I will start by saying Liddel Hart is my favorite military historian/author and I own half a dozen books by him, and regard them as gospel. However I felt that Liddel Hart was not as well versed in this area as he is in European History. He lets his ingrained contrariness run away with him. He wants to create a "great captain" where there is none. He also, I believe, wants to convince the reader of the genius of the "inderect approach" which he expounds in his excellent book "Strategy". However I think considering Sherman's campaign as indirect is like calling D-Day indirect because the allies invaded Normandy as opposed to Calais. ( I must admit that I am biased because I am a Lee fan) Like every other book by Liddel hart though, it is a very quick and pleasant read. I would recommend his book on Scipio as a great intro to his work.

Sherman was both the most original genius of the Civil War, and "the typical American". His career provides lessons to the modern world and to modern warfare. It was his conscious exploitation of the economic and psychological factors of war in his "March through Georgia" which helped to end the Civil War. The long and expensive battles in Northern Virginia were replayed on the battlefields of France in the Great War.

The Union attempted to take Richmond by the shortest and most direct route; but this way was blocked with natural obstacles. If the Confederates fell back they would be closer to their reserves, supplies, and reinforcements. These facts favored the entrenched defenders.

The western campaign ended in the capture of Vicksburg and control of the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans. Liddell Hart contrasts the maneuvers here to the stalemate back east. But the conditions, or politics, did not allow a wide flanking invasion through West Virginia or North Carolina. The threat to Richmond kept Confederate troops there. Longstreet proposed an invasion of Kentucky, a far flanking attack, but was turned down by Lee.

It explains how Sherman out-maneuvered Johnston from Chattanooga to Atlanta. By threatening to outflank Johnston, the Confederates fell back. His replacement by Hood did not prevent the capture of Atlanta. This revived the hope of victory for the North, and helped to re-elect Lincoln.

Sherman then abandoned his supply and communication lines (vulnerable to attack) and marched on to Savannah and the ocean. His army lived off the land. This enabled his army to be resupplied by the Navy. He then marched north, seeming to attack other cities, but passed between and continued to destroy railroads and bridges.

The end came soon after this, as other armies invaded the South. Sherman designed an armistice and amnesty where the Confederates would be disbanded, and their arms turned over to the states. The latter would allow repression of bandits and guerillas. He was criticized for this.

Sherman was a man of modest habits. When admirers raised [money]to buy him a house, he refused to accept unless he received bonds that would pay the taxes! He lived within his means. The resisting power of a state depends more on the strength of popular will than on the strength of its armies, and this depends on economic and social security (p.429).

Liddell Hart gave preference to contemporaneous correspondence rather than Official Reports (which are written for history to justify a policy). Some of the ideas in this 72-year old book may not coincide with more recent history.

Dispite reading most of major accounts of the American Civil War, I had not fully understood the central role played by Sherman until reading Hart's book. Hart makes it clear that Sherman's appreciation of the futility of attacking entrenched positions and his consequently developed strategy and tactics turned the tide for the North, saved the 1864 election for Lincoln, and saved perhaps tens of thousands of Union and Rebel lives. He also points out that the same insight accounts for most of Lee's success, i.e., Lee won battles in which he entised the North to attack entrenched positions (e.g. Fredricksburg) and lost when he attacked entrenched positions himself (e.g. Gettysburg). Hart fully disposes of the long held prejudice that Sherman's approach to war was more inhumane than the alternative of massive blood letting being practiced by virtually every other Civil War general. It is rare to find a historical account containing so much insight.

Although not the most compelling civil war biography I have read, Hirshon has painstakingly researched the intricate details of Sherman's life as a soldier and as a human being. Most of this book's focus is on his life as a soldier, and of course most of Sherman's life was devoted to that profession. I knew very little of Sherman's accomplishments before reading this biography and finished the book feeling that I was provided a well rounded account of the man and the soldier. The maps contained in this book are difficult to read; nevertheless, this book is an excellent historical account of Sherman's life and times.

