Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order

Chapter 1: Unstable Beginnings

CHAPTER 1 UNSTABLE BEGINNINGS THE HUGE MAN WALKED the one hundred yards down the Main Street hill to the house of his newly widowed neighbor. He would take one of her sons, he said, "the brightest of the lot," promising to "make a man of him." Mary Sherman pointed to Cump, her nine-year-old redhead. She had no choice. She had to give him up as she had given up most ofher other children to other sympathetic relatives and friends. Thomas Ewing took the young boy's hand as they went up the hill to his house, and from that point on, he treated him like one of his own. Mary Sherman could only watch it all in helpless yet thankful silence.l Such tragedy seemed impossible for the Charles R. Shermans of Lancaster, Ohio. For hundreds of years before, the family had been leaders, not wards.2 They had founded towns; they were lawyers and judges; they sat in the legislature and served in the militia. Daniel Sherman, just one example, sat in the Connecticut General Assembly for thirty years and was a driving force in the American Revolution in his community, meeting both George Washington and the marquis de Lafayette in the process. Later generations produced a founding father, Roger Sherman, and nineteenth-century politicians William M. Evarts, George F. Hoar, and Chauncey Depew.3 Taylor Sherman, Cump's grandfather, was a lawyer, a judge, and a federal district internal revenue collector. Born in 1758, he later married Elizabeth (Betsey) Stoddard, the daughter of Anthony Stoddard, a Harvard-educated Puritan divine, lawyer, physician , and renowned Indian fighter. Taylor and Betsey's three 1 SHERMAN --------------------------*-------------------------children all migrated to Ohio--Daniel to become a farmer, Betsey to marry a judge, and Charles to become William Tecumseh's father--as a result of the American Revolution. The British and their Tory allies had burned down the homes of many patriots in Connecticut, prompting the state to set aside land in its "Western Reserve" in Ohio to compensate these war casualties. Taylor Sherman became a commissioner for this so-called FireLands District. He visited the region in 1805 and helped negotiate a treaty to remove the Indians from the area. At that time he purchased the property that later served as the major part of his legacy. This land was the magnet that drew his son, Charles, to Ohio. Charles R. Sherman was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1788.4 He learned Latin, Greek, and French in an excellent local school, attended Dartmouth College, and studied law in his father's office. As a youth, he had developed a reputation of being a "wild boy," usually receiving blame for any local prank. In 1810, at the age of twenty-two, he was admitted to the bar, and soon after he married Mary Hoyt, a graduate of a female seminary in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the daughter of a family of successful Norwalk merchants. Charles and Mary Sherman decided to move West soon after their marriage. Charles went to Ohio alone, hoping to settle on his father's Fire-Lands property, but fierce fighting with Indians caused him to go farther south and settle in Lancaster instead, where he worked hard to establish a law practice. In 1811 he returned East for his wife and first son. The trip took twenty-one days on horseback, with the baby, Charles Taylor Sherman, later an Ohio judge, carried on the front of his parents' saddles.5 Lancaster was already impressive enough for one visitor to call it "a handsome little town."6 Located on the Hocking River in southeastern Ohio, it opened to extensive white settlement only after the 1795 Treaty of Grenville forced the Wyandot Indians north. During 1796-1797, Ebenezer Zane constructed his famous road between Wheeling, Virginia, and Maysville, Kentucky, making the region accessible to white settlers. In payment, Zane received grants of 640 acres at several potential town sites along his route. In 1800 his sons laid out one of these sites, calling it New Lancaster. Zane offered free lots to a blacksmith, a carpenter , and a tanner and donated four lots for public building. Within 2 UNSTABLE BEGINNINGS --------------------------*-------------------------a month, Fairfield County was organized with New Lancaster as its county seat. Thanks to Zane's promotion, the town grew steadily. In 1805 its name was shortened to Lancaster, and, by 1818, it had a population of...