Robert L. O'Connell

I always enjoy a biography of a larger than life figure and William Tecumseh Sherman fits that mold. He was a gregarious, animated man, subject to periods of depression, but a man of great energy and drive. Outside of Grant he was the most renowned general of the American Civil War, and. it could be claimed, the most successful.

Robert L. O’Connell uses a unique approach to telling Sherman’s story, breaking his life into three parts: the war strategist that makes his drive through the show more Confederacy culminating with his march to Atlanta, Savannah and the Carolinas, the general universally loved by his soldiers who knew him as “Uncle Billy”, and the personal Sherman, his family (or families, since he spent most of his childhood as a foster child). In his introduction O’Connell stakes his position on this approach, “The more I studied the secondary literature and recalled my exhausting swim through the primary documents, the more I became convinced that any attempt to confine Sherman to a single chronological approach was bound to create confusion. Instead, it seemed to me that three separate story lines, each deserving independent development, emerged out of the man’s life.”

While O’Connell generally succeeds in examining Sherman’s life and giving an expansive, detailed, impression of this complex man, his successes are in spite of his approach, not because of it. In laying out the story of the young Sherman, his father’s early death, his acceptance into the household of Thomas Ewing, his future father-in-law, his time at West Point through his time as one of America’s greatest generals, and his transition into a brilliant logistical mind guiding the development of the transcontinental railroad, O’Connell had to incorporate a good deal of the material that rightfully would fit into one of the other two sections. Also some material found in the later two sections might have helped explain Sherman’s approach to his army family and his home family. For instance, O’Connell holds until the third section Sherman’s attitude towards religion and his battles with his wife, Ellen, over her staunch Catholicism.

O’Connell was most successful illustrating how Sherman developed his attitudes toward war and how his attitude changed during the war. He tells how Sherman’s early days in the Indian Wars and his aptitude for mapping terrain in his photographic mind helped him become the Union Army’s top strategist and a brilliant manager of his army, and how that helped him years later in building the railroad. He explains why the boys in blue came to love “Uncle Billy”, because he learned that they were his greatest asset, not to be wasted on repeated, doomed-to-fail frontal assaults (something that Grant failed to ever understand).

But O’Connell doesn’t paint Sherman as a great heroic figure with no blemishes. Sherman was not an abolitionist, in fact he was ambivalent about slavery and he was more appalled at the southern states having the temerity to secede. As Sherman helped build the railway across the plains, he felt no reluctance in exterminating the buffalo while simultaneously forcing the Indians to move. He was a poster boy for Manifest Destiny and O’Connell doesn’t shrink from showing this side of Sherman.

While Fierce Patriot isn’t nearly my idea of a great biography, it goes a great way in explaining how Sherman became the man that he was, and why the Union was lucky to have him when its need was most urgent. show less

This tribute to Sherman is so much more than a biography. O’Connell provides a truncated history of the Civil War, an excellent analysis of the army and its strategy and tactics, and a fascinating look at the role Sherman played in the development of the American West following the hostilities. Finally, he shows the way religion tore apart Sherman’s family creating a generational ripple that was undoubtedly the country’s loss as well as Sherman’s.

O’Connell makes a compelling show more argument not only for Sherman’s criticality to Union victory in the Civil War, but also that Sherman needed to be second in command to feel the comfort and freedom to express his strategic brilliance. (One thinks of George Washington as General of the American Patriot Army, in horror of the possible repercussions of being in command, and constantly writing to Congress that it wouldn’t be his fault if they didn’t win.) O’Connell avers that it was the team of Sherman and Grant, whose strengths complemented each other, that was the key to Union victory.

Among the personal characteristics of Sherman that O’Connell points to as contributing to his success, he includes his West Point training, his personal charisma, his intellectual energy, and his past work experience which gave him intimate knowledge of the American terrain, an excellent command of logistics, an appreciation for the strategic importance of both the Mississippi and railroads, and an understanding of when it was best to quit and cut his losses.

Beyond the team of Sherman and Grant for the success of the Civil War, O’Connell credits Lincoln’s political brilliance and his insight into his generals (even if he didn’t always have the political capital to change them around); the importance of defected slaves who not only performed hard labor for the Union Army, but served as a network of intelligence about Confederate movements, Southern topography, potential ambushes, arms caches, and so on; the transition to rifled instead of smoothbore weapons; and to the significant role played by psychological warfare.

For those of us who always wondered about the sanity of generals who ordered open-field, close-range infantry attacks, O’Connell points to the revolution in firearms that took place in the middle of the Civil War. Just prior to that time, weapons consisted of smoothbore guns with inferior slugs that used flint for ignition. By 1862, however, many soldiers on both sides obtained rifles with Minié balls and percussion cap ignitions, even if they had to buy them with their own money. The accuracy range of these rifles exceeded that of cannon. The dynamics of the battlefield had suddenly shifted from what made sense when most of the officers had been trained at West Point or fought in the recent war in Mexico. Then, frontal assaults worked brilliantly. Now, they heralded slaughters. But it took the officers a while to adapt.

After the Civil War, Congress created the rank of General of the Army for Grant and promoted Sherman to Lieutenant General. When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman was appointed Commanding General of the United States Army and promoted to General of the Army.

One of Sherman's main assignments was to protect the construction and operation of the transcontinental railroads from attack by hostile Indians. Sherman employed many of his veterans as railroad workers, since they had years of experience with the speedy breaking up and bending of track. In addition, Sherman orchestrated the killing of some five million buffalo between 1867 and 1874, reasoning that if all the buffalo were extinct near the railroads, the Indians would have no reason to approach. O’Connell does not deny that Sherman, like almost everyone else at the time, had Indian exclusion as a goal. He wrote to Grant, after a battle in 1866 between the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians and soldiers of the United States Army in which all 81 army men were killed by the Indians, that "we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.”

