There is an adage among historians that because so many books on the Civil War have been published, it is hard to find anything new to say. The same is true about William T. Sherman. Along with Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant, Sherman is one of the war’s leading men most written about—and for good reason. He did, after all, command the army that famously (or infamously) marched across the Deep South, an operation that contributed mightily to Union victory. Yet while the war elevated him to the status of hero, Sherman was more than popular memory often makes him out to be. These five books have been chosen because each, in its unique way, illuminates the man, not the myth, offering compelling portraits of one of the Civil War’s inscrutable figures.
William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country, A Life
by James Lee McDonough
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2016)
Of all the Sherman biographies, this has to be one of the most exhaustive. Written in the style of Ron Chernow’s Grant or David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, James Lee McDonough’s William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country, A Life is a big, bold biography that covers Sherman’s life down to the most granular detail.
In 700-plus pages, McDonough examines Sherman from cradle to grave. As its subtitle implies, the author’s main concern is Sherman’s career as a soldier and general in the U.S. Army, a focus one would expect from a military historian.
That focus doesn’t take away from McDonough’s narrative chops or his comprehensive exploration of Sherman’s life. From Sherman’s childhood, affected most notably by the tragic death of his father in 1829, to his time at West Point, or his early career spent fighting the Seminoles in southern Florida, McDonough covers it all.
Yet part of what makes this book so compelling is that McDonough writes with an eye to national affairs. Where some biographers of such length and scope get pulled into the minutia of their subject’s life, McDonough is sure to come up for air, which makes this a highly readable account, well suited for nightstands or the beach.
Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order
by John F. Marszalek
(Free Press, 1993)
One of the most intriguing biographies of the man ever written, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order reads as a standard biography—on the surface. Like McDonough and others, John Marszalek goes to great lengths to the tell the story of Sherman’s life. The book is noteworthy for the attention paid to Sherman’s familial relationships, especially with his wife, Ellen, who happened to be his foster sister.
But what makes Marszalek’s work different from the rest is his attempt to tap into Sherman’s brain. Marszalek argues that Sherman was a man who tried to cut through the fog of his often unstable life by always searching for order and stability in the world.
There is clearly evidence for this, yet some readers might quibble with Marszalek’s psychoanalysis of Sherman. But most readers will see that Sherman was not the stoic crusader that mythmaking often describes. Instead, he was a man riven with anxieties and someone who, if not for the Civil War, might have been a professional failure. Ultimately, Marszalek’s Sherman is a more human Sherman and that’s why this biography remains so popular among avid readers and Sherman scholars alike.
William Tecumseh Sherman: Gold Rush Banker
by Dwight L. Clarke
(California Historical Society, 1969)
This seminal work on Sherman’s time as a banker in San Francisco is a must read for anyone interested in who he was before he became a Civil War hero. Plenty of biographies cover Sherman’s time heading up the San Francisco branch of Lucas, Turner & Co., yet none do so in as fine detail as Clarke does.
What makes the book so notably interesting is that it is as much a story about San Francisco in the waning days of the Gold Rush as it is about William T. Sherman. The fact is that Sherman—a West Point graduate who left his young army career to pursue private business opportunities—arrived in San Francisco looking to set up shop when the city was flush with gold and experiencing an economic boom. At the same time, lax oversight sparked regular cycles of financial instability. Sherman’s bank was almost done in by a citywide bank run in February 1854—a period in which many of his bank’s competitors went belly-up. Even worse, because so much of California’s economy hinged on the presence of a finite resource, the good times were bound to end once the gold mines ran dry.
Sherman began to sense that all was not well with the industry early in his stint with the bank, and sure enough by the spring of 1857, four years into his career, Lucas, Turner & Co. closed its doors. The virtue of Clarke’s book is that he tells this story in wonderful detail and is the only Sherman biography to focus exclusively on this tumultuous period in Sherman’s life.
William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West
by Robert G. Athearn
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1956)
Like Clarke’s book, Robert G. Athearn’s work is a classic, taking up an often overlooked period of Sherman’s life: his post-Civil War career on the American frontier. While H.W. Brands’ The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo, and the War for America (2022) offers a more recent account of Sherman’s role in the settling of the West, Athearn’s is the original.
Published in 1956, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West takes the reader on a journey across space and time, starting first with Sherman’s appointment in June 1865 as the head of the Military Division of the Mississippi (later called the Military Division of the Missouri). This command placed him in charge of territory stretching from the western bank of the Mississippi River to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. His first priority was to ensure the safety of the many roads spreading across the plains. Eventually this included the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. As Athearn shows, Sherman played a pivotal role in the railroad’s construction, evidenced by the fact that the project’s lead engineer, Grenville Dodge, named the route’s highest point “Sherman Summit” in his honor.
Of course, in securing these routes across the West, Sherman became an open enemy to the region’s Native Americans. This is a topic Athearn covers in great detail as he shows how Sherman became an agent of American expansion. Not only did he serve on the ill-fated Indian Peace Commission of 1869, a body tasked with pacifying the West while securing the nation’s territorial objectives, Sherman also became the overall head of the U.S. Army after his old friend Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency in 1868. As a result, Sherman found himself more or less in charge of Indian affairs, giving him a role in many of the episodes—famous and infamous— that have since defined the region’s history.
Memoirs of General William T. Sherman
by William T. Sherman
(D. Appleton, 1875)
Sherman himself completes this outstanding list. His memoirs are an essential read for any enthusiast of Civil War history. Like those of his friend and compatriot U.S. Grant, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman offers a take on the war as Sherman saw it, lived it, and fought it.
Some sections might strike readers as dry. Sherman was a military man who wrote at length about his movements and strategies, sometimes down to the smallest detail. Interspersed in the narrative are military orders and correspondence, making the book a repository of primary source material as well as a story of Sherman’s life.
But other parts brim with excitement, particularly those related to his time in California during the Mexican War. As luck would have it, Sherman was one of the first men to rub his fingers through gold extracted from the stream at Sutter’s Mill. He would ride up into the mountains to inspect the mining camps popping up in the summer of 1848 and later write the official report on the Gold Rush, a document that sent many thousands of so-called “forty-niners” heading west. Readers will find exciting episodes like this and many more throughout Sherman’s life, which makes these Memoirs a vital source for understanding not just the Civil War, but most of the 19th century.
Bennet Parten is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University and the author of Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
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