bold march through the heart of
Germany to the victory at Blenheim, stands Sherman's March to the Sea
and his "Christmas Gift" of captured Savannah. And yet this brilliant
leader of men had never seen a hostile shot fired until he was
forty-one, and his first battle was the defeat at Bull Run.

The March to the Sea, upon which Sherman's fame as a soldier so
largely rests, was by no means the greatest or most significant of his
many achievements. His record as a soldier is filled with examples of
his courage, his shrewdness, and his tenacity, while his mingling of
gentle ways and grim determination, of restlessness and calm, of
forethought, fearlessness, and frankness, make him at once a unique
and central figure in the decade of war and reconstruction that forms
so important a chapter in the story of the United States of America.

William Tecumseh Sherman was born on February 8, 1820, in the town of
Lancaster, the county-seat of that fair and fertile section known as
Fairfield County, in the southern part of the State of Ohio--the busy
commonwealth that furnished 300,000 men to the armies of the Union,
and gave to the Civil War its three greatest generals; for Grant and
Sherman were Ohio born, and Sheridan's boyhood was spent in the same
State.

But Sherman's ancestors were of stout Puritan stock, dating back
almost to the days of the Mayflower. His first American "forebear" was
a Puritan minister, Rev. John Sherman, an emigrant to the Connecticut
colony from Essex in England. Of one of the collateral branches was
Roger Sherman, drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
The father of the soldier was Judge Sherman, of the Ohio Supreme
Court; his mother was "a Hoyt of New England."

William Tecumseh Sherman was the sixth of eleven children, a younger
brother being the lad who, later, became Senator John Sherman of Ohio.
Judge Sherman, the father of the boys, died in 1829, and William was
adopted into the family of Senator Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, a resident
of Lancaster, and a notable figure in American history, for he was
senator and cabinet minister for nearly forty years.

Sherman's training was that of a soldier from boyhood. At sixteen, he
was entered as a cadet at the Military Academy at West Point, from
which he graduated in 1840, standing sixth in a class of 42.
Engineering was his favorite study, but devotion to his books seems
not to have kept him out of mischief. He was not, he himself admitted