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Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American

B.H. Liddell Hart

4.16 · Rating details · 317 ratings · 23 reviews

When Liddell Hart's Sherman was first published in 1929, it received encomiums such as these:

"A masterly performance . . . one of the most thorougly dignified, one of the most distinguished biographies of the year." -- Henry Steele Commager, New York Herald Tribune

"It is not often that one comes upon a biography that is so well done as this book. Nearly every page bears ...more

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Paperback, 474 pages

Published March 22nd 1993 by Da Capo Press (first published November 30th 1928)

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Dec 02, 2014 Ben Bartlett rated it it was amazing

This classic biography is important in three ways. First, it is simply an excellent portrayal of a great man's life. Second, it is a powerful corrective to the unfair popular perspectives on Sherman that are often taught at the high-school level. And third, it marks the beginning of BH Liddell's developing ideas on strategic concepts like proceeding along the line of least expectation and maintaining flexibility of options. Terrific biography, one of the best I've read. ...more

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Sep 23, 2017 John Minster rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biographies, american-history, military-strategy

"Sherman" was really a pleasure to read; Liddell Hart highlights a controversial and fascinating general with perspicacity and brevity. He paints Sherman as one often considered belligerent, pugnacious and wild; yet in reality he was logical, measured, and when needed, forceful.

Perhaps the most prescient general of the war, Sherman and his titular march are rightly legendary. Liddell Hart charts Sherman's evolution of thought leading to that fateful course, while inserting some of his own strat ...more

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Jun 10, 2017 Harry Lee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography-history, essentials

It's not easy to find a hero. Most are flawed. But Sherman is the man.

The book was a real page-turner for me and has become a favourite. I had the book for a while now, but was wary of reading it ... worried that I might start a book and not finish it because I might be bored and get lost in the details. I read it with some Civil War maps from Wikipedia. I usually read a few books at the same time, but this book totally consumed me.

In finishing the book, I have found for myself someone that I ...more

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Jul 11, 2020 Kenneth rated it it was amazing

Very often I am plagued by the question of whether I have enjoyed a work of biography because I liked the subject or because the quality of the writing was excellent leading me to like the subject. In this case, I have no doubt: I loved both. BH Liddell Hart was a professional soldier and also an extraordinary writer. William Tecumseh Sherman was the best grand strategist either side of the Civil War produced and the second most able tactical commander after Lee. It's no exaggeration to say that Very often I am plagued by the question of whether I have enjoyed a work of biography because I liked the subject or because the quality of the writing was excellent leading me to like the subject. In this case, I have no doubt: I loved both. BH Liddell Hart was a professional soldier and also an extraordinary writer. William Tecumseh Sherman was the best grand strategist either side of the Civil War produced and the second most able tactical commander after Lee. It's no exaggeration to say that his decisions, more than those of any other Union commander, won the war unless one counts Grant's support of those decisions and his judgement of character to trust Sherman.

Sherman was orphaned at an early age and was adopted into a political family in Ohio who were friends of his parents. His adoptive father was a Senator as was his adoptive brother and he eventually married his adoptive sister. So Sherman got an early view into the political milieu of the Republic and this gave him a very realistic understanding of the country. His early military career saw him posted to several points in the South and wherever he was posted he took an interest in the local country and the views of the local citizens. He was a very spartan and practical man but he also had both a deep empathy for the feelings of his fellow man and a keen eye for the realities that underlay many delusions.

He also understood both the utility and the economy of Force. When he was posted to California after the Mexican War when a group suggested he join an unarmed attack on a group of determined, and armed, vigilantes he declined knowing that good will backed by insufficient force is worse than useless because it undermines the principle on which the good will was based in the first place. He had a mediocre career as a banker and in 1859, found himself as the dean of a military school in Louisiana training the officers who would some day oppose him. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was offered a position by a New York bank during this period to set up their operations in London. Future confederate commanders Bragg and Beauregard convinced him to stay and finish out his task which had the effect of destroying the Confederacy because the deal was for a multi-year contract which Sherman would have completed.

His residence in Louisiana during the 1860 election and the rush to secession put him in a unique position. With family members in Congress he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain to secessionists employing him that the North would never accept the dissolution of the union nor the continuation of slavery. When secession made his role untenable he came North and tried to re-enlist in the Army but was offered a desk job rather than a combat command and so declined. All the while, he tried to use his experience in the South to explain to the North just what they were getting into, that the war would not be quick and that the commitment of the Confederacy to the cause was total. As in the South, in the North his knowledge was discounted and his advice ignored.

