American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South

Patriotic Gore

Patriotic Gore h 1. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, the men with the exotic names who turned the Civil War decisively in the North’s favor, are sometimes credited with putting an end to the romance of war. The once popular Southern novelist John Esten Cooke lamented that in modern warfare as conducted by the Union forces, “where men are organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination.” One looks in vain among the Northern victors for the ›air and dash of the Confederate heroes—the wily guerrilla raider John Mosby, celebrated in a poem of Melville’s, or Jeb Stuart sporting an ostrich plume in his cap. The North, to be sure, was not without its distinguished martyrs . Colonel Robert Gould Shaw led his black troops in the doomed charge on Fort Wagner, giving Boston Brahmins a ‹t subject for their fantasies of leadership and martial heroism. Another Bostonian, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, led a black regiment to occupy Jacksonville, Florida, ordering that no houses be destroyed or plundered—“Sherman’s ‘bummers’ not having yet arrived,” Higginson noted proudly. When the town went up in ›ames anyway, Higginson insisted that it was the white reinforcements who had torched the wooden buildings and not his own well-mannered troops. Preparing for departure, he returned through the smoke-‹lled streets to the house where he had been billeted to pluck a tea rose for his lapel.1 224 The grim conditions of the ‹nal stages of the war put an end to such sentimental gestures, as Lincoln turned to the implacable generals who understood that victory was a matter of superior numbers and superior technology. Sherman knew well that he couldn’t compete with the young hotheads of the South according to their own methods. “War suits them,” he wrote, “and the rascals are brave, ‹ne riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense. . . . These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.” For Sherman, the romance of war lay neither in the battle‹eld bravura of the Confederate cavalry nor in the idealized antislavery causes espoused by Boston Brahmins, but rather in what he called “the grand and beautiful game of war.” It was a game for which he was well suited. The son of a lawyer with Connecticut roots who admired Tecumseh, the great chief of the Shawnees, Sherman had grown up in the frontier state of Ohio—“an untamed animal just caught in the far West,” he called himself—and attended West Point, from which he graduated in 1840. Sherman was never an abolitionist; he fervently opposed using black soldiers during the war as well as giving the vote to blacks. He felt at ease in the South, where he had taken part in mop-up operations against the Seminoles in Florida before serving in Mobile and Charleston, where he had friends among the leading families. When he taught at a military academy in Louisiana in 1860, he suggested to his wife back in Ohio that they might purchase slaves to run the household. She was appalled. Sherman’s view of the rebellious South was not ideological; in his view, the South needed to be disciplined for its ill-advised decision to secede from the Union. Like Grant’s, Sherman’s early service in the war was undistinguished , and he almost gave up the “beautiful game” after some setbacks along the Mississippi, when he was much maligned in the newspapers for overestimating Confederate troop strength in Kentucky, for his harsh treatment of civilian supporters of the Confederacy in Memphis, and for what Edmund Wilson called “a certain insouciance in his efforts to protect property.”2 Relieved of his command in late 1861, sullen and suicidal, Sherman developed a lifelong hatred of the press. Many, including his wife, 225 feared that he was insane. When he returned to the battle‹eld, as Grant’s main lieutenant, he was openly determined to pursue the game of war according to his own convictions. What secured Sherman’s fame was the great campaign beginning in the spring of 1864, when he crisscrossed the state of Georgia , ‹rst taking Atlanta, then marching to Savannah—the “March to the Sea”—then back up the coast through the Carolinas to Raleigh and ‹nal victory. Throughout this campaign, Sherman, affectionately called “Uncle Billy” by his troops, showed a zeal...