A First-Rate Madness (5 page)

Sherman's disgust with politicians and his postwar refusal to ever enter politics (“If nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I shall not serve”), even when the presidency was repeatedly offered him, stemmed from this prewar experience. Until the actual fall of Fort Sumter, Sherman hoped that the politicians could pull back from the brink. His repeated pleas to his brother and others were futile; the election of 1860 entailed a clear choice: slavery or war. Sherman declined to vote.

 

 

THE WAR SOON CAME. The first battle, Bull Run, was a Northern debacle, which Sherman witnessed firsthand. Afterward, he was appointed second in command in Kentucky. Soon his superior was transferred, and he took responsibility for the key border state. He was filled with anxiety. That October, in a routine reconnaissance with 4,000 soldiers, Sherman suddenly became convinced that he was surrounded by spies and that his troops were about to be overrun. He begged his superiors for 200,000 more men, a staggering number; he expressed his fears so vehemently that other officers, the secretary of war, and his family became concerned about his mental health.

In
Citizen Sherman,
Fellman describes how two reporters, Henry Villard and William Shanks, “shared the Louisville telegraph office with Sherman nearly every night from about 9 p.m.
until 3 a.m.
All would pore over Associated Press reports as they came in. Sherman
unceasingly talked,
paced, smoked cigars. . . . He seemed to smoke not from pleasure but as if it were a duty to be finished in the shortest imaginable time. . . . Sherman puffs furiously.” Fellman, paraphrasing Shanks, noted that Sherman “would
never finish
a cigar. . . . Sherman simply never sat still . . . his fingers were always busy. . . . While sitting he would
cross and uncross his legs continuously
. And
on and on he talked,
nervously and obsessively. . . . He must talk quick, sharp . . . making odd gestures, which . . . emphasizes his language. He never hesitates at
interrupting
anyone, but he
cannot bear to be interrupted
himself. . . . Sherman had a
bad temper
but what is worse, he makes no attempt to control or correct it. . . . He expressed himself entirely
without reserve
about men and matters . . . and I could not help thinking that in doing so he said
more than was wise and proper
.” (italics added)

The italicized phrases illustrate classic signs of mania: irritable mood, decreased need for sleep (sleeping little but being a bundle of energy), distractibility, rapid speech, increased talkativeness, hyperactivity, physical agitation, and inability to function at work. Villard added that after the general's frenetic behavior ended he would “lapse into long silent moods . . . and literally brood day and night. . . . It was soon whispered about that he was suffering from mental depression.”

“I am up all night,” Sherman wrote, always under “the quiet observation of spies.” He lost his appetite and began to drink, which worsened his depression. He was convinced his life would end soon. “The idea of going down in History with a fame such as threatens me nearly makes crazy—indeed I may be so now,” he wrote to his wife.

Sherman's staff took the unusual step of writing to his family and asking that they visit him in the Kentucky field. By the time his wife arrived, he was practically mute. “He has had little or no sleep or food for some time,” Ellen Sherman wrote from Kentucky. She knew insanity to run in the Sherman family and had seen her husband in severe melancholic states. “Several of the army officers are staying at the hotel and all seem deeply interested in him,” she wrote. “He however pays no attention to them, or to anyone, and scarcely answers a question unless it be on the all-engrossing subject [of the war]. He thinks the whole country is gone irrevocably and ruin and desolation are at hand.”

Sherman's brother John, now a U.S. senator, questioned the general's grasp of reality: “You are not only in error but are laboring under some strange delusions. . . . Your mind casts a somber shadow on everything. . . . Your manner is abrupt and almost repulsive.” Sherman was in despair: “I see no hope at all. You can trust in Providence [but] why he has visited me with this terrible judgment is incomprehensible.” Sherman's superior, General Halleck, ordered a medical examination; a physician concluded that there was “such nervousness that [Sherman] was unfit for command.” Halleck sent Sherman home to Ohio.

In retrospect, Sherman's mania seemed to have lasted about two weeks. It was followed by two months of deep depression with likely paranoid delusions. In his memoirs he made much of the fact that the reporters who publicized concerns about his mental health disliked him; historians later dismissed the manic episode as a concoction of his enemies. Yet even his family clearly feared for his sanity, and Sherman himself wrote to his brother a few months after the danger had passed: “I should have committed suicide were it not for my children.”

 

 

SIX MONTHS LATER Sherman was feeling better, though wearied by his recent despair. His wife and brother had done much to rehabilitate his public image, including personally visiting President Lincoln, who was sympathetic—indeed, perhaps empathetic—to his plight. The Union still needed Sherman, but top leaders, including Ulysses S. Grant, his new immediate superior, ensured that when he returned to service he was no longer placed in sole command. Under Grant's supervision he fought effectively in his next great battle, Shiloh. Formerly so self-disparaging, he experienced “an abrupt spiritual rebirth,” in Fellman's words. In July 1863, Sherman and Grant sealed the first real Union military success with the brutal siege of Vicksburg.

