William Sherman

William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) was a United States Army officer in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Born and raised in Lancaster, Ohio, Sherman lost his father when he was only nine. He graduated from West Point in 1840 and served in the Seminole War in Florida. Unlike many War of Secession generals, Sherman sat out the First Mexican War and performed administrative duties in the newly annexed California territory during the war years.

Sherman left the Army in 1853 to accept a position as bank president in San Francisco. His bank failed during the financial panic of 1857. Sherman next attempted to practice law in Leavenworth, Kansas. At this, too, he failed. He ultimately accepted a position as superintendent of what would later become Louisianna State University, at that time a seminary and military academy. When the War of Secession began in 1861, Sherman accepted a commission as colonel of the 13th US Regular Infantry and was also appointed brigadier general of volunteers by President Abraham Lincoln. He fought at the Battle of First Bull Run in July 1861 and later that year was given command of the Department of the Cumberland. Sherman suffered a nervous breakdown and took several months' leave but returned to active duty in time to take part in his friend Ulysses S. Grant's successful offensives against the Confederates in the spring of 1862. (Both Grant and Sherman ran afoul of their commander, Henry W. Halleck.) Sherman was caught unprepared by Albert Sidney Johnston's Confederate army at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862, but nonetheless managed to rally his division and conduct an orderly fighting retreat that helped avert a Union rout and set the stage for a Union victory the next day. Sherman was promoted to major general of volunteers.

Sherman's command was penetrating into northern Mississippi when Braxton Bragg invaded and conquered Kentucky in the fall of 1862. When the war ended, Sherman was stripped of his generalship of volunteers and became a colonel once again. Haunted by lingering rumors of insanity, he would never receive a generalship of regular troops. Nonetheless, he remained in the US Army. During the Second Mexican War, he commanded the defenses of San Francisco. During this war, he interviewed anti-war journalist and Confederate veteran Samuel Clemens on suspicion that Clemens was a Confederate agent, but nothing came of Sherman's investigation.

Sherman's wife and mother were both devout Catholics and one of his sons became a Jesuit priest. However, Sherman himself, though baptized into the faith, did not take its practice very seriously.