In Citizen Sherman, Fellman describes how two reporters, Henry Villard and William Shanks, “shared the Louisville telegraph office with Sherman nearly every night from about 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. All would pore over Associated Press reports as they came in. Sherman unceasingly talked, paced, smoked cigars. . . . He seemed to smoke not from pleasure but as if it were a duty to be finished in the shortest imaginable time. . . . Sherman puffs furiously.” Fellman, paraphrasing Shanks, noted that Sherman “would never finish a cigar. . . . Sherman simply never sat still . . . his fingers were always busy. . . . While sitting he would cross and uncross his legs continuously. And on and on he talked, nervously and obsessively. . . . He must talk quick, sharp . . . making odd gestures, which . . . emphasizes his language. He never hesitates at interrupting anyone, but he cannot bear to be interrupted himself. . . . Sherman had a bad temper but what is worse, he makes no attempt to control or correct it. . . . He expressed himself entirely without reserve about men and matters . . . and I could not help thinking that in doing so he said more than was wise and proper.” (italics added)
The italicized phrases illustrate classic signs of mania: irritable mood, decreased need for sleep (sleeping little but being a bundle of energy), distractibility, rapid speech, increased talkativeness, hyperactivity, physical agitation, and inability to function at work. Villard added that after the general’s frenetic behavior ended he would “lapse into long silent moods . . . and literally brood day and night. . . . It was soon whispered about that he was suffering from mental depression.”
“I am up all night,” Sherman wrote, always under “the quiet observation of spies.” He lost his appetite and began to drink, which worsened his depression. He was convinced his life would end soon. “The idea of going down in History with a fame such as threatens me nearly makes crazy—indeed I may be so now,” he wrote to his wife.
Sherman’s staff took the unusual step of writing to his family and asking that they visit him in the Kentucky field. By the time his wife arrived, he was practically mute. “He has had little or no sleep or food for some time,” Ellen Sherman wrote from Kentucky. She knew insanity to run in the Sherman family and had seen her husband in severe melancholic states. “Several of the army officers are staying at the hotel and all seem deeply interested in him,” she wrote. “He however pays no attention to them, or to anyone, and scarcely answers a question unless it be on the all-engrossing subject [of the war]. He thinks the whole country is gone irrevocably and ruin and desolation are at hand.”
Sherman’s brother John, now a U.S. senator, questioned the general’s grasp of reality: “You are not only in error but are laboring under some strange delusions. . . . Your mind casts a somber shadow on everything. . . . Your manner is abrupt and almost repulsive.” Sherman was in despair: “I see no hope at all. You can trust in Providence [but] why he has visited me with this terrible judgment is incomprehensible.” Sherman’s superior, General Halleck, ordered a medical examination; a physician concluded that there was “such nervousness that [Sherman] was unfit for command.” Halleck sent Sherman home to Ohio.
In retrospect, Sherman’s mania seemed to have lasted about two weeks. It was followed by two months of deep depression with likely paranoid delusions. In his memoirs he made much of the fact that the reporters who publicized concerns about his mental health disliked him; historians later dismissed the manic episode as a concoction of his enemies. Yet even his family clearly feared for his sanity, and Sherman himself wrote to his brother a few months after the danger had passed: “I should have committed suicide were it not for my children.”
SIX MONTHS LATER Sherman was feeling better, though wearied by his recent despair. His wife and brother had done much to rehabilitate his public image, including personally visiting President Lincoln, who was sympathetic—indeed, perhaps empathetic—to his plight. The Union still needed Sherman, but top leaders, including Ulysses S. Grant, his new immediate superior, ensured that when he returned to service he was no longer placed in sole command. Under Grant’s supervision he fought effectively in his next great battle, Shiloh. Formerly so self-disparaging, he experienced “an abrupt spiritual rebirth,” in Fellman’s words. In July 1863, Sherman and Grant sealed the first real Union military success with the brutal siege of Vicksburg.
After Vicksburg, Sherman began to engage in the kind of war that would make him famous. “We are absolutely stripping the country of corn, cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, everything,” he reported to Grant on his operations around Jackson, Mississippi. “The wholesale destruction to which the country is now being subjected is terrible to contemplate, but it is the scourge of war.” He even mocked the earlier accusations of insanity leveled against him: “To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi River I would slay millions. On this point I am not only insane but mad.”
Grant proved to be Sherman’s savior, believing in Sherman despite the latter’s past mental instability. (“He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk,” Sherman would say after the war.) Under Grant’s watchful but approving gaze Sherman was let loose in Georgia. The strategy of destroying the economic heart of the South was planned with Grant, yet the specifics were left up to Sherman. Initially, upon crossing into Georgia from Tennessee, Sherman conducted conventional flanking actions, avoiding direct conflict with the Confederate army under General Joseph Johnston, focused on the goal of destroying Atlanta. When, after some minor engagements around Atlanta, the Northern troops entered the city, Sherman was merciless. All citizens were forced from their homes and given one-way rail tickets northward; then he burned it all. Atlanta remains the last U.S. city ever destroyed in warfare. Grant had not ordered the evacuation and destruction of Atlanta, but once Sherman started the process, Grant did not stop him. (In his Memoirs, Grant credits Sherman with the entire plan of the march, and notes that he agreed with Sherman, having to convince numerous other generals and a reluctant president that Sherman’s campaign was worthwhile.)
Sherman stated his goal clearly, explicitly telling the South what he intended to do. He knew that the prospect of his attacks was as much a weapon as the attacks themselves. His Confederate counterpart John Bell Hood, who had replaced Johnston, wrote him bluntly when Sherman announced the depopulation and planned destruction of Atlanta, “The unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts . . . in the dark history of war. In the name of God and humanity I protest.” “God will judge us in due time,” Sherman replied.
In a letter responding to the mayor of Atlanta, Sherman offered a remarkable explanation for his strategy, one that chides Southerners for their lack of empathy with the civilians their own armies had made homeless, and that even shows a kind of empathy for the Southerners he was about to make homeless:
Gentlemen:
. . . You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.
We don’t want your negroes, or your horses, or your houses, or your lands, or any thing you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it. . . .
I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands upon thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who o
nly asked to live in peace at their old homes and under the Government of their inheritance. . . .
But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.
Now you must go, and take with you the old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the weather until the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta. Yours in haste,
W. T. Sherman, Major-General
commanding
Sherman then turned south, ignoring the attempts of General Hood and the Confederate army to coax him back into battle. The March to the Sea began, and now Sherman came into his own. Generals had always protected their links with headquarters, which they needed to give and receive orders, food, and ammunition. Knowing he would now go deep into Southern territory, and that he could not defend his supply lines, Sherman cut them loose. (He let Grant know his intentions, and Grant said he preferred otherwise, wishing Sherman to attack Hood; but he left the final decision to Sherman.) Said the British military experts of the Army and Navy Gazette, “If Sherman has really left his army up in the air and started off without a base to march from Georgia to South Carolina, he has done either one of the most brilliant or one of the most foolish things ever performed by a military leader.” For three tense months, Sherman was entirely on his own; Grant and Lincoln had no clue what he was doing, whether he was winning or losing, alive or dead. (When Sherman was close to Savannah, Grant even sent orders by messenger for him to break off the march and come to Virginia by sea. Sherman, upset, did not respond and intensified his assault on Savannah; when it finally fell, he persuaded Grant to rescind the new orders and allow him to continue the march through the Carolinas.)
Sherman now started his innovative attack on civilian morale and property. His men foraged off the land, forced to do so by lack of supplies, but also as part of Sherman’s new military strategy. Attack and destroy property, not soldiers; ruin the ability to wage war—by decimating crops, farms, cities, and, most important, civilian morale. With their base of support thus ravaged, even the most gallant warriors would have to submit. When Sherman was finished, the South would have neither the food nor the will to keep up the fight. At about this time, a Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, had divined what was in Sherman’s psyche: all destruction, Bakunin taught, is also a creative destruction. Sherman was unapologetic then and later: “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war.” “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” he had told Atlantans. After the war, he reflected on the emotional impact of his warfare, the suffering he may have known from his own personal depression: “My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ ”
SHERMAN WAS IN a high-strung, high-energy, hyperthymic state (which appeared to be his usual personality when he was not severely manic or depressed), but he was not disconnected from reality as he had been in Kentucky. A Grant emissary reported Sherman engaged in “a marvelous talk about a march to the sea. His mind, of course, was full of it. He seemed the very personification of nervous energy.” Sherman “rocked back and forth in his chair, his hands were at work shredding the newspaper they held, while his stockinged feet darted in and out of their slippers.”
During the next three months Sherman’s troops slowly moved toward Savannah, systematically tearing up railroad tracks and heating and twisting the rails into spirals (“Sherman’s neckties”), often shaping the metal into the letters “US.” Troops lived off whatever they found en route to the Atlantic, and though Sherman had ordered them not to take more than the mission required, and not to harm or even insult civilians, but to burn the property of anyone who defied them, once the destruction began it was difficult to rein in. Soldiers looted homes, and there were reports of rape, torture, and killing. When rebel guerrillas began planting explosives in the roads, Sherman used Confederate prisoners as minesweepers.
