Citizen Sherman: a life of William Tecumseh Sherman

Description

I. Humiliation. Rosebud: a truncated patrimony -- In the army: a dead-end career -- Marriage triangle -- Failure as a banker and debts of honor -- Going south and leaving: the ambivalent unionist -- Into the abyss: collapse in war. II. Transformation. Ecstatic resurrection at Shiloh -- Purging the devil: Sherman assaults the press -- Turning friends into enemies -- Niggers and other vagabonds -- Rage at the south: psychological warrior -- Facing death: the loss of Willy -- The selective destroyer -- Sherman the forgiver: a separate peace. III. Fame. Indian killer -- Officeholder -- Vagabond and icon -- Feuds: the test of honor -- The struggle of marriage, and other women -- Crisis of patrimony: the loss of Tom -- Celebration and reconciliation.;More than any other Union general, Sherman was capable of conducting mass psychological warfare in order to break the heart of the Confederacy. Sherman succeeded in large measure because he could plumb and enact his own rage with ruthless clarity. The inner nature of Sherman's genius for destruction forms the center of Citizen Sherman. But this biography is much broader than an analysis of war from Sherman's perspective, for Michael Fellman seeks to illuminate the emotional as well as the intellectual, ideological, and occupational lives of this extraordinary, but at the same time representative, American Victorian man. It was men like Sherman, statesmen of the sword, who beat the Confederacy and destroyed the Indian nations, and Michael Fellman examines, with both detachment and compassion, how such men equipped themselves to secure American nationalism.