Personal Recollections of Distinguished Generals

by William Franklin Gore Shanks

CHAPTER I.

SHERMAN AS A STRATEGIST.

Of the few really great men who have been developed by the late war in this country, and who will leave a lasting impression on the minds of the people, William Tecumseh Sherman may be regarded as the most original. His name has been made more widely prominent, and his character more universally popular, than that of any other of our heroes; but it has been less in consequence of his brilliant success as a leader than by reason of his strongly-marked characteristics of person and mind. He is, without doubt, the most original and eccentric, though not the most powerful—the most interesting, though not the most impressive character developed by the rebellion. He is by far our most brilliant general, but not by any means the most reliable; the most fascinating, but not the most elegant; the quickest, but not the safest; the first to resolve, but not the most resolute. As a man he is always generous, but not uniformly just; affectionate by nature, but not at all times kind in demonstration; confiding, and yet suspicious; obstinate, yet vacillating; decided, but not tenacious—a mass of contradictions so loosely and yet so happily thrown together as to produce the most interesting combination imaginable. General Sherman's character has many beauties and virtues, but also many glaring defects and faults. His picture, as I have seen and studied it, possesses what the artists call "great breadth of light and shade," and is full of contrasts alternately pleasing and offensive, and which, in order to properly analyze the character, should be portrayed and described with equal force and impartiality. He is a character without a parallel among his contemporaries, though not without a contrast; and it is for the latter reason that I have chosen his character as the one upon which to base, as it were, the following estimates of the characters of his fellow-officers of the United States army, and not because I think, as may be supposed, that he deserves the first place in the rank of our great captains. The war lasted long enough to give the leaders, if not their proper places in popular estimation, at least their true linear rank in the army. General Sherman may be considered as first among the strategists of the war; General George H. Thomas as first among the tacticians; but Grant, combining the qualities of both tactician and strategist, must always be ranked as greatly the superior of both Thomas and Sherman.

General Sherman may be described as a bundle of nerves all strung to their greatest tension. No woman was ever more painfully nervous; but there is nothing of the woman's weakness in Sherman's restlessness. It is not, as with others, a defect of the organization; it is really Sherman's greatest strength, for from it results the brilliancy of conception and design which has characterized his strategic movements, the originality which has appeared in his views on political economy and the policy of war, and the overwhelming energy which is "his all in all," the secret and cause of his great success. From his extreme nervousness results the most striking feature of his character—a peculiar nervous energy which knows no cessation, and is resistless. It is not merely that energy and quickness of movement which naturally belongs to nervous organizations, but intensified a hundred fold. At the same time, it is energy without system, and oftentimes without judgment, but nevertheless always effective. General Sherman is the engine, but he is not always the engineer. He furnishes the motive power, but he frequently requires some person or thing to keep him to the track; in fact, he requires to be controlled and directed. He is untiring in his efforts; you can never dismay him with the amount or frighten him with the dangers of a task; and he hesitates at nothing, matters great and small receiving his attention. He is no believer in that too common fallacy that labor is a wearisome waste of the physical and vital powers; a punishment, not a privilege; and degrading, not elevating. Work is necessary to his existence, and hard, earnest work at that. Always a hard, earnest worker, he devoted, during the continuance of the war, but little time to sleep, and that little sleep was never sound. His active mind, I once heard him say to a fellow-officer, delights in preposterous dreams and impossible fancies, and, waking or sleeping, continues ever active in planning and executing.

