Sherman and Lee

NEIL SCHMITZ Sherman and Lee Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, A Life ofWilham Tecumseh SL·rman (New York: Random House, 1995)· Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee, A Biography (New York: Norton, 1995)· rant's dead and gone; Lee's petrified, silent; Sherman lives on. He flies helicopter gunships in Vietnam and loves the smell of napalm in the morning. He looks like Clint Eastwood. He looks like Bruce Willis. Inside Atlanta in 1864, ripping up tracks, smashing machinery, he says to General John Bell Hood, commander of the opposing Confederate Army, "Make my day." Sherman is Lincoln's repressed . He is what happens to civilian Geotgia, to civilian South Catolina , to the aristocratic planter, his big house, his monkey nigger, his piano. September 12, 1864, to the petitioning Mayor of Atlanta and the City Council, Sherman writes: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it, and those who brought war into our country deserve all the cutses and maledictions a people can pour out."1 Postbellum Shetman, crushing Indian resistance in the West, delivers this famous flip remark. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."2 He comes right into our categories : proto-fascist, genocidal racist, manic/depressive, espousing a totalitarian Unionist discourse. Michael Fellman's unforgiving Citizen Sherman is a stern postmodernist reading ofSherman. It doesn't do military assessment, isn't interested in battles. It is interested in the psychodynamics of Sherman's rage, "its applications and complex moral meanings."3 It is interested in Sherman's marriage, its long march. It specifies Sherman's Indian hatArizona Quarter!} Volume 52, Number 3, Autumn 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 610 128Neil Schmitz ing, his negrophobia, his anti-Semitism. Fellman's acerbic reading is a long way from B. H. Liddell Hart's admiring exculpatory SL·rman, SoIdier , Realist, American (1929), and still some distance from John Marszalek 's Sherman, A Soldier's Passionfor Order (1993), which extends the courtesies and explanations of the classical modernist reading, which still soldiers Sherman. Fellman's Citizen Sherman effectively strips Sherman ofhis stars, ofhis storied importance, ofhis military alibis. Leaving Atlanta, cutting his wire, abandoning his rail connection, Sherman, Fellman argues, silenced Conscience (Lincoln), got away from Caution (Grant), was free to operate on his own terms, to use terror. Was Sherman guilty of war crimes? James Reston, Jr.'s 1984 Sherman's March and Vietnam and Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Apocalypse Now! put Sherman down in the midst ofAmerican atrocity in Vietnam. Burning plantations, destroying the local agriculture, Shetman's junior officeis, Fellman shows us, agonized. Writing on the Indian problem in the postwar period, Sherman would actually use the tetm "final solution." Rage, the cold ideological kind Melville describes in "The Metaphysics of Indian Hating," Slotkinian Regeneration Through Violence Rage, is Sherman 's postmodernist caption. How might Otson Welles have shot Citizen Shermanl Wellesian touches ate all over Fellman's Citizen SL·rman. Chapter 1 is entitled "Rosebud: A Truncated Patrimony." Fellman's Sherman narrative often has the look and feel of Oison Welles' Citizen Kane (1939). As a child, Sherman lost his father, went to live as a dependent in the house of the baronial Thomas Ewing. He was in that odd oedipal structure, would marry Ewing's cherished daughter, Ellen. Early in the wat, unhappily in command at Louisville, feeling ignored by the War Department in Washington, D.C, wildly overestimating the Confederate forces opposing him, Sherman would suffer the humiliating scandal of an incapacitating nervous breakdown. Ellen Sherman, personally interceding with Lincoln, using Ewing family power with the press and in the government , would save Sherman's career, if not his life. Who might play Ellen Ewing Shetman opposite Eastwood's or Willis' Sherman in the movie version of Fellman's book? Fellman's elder Sherman lives a luxurious cosmopolitan life in New York, feasting, banqueting, frequenting showgirls. Here he meets and falls in love with the singer/sculptor, Vinnie Ream. He is in public life, a national figure, a celebrity. Fellman keeps Sherman's marriage constantly before us. Often separated, always Sherman and Lee129 contesting, the Shetmans battle through the years to the very end, legally separated, emotionally divorced...