Citizen Sherman

July 3, 1995
This is a study of William T. Sherman as a human being rather than a soldier. Fellman, who teaches history at Simon Fraser Univ., in Canada, utilizes Sherman's extensive correspondence to depict a man driven by anger. A frustrating childhood and an unhappy marriage, a foundered career in the pre-Civil War army and a succession of business failures left Sherman a seething cauldron of hostility that he unleashed on the South during the war. Yet Sherman's will kept his emotions in check most of the time. His harrowing of the Confederacy was a means to end a war he wished to be followed by a peace of reconciliation--albeit at the expense of blacks, whom Sherman detested. Postwar fame modified his contentiousness, but only in old age did he mellow significantly. Sherman's life and career highlight the fact that relationships between aggression and achievement are complex and often symbiotic. Photos not seen by PW.

July 1, 1995
Those readers familiar with the life and career of William Tecumseh Sherman know he was rarely a happy person. When he was nine, Sherman's widowed, destitute mother "farmed" him out to be the ward of the prosperous Ewing family; Sherman never fully warmed to his foster father, and he nursed a sense of rejection and alienation all his life. Like his mentor, U. S. Grant, Sherman endured the shame of business failure as a civilian before the war, and he remained subject to periodic bouts of severe anxiety and depression. Although his marriage endured the strains of prolonged physical separations, Sherman's feelings toward his wife (who was also his foster sister) ranged from irrational resentment to an abject sense of inadequacy for failing to meet her emotional and sometimes financial needs. In tracing his subject's life, Fellman is moving over well-traveled ground. However, his probing into Sherman's deeper motivations and feelings makes for fascinating reading and speculation. If Fellman seems alternately entranced and repelled by Sherman's actions and personality traits, it seems a natural reaction to one of our most enigmatic and frustrating military figures. ((Reviewed July 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)