Prevaricating through Georgia: Sherman's Memoirs as a Source on the Atlanta Campaign

Prevaricating through Georgia: Sherman's Memoirs as a Source on the Atlanta Campaign Albert Castel It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of The Personal Memoirs of W. T Sherman, Written by Himselfon both popular and professional conceptions of the Civil War.' Ever since their publication in 1875 many thousands of people have read them and numerous historians have made heavy use of them in writing about what has been well-called "the American Iliad." That this is so is understandable. Sherman played a major, and eventually the leading, role in some of the Civil War's most dramatic and decisive events. In his Memoirs he often presents significant information about these events that can be found in no other source. Not least of all, he writes in a manner that is attractive to the general reader and furnishes the historian with an abundance ofquotable passages and colorful anecdotes with which to enliven his own pages. But if Sherman's Memoirs are a highly influential source on the Civil War, are they also highly dependable one? No! thundered Henry Van Ness Boynton , Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette and a brevet brigadier general of the Union army, in a book that appeared soon after the publication of the Memoirs and which was entitled Sherman's Historical Raid. "Judged by the historical records," Boynton charged, "the verdict must be that the work is intensely egotistical, unreliable, and cruelly unjust," an accusation he sought to support by presenting documents contradicting Sherman's account of various key episodes in his wartime career. Sherman contended, and probably believed, that Boynton was hired to write his critique of the Memoirs by Secretary of War William W. Belknap and Grant's ' Written in 1873-74, the Memoirs were published in two volumes in 1875 by D. Appleton and Company ofNew York. In 1886 the same company published, also in two volumes, a revised and expanded edition of the Memoirs with appendixes containing correspondence engendered by the 1875 edition. AU citations in these notes refer to the 1886 edition unless otherwise indicated. Civil War History, Vol. XL, No. 1, © 1994 by The Kent State University Press PREVARICATING THROUGH GEORGIA49 personal secretary, Orville Babcock, both of whom soon found it necessary to resign from their offices because of corruption. Whether or not Boynton in fact was employed by Belknap and Babcock is beyond the purview of this article. It also is irrelevant; even a hired pen prefers facts to falsehoods as ammunition. It is worth noting, however, that Boynton was a college professor before the Civil War, that during it he became lieutenant colonel of the 35th Ohio, that he received a Congressional Medal of Honor for his conduct at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, that he was breveted brigadier general for his performances at Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge, and that from 1897 to 1905 he was chairman of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park Commission. This is scarcely the background and record of a man who could, to quote what Sherman said about him in an 1880 newspaper interview , be hired "to do anything for money. Why, for a thousand dollars he would slander his own mother."2 Fifty-four years later the same question was asked about the Memoirs by Maj. Basil H. Liddell Hart, the famous British military historian and theoretician , in his Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American. His answer, in stark contrast to Boynton's, was a resounding Yes! Although Sherman, he conceded, was guilty of "occasional careless slips," the "general impression conveyed by the memoirs coincides closely with that obtained by an analysis of the records, and the only important ommissions are some of his own achievements . . . . The faults of his memoirs are of detail, not of vain glory or bias."3 Which ofthese diametrically opposed opinions is correct, or at least comes closest to so being? The only way to find out is to do what Boynton and Liddell Hart claimed that they did: compare Sherman's versions of events with the "records"—to be specific, the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies—and other pertinent primary sources. Since doing this thoroughly for all of the nearly six hundred...