Generals Of The Union Army

"No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves it today."

"It required no effort on his part to admit another man's superiority, and his admission that General Grant was right and he was wrong about operations in Vicksburg was not intended for effect as some suppose, but was perfectly in character."

"But we will not always be in this condition. Wait until Dudy becomes president. I dreamed last night he had been elected president."

"We must go back to the campaigns of Napoleon to find equally brillant results accomplished in the same space of time with such a small loss."

"The truly polite woman has no snub in her voice nor scorn upon her lips for those who occupy a lower social grade than herself. Nor will she thoughtlessly and carelessly shut the door of opportunity in the face of any one who is striving to rise in the scale of character, and build, over a sad past, more stately temples of thought and action. True politeness is consistent with perfect sincerity. If we are true to ourselves, we cannot be false to others. "I will tell this story,' said a person in the presence of General Grant, "as there are no ladies present." "But," replied the general, "there are gentlemen here." The man who could crush down defeat and organize victories had the manly politeness to guard the ears of others from being assaulted by unbecoming words."

"It is enough to add that he was a very good General and a very bad President."

"Thousands had journeyed to Washington from out of town. The hotels were sold out, even after filling their hallways and lobbies with extra beds. The visitors, not a few of whom employed whiskey against the cold, waited all along the avenue to salute the Civil War hero they had re-elected the previous November.No group cheered Grant more heartily than the Negro men and women who had lined his route. These members of the audience could point with pride to the Lincoln Zouaves, a colored military unit from Baltimore, resplendent in their tasseled fezzes, baggy red pants, white leggings, and red-trimmed black jackets. Colored spectators sang along when musicians struck up 'Marching Through Georgia', the Civil War ditty celebrating General William Tecumseh Sherman's drive from Atlanta to the sea. Negro support for Grant was an expression of hope. The fervent belief that only Grant and his Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, could keep America's promise of equal rights for all men. Lincoln had been the first president to invite Negro participation in the inaugural pageant. Grant was the second. But for Grant, freedom and equal rights were matters of principle, not symbolism. More than even the most progressive-minded white Americans of his time, he rejected prejudice. He knew his soldiers had sacrificed not only to hold the nation together, but also to make men free. He did not want those sacrifices to have been in vain."

"Grant has shown himself an active, honest advocate of the negro and their friend."

"Sir, if you ever presume again to speak disrespectfully of General Grant in my presence, either you or I will sever his connection with this university."

"Grant's desire to annex and eventually make a state of Santo Domingo can seem oddly progressive, which is not to excuse the self-righteous paternalism, nationalist exceptionalism, or economic shadiness that lay behind his annexationism. But anti-racism was among the principal goals of his initiative... In that respect, his hope that whites might one day overcome their irrational anti-black prejudices so that the United States could prosper as a multi-racial nation is all the more impressive."

"I can't spare this man--he fights."

"If Grant only does this thing right down there, I don't care how, so long as he does it right. Why, Grant is my man and I am his the rest of the war!"

"I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do, what you finally did, march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition, and the like, could succeed. When you got below, and took Port-Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join General Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong."

"After the failure of his first experimental explorations around Vicksburg, a committee of abolition war managers waited upon the President and demanded the General’s removal, on the false charge that he was a whiskey drinker, and little better than a common drunkard. “Ah!” exclaimed Honest Old Abe, “you surprise me, gentlemen. But can you tell me where he gets his whiskey?” “We cannot, Mr. President. But why do you desire to know?” “Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.”"

"They will never shoulder a musket again in anger, and if Grant is wise, he will leave them their guns to shoot crows with and their horses to plow with. It would do no harm."

"He's the quietest little fellow you ever saw. He makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew. I believe he had been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here. Grant is the first general I have had. You know how it's been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, they all wanted me to be the general. Now it isn't so with Grant. He hasn't told me what his plans are. I don't know and I don't want to know. I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me. He doesn't ask impossibilities of me, and he's the first general I've had that didn't."

"Grant was in the first rank of American heroes, alongside Washington and Lincoln."

"Grant imagined that annexation would provide a safety valve for the country and a safe haven for African Americans."

"Still on the whole the campaign is the best, cleanest and most satisfactory of the war. I have received the most fulsome praise of all men from the President down, but I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them."

"Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!" So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia."

