Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order

Chapter 6: Contented Southern Schoolmaster

CHAPTER 6 CONTENTED SOUTHERN SCHOOLMASTER As SHERMAN ENTERED still another new beginning, he felt less optimistic than he would have wished. He yearned for a return to the army; a Louisiana quasi-military position was a weak substitute . Louisiana was far from Ohio, so he knew that Ellen and the Ewings would always reject it for that reason alone. Looming over all was the slavery controversy, threatening to tear the nation apart and force him to make a fateful choice. Sherman believed that slavery was necessary for societal order, but he also believed the Union served the same function. Family, army, slavery, and Union tore at him from all sides. His task in Louisiana was to discover how he might reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable matters and find personal order. Now that he had made up his mind to accept the superintendency of the new Louisiana military school, Sherman began looking for advice on how best to organize it. His former West Point superintendent, Richard Delafield, sent him books and papers. Don Carlos Buell penned a long letter of suggestion, as did railroad executive George B. McClellan. Sherman visited a military school in Frankfort, Kentucky, and he wrote the head of the Virginia Military Institute. He tried to prevent an unfriendly reception in Louisiana by asking his brother, John, a rising star in the recently formed Republican party, to be careful what he said about slavery. His new job in the South would be tough enough without the added burden of being identified with an outspoken "black Republican" brother. I Deep down, Cump knew John would do the right thing, but he was not so sure about his wife and her family. When he left 123 SHERMAN --------------------------*-------------------------Ellen in mid-October 1859, her letters urged him to return for fear of yellow fever. Ellen and the Ewings no longer insisted that he manage the salt wells and coal mines; they now wanted him to go into banking in England. Leave Louisiana and go to England was to be their constant refrain for the next four months.2 Sherman again ignored their appeals. He told Ellen that if his health held and if abolitionists did not cause him to be driven from the South, he would make his career in Louisiana. He had heard that southern military schools were anti-Union, but he was willing to see for himself. "If they [Southerners] deign to protect themselves against negroes, or abolitionists, I will help; if they propose to leave the Union on account of a supposed fact that the northern people are all abolitionists like Uoshua] Giddings and Uohn] Brown, then I will stand by Ohio and the North West."3 Arriving in Louisiana, Sherman boarded a stagecoach in Baton Rouge and rode through a moonlit night toward Rapides Parish, where Alexandria, with its sixteen hundred people, was the parish seat. The heavily pined area was in the approximate center of the state, some three hundred miles by the Red and Mississippi rivers from New Orleans. Large plantations surrounded the town. Thomas O. Moore, the newly elected governor, lived nearby, as did G. Mason Graham, the half-brother of Sherman's former commander Richard Mason and chairman of the military seminary'S board of supervisors. Sherman was impressed with Graham, but he was not equally pleased with Alexandria, which he found to be not "much of a town." The seminary was even more isolated, located in the thick woods near Pineville, some three miles away.4 The seminary building, three years in construction, was an imposing structure. Sherman called it "a gorgeous palace, altogether too good for its purposes." It was three stories high and had five four-story towers in the gothic revival style of the day. It was located on top of a hill on a four hundred acre site with enormous pine trees surrounding it. The building contained seventy-two large rooms but no furniture of any kind. Sherman playfully wrote his daughter, Lizzie, about his "great Big Castle like those in which the Knights used to live" but where he would soon become an "old and cross" schoolmaster. He saw a challenge and seemed ready to get about meeting it. He planned to turn his "attention to [the] success of the [institution] before 124 CONTENTED SOUTHERN SCHOOLMASTER --------------------------*-------------------------I ... [turn] my thoughts to personal advantage," he told Thomas Ewing.5 On his first several days on the Graham...