After Vicksburg, Sherman began to engage in the kind of war that would make him famous. “We are absolutely stripping the country of corn, cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, everything,” he reported to Grant on his operations around Jackson, Mississippi. “The wholesale destruction to which the country is now being subjected is terrible to contemplate, but it is the scourge of war.” He even mocked the earlier accusations of insanity leveled against him: “To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi River I would slay millions. On this point I am not only insane but mad.”

Grant proved to be Sherman's savior, believing in Sherman despite the latter's past mental instability. (“He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk,” Sherman would say after the war.) Under Grant's watchful but approving gaze Sherman was let loose in Georgia. The strategy of destroying the economic heart of the South was planned with Grant, yet the specifics were left up to Sherman. Initially, upon crossing into Georgia from Tennessee, Sherman conducted conventional flanking actions, avoiding direct conflict with the Confederate army under General Joseph Johnston, focused on the goal of destroying Atlanta. When, after some minor engagements around Atlanta, the Northern troops entered the city, Sherman was merciless. All citizens were forced from their homes and given one-way rail tickets northward; then he burned it all. Atlanta remains the last U.S. city ever destroyed in warfare. Grant had not ordered the evacuation and destruction of Atlanta, but once Sherman started the process, Grant did not stop him. (In his
Memoirs,
Grant credits Sherman with the entire plan of the march, and notes that he agreed with Sherman, having to convince numerous other generals and a reluctant president that Sherman's campaign was worthwhile.)

Sherman stated his goal clearly, explicitly telling the South what he intended to do. He knew that the prospect of his attacks was as much a weapon as the attacks themselves. His Confederate counterpart John Bell Hood, who had replaced Johnston, wrote him bluntly when Sherman announced the depopulation and planned destruction of Atlanta, “The unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts . . . in the dark history of war. In the name of God and humanity I protest.” “God will judge us in due time,” Sherman replied.

In a letter responding to the mayor of Atlanta, Sherman offered a remarkable explanation for his strategy, one that chides Southerners for their lack of empathy with the civilians their own armies had made homeless, and that even shows a kind of empathy for the Southerners he was about to make homeless:

Sherman then turned south, ignoring the attempts of General Hood and the Confederate army to coax him back into battle. The March to the Sea began, and now Sherman came into his own. Generals had always protected their links with headquarters, which they needed to give and receive orders, food, and ammunition. Knowing he would now go deep into Southern territory, and that he could not defend his supply lines, Sherman cut them loose. (He let Grant know his intentions, and Grant said he preferred otherwise, wishing Sherman to attack Hood; but he left the final decision to Sherman.) Said the British military experts of the
Army and Navy Gazette,
“If Sherman has really left his army up in the air and started off without a base to march from Georgia to South Carolina, he has done either one of the most brilliant or one of the most foolish things ever performed by a military leader.” For three tense months, Sherman was entirely on his own; Grant and Lincoln had no clue what he was doing, whether he was winning or losing, alive or dead. (When Sherman was close to Savannah, Grant even sent orders by messenger for him to break off the march and come to Virginia by sea. Sherman, upset, did not respond and intensified his assault on Savannah; when it finally fell, he persuaded Grant to rescind the new orders and allow him to continue the march through the Carolinas.)

Sherman now started his innovative attack on civilian morale and property. His men foraged off the land, forced to do so by lack of supplies, but also as part of Sherman's new military strategy. Attack and destroy property, not soldiers; ruin the ability to wage war—by decimating crops, farms, cities, and, most important, civilian morale. With their base of support thus ravaged, even the most gallant warriors would have to submit. When Sherman was finished, the South would have neither the food nor the will to keep up the fight. At about this time, a Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, had divined what was in Sherman's psyche: all destruction, Bakunin taught, is also a creative destruction. Sherman was unapologetic then and later: “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war.” “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” he had told Atlantans. After the war, he reflected on the emotional impact of his warfare, the suffering he may have known from his own personal depression: “My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' ”

 

 

SHERMAN WAS IN a high-strung, high-energy, hyperthymic state (which appeared to be his usual personality when he was not severely manic or depressed), but he was not disconnected from reality as he had been in Kentucky. A Grant emissary reported Sherman engaged in “a marvelous talk about a march to the sea. His mind, of course, was full of it. He seemed the very personification of nervous energy.” Sherman “rocked back and forth in his chair, his hands were at work shredding the newspaper they held, while his stockinged feet darted in and out of their slippers.”

During the next three months Sherman's troops slowly moved toward Savannah, systematically tearing up railroad tracks and heating and twisting the rails into spirals (“Sherman's neckties”), often shaping the metal into the letters “US.” Troops lived off whatever they found en route to the Atlantic, and though Sherman had ordered them not to take more than the mission required, and not to harm or even insult civilians, but to burn the property of anyone who defied them, once the destruction began it was difficult to rein in. Soldiers looted homes, and there were reports of rape, torture, and killing. When rebel guerrillas began planting explosives in the roads, Sherman used Confederate prisoners as minesweepers.