Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order, and: Sherman: Merchant of Terror, Advocate of Peace (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Sherman: A Soldier's Passionfor Order. By John F. Marszalek. (New York: The Free Press, 1993. Pp. xvi, 635. $29.95.) Sherman: Merchant ofTerror, Advocate ofPeace. By Charles Edmund Vetter. (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 1992. Pp. 347. $25.00.) Since his death just over a century ago, William T. Sherman has dodged biographers ' efforts to recover his life. To be sure, there have been several biographies , most notably Lloyd Lewis's Sherman: Fighting Prophet (1932), but one comes away from these studies less than satisfied that they have captured the real Sherman. Rather, the portrait that emerges from these studies is more a Rorschach test of the author's own prejudices—from the blunt, pragmatic Westerner masterfully crafted by Lewis to the guilt-ridden arsonist presented in James Reston, Jr.'s Sherman's March and Vietnam (1984)—than ajudicious understanding ofthe man who made war hell. Recently, historians have returned once more to Sherman: Charles Royster and Albert Castel have offered thoughtful evaluations, and several scholars are engaged in preparing biographies or studies. The first of these to appear are John F. Marszalek's full-scale biography and Charles Edmund Vetter's somewhat eclectic study of Sherman's generalship. In an impressively researched work, Marszalek offers us what to date must now stand as the best biography of Sherman. He argues that Sherman's desire for order and independence is far more influential than these common desires normally are in one's life. These themes shaped his attitude toward matters public and private, especially his family relationships, although occasionally Marszalek's emphasis risks making Sherman two-dimensional. Surely Sherman 's view of American society was grounded in his insistence on order. As Marszalek shows, Sherman had very little use for many of the qualities of the very nation he fought to save. He hated politicians (although, as Marszalek acutely notes, he was quite free with his own political opinions), representative government, public opinion (as when he grumbled, "vox populi, vox humbug"), and, of course, the press. Much like Sherman's life, Marszalek's story sags after the end of the war, but this portion of the book, topically organized, still contains much of interest about Sherman's changing relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, his interest in shaping the history ofthe war, and his troubled family life. BOOK REVIEWS337 Marszalek's work inevitably invites comparison to Lewis's biography. While one will never confuse the two as prose stylists, this is not necessarily to Marszalek's disadvantage, for he keeps the focus of his narrative squarely on Sherman, refraining from the Sandburgian detours Lewis took all too often . Unlike Lewis, Marszalek deplores Sherman's racism and demonstrates how it shaped his attitude toward the war. Both biographers emphasize Sherman 's obsession with order, and although at times it may seem as if Marszalek leans too heavily on that theme, anyone familiar with Sherman's correspondence will acknowledge that at times the general appeared fixated on order. One might stress a somewhat different aspect of Sherman's personality —his desire to control the world about him. Control meant order; disorder and anarchy resulted from a loss of control. In this Sherman differed from Grant, as he knew only too well when he admitted, "He doesn't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell." Of course Sherman also differed from Grant when it came to politics, although Marszalek exaggerates the degree to which the two men became estranged during Grant's presidency (Sherman became a fervent defender of Grant the man and the general, if not the president, in his last years) and the causes of that estrangement, which had to do as much with Reconstruction and Julia Dent Grant's efforts to force Sherman to keep her son Fred on his staff as with Sherman's dissatisfaction with his situation as general in chief. But these comments should not obscure Marszalek's real achievement in providing us with an integrated understanding of the man. In a somewhat discursive narrative, Charles Edmund Verter traces the development of Sherman's personality and character through 1861 , his evolving understanding of war...