1820-1891 · American Union general in the Civil War and later Commanding General of the Army
Posthumous or imagined likeness of William Tecumseh Sherman. Source · Public domain
About William Tecumseh Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891) was born in Lancaster, Ohio, raised after his father's death in the household of the politician Thomas Ewing, and graduated from West Point in 1840. He served in California during the Mexican War, failed as a San Francisco banker, and was superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary when secession came. After Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the capture of Atlanta and the marches through Georgia and the Carolinas, he became Commanding General of the Army (1869–1883).
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