His combat career began as a commander at Bull Run at which his personal conduct was exemplary though neither his unit nor the Union Army covered itself in glory. He was then transferred to the Western theater and assigned to help build up the state militias that were being federalized and would wage the war in the west. As Grant began to increase in aggression, Sherman got more opportunity for action and rose in stature. At Shiloh, Sherman was significantly more adept at handling his tasks than Grant but appreciated having an honest in introspective commander and the two men worked well together to the end of the War.

Sherman commanded detachments in a number of abortive assaults on Vicksburg and also contributed to the tactical and strategic decisions that led to the successful siege. In the wake of that battle, rather than take leave, he brought his family down from Ohio to Mississippi and while there his 9 year old son caught yellow fever and died. Liddell-Hart makes much of this and its effect of driving Sherman deeper into himself and making him more coldly rational but I wonder whether a more psychological interpretation of this might not be helpful because it was immediately after this that Sherman embarked on the campaign that made him famous and more or less destroyed the Confederacy.

"Sherman's march to the Sea" was really three phases. The first was a stunning series of turning motions against the larger and better supplied army of Johnston standing between him and Atlanta. Throughout the campaign the only frontal battle that occurred was Kennesaw Mountain, a setback for Sherman, and the rest of it was a series of armed probes that made each of Johnstons strong lines untenable while at the same time preventing Johnston from being able to mass for an attack on him. Eventually Johnston was replaced by Hood who was no match for Sherman at all and whose errors led to the fall and ultimately the destruction of Atlanta.

Then began the "March to the Sea" whose main objective and accomplishment was to destroy the morale of the South by proving to one and all that the press was lying to the people of the Confederacy about the success of their armies and demonstrating its incapacity to secure them. The third and final phase was the march through the Carolinas which has the effect of destroying the capacity of the South to supply Lee's army facing Grant and so led to the collapse of the Virginia front, the capture of Richmond and the end of the Confederacy.

Sherman then negotiated a controversial end to hostilities more generally which generated some controversy. Andrew Johnson and Stanton rejected his terms and ordered him to renew hostilities against Johnston, which he did, at which point Johnston surrendered again and when Johnson and Stanton permitted another commander to attempt to destroy the remnants of the army Sherman darkly hinted that he would use his own forces against those that sought to break the surrender he had accepted. Sherman knew from his experience in the South, on account of his systematically destroying it, that the will of the South had been broken and that a lenient piece with the whole of the Confederate Army was the surest way to prevent resistance to reconstruction but that a forceful peace and an attempt to run down and destroy the remaining Confederate units would simply create an insurgency which would take forever to put down. In the end a middle course was taken and the birth of the Klan and Jim Crow was the result.

After the war Sherman spent the rest of his life in a senior post in the Army but with little actual power within it. He resisted all efforts to politicize him or to use his name for one cause or another. His efforts to make Reconstruction more productive and the fruits of the victory more lasting were rejected as were his attempts to treat the Indians fairly in the west and he quickly realized that his involvement was simply lending his prestige to bad actors and to overpower them he would have to engage in a form of political combat to which he knew his honest bearing was unsuited. At his death Johnston, the man that Sherman had broken more than once and whose honor he had nearly mutinied to defend, was one of his pallbearers.

Liddell-Hart's book is outstanding. The character of Sherman is made manifest on every page, and his tactical and strategic genius are illuminated clearly and efficiently by a man who studied both his whole life and from his own experience knew the hazards of combat and command. I read this as an e-book and I would suggest doing so with campaign maps of both the siege of Vicksburg and the Nashville-Atlanta campaign near to hand as the authors command of geography and maneuver can be difficult to follow without a map. But the main thrust of the book and the real joy of it, is the portrait of a realist idealist, kind of a unique American type, and one I hope to emulate.
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Oct 19, 2010 The Angry Lawn Gnome rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, borrowed, history, politics

Not nearly as good as his later works, though I guess the "indirect" approach repeated over and over in Strategy was maybe first hinted at here.