As he advanced on Savannah he assured superiors of the value of the “total war” strategy that his march would make famous. “I attach much more importance to these deep incisions into the enemy’s country, because this war differs from European wars in this particular,” he later telegraphed Henry Halleck, the chief general in Washington. “We are not fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” When he got to South Carolina, the state that started the whole conflict with its secession and takeover of Fort Sumter, Sherman was merciless. Wrote a Michigan soldier in his army, “In South Carolina, there was no restraint whatever in pillaging and foraging. Men were allowed to do as they like, burn and destroy.” Historian Michael Fellman notes that though Sherman opened the door to total war, he did not fully practice it. After Atlanta, he did not evacuate any city; rape of women was not practiced; no concept of genocide existed. All these practices came later, especially with the Second World War. For his time, Sherman was brutal. But compared with what would later come, he was mild.
This future misery gave no succor, of course, to the people of the South who stood in Sherman’s path. Nor did Sherman think much about restraining his men; he mostly focused on destroying as much property and instilling as much fear as feasible. The general paid attention to how his victims reacted; years later he commented that Georgians at least “bore their afflictions with some manliness,” but South Carolinians “whined like curs.” By the time Sherman reached North Carolina in March 1865, he was steps away from meeting up with Grant in Virginia and forcing Lee’s surrender. The manic general eased off, ordering one of his generals, “It might be well to instruct your brigade commanders that now we are out of South Carolina and that a little moderation would be of political consequence to us in North Carolina.” A month later, the war was over.
WITH ALL THIS military success, Sherman had rehabilitated his image from crazy failure to insane genius. Another military leader, George McClellan, as we will see later, evolved in the opposite direction—from precocious sensation to plain dud. Almost no psychiatric contrast in history stands out more clearly, side by side, than these two men.
The American Civil War lays out the stark contrast: the greatest generals in war are often abundant failures during peacetime, and vice versa. McClellan and Sherman are the sharpest contrasts; but there is also Grant the peacetime drunkard, and Stonewall Jackson the barely tolerable military professor. Only Lee stands out as effective in both peace and war (and even he had a mentally unstable father, and Lee himself may have been dysthymic in his general personality).
The contrast reflects, I think, the different psychological qualities of leadership needed in different phases of human activity, peace and war being two extremes. A civilian analogy might be when a president takes office in peacetime versus wartime, or in a strong economy versus an economic crisis. Another might be when a businessman manages an already successful company well, versus starting, building, and growing a new enterprise. The same kind of leader can be a successful Calvin Coolidge in one setting, a failed Herbert Hoover in the other. Or the very same person—a Ted Turner, as we’ll see next—can be a bust in one context, a hit in the other.
FOR LEADERS IN any realm, creativity is not just about solving old problems with new solutions, it’s about finding new problems to solve. Mania enhances both aspects of creativity: the divergence of thought allows one to identify new problems, and the intense energy keeps one going until the problems are solved. We can see these features in bipolar leaders as different from each other as William Tecumseh Sherman and Ted Turner. The problem for Sherman was not how to better attack and defeat the Confederate armies: many Northern generals had tried many approaches, without victory. Sherman gave up on that
problem. He came up with a new one: How can you break the morale of the Southern people? If you can do that, then you might weaken the Confederate armies enough so that they will gradually dissolve. His solution: Destroy cities and farms, attack the economy, target people and property, and you will win by undermining the army’s base of support.
The problem for Turner was not how to become a big mogul in the traditional news media. There was a standard solution to that problem: move to New York and work your way up the corporate ladder. Instead, Turner saw that the cable medium provided a new mechanism for news, and his solution was to start an all-day news provider in that medium.
None of this is to suggest that we should glorify Sherman or Turner. They solved old problems by creating new ones. Sherman solved the problem of brutal face-to-face army combat, which had produced the carnage of Antietam and Gettysburg, but he created a new and greater problem: targeting civilians in wartime. Turner ended the news monopoly of New York corporations, but he created a new problem: the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the endless punditry that treats opinion as news.
These leaders were creative, manic originators: they answered questions nobody had yet asked, but in so doing they produced other questions nobody can yet answer.
CHAPTER 2
WORK LIKE HELL—AND ADVERTISE
TURNER
The classic entrepreneur founds entirely new notions: Henry Ford and the mass-produced automobile, Thomas Edison and the light bulb, Bill Gates and personal computer software, Ted Turner and twenty-four-hour cable television news. Given the theme of this book, Turner is especially relevant because he has been somewhat open about his mental health.
A First-Rate Madness Page 4