Brian Holden Reid’s The Scourge of War is the tenth biography of William Tecumseh Sherman to appear in the last twenty-five years—a period that has seen new histories of Sherman’s Georgia and Carolinas campaigns, plus fresh editions of Sherman’s letters and his 1875 Memoirs. Of them all, John Marszalek’s Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (2007) stands preeminent, and Marszalek has in fact produced a new edition of Sherman’s Memoirs.
Holden Reid, a British subject who teaches in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, is skeptical of the provincialism that characterizes many American histories of the Civil War. The moment one places the March to the Sea in the overall context of nineteenth-century warfare in Europe and elsewhere, the impression of Sherman’s unprecedented brutality fades away. Holden Reid believes that little of the suffering experienced by Southerners at Sherman’s hands matches “the conduct of French troops in Calabria, Italy, in 1806–11 . . . with mass executions and deportations”; or the “privations, pain, and heartbreak endured during the siege of Genoa, Italy, in 1800, where 15,000 starved to death”; or Portugal in 1810 and Russia in 1812, where “people were forced to destroy their crops and property by their own side.” It is one of the besetting sins of American historiography of the Civil War that so little of this comparative context is ever deployed, despite the fact that it elucidates many of the seeming contradictions of military policy in both the Union and the Confederacy.
Holden Reid’s Sherman is not “a ruthless, utterly heartless, and unprincipled destroyer,” nor a “proto-fascist” guilty of “preferring dictatorship and showing ‘dictatorial’ tendencies himself.” He was “highly-strung” and liable to “jump to logical extremes and could draw erroneous conclusions,” which when combined with his talents as “a fascinating talker and a brilliant writer” could lead him into overstatement and contradiction. But he was also a wide and perceptive reader in subjects from international law to military theory, as able to quote Henri Jomini (one of the most famous—and overrated—military writers of the day) as Emmerich Vattel, the international jurist. When Confederate general John Bell Hood protested Sherman’s order that Atlanta’s civilian population be evacuated after the city’s capture, Sherman tartly instructed him that this order fell quite within the parameters of prevailing international law. “See the books,” he directed Hood.