Sherman, Jefferson and Solzhenitsyn

So maybe my last post, on the villainy of Benedict Arnold, was a tad preachy. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it in The Gulag Archipelago, “... the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The close friendship of William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant was strained but not overcome by political differences. Sherman was not a preachy guy, and laudably unsentimental about warfare. He opposed Grant's focus on the rights of the former slaves in Reconstruction, as well as his Indian peace policy. There is a moral element to those political matters, and most modern people, including me, are inclined to side with Grant's defense of blacks and Indians.

Before the war, when Grant was living on a Missouri plantation with his in-laws, he participated in the slave system. Yet he never shook off his antipathy to the "peculiar institution", which Sherman, living in Louisiana, seemed more comfortable with.

In 1859, at a time when Grant badly needed money, he did not sell the only slave he ever owned, instead writing manumission papers to free him. Compare that action to Thomas Jefferson holding on to his slaves at Monticello, not even freeing them in his will as Washington had done a generation earlier, and using their lives to undergird his own lifelong luxury. Is that record made better or worse by the facts that Jefferson was a sincere intellectual opponent of slavery in his youth, and in his maturity abolished the international slave trade? Jefferson's behavior is further complicated by his apparent sexual relationship with a slave, Sally Hemings.

Grant was a famously faithful and straitlaced family man, while Sherman was not, but it is dull to reduce matters of morality to sexual relations. Grant had failings, as he was all too aware at the end of his life. Even his last great accomplishment, the Memoirs, while a masterpiece of history and literature, is an account as fallible as anyone else's (see its unfair treatment of generals such as Rosecrans and Granger).

And Sherman, for all his mighty flaws, is a great American, albeit lesser than Grant. The bare facts (even when they can be nailed down) do not do his character justice. This can be taken as an argument for the limits of biography and in favor of historical fiction.