(1820 - 1891)
Named Tecumseh after the Shawnee chieftain, William Tecumseh Sherman fought the Seminoles in Florida in the 1840s. Unlike many Civil War generals, he saw no action in the Mexican-American War, stationed instead in California as an administrative officer. For tactics employed during the Civil War, Sherman is widely considered by military historians to be America’s first modern general.
Vox populi, vox humbug.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863Miscellany
Union general William T. Sherman believed newspaper correspondents to be liabilities. “A spy is one who furnishes an enemy with knowledge useful to him and dangerous to us,” Sherman wrote in an 1863 letter. “I say—in giving intelligence to the enemy, in sowing discord and discontent in an army—these men fulfill all the conditions of spies.”
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. War is hell.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1879
