1858 (47 page)

He was just as apologetic to his boss, Mr. Turner. He told him that he was “disqualified” for banking and that “I seem to bring bad luck. I ought to have known California better than to risk my own and other persons’ wealth in such a cursed land.”
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His brother John had become one of the most influential men in America by the time Sherman had reached what appeared to be the end of his rope as the proprietor of a roadside stand in the winter of 1858. No one who knew them would have predicted the two brothers would turn out that way. William had been a fine student and college graduate, but John was not. His younger brother stopped formal schooling at age fourteen and went to work as a laborer. He soon became interested in politics and embarked on one of the most impressive political careers in United States history. The Ohioan served several terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, nearly becoming the Speaker in the winter of 1858–1859, was elected to the U.S. Senate and later served as the secretary of the interior and secretary of state under different presidents, holding down important jobs in public life until 1898. John Sherman gained fame early as an opponent of slavery and throughout the 1850s was seen as one of the nation’s leading abolitionists.
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His brother William Tecumseh Sherman did not share his politician sibling’s virulent hatred of slavery. William had no strong feelings about the slavery controversies in Kansas that had caused such an uproar throughout the nation. In fact, he had no feelings about slavery at all. He wrote little about it, except to tell his brother that the current status of blacks was acceptable to him. It was his view that blacks should remain in bondage in the Southern states. “The Negroes of our country should remain slaves,” he wrote his brother. He did not speculate about the spread of slavery to the territories, especially Kansas, in letters to him. Ironically, Sherman was farming in Kansas at the same time that abolitionist John Brown, who had caused so much trouble there in 1856, had returned to the territory to live with his sons and plan subsequent antislavery activities.
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He did make a prediction to his congressman brother about politics and slavery. He told him that every issue in the country was being determined on the slavery question and not on its merits. He told the congressman that if that continued the country would be dragged into a civil war.

Sherman ended the winter of 1858 trying to sort out his life. He no longer wanted to be a farmer—anything would be preferable to that. He wrote, “I feel in danger, ready to run to any quarter of the world where I can do anything.”
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He was in no hurry to return to Ohio and his foster father, either.

Friends of the former soldier had numerous suggestions: superintendent of an iron company, manager of a hotel building project, participating in a cattle drive from Utah to California, or assistant manager of a bank in London. One even suggested running a grocery store.

None made any sense to him, and he traveled back to Ohio to take Ewing up on his offer of a job in his nearby salt factory. He had given in to his wife, his foster father, and what he believed to be his fate. He wrote Ewing, “If Ellen & the children are willing to live down in Hocking and you think it proper that I should leave my family there, and can satisfy yourself that I can serve you and them, too, I’ll hold to my promise to come to Lancaster this fall, and go to work at Surveying Engineering or whatever you are willing to entrust to my care.”
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He worked in Lancaster for a short time and then moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, at Ewing’s insistence, to work with Ewing’s sons there in a law firm they had set up. They strong-armed local legal officials to permit Sherman to become a lawyer by merely taking a general knowledge test and skipping law school. He passed and became a very unhappy lawyer, writing his wife that his legal work would be “bungle, bungle, bungle from Monday to Sunday.”
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In the fall of 1858, after eight years of marriage, numerous separations, and fights too numerous to count, Ellen Sherman finally decided between her parents and her husband. She wrote William Tecumseh Sherman a heartfelt letter. “One thing I cannot consent to, and that is to live separate from you any longer. I will wear cheap clothes, put them on the children—eschew society
in toto
, live far from the church or near it, as I can, do as much of my own work as possible and be more amiable than you have ever known me, if you will only be cheerful and happy. I cannot lead this unnatural life any longer, suffering anxiety on your account as I do. If your means will permit no better rent [than] a log cabin or its equivalent with two or three beds and a rag carpet and a stove and if we can have fueled bread, meat, and coffee and sugar I shall not despair. I am in bad health and I am unhappy and I beg you to take me with you somewhere.”
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He appreciated her letter but, as always in the back of the mind, there was the army. He always regretted leaving the army, especially when he went to work for his foster father in the salt factory in 1858. He enjoyed army life and the camaraderie of the officers and enlisted men. He was a good soldier, even though he had not been in combat. Any brush with people in uniform sparked his old romance for the military. One of his several jobs prior to the banking fiasco was as a contractor for the army at Fort Riley, Kansas, where, like everyone else, he listened to the rumors about John Brown and the other raiders in the territory. Sherman worked with officers outdoors in checking munitions and supplies. He arrived early and stayed late, reveling in every minute he could spend with men in the army. He gushed to his wife that in that job especially, he really missed the service. Sherman told her that there was no more regret for him “than to meet my old comrades in the open field, just where I most like to be.”
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Sherman’s desire to get back into uniform consumed him and he made one last attempt by writing an officer he knew in the adjutant general’s office, Don Carlos Buell, a classmate at West Point and one of the investors in his San Francisco bank whose money he had saved during the bank run. He asked Buell to recommend him for a job in the army paymaster’s office. Sherman then enlisted his influential foster father to pressure President Buchanan, with whom Ewing did not get along, to appoint him. Their combined influence did no good; both the army and the president turned Sherman down. His army days were apparently over.
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But there was one small sliver of hope in the winter of 1858–1859 for Sherman to get back into the military life, an opportunity neither he nor anyone else had anticipated. During the winter, a group of men in southern Louisiana began to raise funds to start a military school in Alexandria that they wanted to be the finest in the region, a Southern academy that could rival West Point. The school, the Louisiana Military Seminary, was seeking a superintendent. They wanted a retired army man who could offer the students military and academic training, and had some administrative experience to use in running the new institution. A plus would be a West Point graduate. A real plus would be a man with some fiscal background who could oversee the financial operations of the school.