This is a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman by Stanley P. Hirshson, Professor at Queens College, City University of New York. On the surface, it seems to be an un-biased story of the life of a very complicated man.

Like so many Civil War generals on the Union side, Sherman was almost a failure in civilian life. He tried his hand at many professions, but never really made enough money to support his growing family. In the army, however, he had moments of brilliance. And brutality, evidenced most clearly in his march to the sea. He could send his men into a town with orders to destroy it, then wander through the same town afterward looking for friends who lived there when he knew them. He admitted that many of the soldiers he commanded during that time were not much more than thieves and ruffians.

The book starts slowly and ends the same. Most of Sherman's story is the Civil War, four years of privation, desperation, and triumph. Maligned by his enemies, again as were most successful generals, his fights after the war were political, although he never sought political office. Rather his ambitions were for himself as the highest ranking officer in the U.S. Army, and for the Army itself.

Although this is a scholarly work, it is an easy read, especially for a Civil War buff. There are moments when the reader will feel she is attaining some insight into his personality. But those moments slip away quite often. Because of this, the reader might wonder if something is being held back. For instance, I would like to have seen more details of the post-Civil War Army policies toward the Native Americans, something Sherman had much to do with.

This is a must read for the Civil War scholar, American military history fan, and those interested in 19th century America. Sherman lived in much of the U.S. and details of these places in his time add to our understanding of life when our great-grandparents were young.

As Prof. Hirshson's student, I can say that this book reflects the author quite well. It is an accurate account of General Sherman's life. The book is well written and while reading it, I was able to imagine Prof. Hirshson giving a lecture to me as opposed to just reading through it. The language is very user friendly.

This biography of Tenskwatawa is the only work devoted to the role and importance of the influencial Shawnee Prophet who has long been eclipsed in both popular and scholarly works by his far more famous brother, Tecumseh.

Born in 1775 in Ohio, Tenskwatawa was one of three triplets born into the family of the Shawnee war chief Puckeshinwa. After surviving a less than ideal childhood and losing an eye in the process, Tenskwatawa soon found himself an outcast among his own tribe. Following the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, he and his people are forced to give up their claims to most of the Ohio Country and many, including himself, fall victim to alcoholism and despair. But after experiencing a vision he believes is sent by the Master of Life, Tenskwatawa is reborn as the Shawnee Prophet and begins to preach a return to the old ways and to reject the ways of the whites whom he says have corrupted and destroyed the Indians. His religious revival brings together many thousands of loyal followers from many tribes across the Old Northwest and becomes the core of the pan-Indian confederacy engineered by his older brother Tecumseh who intends to push the Americans back east of the Appalachain Mountains and reclaim their ancestoral homelands. Tragicly, these dreams are crushed by William Henry Harrison's victory over Tenskwata's forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Though Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa would continue to fight alongside the British in the War of 1812, the Prophet's reputation is devastated forever, as is the dream of uniting the tribes and driving the whites from their lands.

This is a fascinating book that covers much information not only about the Prophet, but his people and their history, as well as shedding much light on one of the primary causes of the War of 1812 and the Indians' role in that conflict.

The author uses many sources and many factual accounts of the events of the early 19th century in the area of the Old Northwest, present day Ohio Valley region. He shows that Tenskwatawa, also known as the Shawnee Prophet, was a proud man who would do anything to maintain his followers. It gives us a great insight into the difficult relations between the Americans and the Native Americans. The reading is fairly easy and the events described were very interesting. It was a very in-depth look into the life of the Shawnee Prophet, his followers and how they dealt with the world of change swirling around them and the culture clash that existed between the Native Americans and the white settlers moving in.

If you are interested in learning more about Native American culture, especially the Shawnee, then I would strongly recommend this book.

