William Tecumseh Sherman: A reading list

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John Marszalek, William Tecumseh Sherman

William Tecumseh Sherman will be the topic of John Marszalek, the July speaker for the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable.

To help us prepare for John’s talk (you can find out more about it on our events page), I asked John to provide a reading list, and he kindly consented. Here is what he sent:

SHERMAN: A SOLDIER’S PASSION FOR ORDER was first published by the Free Press, then in paperback by Vintage Press, and most recently in paperback by Southern Illinois University Press.

From the Library Journal:

That Sherman was a troubled soul who sought to make his family appreciate his trials and triumphs is evident in the small cache of Sherman letters published for the first time in Joseph Ewing’s Sherman at War (Morningside, 1992). The new letters notwithstanding, Marszalek’s psychobiographical musings about Sherman’s inner self doubtless will cause some historians to blush. But the rich historical contextual material on everything from Western finances, Indian wars in Florida and the West, and Civil War military policy make Marszalek’s Sherman real and powerful. Highly recommended.
– Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph’s Univ., Philadelphia

SHERMAN’S MARCH TO THE SEA, paperback, published by McWhiney Foundation Press (distributed by Texas A and M University Press).

SHERMAN’S OTHER WAR, THE GENERAL AND THE CIVIL WAR PRESS with Memphis State University Press, but more recently a paperback by Kent State University Press.

Voter fraud and the Lincoln-Douglas debates

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Abraham Lincoln, electorate, George McClellan, Illinois, Illinois Central Railroad, Lincoln-Douglas debates, Stephen Douglas, voters, voting, voting fraud

As it does today, the idea that people will vote when they have no right to — and thus, potentially, misdirect the will of the people — shadowed the 1858 election for U.S. Senator in Illinois, the one that produced the iconic Lincoln-Douglas debates.

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Abraham Lincoln and his Republican cohorts feared the collusion of two forces, the railroads and

A 1958 postage stamp commemorating the Lincoln-Douglas debatesd the Irish.

Their fears had some merit.

The Illinois Central Railroad Company had been the recipient of political favors from Sen. Stephen Douglas, who had sponsored legislation that funded railroads through publicly held land. The Illinois Central would certainly want to protect its advantage by supporting his campaign for re-election.

Lincoln and the Republicans feared that support would take a nefarious form.

According to Allen Guelzo, author of Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America, Lincoln and the Republicans envisioned the Illinois Central “sending road gangs of Irish Catholics down the line, dropping them off in strategic districts days or weeks before the election to perform grading and repairs, and to turn up on Election Day to vote as though they were permanent residents.” (208-209) Lincoln himself said as much, without naming the Irish, in one of this speeches.

 

George Smalley reports the battle of Antietam

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Antietam, George Smalley, Joseph Hooker, New Yrok Tribune, reporting the Civil War

During the hours after the battle of Antietam in September 1862, New York Tribune correspondent George Smalley went through hell.

Having attached himself to the headquarters staff of Gen. Joseph Hooker, Smalley had seen more of the battle than any other newspaper correspondent at the scene.

George Smalley

Desperate to get word back to his newspaper, he rode through the night to the telegraph station at Frederick, Maryland. The telegraph operater agreed to send a short account, and Smalley sat down and wrote one.

“Fierce and desperate battle between two hundred thousand men has raged since daylight, yet night closes on an uncertain field. It is the greatest fight since Waterloo–all over the field contested with an obstinacy equal even to Waterloo. If not wholly a victory tonight, I believe it is the prelude to a victory tomorrow. . . .”

Smalley handed the telegraph operator each page as he wrote it. Without Smalley’s permission or knowledge, the operater sent the account to the War Department in Washington rather than to the Tribune in New York. There President Abraham Lincoln read the first account of the battle that he knew Union forces had to win.

Smalley’s job, however, was far from done.

William Tecumseh Sherman: Marching through the American mind

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Ed Caudill, John Singleton Mosby, march through Georgia, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Paul Ashdown, William Tecumseh Sherman

The Union Army, under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman, decamped from a devastated and burning Atlanta on November 16, 1864 and marched across the expanse of Georgia until it reached Savannah. The purpose, according to its commander, was to bring the horrors of war into the farms, fields, parlors and living rooms of the South in a way that would teach Southerners the futility of continuing the fight for their independence.

William Tecumseh Sherman

The march through Georgia took almost exactly a month. A week before Christmas, Sherman wired President Abraham Lincoln from Savannah, offering him the city as a “Christmas present.”

Sherman succeeded far beyond anything that he had in mind at the beginning of his journey.

As Ed Caudill and Paul Ashdown (two of my good friends and colleagues at the University of Tennessee) write in their Sherman’s March in Myth and Memory: