The most recommended William Tecumseh Sherman books

This book is the single best biography of Sherman – the good, the bad, the ugly – by one of the foremost scholars of the Civil War. Marszalek’s portrait of Sherman as a man who sought order in all aspects of his life provides valuable insight into Sherman’s military genius and his personal failings. This biography gives the most comprehensive portrait of the intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically complex man whose legacy continues to be debated today. This is the one-stop-shop for those who want to get to know the man I believe to be the most interesting personality of the Civil War.

Who doesn’t like to read other people’s mail? And if you’re going to do it, why not read the best? Sherman was as prolific as he was eloquent. Brooks Simpson and Jean Berlin, two of our best Civil War scholars, compiled and annotated hundreds of Sherman’s wartime letters to his family, friends, and enemies.

Though he was often circumspect in his letters, fearing they might be stolen and published by the newspapers he hated, you can feel the emotion in his letters that you don’t find in his Memoirs. Every page contains a thought, a sentence, a phrase that stays in the reader’s mind.

“You remember what Polonius spoke to his son Laertes, ‘Beware a quarrel, but being in, bear it, that thy oppressor may beware of thee.’ What is true of a single man is equally true of a Nation.”

I knew E.L. Doctorow from his gangster novel Billy Bathgate and loved his quirky characters and beautifully controlled prose. The March is a story set in the American Civil War, more specifically, General Sherman’s famous scorched-earth march through the Confederate South from Atlanta to Savannah.

We don’t see a lot of Sherman, though he’s well drawn: the book centres on the oddball mix of soldiers, deserters, civilians, and photographers caught up in the army’s slipstream and how it changed their lives.

I admired it for its realism and the clear sense of the randomness of war: who survives, who dies, who flourishes, and who is overwhelmed. An army is far less of a man’s world than one might expect, and Doctorow draws some memorable female characters.

 This novel was first published in Germany in 1954, based on the author’s actual experience as a U-boat man during the Second World War. Told through the eyes of the fictional Teichmann, it is a visceral tour-de-force of German naval life beginning on minesweepers and gravitating toward U-boats. A brilliant portrayal of a grim reality.

I read this book during my teenage years and it was one of the first times I can remember reading a book that is grittily realistic; devoid of the 'boy's own' adventure style of many Second World War novels, but nor did it preach an obvious repentance by the German protagonist that also became quite common. In that sense, it’s virtually a dramatized documentary story of the author’s war.

Most books about Sherman’s famous March recount his army’s march from Atlanta to Savannah. Campbell turns her lens instead on the march from Savannah north through the Carolinas, when “Southern women frequently faced the enemy alone.” In doing so, she walks the reader through the culture of white Southern womanhood that clashed with Northern soldiers’ view of proper female behavior in its energetic defense of home, hearth, and enslaved workers. Campbell tells, too, of the resistance of blacks against Sherman’s aggressive foragers, who sometimes sought to take items even from those who had virtually nothing.

This book provides a window into the women’s war on the Confederate home front when it became the frontline in Sherman’s campaign to humiliate the Confederate Army and demonstrate its impotence.

Out of this collision between Southern women and Northern men grew the archetypes of “barbarian” Sherman and “gentleman” Lee, says Campbell, icons in the… show more.

If Campbell’s book places Sherman and his strategy and tactics in the context of female Confederate resistance, Grimsley — one of the nation’s most innovative thinkers and writers of military history — places Sherman’s thinking and actions in the context of the evolution of the United States’ treatment of Confederate civilians.

The Lincoln administration policy in the beginning, notes Grimsley, was “to exempt white Southerners from the burdens of war.” But by 1864, a “hard war” policy, embracing attacks upon and/or confiscation of Southern civilians’ property, had become the guiding military policy of the United States.

Sherman’s inventive, carefully planned March embodied that policy. His goal of targeted destruction was designed to leave more than mere hardship in its wake. His army left its victims in terror, humiliation, and despair that contributed directly to the United States’ victory.

Victor Davis Hanson, a PhD classics professor and historian, puts forth a fascinating account of three military leaders who brought an end to powers who held people in bondage. Which three? 

Epaminondas broke the power of Sparta by freeing the Helots. The Spartans held the Helots in slavery to do all the farming so they could focus on military training. Epaminondas not only defeated the Spartans in battle, but he also brought an end to the slavery that empowered them.

William Tecumseh Sherman, in his famous march to the sea, broke the Confederacy. When all seemed lost for Lincoln, word came like a thunderbolt from Sherman that, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Shermans Army of the West proved that the South could be defeated. This bringing an end to slavery.   

George Patton, “…you will continue your victorious course to end that tyranny…” Hanson speculates that the war could have… show more.

The Mexican War molded the generals who fought in it. They formed lifelong friendships that ceased for a short while during the Civil War, then resumed as soon as it was over. Clever men, like Ulysses S. Grant, remembered how their opponents acted during the Mexican War, then used that information to formulate their battle plans.

Grant was cocky and overconfident going into the Fort Donelson campaign. His experiences in Mexico told him General Pillow would play it safe and let him march up to the fort with any size force. And later, when he assumed command of all the Union armies, Grant shifted the paradigm. While most Union commanders saw Robert E. Lee as unbeatable, Grant knew he was mortal. That was the secret sauce that carried him through the Wilderness campaign.

I loved the writing style on this one. If you’re unfamiliar with Martin Dugard, he is co-author… show more.

Because Crook (not Custer!) was probably the most successful and thoughtful general officer to lead troops in the West. Robinson traces Crook’s career from the 1850s Rogue River War in the Oregon Territory, through the Great Sioux War of the 1870s, concluding with the pursuit of Geronimo in the 1880s, where he achieved his greatest fame. And because, as indicated in an epigraph, quoting Oglala Chief Red Cloud, “He, at least, never lied to us.” I found comments on Crook’s employment of tribal scouts especially informative. Robinson concludes, “In war, he could be as cruel as they, but he always respected them as human beings.” He doesn’t apotheosize Crook, who reflected the views of his era in advocating assimilation to make Indians useful and productive citizens “by white standards.”

The Battle of Shiloh has been the subject of a number of distinguished historians, but only Winston Groom is able to capture the 170 individual fights between regiments with clarity and skill. The sheer numbers are daunting—100,000 soldiers fighting in 12 square miles. But Groom has told the complex Shiloh story effectively without getting bogged down in “minute detail and technical aspects” as he reports in his beginning notes. Groom’s writing is enhanced by ten detailed maps that bring lucency and specificity to the narrative. Shiloh, fought in 1862, had a deeper impact that foretold the future. In Groom’s words: “It was as if at Shiloh they had unleashed some giant, murderous thing that was now going to drench the country in blood, just as Sherman had predicted back in 1860.”