I enjoyed this work. Even though it was not an exhaustive report on General Sherman, (as it probably never was intended to be), it was interesting and thought provoking. I especially liked the somewhat fresh ideas on Sherman's treatment of the Carolinas after his well known march to the sea. Not all authors have the poetry and flow of a Carl Sandburg but Mark Coburn has a style that makes this work an enjoyable read as opposed to some that can lose you in details that are not important to the issue. If you can obtain a copy, I would recommend you do so.

This is an excellent book reviewing the battles that took place from Chattanooga to Atlanta in the summer of 1864 in the Western armies. The authors, working independently, have chronicled much of the strategy and and battlefield drama that characterized such engagements as Dallas, New Hope Church, Pickett's Mill, Kennesaw Mountain, Ezra Church, Resaca etc.
As a layman, I was not bogged down with too much military lingo, and was able to get a good grasp of the strategy used on both sides. Maps and pictures add to the clarity. The authors seemed to start out being favorably disposed to Joseph E. Johnston's command, then, as they analyze all the historical and geographical factors from hindsight, they bring the reader to wonder at his failure to maneuver into a decisive victory over Sherman's advancing army. With the ensuing command of Gen. Hood one senses the nearly frantic contrast to throw men into battle as Atlanta becomes ever-more threatened, at great sacrifice of Confederate lives.
If you had ancestors that fought in the Atlanta Campaign, this is a very good book, with details drawn from numerous sources. The writers have added soldiers' and officers' comments from diaries and letters that detail the morale, the terrain, the weather, and attitude towards the events of the day. These add more interest to the sometimes dry, official commentaries so often quoted in other works.
Good history for layman or scholar; Union or Confederate.

The book portrays a little focused on time & place: the frontier in the early 1800s (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois). The author depicts William Henry Harrison as a manipulative, greedy & sometimes untruthful individual. Most people are aware of the native American treaties that the government negotiated & broke with the Plains Indians later in the century; the book details the interactions between the government & Indians in an earlier time period. The author reveals the impact of Tecumseh on Canadian history & portrays him as a complex & charismatic individual.

As a history student whose interests are in the Colonial period to the Civil War I was intrigued with this book on Tecumseh. It was well written and very informative of the Shawnee Chief's career. Not only was this a wonderful resource guide but most importantly it was an easy read, which is essential for college students. True, Tecumseh spread a lot of blood on the plains of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky but his teachings along with his brother Tenskawatawa are the important keys to understanding the will of Tecumseh.

John Sugden's "Tecumseh" is more than a well researched biography of the great Indian chief; it is also a moving story of the clash of cultures in the Old Northwest in the late 18th and early 19th century. At no time are the Indians portrayed as the "gentle children of nature" oppressed by the wicked white man...a portrayal that has become all too common in our era where history is too often written from the viewpoint of the underclass. Instead, the Indians are portrayed as human beings ( at times noble and at times savage ) struggling to survive the whirlwind of the white world that was destroying their way of life.

Tecumseh's life and character are well documented and his dream of an Indian confederacy, united to resist the American seizure of Indian land, is the centerpiece of the book. Other Indian leaders, as well as Tecumseh's brother The Prophet, figure in the narative, as do the different approaches the various tribes took in dealing with the Big Knives. An understanding of Tecumseh's life is not the only reward derived from a reading of this book. One also comes away with a much deeper understanding of the divisions within the Indian world and the various problems they faced within a way of life on the road to extinction. At the end, one senses the true depth of the tragedy, and gains an admiration for a man of great character and nobility, who gave of all his energy, in an attempt to save his people and their way of life.

Tecumseh was a powerful warrior and a powerful man. He led his people in what he thought was right, yet he did not stand for the massacre of those who took his people's land. This book gets that message through, but it is tedious. It reads like a high school textbook (and that is not a compliment).

I read this book for a college Ohio History class. I hadn't had any previous knowledge about Tecumseh other than he was an Indian leader. Overall it was a very interesting book. Some may run into some problems if they do not fully understand the history of the War of 1812 in Ohio. Some of the battle descriptions go into detail. There is a chapter in the book that describes some of the Shawnee cultures and customs that I found very interesting.
All said, this is a very good biography of a very respected Indian leader.

