Before his march through Georgia, Sherman was a failed banker who feared San Francisco
The general who seized Atlanta and marched to the sea had spent years flopping in business. William Tecumseh Sherman survived two shipwrecks, ran a bank through a panic, and later joked that he could lead a hundred thousand men in battle but was afraid to manage a building lot in San Francisco's swamp.
Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, on February 8, 1820. When his father, an Ohio Supreme Court judge, died suddenly of typhoid in 1829, his mother was left with eleven children and no money, and nine-year-old William was taken in by a neighbour, the lawyer and politician Thomas Ewing. Ewing got him into West Point at 16, where he did well in class but shrugged off the rules on neatness and never rose above cadet private. He graduated in 1840. His unusual middle name came, by his own account, from his father's admiration for the Shawnee chief Tecumseh.
His early career zigzagged. He reached California during the war with Mexico, helped survey the street grid of Sacramento in 1848 and earned $1,500 from a general store in 1849 while his army pay was $70 a month. In 1850 he married Ellen Ewing, his foster sister, with President Zachary Taylor among the guests. He resigned in 1853 to run a bank branch in San Francisco and kept it solvent through the crash of 1855, but the business later closed. In 1859 he became superintendent of a Louisiana military academy that is now Louisiana State University, quitting when the state seceded.
The war nearly broke him too: gloom about Union prospects in Kentucky led to a collapse and brief leave. He recovered by partnering with Ulysses S. Grant at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga. When Grant went east in 1864, Sherman took over in the west, and his capture of Atlanta helped re-elect Abraham Lincoln. The march through Georgia and the Carolinas that followed saw little fighting but systematic destruction of infrastructure, meant to break the South's ability and will to fight, and it earned him lasting criticism for harshness.
In April 1865 he accepted the surrender of Confederate armies in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, on terms Secretary of War Edwin Stanton judged too generous. He led the army from 1869 to 1883, applying similar hard-war methods in the Indian Wars, refused to enter party politics, and published celebrated memoirs in 1875. He died on February 14, 1891.
Source: William Tecumseh Sherman
