a lifelong grudge against the Church and railed when he lost a favorite son to the priesthood, blaming his wife Ellen's ardent faith for such a disaster. Sherman's strong and vigorous prejudices, frequently expressed with enormous skill, provide a biographer's feast. Raised in the same household, Cump and Ellen should have recognized some of the incompatibilities that turned their marriage into a battlefield. Fellman believes that Sherman' s postwar flirtatious correspondence with the attractive young sculptor Vinnie Ream concealed a full-blown affair, as did Sherman' s epistolary exchange with Mary Audenreid, widow of one of his staff officers. After reading the same letters in the Library of Congress, John Marszalek concluded otherwise in his 1993 Sherman biography. BOOK REVIEWS249 Why the difference? Perhaps because Fellman rarely discounts for Sherman's lifelong habit of overstatement and exaggeration. Georgians and Carolinians continue to measure Sherman by words more than deeds, remembering his warnings of devastation better than the conduct of his troops. Sherman clearly enjoyed expressing himself on paper. He disdained trite and mild opinions, frequently stretching toward the outrageous. Phrases once intended to amuse or annoy his wife or brother now constitute his legacy. Deftly drawing on an enormous body of extant letters, Fellman traces the frustrations of Sherman's life before the Civil War, his inability as peacetime soldier, San Francisco banker, Kansas lawyer, and Louisiana educator to make a mark or even a proper support for his family. Sherman was thrust into significant command in Kentucky early in the Civil War through the influence of his brother, Ohio senator John Sherman; Fellman argues convincingly that General Sherman succumbed to clinical depression. Given a second chance through family influence and the friendship of Gen. Henry W. Halleck, Sherman 's worst fears came true when Confederates unexpectedly attacked his unprepared division at Shiloh. Somehow, Sherman emerged far stronger, aware that he could survive errors and that Ulysses S. Grant, another exemplar of prewar failure, would sustain him. On that bloody field, Grant and Sherman forged a bond that enabled them to achieve Northern victory. Despite the racism that Fellman emphasizes, Sherman's belief in the importance of the Union channeled his aggressions during the remainder of the war. Dedicated to the triumph of Northern...