Moody - Demon of the Lost Cause Sherman and Civil War History

In 2004 the Atlanta Journal Constitution published on the front page of the opinion section an article about William Tecumseh Sherman. More than a quarter of the page was taken up by a photograph of a stern-looking Sherman, with his right hand resting Napoleon-like in his Brooks Brothers uniform, laid over an image of fire. The article is titled Sherman Still Burns Atlanta, but it is subtitled Despised Yankee General Wasn't as Evil as History Has Painted Him. The article quoted many historians who have written that a great deal of the history surrounding Sherman is simply myth. To many of the newspaper's readers this story must have been proof that Atlanta with its numerous northern transplants was no longer a real southern city, at least its newspaper did not represent real southerners. To native-born southerners, Sherman is the symbol of the brutality of the North and no amount of scholarly work or Sunday newspaper fluff pieces is going to change that. On a recent visit to Eatonton, Georgia, I visited the Uncle Remus Museum and was regaled with stories of how Sherman had destroyed every home in the town. I then took a self-guided tour of Eatonton's beautiful antebellum homes.

Northerners have their own myths about Sherman. The northern myth is actually very similar to the southern myth. Sherman was brutal, but he was an innovator. He was a man who fought a hard war when others were too timid or too tied to tradition to do what had to be done. Sherman was the first truly total warrior. These views are amazingly close to one another and similarly flawed, for Sherman was as much a traditionalist as any general of the American Civil War. One thing cannot be argued though; William Tecumseh Sherman is by far the most controversial figure of the American Civil War. While debate may surround other men, none other elicits the emotion that Sherman does.

The modern image of Sherman has evolved over the years. In large part, it is the product of southern writers trying to justify the war and explain their loss, but it is also the product of Union generals' and politicians' attempting to glorifytheir own place in the history of the war, men with personal grudges against the general, and modern historians' using Sherman to make their own arguments about contemporary society. Sherman is also responsible for his own myth. From these different sources is born the complex William T. Sherman who through the years will become all things to all people. In this work I examine how Sherman's reputation has evolved over the years from accusations of being a Southern sympathizer and traitor at the end of the Civil War to the modern image of Sherman as the man who laid waste to the state of Georgia in 1864, who almost single-handedly invented the concept of total war and was the unprincipled destroyer of the old South. Any serious student of the war knows that much of what has been written is filled with myth. To present the accurate version of historical events is a critical step, but it is not the complete story. It is important to understand how and why the myth became accepted by the public and all too often the scholarly community. The creation of history has the ability to become larger and more interesting than the events themselves, even in the case of a man like William T. Sherman.