"So we made a thoroughfare For Freedom and her train Sixty miles in latitude Three hundred to the main Treason fled before us For resistance was in vain While we were marching through Georgia"

"Bring the good old bugle, boys We’ll sing another song Sing it with a spirit that will Start the world along Sing it as we used to sing it Fifty thousand strong While we were marching through Georgia"

"Returning home on leave following my second year at West Point, I called on a great-uncle who had joined the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen and had fought in a number of major Civil War battles, including Gettysburg, and had been with Robert E. Lee at Appamatox. My Uncle White was the younger brother of my grandfather. He hated Yankees and Republicans, not necessarily in that order, and talked derisively about both. When I visited, he was seated in a wheel chair, in grudging acquiescence to the infirmities of age. Tobacco juice decorated his shirt and stains around a spittoon on the floor testified to the inaccuracy of his aim. Flies buzzed through screenless windows. "What are you doing with yourself, son?" Uncle White asked. I answered the old veteran with trepidation. "I'm going to that same school that Grant and Sherman went to, the Military Academy at West Point, New York." Uncle White was silent for what seemed like a long time. "That's all right, son," he said at last. "Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson went there too.""

"I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing. Aside from a short period in 1861-62, when Lee was placed in charge of the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, neither general stepped foot in Georgia during the war. Lee cut off furloughs to Georgia's soldiers later in the war because he was convinced that once home they'd never come back. He resisted the dispatch of James Longstreet's two divisions westward to defend northern Georgia, and he had no answer when Sherman operated in the state."

"The Appomattox surrender document still had wet ink when Lee gave General Orders No. 9, his farewell address, to the Army of Northern Virginia on April 10, 1865. Lee's address was the first salvo in what would become a written battle to define the meaning of the war. He argued that his army surrendered only because it had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources." Not only did the United States have more of everything, it had Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Mitchell writes, "Grant was a butcher who did not care how many men he slaughtered for a victory, but a victory he would have." As for Sherman, Mitchell mentioned him seventy-two times, as though he carried a sulfurous pitchfork, leaving Sherman sentinels, the burned chimneys of plantation houses, in his wake. Only someone who fought without mercy and with unlimited resources of men and materiel could have defeated the virtuous Confederates. In reality, Grant and Sherman exhibited extraordinary generalship in a righteous cause."

"For most of my life, I viewed plantations exclusively through the lens of the white planter class. Growing up, I learned the great sin of the Civil War was General William Tecumseh Sherman's infamous March to the Sea and his supposed indiscriminate, illegal, and immoral burning of private property. Actually, Sherman's hard-war policy was purposeful and directed, causing few civilian casualties. After reading about the enslaved experience, I find it hard to feel sorry for the planters."

"Sherman remained widely popular after the war. Since his initial terms to Johnston were exceedingly generous, the South respected Sherman and looked to him for support during reconstruction. Sherman was an opponent of the Radical Republican Party and thought it was “Corrupt as Hell.” He helped his friends in the South and was vital in getting former Louisiana governor Thomas O. Moore’s plantation returned after it was confiscated. David French Boyd, founder of Louisiana State University, wrote to Sherman on September 22, 1865 and stated, “You were mainly instrumental in our discomfiture; yet the very liberal terms you proposed to grant us thro’ Joe Johnston and your course since have led the people of the South to expect more from you than any of the high northern officials.” Following the war, Sherman was given command of the newly created Military Division of Missouri, which included the entire army west of the Mississippi River. Sherman was the commanding officer of the Indian Wars and carried over the strategy of total war. The Indians were faced with the decision of moving to the reservation or extermination. When Grant became General of the Army on July 25, 1866, Sherman was promoted to lieutenant general. After Grant became President of the United States in 1869, Sherman became commanding general of the United States Army. Sherman served as the commanding general until he retired on November 1, 1883. In 1875 he published a Memoirs (2 volumes) recounting his life and military career. When talk began of electing Sherman as president, Sherman, disgusted with politics, responded, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” He spent the last few years of his life in New York City and died on February 14, 1891."

"In Tennessee, Sherman’s views on warfare changed. Originally he believed noncombatant populations and private property should be respected. However, guerrilla activity, civilian resistance, and the Confederate Army’s reliance on civilian supplies made Sherman realize civilian populations were vital to success in war. Wanting to find the fastest solution to end the war, he adopted the belief of total war. Sherman tried to demoralize the South by targeting economic support structures that enabled the war to continue. He wanted to destroy the South’s will to fight but maintained he would support the South when it laid down its arms; a claim validated by his actions after the war."