This book is a textbook companion of the author's biography of Tecumseh's brother, Tenskwatawa or the Prophet. R. David Edmunds is known for both his combination of ethnographic material, oral tradition, and traditional historical research with good storytelling. His unique contribution is highlighting the importance of the religious message of revitalization to Indian resistance in the Old Northwest. This book is a good introduction to Indian experiences in the Old Northwest during the Revolutionary and Early Republic Periods. Those really interested in this title may want to continue their reading with "The Shawnee Prophet" by the same author, "A Spirited Resistance" by Gregory Dowd, and "The Middle Ground" by Richard White.

William T. Sherman seems to have a biography written of him every three years or so. There are currently four bios available, not to mention his own memoirs and more venerable books such as the volumes by Liddell Hart and Lloyd Lewis. He's an endlessly fascinating character, multi-faceted, complex, and as amazingly verbose. He had an opinion on most everything, and to use my wife's phrase, "never had an unuttered thought." Because of this he's great biography material, and historians have been interested in him a great deal as a result.

Those recent bios vary greatly in their treatment of their subject. John Marszalek's Sherman: A Soldier's Passion For Order is the culmination of that man's life, seemingly. Marszalek lived with Sherman for a great while, to the extent of naming a dog Cumpy (Sherman's childhood nickname), and it showed in that the book is still the longest and most exhaustive biography. He sees Sherman as a twisted soul, tormented by his inability to control the world around him, but able to deal with things once he gets in command of an army and is able to influence events to an extent. Michael Fellman's Citizen Sherman is more harsh and unforgiving. Fellman is a Canadian historian who looks at the American Civil War through relentlessly modern lenses, and sees racism, misogyny, elitism, and various other ills pretty much everywhere in 19th century America. He doesn't think much of Sherman. Stanley Hirshson's The White Tecumseh, on the other hand, is apparently a very forgiving portrait of what the author considers a great soldier (this is the one Sherman bio I haven't read). The author of the present book, Lee Kennett, falls somewhere between Marszalek and Hirshson. He handles Sherman pretty mildly, though he does make note of his foibles and prejudices (as expressed in things he wrote) in passing.

Most biographers of Sherman note that he wanted to be judged as a soldier, and then dutifully tell you that they will abide by his wishes. Kennett follows suit, but only sort of succeeds. Instead his book is largely a study of Sherman's personality, with a whole chapter devoted to this subject on the eve of the Civil War. The book is remarkably spare in terms of narratives of the actual battles themselves: instead there's a great deal of space devoted to the politics of the army 1861-1865. So the Meridian raid gets about a paragraph, and the battles around Atlanta are disposed of in a page or so.

The author also leaves things out, things that make it into some Sherman biographies. Perhaps the best-known anecdote is Joe Johnston killing himself by standing bareheaded at Sherman's funeral, and catching pneumonia. It's not here, and there are a number of other things that didn't make the book either. I know this is a short biography, but somehow I expected some of these things to make the book.

Several previous reviewers put this forward as an introductory biography of Sherman. One thing the book definitely is is neutral on the subject. Until now, the one neutral book was Marszalek, the longest, so I suppose this one, at half the length, is better. I don't consider a 352 page book an introduction to anything, however, and I can't say I agree here. Introductory books are 200 pages or so.

That being said, this isn't a bad book, and I can't come up with any reason to review it negatively. It's just not a particularly good one either.

Over the last few years several outstanding biographies have been written. Biographies that delve deep into their subject and bring that person and their entire family to life. This is not one of those books. This is not to say that Lee Kennett has produced a bad biography, just a biography that pales in comparison to some other works. Simply put, it is impossible to do a complete biography on a man as complex as William T. Sherman in a scant 353 pages. To write a reasonably detailed account of the, "Great March" alone would have taken more space than this whole book.

