William Tecumseh Sherman

Biography

William Tecumseh Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1820 and raised as a foster son in the household of Senator Thomas Ewing. He graduated from West Point in 1840, served in Florida during the Second Seminole War and on administrative duties during the Mexican-American War, and in 1850 married Ewing's daughter Ellen.

He resigned his commission in 1853 to run the San Francisco branch of a St. Louis bank, which he kept solvent through the panic of 1855. In 1859 he became the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, the forerunner of Louisiana State University, but left when Louisiana seceded and briefly ran a St. Louis streetcar company.

Rejoining the army in 1861, he served at Bull Run, suffered a breakdown in Kentucky, and then became Ulysses S. Grant's closest partner in the western campaigns. In 1864 he took Atlanta and led the destructive March to the Sea through Georgia and the Carolinas, and in April 1865 he accepted the surrender of the remaining Confederate armies in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida on terms that Washington found too generous.

When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as commanding general of the army and held the post until 1883, directing the Indian Wars and serving on the Indian Peace Commission; in 1868 he negotiated the treaty that let the Navajo return home from Bosque Redondo. He published his memoirs in 1875, refused a presidential nomination in 1884, and died in New York in 1891.