1858 (45 page)

Sherman wrote his wife about the Ewings, “I am fully aware how slight are my claims to her [Mrs. Ewing’s] regard… Very often I feel my insignificance and inability to repay the many kindnesses and favors received at her hands and those of her family. Time and absence serve to strengthen the claims and to increase the affection and love and gratitude to those who took me early under their care and conferred the same advantages as they did upon their own children. Indeed I often feel that your father and mother have usurped the place which nature has allotted to parents alone,” hinting that he somehow saw the Ewings as illegitimate parents.
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His first army assignment gave him an artillery command in Florida, where he participated briefly in the continuing wars against the Seminole Indians. He quickly decided that the war was a waste of time. He also came to understand that in war armies had to adapt to their situation—the army could not fight the Indians in the jungles of the southeast like it could a European force on an open field. It was lesson that would be invaluable later in the Civil War.

During the following years, he served in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, where he saw firsthand how committed Southerners were to the institution of slavery. He disagreed with them, but he also disagreed with the growing chorus of abolitionists that wanted slavery to be eliminated everywhere, and immediately.

Along with army life, Sherman grew to love his foster sister, Ellen, now sixteen and grown up. He wrote her frequently, soliciting her advice, and the pair became close, eventually falling in love. He asked her to marry him and she consented, but with two demands—he had to resign from the army and they had to live in Lancaster, Ohio, close to her parents. Sherman balked at both requests. He did not want to live with the Ewings again as their ward, and he certainly did not want to leave the army.

His dreary days in South Carolina ended quickly when the Mexican War began. It seemed like everyone he knew was sent there for what Sherman saw as the road to military glory. Jefferson Davis, ahead of him at West Point, was there, as were Robert E. Lee, whom he had heard so much about at the Point, and many other officers who were his classmates. They even sent Sam Grant, whom many said was the sorriest-looking cadet they had ever seen. Sherman was not going to Mexico, but he would travel to California to serve in an army unit whose job was to protect the republic
in case
the Mexican War spread to the Pacific Coast.

It did not. Sherman, who had risen to the rank of captain, spent several years in the Monterey and San Francisco areas with little to do except spend time drawing, turning out dozens of remarkably good sketches of wildlife. He became a clerk to a colonel and the heavy workload made him ill. That, combined with boredom, resulted in a dreary letter to his beloved Ellen, “I am so completely banished that I feel I am losing all hope all elasticity of spirits. I feel ten years older than I did when I sailed and, though my health is good, I do not feel that desire for the exercise that I formerly did.”

And he missed the action in Mexico. He wrote Ellen, whom he married in 1850, “To hear of the war in Mexico and the brilliant deeds of the army, of my own regiment and my own old associates, everyone of whom has honors gained and I out in California—banished from fame, from everything that is dear and no more prospect of ever getting back than one of the old adobe houses that mark a California ranch…there is nothing new here, no strange events, no hair-breadth escapes, no battles, no stirring parties, no nothing and this war will pass and I will have to blush and say I have not heard a hostile shot.”
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He complained, too, that if the Mexican War ended suddenly, officers who served with distinction there would get all the promotions, not people like him who sat out the conflict in California. He told her that those men would also win the best jobs in the private sector if they left the army, not people like him.
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Sherman was happy to be back in California to represent Turner and his banking companies. The return for the newly minted banker and former army officer was a disaster. His arrival was highlighted first by the wreck of his vessel, which ran aground on rocks several miles from San Francisco. After helping the captain to evacuate all of the passengers, Sherman made it to land and then booked passage on a small boat headed for the city; the boat capsized and Sherman had to be fished out of the water by the crew of a passing vessel.
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It was an inauspicious start.

But, he added, the people who lived there seemed to be making a lot of money, and he wanted, through his bank, to make a lot of money off them. If he could succeed financially, something that was impossible in the army, then perhaps his wife would have a better view of him and their growing family could prosper. The banking business, in booming San Francisco, seemed like a good path to that goal.

There were obstacles. The Lucas and Turner bank, a new venture, had been capitalized at just $100,000, a small sum. There were only a handful of employees. Loans were given out at low 3 percent rates. The bank itself was in rented quarters in a downtown building and not impressive. Sherman argued with Turner and Lucas to capitalize the bank at triple the amount, $300,000, hire more employees, build its own structure, and open up smaller branches in other California cities. They refused.

