1858 (44 page)

The year 1858 began badly for William Tecumseh Sherman. The former soldier had given up the army for a career as a banker, trading in his blue army uniform for the finely tailored suits and splendid cravats of a financial man. He had been hired by the national banking firm of Lucas and Turner, based in St. Louis, and sent to California to run their bank in San Francisco in 1853.

The banking business did not go well and by 1858 he was sick of it. Earlier that year, prior to his roadside-stand business, he left his home in St. Louis and made one final visit to San Francisco. Just before he left, Sherman bumped into another former army officer who was just as insolvent as he—Ulysses S. Grant. “Sam” Grant had served with numerous other West Pointers, such as Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis, in the Mexican War. Sherman and Grant barely knew each other at West Point, but their chance encounter on the streets of St. Louis gave the men a chance to commiserate with each other about life after the army for men whose only skills seemed to be of a military nature.

Grant had left the army to become a farmer in Missouri. He had failed miserably in the several years he had spent trying to till the plains, struggling with the region’s freezing cold temperatures in winter and its oppressive heat and dangerous dust storms in summer. Grant knew by 1858 that he was not a farmer, and by then he had lost just about everything he had trying to make his tiny set of acres prosperous. Grant’s finances hit rock bottom in January of 1858. First, he had to sell several of his treasured possessions, including a gold chain with sentimental value, to a pawn shop in order to pay his bills. The money he made on the chain, a paltry $22, did not help much.
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To make ends meet, he then traveled back and forth to St. Louis, where, appearing just like any unkempt drifter down on his luck, he stood on street corners and sold small bundles of firewood he had cut at his farm for a few dollars. That didn’t bring in much money either, and Grant wrote his sister in the winter of 1858 that he was broke and could not pay a bank note on the farm due in April. “I don’t see now that I shall have the money,” he told her.
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Grant had poured out his tale of woe to Sherman, who told his West Point classmate his own sad story of failure out of uniform. He was despondent in his talk with Sherman and everyone else and saw no future for himself, a washed-up former soldier with no other skills. Grant wrote his sister that he planned to travel to see his family in Ohio that spring, “One more visit home before I get old.”
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Sherman, saddened by the meeting with his old classmate, wrote later, “[I] concluded that West Point and the regular army were not good schools for farmers [and] bankers.”
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William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses Grant would meet again.

Sherman departed for California right after he bumped into Grant, at the end of January 1858, to wrap up business matters at his former company’s bank there, uncertain how the year would turn out, but confident that it would end better than 1857 had. He was wrong.

He found chaos everywhere he looked in the Lucas and Turner bank in San Francisco. The bank reported $200,000 in bonds, mortgages, and notes in its financial inventory, but the economic slump that swept across the country meant that their assets and paper were actually worth far less. They owned land and buildings worth over $100,000 on paper, but those had also been dramatically devalued by the panic. Sherman’s job was to collect whatever monies he could, offering substantially reduced terms, so that Lucas and Turner could settle all of their accounts in California, leave the state, and try to regroup in their national offices in St. Louis.
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William Sherman’s heart went out to the Californians who owed his bank money. They had lost much in the economic collapse; some lost everything. How could he in good conscience force them to immediately pay back all they owed? He could not. Sherman systemically went about trying to collect just small percentages of what was owed the bank, writing debtors and simply asking them to pay what they could, sometimes asking for just ten cents on the dollar. Some of the Californians could not even pay that much and the bank recovered only a small percentage of what was owed.

That 1858 trip was the final chapter of William Sherman’s life in California. He had last headed for the West Coast in February of 1853, just a few years after the gold rush there, when the state boomed and tens of thousands of prospectors arrived by wagon train, horseback, and ship to make their fortune in hills that all believed were laden with gold. Their presence had turned San Francisco from a sleepy port city into a sprawling, raucous community of fifty thousand people, sixty times its size five years before—Chinese immigrants, prospectors, prostitutes, and merchants eager to make money off the men and women who made their money off the gold rush. The city that Sherman sailed to was fast becoming one of America’s most important ports and metropolitan centers, Sherman described it then as “the most extraordinary place on earth.”
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By 1858, the boom had turned to bust. “When we began [early 1850s], we were on the top of a high wave rolling towards a dangerous but hidden reef,” he wrote his foster father, Thomas Ewing. “Lands and houses here were yielding fabulous rents, and gold was a drug. People paid their three and five percent a month without a blush. Houses were building in every direction and the cities were pushing their streets over hills and out upon the bay, where but a year before ships were riding at anchor…we all supposed these magical changes were the result of gold from our mountains. This was but partially the case, for our gold was going East about as fast as it came down from the mountains.”
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He told Ewing that the financial storms had battered the city’s best people. “Almost every bank has failed. A large proportion of the wealthy have become embarrassed and bankrupt. Real estate has fallen from an exaggerated rate to almost nothing.”
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Sherman was in the army, where he had been sent to clean up and take charge of the corrupt commissary office in New Orleans, when Henry Turner, a wealthy St. Louis banker, asked him to leave the military and go to California. Turner was the partner in the successful Lucas and Turner bank there. He told Sherman that the years he had spent as a quartermaster and commissary officer in the military had made him a capable financial administrator. And Sherman knew California. That combination made him perfect to be the president of the brand-new Lucas and Turner bank in California. Sherman would not only be paid more money than he had ever earned in the army, but would be given stock in the company as well.

