Read Southern Storm for Free Online Page A

provided a vast pool of unpaid labor to handle the crops or construct fortifications. On the other it represented an elemental force that threatened to burst free at the first provocation. A young boy living near Eatonton had experienced enough about life to recognize the fear. “The whites who were left at home knew it was in the power of the negroes to rise and in one night sweep the strength and substance of the Confederacy from the face of the earth,” remembered future writer Joel Chandler Harris. “Some of the more ignorant whites lived in constant terror.”
    Many slaves were ready for liberation and awaited only the opportunity to manifest itself. By most measures, thirty-five-year-old Willis Bennefield was a privileged servant. He belonged to a doctor with aplantation just outside Waynesboro who used Willis to chauffeur for him on his calls. As a boy Willis had accompanied the doctor’s sons to school and waited for them on the outside steps. “I got way up de alphabet by listening,” he recollected many years later. Among his happier memories of those times was going to church. “We had dances, and prayers, and singing, too,” he stated. “We sang a song, ‘On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand, and cast a wishful eye.’”

    CHAPTER 3
The Stormbringer
     
    W illiam Tecumseh Sherman lived with a ghost. It was the spirit of his first son, William Jr., who had been the receptacle for every hope and aspiration of his inordinately proud father. “You must continue to write me and tell me everything—how tall in feet and inches—how heavy—can you ride and swim—how many feet and inches you can jump. Everything,” wrote Sherman in early 1863. His desire to be with his wife and oldest boy was so powerful that he arranged for them to join him near Vicksburg during a rare slow period in the western war. Little Willy (he was just nine) showed his winning ways by becoming an honorary sergeant in one of his father’s regiments. Then tragedy struck. Willy grew ill, an army surgeon diagnosed typhoid, and the failing child was rushed to Memphis, where specialists informed Sherman the case was hopeless. The beloved boy departed this world on the afternoon of October 3, 1863.
    To his great friend and mentor, Ulysses S. Grant, Sherman revealed that “this is the only death I have ever had in my family and falling as it has so suddenly and unexpectedly on the one I most prised on earth has affected me more than any other misfortune could.” Sherman knew who to blame. “Why, oh why, should that child be taken from us, leaving us full of trembling and reproaches? Though I know we did all human beings could do to arrest the ebbing tide of life, still I will always deplore my want of judgment in taking my family to so fatal aclimate at so critical a period of life.” To his wife he also confessed that “sleeping, waking, everywhere I see poor Willy. His face and form are as deeply imprinted on my memory as were deep-seated the hopes I had in his future.” Yet out of this great loss was forged a grim determination. “On, on I must go till I meet a soldier’s fate, or see my country rise…till its flag is adored by ourselves and all the powers of the earth,” he vowed.
    The emotional blow of Willy’s death would be followed in slightly more than a year by professional triumphs that would make Sherman one of the North’s most celebrated military heroes. It was typical of a life charted in great lows and grand highs, and of a serpentine personal odyssey that carried Sherman from an intense contemplation of suicide to the stern rejection of influential friends bearing presidential aspirations. While Sherman would later protest that it was the powerful flux of national events that caused him to be “forced into prominence,” he nevertheless relished the spotlight. He was a private man who wielded the written word in public forums like a rapier. He dedicated his life’s energies to protecting the uniquely American