"So it was in the civil war. Farragut's father was born in Spain and Sheridan's father in Ireland; Sherman and Thomas were of English and Custer of German descent; and Grant came of a long line of American ancestors whose original home had been Scotland. But the Admiral was not a Spanish-American; and the Generals were not Scotch-Americans or Irish-Americans or English-Americans or German-Americans. They were all Americans and nothing else. This was just as true of Lee and of Stonewall Jackson and of Beauregard."

"He's too important to forget."

"He played a significant role in defining us- dimensionally, in the nature and spirit of our fighting forces, and our ethics, or at least the celebrity version of it. Historically, he was one of the ingredients for what we became. A continent for the taking brought forth people like Sherman, and they in turn produced us. Their energy, ambition, optimism, and pragmatism serves to explain our own, but so does their self-righteousness and proclivity for violence. Sherman was all of these things, a mixture of good and bad, but still a familiar and comfortable presence. It's hard to imagine a more American man than Sherman. 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."

"General Sherman, who had lived in the South, liked Southerners and did not at all sympathize with Northern racial views, yet became the most hated and feared destroyer of the South and its whole civilization. And I think he did so because he saw that as necessary to win the war. And I think Lincoln made some of his decisions—issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, or turning Sherman loose — because he saw that as necessary to win the war."

"In his fast-moving campaigns in the Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman habitually sought to threaten two objectives before he attacked. This forced the Confederate generals to split their forces, giving Sherman a decisive edge when he made his lunge."

"Some Confederate soldiers switched sides, beginning as early as 1862. When Sherman made his famous march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army actually grew in number, because thousands of white southerners volunteered along the way. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of the Confederate army disappeared through desertion. Eighteen thousand slaves joined Sherman, so many that the army had to turn some away. Compare these facts with the portrait common in our textbooks of Sherman's marauders looting their way through a united south. The increasing ideological confusion in the Confederate states, coupled with the increasing strength of the United States, helps explains the Union victory... Many nations and people have continued to fight with far inferior means and weapons... The Confederacy's ideological contradictions were its gravest liabilities, ultimately causing its defeat."

"These members of the audience could point with pride to the Lincoln Zouaves, a colored military unit from Baltimore, resplendent in their tasseled fezzes, baggy red pants, white leggings, and red-trimmed black jackets. Colored spectators sang along when musicians struck up 'Marching Through Georgia', the Civil War ditty celebrating General William Tecumseh Sherman's drive from Atlanta to the sea."

"Historians identify General Sherman as its main architect, and the army principally responsible for the demise of the buffalo. Even Congress stepped in to try to curb the carnage; despite its attempt to pass legislation in 1874 to limit the buffalo slaughter, Sherman's malicious genius proved triumphant when army veteran and president Ulysses S. Grant vetoed the legislation."

"The southern slave's eagerness to be free and willingness not just to leave but to fight, the Union army's embrace of their plight, the physical destruction of the plantation, and the psychological humiliation of the plantation class, all this illustrated that an apartheid state, once cracked, shatters and can never be reconstituted again. From the freeing of the slaves Sherman's men gained the moral imperative... In turn, from Sherman's men the slaves at last could prove they too were human, even more humane than their masters."

"It is difficult to determine whether Georgians hated Sherman and his army as much as the Spartans despised Epaminondas and the Thebans. Both men had wrecked their centuries-old practice of apartheid in a matter of weeks. It is a dangerous and foolhardy thing for a slaveholding society to arouse a democracy of such men."

"He come through Madison on his march to the sea and we chillun hung out on the front fence from early morning unil late in the evening, watching the soldiers go by. It took most of the day…The next week…Miss Emily called the five women that wuz on the place and tole them to stay 'round the house... She said they were free and could go wherever they wanted to."

"A suspicion that rain had been falling rather steadily came also from a new onslaught on the situation by Fogarty. He led his troops onto the field, all armed with cans of gasoline, which were showered at strategic points in the infield. Having the enemy thus cornered temporarily, Brigadier General Fogarty took a ruthless turn reminiscent of Sherman's march to the sea. In short, Fogarty applied the torch and in a trice, as we say, the infield was a mass of flame and smoke."

