Review: Hirshon, The White Tecumseh (1997)

[truepenny]

The White Tecumseh: A Biography of General William T. Sherman by Stanley P. Hirshson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a mediocre biography of William Tecumseh Sherman. I was hoping (expecting?) that the title was being used ironically, or at least with self-awareness or at LEAST quoting something said about Sherman during his lifetime, and nope. So that's cringeworthy. Otherwise, Hirshson seems to be an honest biographer, not trying to cover over any of the giant flaws in Sherman's character, and following his subject faithfully through pre-Civil War, Civil War, and post-Civil War life. He's just not a very interesting writer (it's possible he comes off particularly badly against Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, which is the book I finished immediately prior). This book plodded along from birth to death.

It's a pity, because Sherman himself was such a firecracker of a person, exploding here in a nervous breakdown, there in a fantastically ill-advised attempt to dictate terms, not just to Johnston and the Confederates, but to the Union government in Washington D.C. And of course burning Atlanta and marching through Georgia. "War is cruelty," he said at one point (also "War is hell"), and for someone who does not seem to have been particularly self-aware, he understood war in a searingly honest way that few generals on either side did. (Grant did. Jackson did.) Sherman was also appallingly racist (although not more racist than a lot of other white Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century), and is one of the many white men who should not be forgiven for their treatment of Native Americans. (When your opinion is, "Yes, well, it's a pity we're committing genocide but (a) it has to happen and (b) they asked for it," you really need to sit down and think about your choices, which of course Sherman never did.) He was also a petty bitch (egged on by his wife, whom I disliked immensely) and a father of a rather selfish stripe. (When his elder surviving son decided to become a Jesuit instead of a lawyer, Sherman took it as a personal, devastating insult and swore enmity to the Catholic Church. He seemed to feel that Tom OWED it to him to become a lawyer and it just unhinged him that Tom was determined to do something else.)

So a rather boring biography about an interesting person.



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