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In the movie business, Hollywood money people insist that dir r rectors put the bucks up there in living color. Blow off the narration; ditch the backstory; skip the "talking heads." Show, don't tell. So it says something that in the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind, the greatest Civil War epic ever filmed, the most dramatic swath of destruction in our country's most horrific conflict is summarized not by a cast of thousands trading gunfire volleys but in a single screen-filling name: SHERMAN!
The capital letters and exclamation point weren't accidents. Audiences in 1939 knew the deal. Back then, a few people who remembered the Civil War were still alive. Moreover, many moviegoers had parents and grandparents who raised them on stories of the devastation of the Shenandoah Valley; the depredations of cavalry raiders in Missouri and Ohio; and the long, awful sieges of Atlanta; Petersburg, Va.; and Vicksburg, Miss.
Yet no tale of woe equaled the ravages inflicted by Union troops in Georgia during the 1864 March to the Sea. Roving federal detachments ran off militiamen, tore up railroad tracks, smashed arsenals, and burned the plantations of the great slaveholders. At the head of those deadly blue columns rode Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who so relentlessly imposed what he called "the hard hand of war." Even 75 years later, his name alone said it all.
Yet 2Vi years before Sherman "made Georgia howl," few would have pegged that jumpy, unkempt, red-haired brigadier to do much beyond train indifferent rookie regiments in the back country of Missouri. As far as front-line duty, he had been tried and found wanting. The one-star saw rebel bogeymen everywhere. He could not sleep. He had trouble making decisions. He scratched and fidgeted and blurted out odd remarks.
His behavior alarmed visiting officials and journalists. ThenSecretary of War Simon Cameron called him "insane," although a New York Times reporter settled for the less pejorative "unbalanced." Any way you cut it, Sherman was, as GI wise guys put it in World War II, "nervous in the service." Today, we'd suspect Sherman had developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We'd probably be right.
Sherman had good reason for his condition. Commissioned in the field artillery from West Point in...