Memoirs

Summary

Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864. The early chapters are unexpectedly picaresque. A young lieutenant arrives in Monterey by sea in 1847, watches the gold rush empty the army of its soldiers, and helps carry the first official reports of the discovery east. In the 1850s he returns to San Francisco as a banker, survives the panic of 1855 and the Vigilance Committee crisis, and quits finance in exhaustion, later failing again at law in Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1859 he takes charge of the new military seminary at Alexandria, Louisiana, and the chapter on Louisiana records his growing certainty that secession means a long and bloody war and his resignation when the state seizes the federal arsenal. The war chapters move from the brigade he led at Bull Run, where he watched a retreat happen without any order to retreat, to his command in Kentucky in the autumn of 1861. There his estimate that two hundred thousand men would be needed to clear the Mississippi valley was leaked, and newspapers declared him insane. He was relieved and sent home, and the memoir treats the episode in a tone of bruised self-defence. Shiloh restores him: surprised in camp on 6 April 1862 and wounded in the hand, he holds his division together, and he later writes that the battle gave him new life. The chapters on Memphis, Chickasaw Bayou and Arkansas Post show him as a military governor wrestling with guerrillas, cotton speculators, fugitive slaves and civilian complaints, while the Vicksburg chapter records his initial objections to Grant's plan and his loyalty once it succeeded. The book reprints long official letters, including the September 1863 letter to Halleck that sets out the logic of making war on the will of a hostile population. In the Chattanooga chapter his nine-year-old son Willie, visiting camp near Vicksburg, falls ill with typhoid on the river journey north and dies at Memphis; Sherman reproaches himself in a letter written at midnight. The volume closes with the Meridian expedition, a rehearsal for the destruction of railroads and stores that the second volume carries to Atlanta, Savannah and the Carolinas. Throughout, Sherman argues with critics, quotes his own dispatches at length, and makes supply, rail lines and river transport as vivid as battle.

Top Lessons

• A public label of insanity can outlast its evidence

  The Kentucky chapter shows a commander whose strategic estimate later proved roughly right being branded insane in print and removed. Sherman's anger decades later shows how a newspaper diagnosis wounds reputation, self-trust and career, and how recovery came through action rather than vindication.

• Logistics is the hidden plot of war

  Sherman narrates rivers, railroads, forage and hospital boats with as much care as combat. His war is a problem of moving and feeding men, and the Meridian raid shows that destroying an enemy's means of supply can matter more than defeating its army in battle.

• Assigning the costs of war to those who began it

  In letters from Memphis and to Halleck, Sherman argues that waste and destruction are chargeable to those who chose secession, and that war should be 'pure and simple' toward belligerents. The memoir lets readers watch a moral rationale for hard war being built before it was carried out in Georgia.

• Private grief inside a public command

  Willie's death is told in a few paragraphs and a midnight letter, then the narrative moves on to Chattanooga. The compression is itself the evidence: a father blames himself for bringing his family to a sickly river camp, yet writes that duty leaves no time to mourn.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Three threads matter for a medical reader. First, the Kentucky breakdown of late 1861: the press called Sherman insane, he was sent home on leave, and his family letters (outside this book) describe despair and thoughts of suicide. Biographers have read the episode variously as acute stress, a depressive episode or an exhausted man's realism caricatured by the press; these are interpretations, and the memoir itself offers only anger and documentation. Second, disease and military medicine: typhoid kills Willie, river camps are described as 'sickly', and the Shiloh chapters show regimental surgeons, field hospitals and the evacuation of sick men by steamboat. Third, the moral psychology of hard war, which links to modern discussions of the civilian costs of total war and of command stress.

• Vol. I, Ch. IX (Kentucky, autumn 1861)

  Cameron's memorandum, newspaper reports that Sherman was insane, his relief from command and his sense that his position was unbearable.

• Vol. I, Ch. IX (Bull Run report)

  Close-range fire breaks the brigade; wounded stream toward buildings used as hospitals and the retreat becomes a spontaneous rout.

• Vol. I, Ch. X (Pittsburg Landing, March–April 1862)

  Sick soldiers shipped to Savannah for want of any building for a hospital; Sherman's postscript rejects floating hospitals in favour of regimental surgeons; his Shiloh report praises surgeons who treated wounded of both armies.

• Vol. I, Ch. XI

  Sherman describes Shiloh as having given him new life after being cast down by the 'crazy' label, and counsels a demoralised Grant.

• Vol. I, Ch. XII (Memphis)

  Letters on regimental and general hospitals, the use of freed people as hospital attendants and nurses, and requisition of buildings for patients.

• Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)

  Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.