He did occasionally express some sympathy for Native Americans. He wrote his wife:

"I don’t care about interesting myself too far in the fate of the poor devils of Indians who are doomed from the causes inherent in their nature or from the natural & persistent hostility of the white race.”

But as O’Connell observes, the Indians were doomed whether Sherman were involved or not; “Sherman’s masterful planning only made it more sudden.”

O’Connell doesn’t spend a great deal of time on the relationship of Grant and Sherman, but documents the closeness they had during the Civil War (Sherman recalling, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk; now sir, we stand by each other always”), as well as the fact that it was not maintained afterward, much to Sherman’s sorrow. But in Grant’s last year, Sherman went to his side repeatedly, helping to restructure Grant’s debts. He served as one of Grant’s pallbearers.

Sherman died in New York in 1891 at age 71. This book is a fitting tribute to a man who, as O’Connell documents, contributed so much to America’s survival in war and to its profile in peace.

Evaluation: This highly favorable, though not hagiographic biography of William Tecumseh Sherman is eminently readable and consistently interesting. show less

"It's hard to imagine a more American man than Sherman. And although he died over 120 years ago, it's a safe bet that should Uncle Billy be brought back to life tomorrow, after a short orientation with the requisite hardware and software, he'd find himself right at home." - Robert L. O'Connell, "Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman"

William Tecumseh Sherman was the third most famous general to come out of the Civil War, after Grant and Lee, yet he was arguably the show more most successful. He may not have won as many famous battles as the others, but his march across Georgia broke the back of the South with amazingly few casualties on either side. His success, not just in war but in most other aspects of his life, had much to do with his adaptability, which is what Robert L. O'Connell is getting at in the above lines from his superb 2014 biography, "Fierce Patriot." When circumstances changed, he changed with them.

Another key trait was his outgoing personality. He was a non-stop talker whom people actually liked, and he was skilled at making persuasive arguments. His men loved him. Other officers loved him. President Lincoln loved him. Women loved him. He could easily have been elected president, but didn't want the job. Nor did he want to be the Union's top general. In both war and peace, he was comfortable serving under Ulysses S. Grant.

Most biographies begin at the beginning of the person's life and follow that life right up to death. O'Connell approaches Sherman differently, and it works amazingly well. He divides the general's life into three aspects and then examines each aspect in detail, even though this approach sometimes takes him over the same material more than once. These three parts are Sherman the Strategist, the General and His Army and the Man and His Families, with the first of these taking up eight of the 12 chapters in the book. This first part covers not just the war but also the years spent developing his strategic way of thinking, from his West Point days to his experience as a banker during the California Gold Rush.

The second part reflects on his relationship with his troops, which led to his Uncle Billy nickname. The final two chapters review his complex family life.

His father died when Sherman was young, and the family had to be divided because his mother couldn't support all the children by herself. That's how John, later a prominent U.S. senator, ended up in Mansfield, Ohio, while William was raised in Lancaster, Ohio, by a prominent lawyer named Thomas Ewing and his wife. He later married Ellen, one of the Ewing daughters. She was devoted to her daddy and for years lived more with him than with her husband. It took becoming a Civil War hero for Sherman to become the dominant male in the family, although even then their marriage seemed to require long periods of separation to thrive.

O'Connell's book contains plenty of fascinating detail. He compares military strategy to surfing, and makes the most of that analogy. He calls Sherman "a prodigy of geography" because of his ability to visit a place once and then remember the exact terrain years later, a useful skill for a general. He tells how just before the Civil War broke out, Sherman organized a military academy in Louisiana, training officers for what would soon become the Confederate Army. Escaped slaves played an important role in Sherman's success in Georgia and elsewhere, providing invaluable information about the whereabouts of food and Rebel soldiers, yet Sherman never gave them any credit. After the war, Sherman encouraged the slaughter of buffalo as a means of pacifying the Indians. And much more.

"Fierce Patriot" makes fine reading. show less

Well-researched and well-written, this is an engaging biography of William Tecumseh Sherman. Instead of a standard chronological biography, the author splits Sherman's biography into three uneven parts: (1) Sherman the military man; (2) Sherman's "boys" in the war; and (3) Sherman's personal life. The first part is the largest and, this is great, covers not just the Civil War but his pre-war career and his post-war stint as head of the army. The latter is often shunned, since Sherman was show more anti-Indian, as it conflicts with Sherman the Yankee War Hero image. His war-fighting strategy and tactics are explained and analyzed quite well. The second part is a bottom-up account of Sherman's men in wartime, how they operated, and how Sherman and they cohered into a fighting unit. Along with on-the-ground accounts of strategy and tactics with great significance on the March to the Sea, the March through the Carolinas, and post-war memory-making. The last part was revealing, showing Sherman the man. Including extra-marital affairs, his disdain of politicking, and his friendships. Good all around, though the author does get chatty and thinks he is so witty he can make Dad-joke-level type metaphors with analogies to modern, pop-cultured life. Calling Sherman Grant's "wingman" an ad nauseum number of times, for instance. Take this groaner: "a performance worthy of Daffy Duck (or, given the hair color, perhaps Woody Woodpecker)" (p. 86). Or comparing John Bell Hood to the Black Knight of Monty Python (p. 145). Or comparing West Point to surfing (pp. 15-16)? Huh? Off-putting and deserving of taking an otherwise interesting, informative account and knocking it down a star. Good maps, good images; dumb new end-noting system; no bibliography. show less