Surprisingly positive view of Hood, everything else I've ever read has him as a grade A scumbag for the smear campaign he ran to get Johnston's job, followed up with the idiocy of attacking an entrenched Thomas. This is not BLH's view: He seemed to think part of the reason Sherman cut loose and lived off the land because Sherman felt Hood was too unpred ...more

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Aug 29, 2020 Jeff Lacy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An inspiring biography of a brilliant general who devised new military strategy. Unlike Robert O’Connell’s biography, Liddell Hart concentrates on the details of battles, particularly the invasion from Chattanooga to Atlanta, through Georgia, to Savannah, up through Charleston into North Carolina. I was born in Atlanta, raised in Marietta and the battlefields round Kennesaw Mountain. I was soaked in the myth of Sherman’s March to the Sea. But in Hart’s book, I gained new and better knowledge con An inspiring biography of a brilliant general who devised new military strategy. Unlike Robert O’Connell’s biography, Liddell Hart concentrates on the details of battles, particularly the invasion from Chattanooga to Atlanta, through Georgia, to Savannah, up through Charleston into North Carolina. I was born in Atlanta, raised in Marietta and the battlefields round Kennesaw Mountain. I was soaked in the myth of Sherman’s March to the Sea. But in Hart’s book, I gained new and better knowledge concerning the Union Army’s expedition. I became a great fan of Sherman in O’Connell’s book which devotes a balanced amount to Sherman’s personal and professional life away from meticulous battle movements. Sherman is one of the most intriguing individuals I think our nation has ever produced. He certainly was one of the most influential of the U.S. Civil War. Hart sums him up in the last third of the Epilogue, which I would read first. He was a man in full, yet a man who could be paralyzed by doubts from bouts of depression. He reached the highest level in the Army and many urged him on election cycles to run for President. He forsook any political office. His closest ally was Ulysses S. Grant. He never got over the death of his son, nine-year-old son after a visit to him in the field. He was the favorite of the women at the balls and loved the theatre and opera. Yet he was disheveled and smoked cigars frequently in the field where he slept little, read newspapers, and wrote incessantly, often to his brother, John, a U.S. Senator, and Grant. I also now understand, I think, why people in the south clamor about the fifty mile wide swath of Sherman’s march to Savannah. It came from the strategy of diversion of using his flanks as diversions—keeping the Confederate Army unable to know wear his Army was aiming: East to Augusta, south to Pensacola, or to Savannah. I think I am right here. Nevertheless, Sherman, as Hart points out in the Epilogue, this strategy of movement rather than confronting, was the strategy Sherman adopted to win his march.

From Hart and O’Connell I have to appreciate this Devil of the South. Sherman is the quintessential American who rose to the occasion at the most dramatic time in our history. Myths are just what they are. ...more

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Jul 15, 2019 Stephen Morrissey rated it really liked it

William Tecumseh Sherman and his men may have physically torn asunder the heart of the Confederacy by marching through Georgia and the Carolinas, but the general's mind and grand strategy has, perhaps more significantly, cut through military thought as the first instance of total war.

Liddell Hart, a renowned military historian and commentator, delivers a fine biography of Sherman. Though the language is stilted, and perhaps now a bit dated, and the battles are told in less-than-clear prose, Hart William Tecumseh Sherman and his men may have physically torn asunder the heart of the Confederacy by marching through Georgia and the Carolinas, but the general's mind and grand strategy has, perhaps more significantly, cut through military thought as the first instance of total war.

Liddell Hart, a renowned military historian and commentator, delivers a fine biography of Sherman. Though the language is stilted, and perhaps now a bit dated, and the battles are told in less-than-clear prose, Hart captures the man and what makes him so unique to military history, and why he was a godsend to the Union Army of the Civil War.

On from Chattanooga, Sherman devised a strategy of maneuvers and parries with his army that managed both to capture Atlanta and spare his army from the waterfalls of blood that poured forth from Grant's Overland campaign. After capturing Atlanta, though, Sherman devises something even more spectacular: a march to the sea that will physically despoil the South and psychologically impale it. Cutting off from communications, Sherman and his bummers bore into the heart of Georgia, making it howl quite loudly, though many times in fair and regulated fashion. Upon reaching the sea, Sherman carries forth the torch through South Carolina, laying waste to the farms and cities of those bold enough to declare independence in 1861.

Hart gets it exactly right in labeling Sherman one of the geniuses of the Civil War era. Unlike many, this man understood that the war would be long, brutal, make many men's lives short, and also that it was a war of peoples, not merely of armies. In understanding this, Sherman devised a way to strip the South of its political legitimacy and cripples its armies from a tactical standpoint.

Washington, Grant, Eisenhower, MacArthur - these names ring in our time as the leaders of great war efforts. Sherman, however, perhaps stands alone in not just participating in a victorious war effort, but in understanding and implementing a grand strategy that would define the modern age of warfare. ...more

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May 12, 2020 Frank Minich rated it it was amazing

I'd been interested in Sherman since we visited St. Louis last summer and stopped by Sherman's grave. It was not very impressive, given his notoriety. Neither was William Clark's grave /monument (which was more elaborate) - St. Louis doesn't seem to have the funds to keep-up the cemeteries.
The book is almost completely focused on Sherman's Civil War exploits. For example, everything later than the end of the war is found in the 'Epilogue' chapter (the last in the book).
I'd like to take off a hal ...more

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Nov 03, 2019 Penelope rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I listened to the audio of this book borrowed from the library. Very interesting and informative look at the military strategist and original thinker that was W.T. Sherman. Also, because this was written by a British writer, it was much more direct without the political considerations of the causes and execution of the Civil War taken into account.

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Mar 05, 2020 Andrew Gibson rated it really liked it

4.5. Really good. WTS needs more reps for his stoic, pragmatic, essential role in American history. His march through Georgia and South Carolina were strategic masterstrokes, and this book tells why. Well written and interesting narrative by the author.

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Aug 21, 2018 Robert Wilson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Great book

Outstanding in understanding the General and the man behind the brutal campaign against the south , the march through Georgia and the Carolinas , highly recommend to students of history

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May 03, 2020 Marc rated it really liked it

Useful book. Picks up quite a bit as it enters the better known war campaigns. Fairly light on anecdotes for a biography, however there is a great overarching picture of the controversies Sherman created particularly towards the end of the war.

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Aug 06, 2013 Karl Schaeffer rated it really liked it

I had some trepidations before starting this book. It was written in 1926. How relevant would it be? Hart's treatise on Sherman stands the test of time. It's a excellent read. Sherman is a kick-ass, righteous dude. This author clearly thinks he's the class of the act of civil war generals. Sherman definitely had the vision of what it would take to vanquish the South (i.e., scorched earth policy). His background in the quartermaster corps gave him the insight to move large bodies of troops with l ...more

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Aug 24, 2012 Matt rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography, history, nonfiction, usa

A powerful biography, particularly of Sherman's military accomplishments and the intellectual development of his strategic thinking. You can see how this led to Liddell Hart's Strategy in which he more fully develops his ideas of the value of the indirect approach.

Liddell Hart's examinations of the American political scene, particularly after the Civil War had ended and Reconstruction had begun, seem tacked on, and are shallow enough, and outdated enough, to make it almost worth skipping the Ep ...more

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Mar 27, 2012 Mike rated it it was amazing

This was my first book on the civil war, and while it can get dense, the details allow you to follow Sherman on his quest. The way that he divides his army and removes all excess equipment from the troops to continually make them leaner and faster is amazing. His march was a stroke of genius, and his way of picking multiple objectives and moving his army back and forth, see sawing between them to keep the enemy from committing to either was another stroke of genius.

A definite read for one who l ...more

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Jun 09, 2016 John rated it really liked it

Sherman is presented as a man who is a flawed hero. He makes both brilliant choices and tragic mistakes. The best example of the respect people had for him was when Joe Johnston, Sherman's opponent on the way to Atlanta, stood with his hat off in the rain as Sherman's funeral. When it was suggested that he put his hat back on Johnston replied, "He would do the same for me." Johnston died shortly afterwards of pneumonia. ...more

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Feb 03, 2016 Jerry Mrizek rated it really liked it

Really did like this book although not as much as Liddell Hart liked Sherman. He ignores some big mistakes that Sherman made during the war. That shouldn't detract from Sherman's accomplishments but they should be acknowledged. ...more

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Oct 09, 2008 Peter rated it it was amazing

Hart's best book he ever wrote. ...more

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Jul 16, 2014 Robert Stalker rated it really liked it

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the Confederacy

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About B.H. Liddell Hart

B.H. Liddell Hart

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Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart usually known before his knighthood as Captain B. H. Liddell Hart was an English soldier, military historian and leading inter-war theorist.

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“Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable-those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement. To men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of "moderation," in the Greek sense. It” — 10 likes

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