General with Imagination

THE GENERAL WHO MARCHED TO HELL (349 pp.)--Earl Schenck Miers--Knopf ($4.50).

GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN INSANE.

The headlined scandal broke on Dec. 11, 1861, in the columns of the Cincinnati Commercial. A dispatch explained: "He was . . . while commanding in Kentucky, stark mad . . . He has of course been relieved altogether from command."

Hostile journalists actually thought they had evidence of Sherman's insanity. In the midst of a slow, steady advance toward the Cumberland Gap, the report went, Sherman began to imagine shadowy Confederate cavalrymen in the obscure offing. He ordered a halt, then pulled back in alarm, all quite needlessly.

But William Tecumseh Sherman was far from insane. Though he certainly overestimated the forces facing him in Kentucky, he was in many respects the most brilliant commander the Union had, and one of the few who saw the war from its beginning as a brutal, hellish struggle to the death. Sherman's trouble was that his mind was all too subtly balanced, that he was a man of imagination as well as a man of war.

According to Earl Schenck Miers in The General Who Marched to Hell, the struggles of Sherman's mind within itself were as violent as the slashing offensives he launched against the Confederacy. Both campaigns, says Author Miers, had to be won before Sherman could celebrate the triumph of his career, the decisive march through Georgia to the sea.

Gold-Rush Days. "Cump" Sherman's "nervous-sanguine temperament" showed itself early in his Ohio boyhood. He so hated his red hair that he tried to dye it black, and succeeded only in producing an unhealthy shade of green. At 16, looking to his Eastern relatives like "an untamed animal just caught in the Far West," Sherman entered West Point, and at 20 he was graduated, "standing highest in engineering, geology, rhetoric, mental philosophy, and demerits."

The next 20 years brought a series of failures. Sherman quit the Army after the Mexican War (which he was obliged to sit out ingloriously in California), and floundered about in the gold-rush boom. In 1859 ne took the job of superintendent of Louisiana's state military academy, but threw up the post three months before the attack on Fort Sumter, and became a colonel in the Union Army.

At Bull Run, Colonel Sherman got his baptism of blood. The "sickening confusion [of] a field strewed with dead men and horses" affected him so sharply that he later warned Lincoln never to give him "a superior command." Nevertheless, the Union was in dire need of professional officers, and Lincoln gave him temporary command in Kentucky. Sherman was always an agitated smoker; his tobacco consumption kept pace, says Author Miers, with his expanding fears of responsibility. In a haze of smoke and anxiety, he ordered his "insane" countermarch from Cumberland Gap.

Test of Shiloh. "I should have committed suicide were it not for my children," he wrote to his brother. "I do not think I can again be trusted with a command." But General Henry ("Old Brains") Halleck, commander in Missouri, thought otherwise. Halleck made Sherman his deputy. In this post, Sherman soon came to work with another young commander, Ulysses S. Grant, whose ability to live with his fears encouraged Sherman to do the same. At bloody Shiloh, Sherman stood firm through a two-day onslaught, during which four horses were shot from under him, and held his green regiments in the line even after some of them had run out of ammunition.

After Shiloh, Sherman never doubted himself--yet neither did he overrate his powers. "I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant," he once confided to a subordinate. "I know a great deal more about war . . . than he does . . . But I'll tell you where he beats me ... He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell!"

With Sherman, fear lent wings to inspiration. He conceived the tremendous march to the sea, says Author Miers, partly as an escape from a nerve-racking war of maneuver around Atlanta. Miers describes the march in some detail, but adds little to the story as most readers of history already know it. His book is no great historical milestone or biographical summation. But as a quick sketch of a great man in a great action it is good reading.

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