The new bank president did not think the company could succeed under the present circumstances and threatened to quit. He traveled back to St. Louis and confronted both bosses. After much haggling, they gave in to most of Sherman’s demands. The bank was capitalized at $200,000, Sherman was given money to build a bank office, and more employees were hired. He did not get the branches, but he did get more money in salary and benefits.
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He was pleased and asked his wife to join him in San Francisco with their daughters, Lizzie and Minnie. The Ewings balked. Thomas Ewing insisted that his daughter remain in Lancaster, Ohio. Ellen insisted that she had to be with her husband. Ewing then talked her into leaving baby Minnie with him and his wife, convincing his daughter that the trip to California would be too much for an infant. It was a way that they could protect Minnie, they said. They wanted Ellen to stay home—for good. They also pressured her into trying to talk her husband into leaving California and banking and returning home to Ohio, where his foster parents could take care of their foster son, Cump Sherman, in whom they had little faith.
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Ellen wrote a dismal letter to Sherman in which she told him that she did not want to go to California for any reason, and that he should come home immediately. She wrote, “My hope…is now that you will leave that country entirely never again to be lured thither by promises of wealth or even by a certain prospect of gaining it. You do me justice in believing that I will cheerfully submit to any course you may determine upon, provided we are not to be separated for years, yet you will not forget to take into account the trial it would be for me to leave my parents, now growing old, with a certainty for not seeing them again for years and a probability of never meeting them again in this world. So if there is anything to incline the balance to either side let this bring you home.”
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Ellen Sherman’s trip to California was as problem-plagued as her husband’s had been the previous year. In that day, sixty years before the opening of the Panama Canal, travelers either spent long and difficult months sailing around the southern tip of South America and then northward to reach California or crossed Central America on badly hewn roads in either Panama or Nicaragua. Ellen spent most of the voyage to Central America from the United States in bed, ill, and the overland trip across Nicaragua was hazardous.

Ellen began to complain about San Francisco as soon as she arrived: his army buddies from the old days visited too often, the house they leased was too expensive, the house they then bought cost too much, there was nothing for her to do, the streets were too dusty when the weather was dry, they were too muddy when it rained. She did not like her neighbors. The residents of San Francisco were crude. The hot days and cold nights, and the fabled sharp winds, made her ill and she spent more and more days in bed. She woke up at night terrified that her baby Minnie had died back in Ohio. Ellen, a very religious woman, then tried to make her husband more religious, constantly inviting clergy to their home; this annoyed him.
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“This is El Dorado, the promised land?” she mocked him. “I would rather live in Granny Walters’s cabin [in Ohio] than live here in any kind of style.”
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The Ewings began yet another campaign to talk Sherman into quitting his job and coming home to Ohio. Ewing told him that he could guarantee him a respectable job in one of his businesses with a more than adequate salary. It would enable him to enjoy professional success and come back to Ohio, where his wife so desperately wanted to return.

Sherman would have none of it. “I would rather be at the head of the bank in San Francisco, a position I obtained by my own efforts, than to occupy any place open to me in Ohio,” he abruptly wrote his foster father.
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Making the bank a success was difficult. Sherman had to oversee the construction of the new bank at the same time he ran the old one in its small rented quarters. Numerous bankers had arrived in California following the gold rush, resulting in considerable competition. None of the financial institutions were making much money loaning money at 3 percent though, and the small interest income and the cost of the new building kept the Lucas and Turner profits low. There were other troubles for banks in the city. The bank business had flourished right after the gold rush of 1849, but then leveled off. The gold rush brought corruption to the city; a scandal ensued when a city official disappeared with government money and bank notes. Needed investors had become wary of putting their money in banks.

Sherman worried that he would not be as successful as Lucas and Turner wanted him to be in this new venture. He had a personal worry, too. The new bank president had dozens of army friends still stationed in San Francisco. Many of them turned over all the money they had to Sherman for investments. Sherman feared that if the bank’s business continued to go badly, he ran the risk of losing their life savings.

The stress at home and the work at the bank brought back the severe asthma attacks that had bothered Sherman all of his life. He spent many sleepless nights wheezing and then was exhausted the next day. This went on for months. His wife, too, was sickly in San Francisco, suffering from terrible colds and boils. She told her husband that her ailments, too numerous for doctors to diagnose, had made her miserable. She had become an invalid, rarely leaving their home. Sherman told her that she was a hypochondriac and that her ailments were not in her body, but in her head. They argued often about the reality of her ailments. Still, he tried everything possible to placate his wife, even buying a piano that she could play to amuse herself.
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Then along came another baby, a boy, William, in the summer of 1854, and he brought nothing but worry to the Shermans. The bank president who could barely pay his bills now had a wife and three children to support. His wife spent far too much money on clothes and furnishings, too. He wrote Turner, “I have a family growing at an awful rate, that I know will need a great deal to maintain and provide for.”
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On February 20, 1855, calamity struck the banking business in San Francisco. The city’s biggest bank was the local branch of Page and Bacon, the large national bank with headquarters in St. Louis. Their San Francisco branch went out of business that day.

Frantic, the bankers turned to a man whom they trusted—rival banker William Tecumseh Sherman. He rushed to the Page and Bacon bank, realized that there was a run on it as hundreds of people waited in line outside to withdraw their funds, and sought out the bank’s executives. The bankers told Sherman they were going to publish an ad in the next day’s newspapers assuring the public that they had funds to cover all withdrawals, even though they did not. Sherman advised them not to mislead the public and left. He had his own bank run to worry about, and that started the very next day.

The San Francisco run was a good example of Sherman’s administrative skills, his way in dealing with people, and, most important, his ability to operate in a crisis and under severe pressure from all sides. His military experience turned out to be just as valuable as his banking skills. First, he made certain that, as he had always insisted, his bank had nearly enough funds to cover withdrawals if, in fact, every single depositor demanded their money. The bank did, thanks to Sherman’s planning. Next, he obtained assurances from several wealthy men in town that they would lend him up to $140,000 to cover sudden withdrawals.