Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order

Chapter 21: Safeguarding Historical Order

CHAPTER 21 SAFEGUARDING HISTORICAL ORDER SHERMAN LOOKED BACK to the Civil War as a time of glory that achieved the Union's preservation and his personal success. He had played a leading role in overwhelming the anarchy that had threatened to destroy the nation and his own future, and, in the process, he had become an internationally known celebrity. He thought this accomplishment was permanent, and in the technical sense it was because secession was destroyed as a legitimate political device. In another way, however, the Civil War never ended, and Sherman participated in the continuing battle for the rest of his life. He worked to ensure an accurate historical remembrance of the events of the 1860s, worried that if the Confederate view of the war as the Lost Cause prevailed, his success would be taken from him. The problem was that he proved incapable of the precision of language necessary for his selfappointed role. Personal feelings proved more compelling than the search for truth. He devoted a good portion of his life after the war to clarifying and securing his place in history. He was an impatient supporter of the government's publication of the Official Records of the Civil War, convinced that these volumes were the only genuine hope for an accurate account of that conflict. When former Confederate general John Bell Hood tried to sell his personal war papers, Sherman willingly helped, not only out of sympathy for Hood's financial problems but also because of his concern for the history the papers contained. He saw the need for a comprehensive, definitive study of the war and provided factual information and insight on the western war for Columbia University professorJohn W. Draper's three-volume history. He similarly offered advice, 460 SAFEGUARDING HISTORICAL ORDER --------------------------*-------------------------sometimes of the most detailed sort, to Adam Badeau for his book on U. S. Grant. He pushed his engineering officers to prepare the maps of his march to the sea for publication. He advised military thinkers, encouraged military officers to write books, and critiqued a host of publications that crossed his desk. He recommended the collection of oral histories to preserve the war as it was truly fought. I He knew that his own legacy was secure because of the Atlanta campaign and his 1865 restoration of civilian authority to the South. What worried him, he said, was the future's evaluation of the Union cause. If advocates of the Confederacy controlled the history books, they might distort the great Unionist achievement in preserving the nation. "The Great Lessons of our Civil War," he told the principal of the Harvard Grammar School, "are that each youth must be faithful to his whole country and not a part, that each must stand ready to do his manful part, that wars are as much a part of God's Providence as the Thunderstorm, and that War's legitimate object is more perfect peace." Consequently, he believed that Unionists should write the Civil War histories: "We the victors must stamp on all history that we were right and they wrong--that we beat them in Battle as well as in argument, and that we must give direction to future events."2 In pursuit of that aim, sometime in the early 1870s he decided to write his memoirs. No other Civil War general had done so yet, but Sherman's frustration with his bureaucratically constrained role as commanding general of the army encouraged him to look back to the Civil War, a more fulfilling time, and preserve his role for posterity. In mid-August 1874 he cryptically wrote John W. Draper that he had "written something not for publication but for his children and to help someone writing a history of the war." The Columbia University professor read the manuscript and urged its publication.3 Sherman thought about it some more and decided to seek a publisher. Living in St. Louis, away from Washington and most official duty, he opened negotiations with several companies and signed a contract with an eastern firm. He told a brother-in-law, "I have just done a thing that I may regret all my life, committed to the Appletons of New York the manuscript of two volumes mostly on the Civil War that may bring me some profit but more controversy." The three-year contract called for Sherman to pay 461 SHERMAN -------------*------------- $2,000 for the printing plates...