He did not want to leave the army, but felt enormous pressure from his wife Ellen, Thomas Ewing’s daughter, who had long disdained the low pay of the military and the transitory life of army families. She wanted some financial stability and a better life. New Orleans was very expensive and the Shermans could barely get by on his army pay. Ellen had given birth to their second child in the winter of 1852, more children would be on the way, and she insisted that he leave the army and accept the lucrative banking offer.

So the sunny shores of California were appealing to Sherman for many reasons. The move there was a chance to make more money, please his increasingly unhappy wife, and put distance between himself and his foster father, whom he did not like but upon whom had always been dependent. And it was a chance to return to San Francisco, where he had been stationed with the army and had many friends.

Tecumseh Sherman was the offspring of one of the most patriotic families in America. He was a descendant of Roger Sherman of Rhode Island, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Another ancestor had served thirty years in the Connecticut General Assembly. Sherman’s grandfather was a judge and his father led an Ohio militia company in the War of 1812. The Shermans moved to Ohio to farmlands provided by the State of Connecticut to its Revolutionary War veterans. They settled in the village of Lancaster, in the southeastern part of the state, where Sherman, nicknamed “Cump,” was born in 1820; he was named Tecumseh after the Shawnee Indian warrior. His father Charles became a lawyer and later sat on the Ohio State Supreme Court. His untimely death on June 24, 1829, when William was nine, followed financial woes that left him practically penniless.

With her husband Charles’s passing, Sherman’s mother was left nearly bankrupt, with nothing but their small home and two hundred dollars—and a mountain of debt. She had eleven children and no resources to care for them, so in a common practice of the day she asked relatives and friends to take in her children. Her next-door neighbor, Thomas Ewing Jr., a forty-year-old businessman and political leader in Ohio, became William’s protector, or foster father. He would go on to become President John Tyler’s secretary of the interior and a U.S. senator. Another man in the village did the same for her son John, then six, who would grow up to become a United States senator.

“Cump” became the eighth child in the Ewing household, joining his four natural siblings and two nieces and a nephew. Ewing’s wife Maria insisted that Cump be baptized and the nine-year-old redhead agreed, but a minister could find no Saint Tecumseh and the boy needed a Christian name. The day he was baptized happened to be Saint William’s Day, so the boy was officially named William Tecumseh.

William was always grateful for the good life provided by the Ewings, but he never truly accepted them as his parents, always referring to them as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” and never “father” and “mother.” He got along well with their children, did his chores, and took full advantage of his years of intense education at the Lancaster School, founded by the Ewings, where the school afforded William the opportunity to study Greek and Latin as well as literature, mathematics, and other subjects. He developed an interest in the military in the middle 1830s when he watched local militia companies march out of town to fight area Indian tribes. In 1836, thanks to Ewing’s influence, he won an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Sherman adapted easily to the strict disciplinary codes of West Point. He rose at 5:30 a.m. for breakfast and went to class or studied all day before retiring for the evening at 9:30 p.m. He was a fine student and graduated sixth in his class of forty-two cadets in 1840. Among the cadets with him at West Point were several he would fight with or against in the Civil War twenty years later: Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, Joseph Hooker, John C. Pemberton, P. G. T. Beauregard, Irvin McDowell, William Hardee, Edward Halleck, George Thomas, Don Carlos Buell, and James Longstreet. They were all well dressed and looked like professional soldiers, all except a freshman he knew casually, the disheveled and disorganized Ulysses Grant, whom everybody called “Sam.”
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Sherman was not only one of the best-read cadets at West Point, but the best informed. His foster father sent him numerous newspapers from Ohio and Sherman subscribed to a national newspaper, the
National Gazette
. Each fall anyone, cadets or instructors, who wanted to learn more about the political campaigns sought Sherman out. By the time he graduated, Sherman had become a Whig, like his foster father. He had little interest in pursuing politics, but was quite knowledgeable for a young man.

Sherman did well in his studies, but did not impress the men who ran the academy. He piled up ninety demerits for various infractions (two hundred brought expulsion), was sometimes belligerent to his teachers, and hated the required Sunday morning church services. He was certainly not one of the memorable graduates, such as Robert E. Lee a few years later. Sherman was not a hard-nosed military man, either. He surprised cadets with his love of the theater and surprising skills as an artist. A contemporary journalist wrote that most at West Point would have “admitted that there was nothing manifested in…[his] character…that marked him as one destined to play a great part in the greatest war of modern times.”
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His superiors at West Point may not have loved Sherman, but he loved the army. One of the most important aspects of his years at West Point was his deep-seated passion for the military that he developed there.

He loved everything, from the army’s strict discipline to the variety of people from all over the country. Most of all, he firmly believed that the military was obligated to hold the nation together in time of any foreign attack or constitutional crisis.

Sherman had always been emotionally torn in his personal life. He felt that he had been abandoned by his mother, even though he understood the necessity for the departure of the children from her home. He was grateful to the Ewings for raising him, but never believed that he completely fit in with their family or that they were his true parents.