For Sherman was a good deal better educated than Grant--as he once took occasion to remind him--and from a somewhat higher social stratum. Sherman's father had been a lawyer and one of his grandfathers a judge, and, after the death of his father, William was brought up in the household of Thomas Ewing, the "Logician of the West," who had been senator from Ohio in the thirties and then served in the cabinets of Harrison and Taylor. He had a trained gift of self-expression and was, as Mark Twain says, a master of narrative. His dispatches and reports to Washington had already given evidence of this, but his memoirs are quite amazing. The vigorous account of his pre-war activities and his conduct of his military operations is varied in just the right proportion and to just the right degree of vivacity with anecdotes and personal experiences. We live through his campaigns, as we do not do Grant's, in the company of Sherman himself. He tells us what he thought and what he felt, and he never strikes any attitudes or pretends to feel anything which he does not feel. His frankness and self-dependence, his rectitude in whatever he undertakes--in the panic of 1855, he was almost the only banker in San Francisco who managed to remain solvent--and his contempt for petty schemes and ambitions, together with a disregard for many conventional scruples, make Sherman, in spite of his harshness, a figure whom we not only respect but cannot help liking. Though he declared that war was "all hell" and though the Southerners thought him a devil, his soldiers called him "Uncle Billy," and he was popular both before and after the war as a talker and dancer and diner-out. He is supposed to have been strongly attractive to women. Like Eisenhower, Churchill and Hitler, Sherman was an amateur painter--in water color. He had also a great appetite for the theater and was always quoting from Shakespeare, and he read Dickens over and over again.
Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore
