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democracy, but his vision of this blessed society also embraced racial bias as part of the natural order of things as well as pragmatic limits to some freedoms. He was a person of profound ethical and spiritual contradictions, and possessed of many faces. Speaking to a gathering of veterans in 1866, Sherman revealed, “I am full of passion and sometimes act wildly.”
    William Tecumseh Sherman (the middle name was his father’s homage to the Shawnee warrior chief) was born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820. His father died when he was nine, forcing his financially pressed mother to scatter her children out to relatives and friends for upbringing. Young William became surrogate son to Thomas Ewing, a politician with enough clout to have the boy admitted to West Point, where he graduated sixth in the class of 1840. Sherman knocked around in military assignments for thirteen years (he was posted to California during the Mexican-American War) before trying and failing in a banking career. Subsequent efforts to succeed in law and real estate went bust as well. “I would feel rejoiced to hide myself in any obscure corner,” he told a friend. On another low occasion he anguished, “I look on myself as a dead cock in the pit and will take the chances as they come.” At last Sherman found a job that suited his talents, that ofsuperintendent of the Louisiana Military Seminary in Alexandria. He took the position in 1859.
    Events beyond the seminary’s walls cut short the superintendent’s tenure. On January 26, 1861, Louisiana joined five other states in declaring itself independent of the United States. Sherman remained at his post for one more month (to collect his last paycheck) and then went north. (But not before warning his colleagues, “You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth.”) Following a brief stint as president of a Saint Louis streetcar company, he rejoined the army bearing the rank of colonel, commanding a regiment of U.S. regulars. After a good showing in a badly managed battle at Bull Run, Sherman was made second in command in Kentucky, an assignment which soon became first in command once his superior abruptly stepped down. It was a disastrous promotion.
    Kentucky was a volatile border state, with passions running high on both sides. Sherman had yet to find his equipoise—the balancing point where training and personality merge into a self-confident leader. He reacted badly to the pressures, made some unwise public statements, and came near enough to a breakdown that several newspapers labeled him insane. He was bounced from Kentucky to Missouri, then sent home to rest. It seemed that his return to the army would be chalked up as another failure in his life.
    His wife (Thomas Ewing’s daughter) used all the family leverage she could muster to have Sherman returned to a field command. He led a division at the battle of Shiloh, where he served under U. S. Grant, a man he greatly admired. The two became an effective team through the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns, victories that propelled both men into the national spotlight. When Grant was brought east in early 1864 to command all Union armies in the war effort, Sherman was given responsibility for the key operation in the west.
    Outwardly, the man accepting these important new duties looked nothing like a warrior-chief. Sherman, recollected one of his soldiers, usually “wore very common looking clothes. He generally looked like some old farmer; his hat all slouched down and an old brown overcoat.” Yet those with the perception to look beyond external appearances saw a man prepared to wage relentless warfare. “With his large frame, tall, gaunt form, restless hazel eyes, aquiline nose, bronzed face,and crisp beard,” wrote one of Grant’s aides, “he looked the picture of ‘grim-visaged war.’”
    Sherman was in perpetual motion. “He is a very nervous man and can’t keep still a