Public Libraries of Suffolk County, New York

Fierce patriot, the tangled lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert L. O'Connell

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 355-383) and index

individual biography

photographsportraitsmapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

Fierce patriot

bibliography

Robert L. O'Connell

the tangled lives of William Tecumseh Sherman

"America's first 'celebrity' general, William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of many faces. Some of them were exalted in the public eye. Others were known only to intimates--his family, friends and lovers, and the soldiers under his command. In this rich and layered portrait, Robert L. O'Connell captures the man in full for the first time. From his early exploits in Florida, to his role in California at the start of the Gold Rush, through his brilliant but tempestuous generalship during the Civil War, and to his postwar career as a key player in the building of the transcontinental railroad, Sherman was, as O'Connell puts it, the 'human embodiment of Manifest Destiny.' As he peels away the layers of the Sherman persona, O'Connell dispels a number of common misperceptions about his subject. He sheds new light on Sherman's relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, and also on his struggle against Nathan Bedford Forrest and the insurgency that was the other half of the Civil War along the Mississippi. Later he reveals Sherman's fabled march from Atlanta to the sea not as a campaign of unmitigated destruction, as it is often portrayed, but the careful execution of a necessary piece of strategy calculated to scare the South back into the Union. O'Connell's Sherman is no Attila, but a complicated soldier/statesman--perhaps the quintessential nineteenth-century American."--www.Amazon.com

Part I. The military strategist -- Tyro -- The golden state -- Into the gloom -- The black hole -- Swamped -- Atlanta -- The march -- Bands of steel -- Part II. The general and his army -- The boys -- Road warriors -- Part III. The man and his families -- Cump -- Big time

adult

Tangled lives of William Tecumseh Sherman