William T. Sherman: Special Field Order No. 15

About the Author

William Tecumseh Sherman was born on February 8, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York, in 1840. After serving in Florida and South Carolina, Sherman left the military to tour the southern states, gaining especially rich knowledge of the geography of the Mississippi Valley and Georgia. After rejoining the army, Sherman served during the Mexican-American War and in the Pacific Division before resigning again to work as a banker, as a lawyer, and in real estate. In 1859 Sherman assumed the superintendency of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy.

Following the Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Sherman once again returned to the army, rising by May 1862 from colonel to major general of volunteers and serving at the First Battle of Bull Run, in the defense of Kentucky, and at the Battle of Shiloh, in Tennessee. Sherman next commanded the defenses of Memphis and fought at Chickasaw Bayou, Arkansas Post, and Vicksburg before assuming leadership of the Army of the Tennessee in October 1863 and then overall command of western troops in March 1864. From March 1864 to June 1865 Sherman led the Military Division of the Mississippi and orchestrated the attack from lower Tennessee into Georgia that culminated in the fall of Atlanta on September 2. This victory occasioned Sherman’s promotion to major general in the regular army.

After resting his troops for ten weeks, Sherman dispatched part of his force under Major General George H. Thomas to engage Confederate forces in Tennessee. On November 15, Sherman oversaw a march southeast across Georgia by two columns of infantry and cavalry that covered 250 miles in twenty-six days. With the army traversing central Georgia in a forty- to sixty-mile-wide front, Sherman’s men left a swath of destruction in their wake, disrupting communications, destroying government buildings, laying waste crops, and desolating railroads and agricultural equipment. Unquestionably his use of “hard” war—employing the selective destruction of military and civilian targets and psychological warfare in his Georgia and later Carolinas campaigns—helped break the Confederates’ will to fight. Sherman’s famous “March to the Sea” ended on December 21, when he and his troops entered Savannah. This campaign left white Georgians angry and stunned, while black Georgians stood emancipated and hungry for the fruits of freedom.

Following the war Sherman remained in the army and openly sympathized with the fate of white southerners, not blacks; he opposed the granting of civil and political rights to freedpeople. Sherman commanded the Military Division of the Mississippi, provided military support for the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and participated in the campaigns waged against American Indians. In 1866 Sherman was promoted to lieutenant general and placed in temporary command of the U.S. Army. Following Ulysses S. Grant’s assuming the presidency in 1869, Sherman was promoted to full general and appointed commanding general of the army. He retired in 1884 and died on February 14, 1891. Historians continue to debate Sherman’s contributions to “total” or “modern” warfare and rely upon his frank, two-volume Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (1875) as an important primary source.

Although he was an Ohio native, Sherman shared the conservative, antiblack, proslavery views of many of his southern friends and comrades in the army, holding contempt multilaterally for African Americans, abolitionists, and southern disunionists. According to the historian Louis Gerteis, the general “despised blacks and secessionists equally” and “scornfully dismissed Northern humanitarian concerns with the freedmen’s welfare.” Seemingly unabashed, he publicly opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, the recruitment of African American soldiers, and what Sherman considered the granting of special privileges to people of color. The Reverend Henry M. Turner, a free black man from South Carolina who served as chaplain in the U.S. Colored Troops and later as a state congressman in Georgia, dubbed a commander who shared what he termed the general’s “ignoble prejudice” to be nothing more than a “ Shermanized officer.”

Sherman expressed his antipathy toward blacks in general and escaped bondsmen in particular early in the war in his personal correspondence. In July 1862, while commanding in Memphis, Tennessee, he complained to his wife of being bombarded by loyal masters who sought military assistance in tracking down their escaped slaves. “As to freeing the negros,” Sherman continued,

I don’t think the time is come yet—when Negros are liberated either they or their masters must perish. They cannot exist together except in their present relation, and to expect negros to change from Slaves to masters without one of those horrible convulsions which at times Startle the world is absurd.

A year later Sherman explained to his brother that blacks proved unreliable as servants and he opposed their recruitment as armed soldiers. “I wont trust niggers to fight yet,” he said, “but dont object to the Government taking them from the Enemy, & making such use of them as experience may suggest.”

Writing in September 1864, Sherman summarized his attitude toward the granting of civil rights to African Americans: “I like niggers well enough as niggers, but when fools & idiots try & make niggers better than ourselves, I have an opinion.” When asked rhetorically whether blacks might not stop Confederate bullets as well as whites, the general retorted: “Yes, and a sand bag is better; but can a negro do our skirmishing and picket duty? … Can they improvise roads, bridges, sorties, flank movements, etc. like the white man? I say no.” Shortly after the war, in May 1865, Sherman found himself embroiled in a controversy over the surrender terms he had offered Confederate troops in North Carolina; the general wrote his wife, “Stanton wants to kill me because I do not favor his scheme of declaring the Negroes of the South, now free, to be loyal voters, whereby politicians may manufacture just so much pliable electioneering material.”