Word: shermans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Redheaded, nervous, sloppy "Cump" Sherman was a West-Pointer but not a promising one. An officer during the Mexican War, he saw no action in it. When the Civil War began he had left the Army, failed as a banker, was living apart from his family as superintendent of Louisiana Military Academy. He liked the South, Southerners liked him. Though he was no abolitionist, and thought war between the States "all folly, madness, a crime against civilization," he refused a Southern command, went North to enlist. A colonel at the tragi-comedy of Bull Run, he chevied...
Believing that battles were too often a showy waste of time, Sherman avoided fighting whenever possible. He drove back his able Southern opponent, Joseph Johnston, by continually outflanking him, got almost to Atlanta without a battle. Sherman annoyed his enemy by going at war in a businesslike, persistent way. By products of his campaign, such as living off the country, crippling the enemy by destroying property, began to make him more hated than "Butcher" Grant. But he was successful. News of his capture of Atlanta came just in time to save Lincoln from defeat at the polls. Sherman...
...Sherman knew he was a good soldier, but he thought Grant was better. He once said to a friend: "Wilson, I'm a damned sight smarter man than Grant; I know more about organization, supply and administration and about everything else than he does, but I'll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight but it scares me like hell...
...Sherman's last 25 years, says Biographer Lewis, were "one long chicken dinner." Though figure-head-hunting politicians were after him all the time Sherman steadily kept clear of politics. A smarter man than Grant, he saw what politicians had done to his old friend. He once & for all spiked talk of drafting him for the Presidency by saying: "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." When Death finally came for him in 1891 Sherman was 71. At his military funeral in Manhattan, on a raw February day, a bystander urged...
...Author. As a small boy in the late 1890's Lloyd Lewis heard many a tall tale from Indiana veterans about "Uncle Billy" Sherman. Schoolroom texts, newspaper work, ad-writing failed to dampen his curiosity. Three and one-half years ago he set to in earnest: interviewed Sherman relatives, tracked Sherman's movements, read masses of unpublished letters. His readable, scholarly biography is the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Author Lewis, now dramatic critic of the Chicago Daily News, has also written Myths after Lincoln, Chicago: A History of Its Reputation (with Henry Justin...