Sick and tired of fighting

On 26 April 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman ended the campaign that had taken him from Tennessee through Georgia and South Carolina at a small farm near Durham, North Carolina, when he accepted the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston.

The two opposing generals had exchanged communications for a week or so. Following Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, Johnston pretty much knew the game was up. Also, Sherman had been pursuing him through all terrains, even constructing corduroy roads to get through the Salkehatchie swamps to the tune of twelve miles per day. You’re not going to get away from someone like that, even if you’ve got full strength and a secure supply chain, which Johnston did not.

Although one of the all-time proponents of what we’ve come to call total war (he referred to it as “hard war”), when he knew he’d won, Sherman had no interest in exacting punitive terms. In fact, he proposed generous conditions both politically and militarily, as he’d heard Lincoln express. But Lincoln was dead, and President Andrew Johnson was in a Radical Republican chokehold, so Sherman had to retract his offer.

He was still fighting with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (who was pretty much the poster boy for Radical politics) about the legitimacy of his actions, when Johnston accepted the purely military terms, and the surrender was given on 26 April. The two armies could go home. The following month, Sherman wrote:

“I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers…tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated…that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

Here are a couple of things about this event:

When Sherman died in February 1891, Johnston served as a pallbearer, standing hatless in bitterly cold weather. He caught a cold and died a month later from pneumonia. But the fiercest of enemy commanders had genuinely abandoned all enmity when hostilities had ceased.

And it has always been interesting to me that it was the soldiers, the Union commanders, who were kind and generous to the defeated, while the politicians screamed for blood, punishment and degradation. Sherman was right, 150 years ago, and today as well.