Sherman’s tactics subject of upcoming Civil War Symposium

What: Fourth Civil War Symposium

When: 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. April 12

Where: Clark County Heritage Center

Cost: Adults, $50; members, $40; students, $20

Register: By April 4 at the Center

Note: Ferncliff Cemetery Tour is 6 p.m. April 11

Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman is best known for saying “War is hell.”

Although many Southerners today believe the Lancaster, Ohio, native is in the right place to consider that comparison, historian John Marszalek argues that Sherman’s tactics present his detractors with a bedeviling question: Would you rather have been shot and killed in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg or have returned home, defeated but alive, to find your barn had been burned by Sherman’s marauding troops?

Marszalek, a distinguished historian and author of the award winning book “Sherman, A Soldier’s Passion for Order” (1993), will be one of four authors and presenters at the Clark County Historical Society’s fourth Civil War Symposium April 12 at the Heritage Center.

A member of the prestigious Lincoln Roundtable and executive director and editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Association, Marszalek said that although Sherman may be rightly regarded as one of the creators of the modern notion of “total war,” a major goal of his famous “March to the Sea” through Georgia was to destroy the Confederacy with as small a body count as he could manage.

“He talked about destroying property” and with it the South’s ability to wage war, said Marszalek, “but he did not want to kill people.”

Although not quite the neglected “red-headed stepchild” spurned by a family, the red-headed Sherman was 9 years old when his father died and his mother, who could not financially support a family, gave him to the care of a family that lived down the street.

“The Ewing family took Sherman in,” Marszalek said, adding that father Thomas Ewing, the nation’s first Secretary of the Interior, supported him through his school years, then took the practical move of sending the bright lad on to the U.S. Military Academy, where his tuition was free.

Sherman finished sixth in his class at West Point and would have finished higher but “he kept getting too many demerits” for not attending to spit and polish dress, Marszalek said.

Indeed, one of the most often seen photos of Sherman from the war years shows a man who appears to be well into a bad hair life.

Sherman served in military posts in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina and was head of the Louisiana Military Seminary (now Louisiana State University) when the Civil War broke out.

Sherman had taken that job because, like Grant, he hadn’t met with much success when he left the military in the 1850s. The two had overlapped time at West Point but didn’t really get to know one another before the battle at Shiloh.

Marszalek argues that the deep, trusting relationship they soon developed there is “one of the reasons the federals won the Civil War.”

Just as Grant was called a drunk, Sherman accused of being crazy, the historian said. But their friendship and trust grew despite quite different personalities.

Whereas Grant, when making an entry, “would look for someplace in the back of the room to sit,” Sherman “would start slapping people on the back, shaking hands” and immersing himself in camaraderie, Marszalek said.

And it was a trust that ran deep enough that Grant went against his own better judgment in allowing Sherman to carry out his March to the Sea after Atlanta fell in the fall of 1864.

“Neither Lincoln nor Grant wanted Sherman to march to the sea until he took care of (the Confederate forces led by) John Bell Hood,” Marszalek said.

The historian said Sherman’s commander and commander-in-chief were wed to the conventional wisdom of the time.

“The idea of the traditional war from the 19th century was that you, the general, would mass your troops and maneuver them in such a way that allowed your huge number of troops to face a small number of the opponent,” he said.

In theory, he said, that imbalance allowed generals to achieve their military objectives without a battle being fought.

“But it doesn’t work out that way,” Marszalek said.

In the Civil War, “people are getting killed by the thousands,” he said, including people Sherman had taken a liking to during his years of service in the South.

Convinced the Union “had to win the war,” Marszalek said, Sherman asked the question “how do we do it without killing” in such ghastly numbers.

Sherman’s insight, which has become a staple in military theory, is that it’s possible to do that by destroying not the enemy’s army but the enemy’s financial and logistical ability to support that army.

“People don’t think of (Sherman) that way, but the guy’s a real intellectual,” Marszalek said

In the midst of the war, Sherman exchanged letters about Constitutional Law with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field and corresponded about agriculture and history with leaders and leading professors in those fields.

“He could paint, he could write,” Marszalek said, “and he was able to talk to (experts) in their field of specialty.”

With his objective clearly in mind, Sherman “outmaneuvers the Southern Army so he can march through Georgia without much opposition.”

Remembering from his California days the wagon trains that left their supply lines behind and lived off the land, he ordered his army to do the same.

Destroying railways, barns and manufacturing facilities that produce goods and profits used to support the war effort, Sherman established a reputation as a brute that “played right into his hands.”

In a campaign that lasted form Nov. 15-Dec. 22, 1864, “he had so gotten into people’s heads and people’s minds” that he demoralized them, Marszalek said. “In some cases, he’s still there.”

Although the March to the Sea was a cause of much hunger and suffering in the South in the coming year, the campaign’s casualty count was low. The 3,100 deaths over five weeks (an estimated 2,100 of them to Union troops) was a sliver of the 7,800 killed and 46,000 wounded or missing in the three days of battle at Gettysburg.

Next to his “War is hell” quote, Sherman is best known in American history for saying that “if nominated, I shall not run; if elected, I shall not serve.”

“Every four years beginning in 1868, there’s a drive to get Sherman to run for president,” Marszalek said.

Despite a friendly demeanor that would have made him a more attractive candidate than Grant, Sherman hated politics and politicians, Marszalek said.

He instead remained Commanding General of the U.S. Army until 1884, seven years before his detractors believe he left to spend eternity in the place he’d equated with war.

Also on the April 12 program: