A Story about Respect

General William Tecumseh Sherman is remembered now as the wrathful arm of the North who burned Atlanta and took his army into the heart of the South; most people don't know about the nervous breakdown he suffered before his reputation was made. Sympathetic superiors sent him home for a rest cure, but not before the newspapers had learned of his erratic behavior, exaggerated fears, and paranoia. He disgraced himself and the Union Army. But within a few months, events turned his life around.

Sherman experienced loss early and as a young man always felt like an outsider with something to prove. Sherman's father died when he was nine, leaving his widow impoverished. The family — eleven children — was broken up, the children sent to live with relatives and friends. Sherman was taken in by Thomas Ewing, a powerful politician who treated Sherman fairly — but Sherman always felt in his debt, and resented Ewing for it. Sent to West Point was Ewing's idea, not his own, Sherman found his calling, graduating third in his class and going on to a successful early military career. But he chose as his wife Ewing's daughter Ellen, binding himself further into the Oedipal struggle to prove himself; their letters reveal Sherman's continual need to gain respect for what he felt he lacked inside.

In the 1850's, there were no wars and no advancement for military men. Sherman left the Army and went to work for his cousin's banking firm. He showed an aptitude here, too, but a national economic recession caused his bank to fail. Sherman blamed himself, not events. Having persuaded his brother officers to invest in his bank, he repaid them from his meager personal funds when the bank went under. But he didn't give himself credit for doing the honorable thing; instead, his letters from this period reveal a deepening depression, continual self-loathing, and suicidal thoughts. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was at his lowest ebb.

Rejoining the Army, his reputation for skill and integrity won him a high position, in charge of operations in Tennessee, despite his clearly expressed desire to serve in a lesser role, under someone else. After a few months of service, he was not sleeping, not eating, imagining spies and enemy armies where none existed, demanding reinforcements for no reason that anyone could understand.

He went home to his wife, who not only gave her emotional support to the husband she described as "the soul of honor & full of truest courage & withal so kind and forgiving" she enlisted her powerful family and went directly to Lincoln, who knew Sherman and perhaps understood a fellow sufferer. She reported back to her husband, "He said he wanted you to know...that he had the highest and most generous feelings towards you" and that "your abilities would soon merit promotion."

Brought back into active duty gradually, he developed a relationship with Grant that lent him some strength and led to a life-long bond. "He stood by me when I was crazy," said Sherman later, "and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now we stand by each other always." Then, at Shiloh, Sherman's life and character changed permanently. In the first action of the battle, Sherman's party suddenly came under fire; his aide-de-camp was shot from his saddle, and Sherman was wounded. He went on to be wounded again that day, and had three horses killed underneath him. Surprised by the rebels, he spent the remainder of the battle in the front lines, rallying his troops and showing great personal courage. Whether it was because he was emotionally ready for a crisis, or because he was so surprised he didn't have time to become anxious, he proved something to himself and his troops.

It is as if he never looked back from that moment. If in the past, he had made his own life hell, he spent the rest of his life giving it to other people. Freud thought of depression as anger turned against the self; Sherman developed the ability to use that same anger against his enemies, much to the dismay of Georgia. He went on to apply the same fire and discipline as postwar General of the Army, earning the respect and admiration of all. At his funeral, in 1891, his most distinguished enemy, Joe Johnston, served as pallbearer, contracting fatal pneumonia by going hatless in February New York weather. "If I were in his place," said Johnston, "and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat.