Fierce patriot: the tangled lives of William Tecumseh Sherman

Description

William Tecumseh Sherman was more than just one of our greatest generals. Fierce Patriot is a bold, revisionist portrait of how this iconic and enigmatic figure exerted an outsized impact on the American landscape--and the American character. America's first "celebrity" general, William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of many faces. Some of them were exalted in the public eye. Others were known only to intimates--his family, friends and lovers, and the soldiers under his command. In this rich and layered portrait, Robert L. O'Connell captures the man in full for the first time. From his early exploits in Florida, to his role in California at the start of the Gold Rush, through his brilliant but tempestuous generalship during the Civil War, and to his postwar career as a key player in the building of the transcontinental railroad, Sherman was, as O'Connell puts it, the "human embodiment of Manifest Destiny." Here is Sherman the military strategist of...