Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman by Michael Fellman (review)

Book Revtetvs 185 Book Reviews Michael Fellman. Citizen Sherrnan: A Life al William Tecumseh Sherma11. New York: Random House, 1995. Pp. xiv+ 486. Some of the best scholarship in recent years about mid-nineteenth century America has focused on the intersection of public and private lives. Social and cultural historians, who had previously viewed the Civil War as merely an interruption of longer-term trends, began in the 1980s to see the war as integral to the continuing interaction of people and to established patterns of living. Civil War historians began investigating the war's impact on communities , institutions, ideology, and values, as well as the role of society and culture in shaping the war itself. Michael Fellman's study of William Tecumseh Sherman is an important addition to this body of work. Unlike many of the Civil War studies, which narrowly focus on the war years, Fellman's purpose is "to understand the origins and shaping, both personal and cultural, of this man; to set his profoundly important Civil War leadership in emotional as well as in social, intellectual, and ideological contexts; and to place his military activities in the far broader webs of the experience of a long life, one that was tumultuous for all his seventy-one years and not merely for the four years of the Civil War" (ix). In this purpose he has admirably succeeded. Fellman explains Sherman's adult behaviour and actions as resulting from his difficult formative years. Following the early death of his father, Sherman was raised in the home of Thomas Ewing, a prominent Ohio politician who programmed him for West Point. Sherman experienced feelings of abandonment and betrayal, entered into an intermittently stormy marriage to Ewing's daughter Ellen (who made continuing efforts to convert him to Roman Catholicism ), and spent peripatetic and unsuccessful years during the 1850s as a banker, lawyer, real estate speculator, and commodities broker. Fellman characterizes Sherman's response as one of rage and fury (although many readers would substitute frustration and anger), and periodic clinical depressions , most notably his breakdown in 1861, which resulted in his temporary removal from command of the Army of the Cumberland. Following his subsequent victory at Shiloh and in response to Confederate guerrilla 186 Canadian Review of Amettam Studies activities in Tennessee, Sherman began to externalize his rage-against the press, white Southerners, African Americans, and, later, against Native Americans and rival Union commanders. Fellman cites other cases of depression in the family, and implies a hereditary factor, although inherited urnpolar depression is quite rare. Sherman's mood swings from deep depression to intense sleepless elation may, in fact, suggest manic depression, which is commonly inherited. Crucial to the Union victory over the South, Fellman concludes, was Sherman's March to the Sea and into the Carolinas, when his aggression was aimed at the destruction of the South's physical capacity to wage war and of its will and morale. The analysis of his approach-avoidance feelings toward the Southern aristocracy is vivid and penetrating, from the greater devastation of South Carolina than Georgia or North Carolina at the nadir, to the extraordinarily mild terms of surrender he offered Joseph Johnston in 1865. His conclusion, however, that the taking of Atlanta by September 1864 "saved both the Republican Party and the Union war effort" (178) is incorrect. It is unlikely that McClellan would have won in November in any event because ninety percent of mid-nineteenth century voters remained steadfastly loyal to their party, and even if McClellan had won the 1864 presidential election Lincoln would have maintained military pressure for the remainder of his term. By March 1865, Sherman would have been well on his way to the sea, if not already there. Although this is not a military history, Fellman might have mentioned Sherman's enduring contribution to the concept of "total war," through B. H. Liddell Hart's "Strategy of Indirect Approach" to the concept of blitzkrieg. Citizen Sherman is also an important study in illustrating, in the Sherman family, many of the qualities Anne Rose has seen, in Victorian America aud the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, [1992] 1994), as typical of the mid-Victorian generation...