Happy 200th birthday to General William Tecumseh Sherman (February 8, 1820 – February 14, 1891)!
American hero, military genius, brilliant teacher, warrior against demons both internal and external, an endlessly complex man not without flaws, husband and father and companion, and an eternal source of wonder and depth and fellow feeling. Happy birthday, Cump.
“…his features express determination, particularly the mouth, which is wide and straight with lips shut tightly together … a very remarkable-looking man such as could not be grown out of America—the concentrated essence of Yankeedom.” -A Massachusetts man quoted by Charles Bracelen Flood, Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War
“It is difficult to determine whether Georgians hated Sherman and his army as much as the Spartans despised Epaminondas and the Thebans. Both men had wrecked their centuries-old practice of apartheid in a matter of weeks. It is a dangerous and foolhardy thing for a slaveholding society to arouse a democracy of such men.” -Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle
“They dared us to war, and you remember how tauntingly they defied us to the contest. We have accepted the issue and it must be fought out. You might as well reason with a thunder-storm. War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want.” -W.T. Sherman, 1861
“War is hell.” -W.T. Sherman, 1879