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It was no secret that 9-year-old Willie was the favorite child of William Tecumseh Sherman. In fact, his wife, Ellen, reproved him repeatedly for making his preference for Willie uncomfortably obvious to their other children. But on the evening of Oct. 3, 1863, the boy lay dead in a Memphis hotel room. Sherman would write the next day to Ulysses S. Grant that Willie was "the one I most prised [sic] on earth." But Willie's death was the tragic consequence of a series of decisions for which Sherman would blame himself the rest of his own life.
Those decisions began in the aftermath of the long and grueling Vicksburg campaign, which ended in early July 1863. Soon after, Sherman encamped his XV Corps for a period of rest and refitting in an oak grove between the Big Black and Yazoo rivers, about 20 miles east of the former Confederate stronghold. The land, which Sherman had immediately found ideal, was owned by "old preacher Mr. Fox," as Sherman put it in a letter to Ellen. Sherman was pleased to note that two months earlier, Fox had had over 50 slaves, but now they had run away and his house had been ransacked by Union soldiers. Fox and his family were thus forced to "appeal to us for the Soldier's Ration." Sherman also remarked, with the bitter jocularity he reserved especially for beaten rebels, that Fox had "17 children born to him lawfully & 11 still alive."
All through the late summer and early autumn, Sherman filled his letters home with expressions of deep satisfaction and even delight regarding his camp location. He declared in an Aug. 3 letter to his brother John that "we have lovely camps, plenty of grass, water and shade trees." He bragged to a fellow general that he and his men "have beautiful camps. … I never saw better camps." To his father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, he wrote that his camp "is in reality one of the best possible. It combines comfort, retirement, safety, and beauty." He went so far as to tell his brother-in-law Philemon that in a fit of whimsy he had named the place "'Polliwoggle Retreat,' in honor of a horse pond, very convenient to our Camp and full of songster frogs."
Sherman also had more serious reasons to be pleased with the camp. Both armies had suffered terribly from disease during the Vicksburg campaign, and he was well aware that the risk of rampant infection was heightened during the summer months. