Interesting Essay Regarding William Tecumseh Sherman

The scourge of sentimental thinking:

Though born in Ohio, Sherman had spent much of his life among Southerners. In 1836 he entered West Point, where the emphasis on hierarchy and obedience would prepare Sherman well to move later among aristocratic Southerners. Upon graduation in 1840, Sherman spent the next six years at postings across the Deep South, in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. It was especially while in Charleston that Sherman got to know the South’s aristocracy, attending parties and going on deer hunts along the Cooper River.

...Blinded by his implacable racism, Sherman could see no worthwhile moral or legal debate to be had over slavery. History had forced this institution on the South, Sherman thought, and its continued prosperity depended on embracing it. “Theoretical notions of humanity and religion,” he flatly declared, “cannot shake the commercial fact that their labor is of great value and cannot be dispensed with.”

...Still, slavery did trouble Sherman in one way: He grew increasingly worried that the political fight over it would threaten the stability of the Union. However, while he occasionally singled out Southerners for overreacting to antislavery sentiment — once writing that they “pretend to think that the northern people have nothing to do but steal niggers and preach sedition” — Sherman overall displayed a clear sympathy for their side in the growing schism.

...On the other hand, Sherman was always consistent when it came to the most fundamental disagreement between himself and his Southern friends and colleagues. He resigned his superintendency in January 1861 when it was clear Louisiana would follow the cotton states out of the Union. Sherman would help Southern whites “protect themselves against negroes and abolitionists,” but he refused to accept disunion under any circumstances.

...Sherman would also hold rage in his heart at what he considered Confederate treason, and he came to embrace a war strategy to make the South pay for its disloyalty. “My aim,” according to his memoirs, “was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.” This Sherman, the scourge of the South, is well-established in Civil War history.

...Sherman’s relationship with the South makes him one of the most paradoxical and polarizing figures of the Civil War. He understood, and to a great extent embraced, the beliefs and values that led the South to secede. Yet of all Union generals he was the most viscerally opposed to the rebellion, causing him, as the war went on, to become the Confederacy’s sympathetic, vengeful enemy.