Sherman's Vast Ambivalence

Sherman, Tecumseh, and the liberals of the Upper West Side.

Every time I take my kids to the Tecumseh Playground, at 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in Manhattan, I'm troubled by a political paradox.

On the one hand, this Western-themed lot for tots means to honor Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, of Confederacy-destroying and Indian-killing fame, as does the adjacent public school, which bears his full name. A placard at the playground entrance also touts Sherman's tour as a New Yorker, since the scourge of Atlanta and the Carolinas spent his theatergoing retirement in Gotham, living out his days on West 71st Street not far from Broadway.

On the other hand, my local playground serves one of the most anti-war constituencies in America, the Upper West Side. Until the word liberal was banned from public discourse, most Upper West Siders militantly identified themselves as liberal—indeed, their steadfast support for peacenik politicians, from Adlai Stevenson to George McGovern to Howard Dean, is legendary. If New York State is blue, then my neighborhood is cobalt blue.

So what are we doing with one of our local grammar schools named after the man who practically invented “scorched-earth” warfare?

Well, I suppose you can make the argument that Sherman did more to end American slavery than anyone besides Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant. In tandem with his mentor Grant, Sherman did the horrible things that had to be done to end the Civil War.

While neither man was a tactical genius, they were realists, and ultimately recognized that vast amounts of Northern and Southern blood would have to be sacrificed—and Confederate property wrecked—to beat the rebels.

But that doesn't mean Sherman had any great enthusiasm for Emancipation. In fact, he was thoroughly ambivalent about liberating the slaves or incorporating them in the social mainstream, much less the Army.

Considering his heritage and middle name, this isn't so surprising. Sherman's original given name was taken from the Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh, against whom Sherman's grandfather had fought. Renamed William by his adoptive father, Sherman learned to be a soldier while ethnically cleansing Florida of Seminoles. In short, “Uncle Billie” was no civil-rights activist.

Sherman's memoirs are fascinating, but a better insight into the man and the general comes from E.L. Doctorow's wonderful new novel, The March. This is ironic, since Doctorow is a stalwart anti-war liberal of the Upper West Side variety. Yet he breathes more life into Sherman than Sherman himself—such that I almost ended up liking the so-called war criminal.

Through Doctorow, I was forced for the first time to consider a human Sherman, beyond the unstable and violent caricature who “raped the South.” Indeed, my sympathies are mostly with Uncle Billie when, in the novel, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton travels to Savannah to lecture his subordinate on his responsibilities toward the newly freed “negroes.”

In his memoirs, Sherman asserts with guarded contempt that Stanton's concern for the slaves was born “not of pure humanity, but of politics.” But Doctorow's fictional depiction gives us a wholly more realistic response by Sherman to Stanton's meddling: “To catechize these blacks regarding my character! How would any of them be here if not for me? . . . I have gutted Johnny Reb's railroads. I have burned his cities, his forges, his armories, his machine shops, his cotton gins. . . . He is left ravaged and destitute. . . . And that is not enough for the Secretary of War. I must abase myself to the slaves.” Salt on the wound, especially when you've been hearing, month in and month out, the agonized groans of the thousands of wounded and dying, so stunningly imagined by Doctorow.

But Sherman, as Stanton surmised, had a tin ear when it involved the groans and aspirations of the black chattel who followed him all the way to Raleigh. We see this most revealingly in his exchange of letters with Confederate Gen. John B. Hood, after the Union occupation of Atlanta. Protesting Sherman's expulsion of the city's entire population, Hood wrote, “[B]etter die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your negro allies!” To which Sherman huffily replied, “We have no 'negro allies' in this army; not a single negro soldier left Chattanooga with this army, or is with it now.”

In his memoirs, published a decade later, Sherman is blunter about race, recalling a conversation with Stanton in which he referred to the “simple character” of the former slaves, and stated that “as a rule, we preferred white soldiers, but that we employed a large force of [blacks] as servants, teamsters, and pioneers, who had rendered admirable service.”

Such condescension was unremarkable in those days, but neither was it admirable. In 1875, by then an established national celebrity, Sherman professed goodwill toward blacks and defensively complained that “because I had not loaded down my army by other hundreds of thousands of poor negroes, I was construed by others as hostile to the black race.” But in April 1865, during his negotiations with a defeated foe, Gen. Joseph Johnston, Sherman had crudely undermined one of the principal objectives of the struggle just concluded.

“Both Generals Johnston and [John] Breckenridge admitted that slavery was dead, and I could not insist on embracing it in such a paper, because it can be made with the States in detail,” Sherman cavalierly wrote to Grant. A week later Grant was ordered to Raleigh to rescind Sherman's overly generous peace agreement. In June, Sherman came out publicly against giving blacks the vote.

Nevertheless, the war-hating, egalitarian Doctorow pushes me toward a grudging admiration of Sherman in all his depressive, Spartan, but not dishonorable eccentricity. But when I look for the basic moral truth about Sherman's war—and war itself—I'd rather rely on the novelist's art than the soldier's self-interested narrative. Doctorow sees that truth better than Sherman, even more so against the contemporary backdrop of the bloodbath in Iraq.

“Because I've been telling stories all my life, I've become a pretty good judge of the stories other people tell,” Doctorow told a hostile, largely pro-Bush commencement audience at Hofstra University in 2004. “When the president tells a bad story . . . it has immense consequences. For one thing, it creates other bad story tellers in the president's style, from Cabinet members who ignore the Geneva Conventions and sanction the unlawful interrogation of prisoners, down through the ranks to the American soldiers, who in the very same prison where Saddam Hussein tortured prisoners, have tortured and humiliated detainees.”

How, then, to resolve the warring imagery of the William Tecumseh Sherman School and the peace-loving West Side? On this, I'm as ambivalent as Sherman was about black people. While I doubt he would have tolerated Abu Ghraib, I'm still disturbed by the notion of “War Is Hell” Sherman permanently bivouacked in my daughters' favorite playground. Somehow, P.S. 87 deserves a more politically and educationally appropriate name, so perhaps a compromise is in order.

What about this? Rename the Sherman School the E.L. Doctorow School and leave the playground to both Tecumsehs: the Union general and the Indian chief. And under E.L. Doctorow, let's engrave a subtler, less celebrated quotation from Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”

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