A few anecdotes will perhaps better illustrate the nature of this nervous energy. The most remarkable instance of this characteristic which I can now recall occurred at Nashville, Tennessee. When Sherman assumed command there in March, 1864, the great difficulty in the way of an advance from Chattanooga upon the enemy, then covering Atlanta and the Georgia railroads, was the lack of provisions at Chattanooga and Knoxville. The military agent of the railroads from Nashville to Chattanooga was running through to the army at the latter point about ninety car-loads of rations per day. This merely served to feed the army then gathered there; nothing was accumulating for the spring campaign. General Sherman demanded the cause of this insufficient supply of rations. The agent reported that he needed both cars and locomotives, and added it was impossible to obtain them. General Sherman answered that nothing was impossible, and immediately began to devise means by which to remedy the evil. After a short deliberation, he decided to seize a sufficiency of cars and locomotives in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, and at once went to work to do so. In an incredibly short space of time he extended the northern terminus of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad through the former city, a distance of three miles, to the Ohio River. On the levee, or wharf, he built an inclined plane to the water's edge. One of the ferry-boats which plied between Louisville and Jeffersonville was seized, and especially prepared by the laying of rails across its bow and stern to carry cars and locomotives. On the Indiana side of the river he extended the Jeffersonville Railroad through that town to the Ohio River, and built another inclined plane from the bluff on which the town is situated down the steep wharf to the water's edge. At the same time he ordered the impressment of the necessary cars and locomotives from the various northwestern railroads, taking them off routes as far north as Chicago, and rushed them off to Nashville, crossing the Ohio by the means he had provided. The effect was soon visible. In a month after this movement began the railroad agents reported that they were running two hundred and seventy cars per day through to Chattanooga. By the 20th of April, the day Sherman left Nashville to begin his Atlanta campaign, he had accumulated at Knoxville eighteen, and at Chattanooga thirteen days' rations for his whole army of 120,000 men. The energy which inspired the railroad agents was communicated to the quarter-masters located at Nashville, and the result was the increase of the laboring force of this department from four or five thousand to nearly sixteen thousand men. During the progress of this work General Sherman required the railroad agents and quarter-masters to report progress daily. I happened to be in his office one morning when assistant quarter-master General James L. Donnalson reported a small increase in the number of cars forwarded on that day over the supply of the day before. General Sherman received the announcement with more evidences of gratification than he would have shown on hearing of a heavy re-enforcement of his numbers, for at this time he had more men than he well knew what to do with. "That's good!" he exclaimed—"that's good, Donnalson; we'll be ready for the start;" and then he hastily resumed his seat, and made a rapid calculation of some sort, which he showed with much apparent delight to Generals Donnalson and Webster, the latter his chief of staff. He could not have been more delighted if he had heard the news of a great victory. A moment afterward he turned to me to deny, in a very gruff way—he was always gruff to newspaper correspondents—my application for a pass over the military railroad to Chattanooga. "You see," he said, "I have as much as I can do to feed my soldiers," with a very ungracious emphasis on the word soldiers. As I had Lieutenant General Grant's pass to any point and by any route in my pocket, and had only submitted the question to General Sherman through deference to him as the immediate commander of the department, I could afford to smile at the slur conveyed in his emphasis, and turned away enriched with a reminiscence, and with increased admiration of the man.

Some former experience with, or, rather, observation of the general, had given me somewhat of the same opinion of his energy and earnestness. When he first assumed command at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1861, the agents of the New York Associated Press throughout the country were employed by the government in transmitting its cipher or secret messages, and correspondence between the various military commanders, by telegraph. In consequence of this arrangement, General Sherman frequented the office of the Louisville agency, in which I was at the time employed. He was always at this office during the evening, often remaining until three o'clock in the morning, when the closing of the office would force him to retire to his rooms at the hotel. During these hours he would pace the floor of the room apparently absorbed in thought, and heedless of all that was going on around him. He would occasionally sit at the table to jot down a memorandum or compose a telegram. He would sometimes stop to listen to any remark addressed to him by other occupants of the room, but would seldom reply, even though the remark had been a direct question, and would appear and act as if the interruption had but momentarily disturbed his train of thought.

In July, 1864, while besieging the enemy's position at Kenesaw Mountain, an incident occurred which may be given as illustrative of Sherman's energy. When the campaign opened he had published an order informing the army, in terms which were laughed at at the time as rather bombastic and slightly egotistical, that "the commanding general intended making the campaign without a tent," and during the greater part of the march his head-quarters actually consisted of nothing more than a tent-fly for the use of his adjutant general. He generally slept under a tree during dry weather, and in very wet weather in any convenient house. When the army was concentrated in the gorge of Snake Creek Gap, in which there was not a house of any character, General Logan "raised the laugh" on Sherman by sending him a tent to protect him from the rain, and which, owing to the terrible state of the weather, Sherman was compelled to use. But the greater part of the campaign was actually passed by Sherman without any other quarters than I have described as for the convenience of his adjutant general. Early one morning a regiment of troops passed his bivouac near Kenesaw Mountain, Georgia, and saw him lying under a tree near the roadside. One of the men, not knowing the general, and supposing him, from his jaded, weary, and generally dilapidated appearance, to be drunk, remarked aloud, "That is the way we are commanded, officered by drunken generals." Sherman heard the remark and instantly arose. "Not drunk, my boy," he said good-humoredly, "but I was up all night looking after your rations, and am very tired and sleepy." He soon after broke up head-quarters, and, passing the same regiment on the march, was received with loud and hearty cheers.

He makes his subordinates work, too, with the same zeal. When the rebels, in evacuating Resaca, succeeded in burning the railroad bridge over the Oostenaula River, he turned to Colonel Wright, his engineer in charge of railroads, and asked him how long it would take him to replace that bridge. Colonel Wright replied after a short calculation, during which Sherman showed his impatience at the delay in the answer, that he could rebuild it in four days.

"Sir," exclaimed the general, hastily, "I give you forty-eight hours, or a position in the front ranks."

The bridge was forthcoming at the proper time.