"Maj.Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, [ United States Military Academy Class of] 1840 (Union): U.S. Grant's top lieutenant. He fought at Shiloh and in the Vicksburg, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Carolina campaigns. His Savanna Campaign- the "March to the Sea"- brought total war to the people of the South. He served as commanding general of the US Army from 1869 to 1883."

"By 1864 Sherman had become convinced that preservation of the Union was contingent not only on defeating the Southern armies in the field but, more importantly, on destroying the Confederacy's material and psychological will to wage war. To achieve that end, he launched a campaign in Georgia that was defined as “modern warfare”, and brought “total destruction…upon the civilian population in the path of the advancing columns [of his armies].” Commanding three armies, under George Henry Thomas, James B. McPherson, and John M. Schofield, he used his superior numbers to consistently outflank Confederate troops under Joseph E. Johnston, and captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864. The success of the campaign ultimately helped Lincoln win reelection. After the fall of Atlanta, Sherman left the forces under Thomas and Schofield to continue to harass the Confederate Army of Tennessee under John Bell Hood. Meanwhile, Sherman cut off all communications to his army and commenced his now-famous “March to the Sea," leaving in his wake a forty to sixty mile-wide path of destruction through the heartland of Georgia. On December 21, 1864 Sherman wired Lincoln to offer him an early Christmas present: the city of Savannah."

"Sherman first saw combat at the Battle of First Manassas, where he commanded a brigade of Tyler’s Division. Although the Union army was defeated during the battle, President Abraham Lincoln was impressed by Sherman’s performance and he was promoted to brigadier general on August 7, 1861, ranking seventh among other officers at that grade. He was sent to Kentucky to begin the Union task of keeping the state from seceding. While in the state, Sherman expressed his views that the war would not end quickly, and he was replaced by Don Carlos Buell. Sherman was moved to St. Louis, where he served under Henry W. Halleck and completed logistical missions during the Union capture of Fort Donelson. During the Battle of Shiloh, Sherman commanded a division, but was overrun during the battle by Confederates under Albert Sydney Johnston. Despite the incident, Sherman was promoted to major general of volunteers on May 1, 1862. After the battle of Shiloh, Sherman led troops during the battles of Chickasaw Bluffs and Arkansas Post, and commanded XV Corps during the campaign to capture Vicksburg. At the Battle of Chattanooga Sherman faced off against Confederates under Patrick Cleburne in the fierce contest at Missionary Ridge. After Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to commander of all the United States armies, Sherman was made commander of all troops in the Western Theatre, and began to wage warfare that would bring him great notoriety in the annals of history."

"William Tecumseh Sherman, although not a career military commander before the war, would become one of "the most widely renowned of the Union’s military leaders next to U. S. Grant.” Sherman, one of eleven children, was born into a distinguished family. His father had served on the Supreme Court of Ohio until his sudden death in 1829, leaving Sherman and his family to stay with several friends and relatives. During this period, Sherman found himself living with Senator Thomas Ewing, who obtained an appointment for Sherman to the United States Military Academy, and he graduated sixth in the class of 1840. His early military career proved to be anything but spectacular. He saw some combat during the Second Seminole War in Florida, but unlike many of his colleagues, did not fight in the Mexican-American War, serving instead in California. As a result, he resigned his commission in 1853. He took work in the fields of banking and law briefly before becoming the superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy in 1859. At the outbreak of the Civil War, however, Sherman resigned from the academy and headed north, where he was made a colonel of the 13th United States Infantry."

"Slavery was the cause... [O]ur success was to be his freedom."

"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.' I did not want them to cast in our teeth what General Hood had once done at Atlanta, that we had to call on their slaves to help us to subdue them. But, as regards kindness to the race ..., I assert that no army ever did more for that race than the one I commanded at Savannah."

"An army to be useful must be a unit, and out of this has grown the saying, attributed to Napoleon, but doubtless spoken before the days of Alexander, that an army with an inefficient commander was better than one with two able heads."

"It will be a thousand years before Grant's character is fully appreciated. Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time... he fixes in his mind what is the true objective and abandons all minor ones. He dismisses all possibility of defeat. He believes in himself and in victory. If his plans go wrong he is never disconcerted but promptly devises a new one and is sure to win in the end. Grant more nearly impersonated the American character of 1861-65 than any other living man. Therefore he will stand as the typical hero of the great Civil War in America."

"I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected."

"I hereby state, and mean all I say, that I never have been and never will be a candidate for President; that if nominated by either party I should peremptorily decline; and even if unanimously elected I should decline to serve."