What Kennett has produced is a good quick scan of the General's life. The details of his campaigns and many other facets of his life have been left for others. As an example, he covers the battles around Atlanta in about two pages. Not much in the way of detail will be found on any of the battles that Sherman was involved in for the author has instead tried to deal with the personality traits that made Sherman into Sherman. Unfortunately, the search for Sherman the inner man is not all that successful. The author does make some interesting points but he never seems to really get into the soul of his subject. It would indeed be interesting if someone could really get into the soul of the man who devastated so much of the south and then turned around and attempted to give back to the south all it was about to lose.

On the whole, I found this an interesting book. It is the first time I have read about General Sherman in any detail, and I'm sure that those who have studied the General before will find this book lacking. However, for someone not very aquatinted with Sherman this is a fairly good book. I never quite felt that I knew, "Cump" but I did begin to feel as if I would like to know much more about him. That in itself is an accomplishment for Mr. Kennett for I, like many other sons of the south, was raised to detest that foul Yankee firebug.

If you want a good solid exciting biography of Sherman - this is your book. I'm tired of reading bloated biographies of
say 1000 pages. This book has a nice quick pace. Sherman would have liked that. It gives adequate coverage to Sherman's military and personal life as well as a nice perspective on his historical legacy.

Michael Fellman writes an outstanding account of General William T. Sherman's private life that is essential to understanding the mind of the famous general. The book is not a thorough biography of the commander of the Army of the Tennessee, but instead, an analysis of the Sherman's state of mind in his official and private correspondence. Fellman highlights the important episodes in the general's life and correlates them into a firm portrait of Sherman's flaws and personality quirks. Although the author does not indulge in psychobabble about his subject matter, he does present several analytical theories that readers might find interesting. Citizen Sherman best serves as a supplement to other studies of the general in understanding this complex man.

I usually loathe any historical book which puts its subject on the couch, but this is a notable exception. Fellman infuses this book with his own spin on certain matters, but much of the interpretation is accurate! If you enjoy a "National Enquirer" approach to biography, then this is your bag, though a more intellectual, sobering and accurate analysis of events than a tabloid rag. Fellman delves deeply into Sherman's womanizing and the reasons behind it: Ellen, WTS's wife, was a passionless prig, obsessed with Catholicism and being the type of prim, straightlaced wife that Sherman would ultimately abhor. Can we blame him for repeatedly cheating on Ellen? Of course not.

Fellman is much weaker on the military end of the biography and his limitations show. There are numerous factual gaffes and the author is on safer ground when restricting himself to purely personal matters. This is hardly the definitive treatment of Sherman, try John Marszalek's biography (available on Amazon) for an exceptional and scholarly approach. But if you want a book focused primarily on the private life of Sherman, this nicely fits the bill

Some of the above reviews have merit, Fellman definitely puts Sherman on the couch, and, I also don't usually like this, as it takes some liberties that may not be entirely correct. However, it will take more than one source on Sherman to help the reader draw their own conclusions about the man. This said, I very much enjoyed reading Fellman's analysis. I did find it light militarily, however, I really wasn't looking for that kind of bio on Sherman. A history teacher, this was my first exposure to "Cumpy" the man, as opposed to military commander. I found myself wanting to research him more as a result of reading this book, as I feel it inspired me to learn more about him. There is an implication here that the book did not tell me everything I needed to know, but, as stated above, I found myself not really minding as I enjoyed Fellman's ease with words and the simplicity of the smooth flowing text. Therefore, I didn't critique it so much for being a bit on the lighter side of research work. I found that I would need to consult other sources for more information anyway. Having read Grant's bio and Foote's Civil War trilogy, I found this to be a good introduction to Sherman as an individual, especially after hearing Grant's praise of the man in his own work. I'm interested to read Sherman's own book after reading Citizen Sherman, can compare some of Fellman's analysis with Sherman's own. I very much enjoyed the section on Sherman's women, and the way that the text was oriented less chronologically than in the different departments of Sherman's life.