William Tecumseh Sherman :: essays research papers

William Tecumseh Sherman was born on May 8, 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio. He was educated at the U.S. Military Academy and later went on to become a Union General in the U.S. civil war. Sherman resigned from the army in 1853 and became a partner in a banking firm in San Francisco. He became the president of the Military College in Louisiana(now Louisiana state University) from 1859-1861. Sherman offered his services at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and was put in command of a volunteer infantry regiment, becoming a brigadier general of volunteers after the first Battle of bull run. He led his division at the Battle of Shiloh and was then promoted to major general of volunteers. Soon after Sherman fought in the battle of Chattanooga he was made supreme commander of the armies in the west. Sherman fought many battles with such people as Ulysses S. Grant, and against people such as Robert E. Lee before he was commissioned lieutenant general of the regular army. Following Grants election to presidency he was promoted to the rank of full general and given command of the entire U.S. Army. William Sherman published his personal memoirs in 1875, retired in 1883, and died in 1891. William Tecumseh Sherman, as you have read, was a very talented and very successful man. He is remembered by many accomplishments, but probably most remembered by his famous March to the sea. Sherman's march to the sea was probably the most celebrated military action, in which about sixty thousand men marched with Sherman from Atlanta to the Atlantic ocean, then north through South Carolina destroying the last of the souths economic resources. Bedford Forrest was in Tennessee, and with Atlanta secured, Sherman dispatched George H. Thomas to Nashville to restore the order there. John B. Hood threatened Thomas's supply line, and for about a month, they both fought north of Atlanta. Sherman decided to do the complete opposite of what the strategic plan laid down by Grant six months earlier had proposed to do. In that plan Grant had insisted that Confederate armies were the first and foremost objectives for Union strategy. What Sherman decided now was that he would completely ignore the Confederate armies and go for the "spirit that sustained the Confederate nation itself", the homes, the property, the families, and the food of the Southern heartland. He would march for Savannah, Georgia and the seacoast, abandoning his own line of supply, and live off the land and harvests of the Georgia Country. Grant finally approved Sherman's plan, so Sherman set off on his march eastward, "smashing things to the sea." On November 15, 1864, Sherman began his