They wrote letters to numerous men in the military seeking recommendations for the superintendent’s post. One arrived on the desk of Colonel Buell, who immediately thought of his friend Sherman, who had protected his life savings in the San Francisco bank run. The Southerners might be alarmed that Cump Sherman’s brother John had become one of the fiercest abolitionists in the House of Representatives, but if they indeed wanted a good administrator and genuine military talent, Buell assured them, his old army buddy seemed ideal for the job.
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Besides, Cump did not share his brother’s views on slavery. William Sherman had never been very interested in the plight of blacks. In 1842, Cump Sherman had written of slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, “The Negroes are well dressed and behaved, never impudent or presuming and, so far as I can judge, feeling very light indeed the chains of bondage.” He once wrote his wife, “All the Congresses on earth could not make the Negro anything else than what he was. He has to be the subject to the white man or he must amalgamate or be destroyed. The two races could not live in harmony save as master and slave.” Later, at the end of the Civil War and in Reconstruction, he would often express the same sentiments.
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Unknown to him, at the same time that he was setting up his roadside business, friends had recommended him to be the superintendent of a new military academy. He was given that job in 1859 and soon became the much-praised leader of the academy, where he assumed a very fatherly attitude toward his student-cadets and renewed his own love of the military.

Chapter Fifteen

Americans were startled to wake up on the morning of December 6, 1858, to read in their newspapers that President James Buchanan had launched what appeared to be a full-scale naval invasion of the South American nation of Paraguay. The president had sent a squadron of twenty-one warships carrying 187 cannon and nearly three thousand men to the harbor at Buenos Aires, in Argentina, a friendly nation to the United States, to prepare for an assault on Paraguay.

The president’s war on Paraguay was triggered when national troops in a Paraguayan fortress fired on an American government ship, the
Water Witch
, engaged in a scientific survey. It was not clear if the
Water Witch
, either deliberately or mistakenly used an off-limits channel in the Paraguay River that ran in front of a military installation. The
Water Witch
, like all ships, was supposed to use a channel in mid-river. A Paraguayan officer at the fort hailed the
Water Witch
and told her captain to sail in the mid-river channel. The captain of the
Water Witch
claimed that he was not in the off-limits channel and that the nation of Paraguay could not claim ownership of the river, since the other side of it was in Argentina. The Paraguayan officer warned the
Water Witch
that she would be fired upon, but the American captain paid no attention to the warning and continued to sail upstream. Paraguayan artillerists then fired a shot near the American vessel as a signal to halt, but the shot was ignored. The Paraguayans then fired directly upon the
Water Witch
, damaging her and killing a sailor on board. The captain of the
Water Witch
fired back at the fort. Several volleys followed, in which no one was hurt. The American vessel eventually turned back.

Buchanan was furious and turned the unfortunate death of the sailor into a huge incident, branding the Paraguayans as unscrupulous international villains and charging that “the hostile attitude of the government of Paraguay towards the United States” was responsible for the entire episode. “That government had, upon frivolous and even insulting pretexts, refused to ratify the treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation, concluded with it on the fourth of March, 1853, amended by the Senate, though this only a mere matter of form. It had seized and appropriated the property of American citizens residing in Paraguay, in a violent and arbitrary manner; and finally, by order of President Lopez, it had fired upon the United States steamer
Water Witch
…and killed the sailor at the helm, whilst she was peacefully employed in surveying the Parana River.”
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