New book on Gen. Sherman focuses
on his personality, not battles
By Joe Kirby
Editorial page editor
Marietta Daily Journal
Reprinted with permission

(Editor's Note: Today's commentary first appeared in the Marietta Daily Journal, Marietta, Ga., and is published here with their permission.)

Aug. 31, 2001 - - William Tecumseh Sherman was not a very nice guy. Fascinating, yes. But not much fun to be around or to serve under - and certainly not someone you'd want as an enemy. At least, that's the picture painted by retired University of Georgia professor Dr. Lee Kennett in his just-published biography of the general, "Sherman, A Soldier's Life" (HarperCollins Publishers)..

Sherman had to overcome rumors early in the war that he was crazy, and in fact, hailed from a family in which mental illness was common. Later biographers have sometimes suggested he suffered from bipolar disorder, i.e., manic depression. But Kennett concluded - after running much of his research past a psychologist - that the general suffered (as did World War II Gen. Douglas MacArthur) from a narcissistic personality.

"Sherman's staff was made up primarily of 'Yes' men," Kennett said in a recent interview. "He had no chief of staff and no second in command. And if something was to happen to him, well, he just didn't foresee that eventuality."

Other clues? He had an infinite capacity for justifying what he did, rarely taking blame for his mistakes, his biographer said. By the time of the Atlanta Campaign in 1864, he was supremely confident.

"By then, he thinks his men will march to certain death if he orders it," Kennett said. "He sees himself as an extraordinary leader. This is a part of a psychological picture, the vaulting confidence, that absolute surety of self, and it helps explain his conduct."

Later, he even managed to rationalize his destruction of Atlanta. "In the post-war period, he actually said he regarded himself as one of the benefactors of Atlanta, that he had given national publicity to a place that few people had ever heard of before the war and in addition cleared a lot of space for new buildings," Kennett said.

Sherman wrote his wife after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, in which thousands of his men were killed or wounded in a forlorn, head-on charge against dug-in Confederates, that he had begun to regard the "death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash, and it may be well that we become so hardened."

I had suspected that Sherman was being ironic when he wrote that. Not so, Kennett said.

"I don't think he ever threw men's lives away, with the possible exception of Kennesaw Mountain," Kennett said. "He insisted even on his deathbed that that battle was winnable, if only the men had made a little more effort. But that it was an error in judgment on his part, he would never accept."

Those looking for an in-depth examination of Sherman's generalship won't find it in Kennett's book. He devotes just two paragraphs to the Battle of Resaca, for example, just two pages to the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and wraps up the entire Atlanta Campaign in just 19 pages. Kennett's explanation is that he wanted to focus on Sherman the man, not Sherman the general. The later topic likely will be the subject of a second book, he said.

Sherman's father-in-law and brother were powerful politicians who "saved his bacon" several times during war, and he was more than willing to have them pull strings on his behalf.

Yet despite the post-war adulation and political opportunities that came his way, he rigorously refused to run for office. The general - who probably coined as many phrases as anyone in U.S. history, famously blustered: "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve." And if Kennett's book is any indication, it was a good thing for us that he didn't.

"He had an absolute block on understanding the functions of civil government and the limitations on the power of the presidency. He just didn't get it," Kennett said.

The reader is left with a picture of Sherman as a brilliant, complex and at times unsavory man capable of contradicting himself at the drop of a hat. For an example of the latter, Kennett cites a little-known incident in August 1864 when another general asked to "borrow" any surplus horses in Sherman's army. Sherman rebuffed the request, saying that he had loaned the horses out to nearby Georgia farmers to help them get their crops in. Yet just weeks later, his army was burning and pillaging its way toward Savannah.

And according to Kennett, that's the kind of juxtaposition that helps explain why, of the Civil War's many well-known personalities, Sherman was one of the few who remain both famous and infamous.

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