Tuesday marks the 202nd birthday of Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, the architect of modern warfare.
At the beginning of the Civil War he was assigned as superintendent of a newly established military academy in Louisiana but resigned his post once Louisiana seceded. He fought in the First Battle of Bull Run, was promoted to brigadier general, and then sent to Kentucky as second-in-command under General Robert Anderson and soon served as a divisional commander under General Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman distinguished himself at the Battle of Shiloh and won promotion to the rank of major general.
Together they fought at Vicksburg, Mississippi shattering Confederate defenses and opening the Mississippi River to Northern commerce once more. When Grant was placed in supreme command in the west, Sherman succeeded to the command of the Army of the Tennessee and in that capacity took part with Grant in the Chattanooga campaign in November 1863. In March 1864, when Grant became general-in-chief of the Union armies, Sherman was made commander of the military division of the Mississippi, with three armies under his overall command. Assembling about 100,000 troops near Chattanooga, Tennessee, in May 1864, he began his invasion of Georgia. Confederate forces retreated and on September 2, 1864, Sherman’s forces were able to occupy Atlanta, a vital industrial center and the hub of the Southern railway network. Sherman was able to detach part of his army and lead the remaining 62,000 troops on the celebrated “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah on the Atlantic coast. Separated from its supply bases and completely isolated from other Union forces, Sherman’s army cut a wide swath as it moved south through Georgia, living off the countryside, destroying enemy railroads and supplies, reducing the war-making potential of the Confederacy. Sherman reached Savannah in time for Christmas and “presented” the city to Lincoln
Sherman lived most of the rest of his life in New York City where he was devoted to the theater and to amateur painting. Sherman died of pneumonia on February 14, 1891, six days after his 71st birthday. President Benjamin Harrison, who served under Sherman, wrote “He was an ideal soldier, and shared to the fullest the esprit de corps of the army, but he cherished the civil institutions organized under the Constitution, and was only a soldier that these might be perpetuated in undiminished usefulness and honor”.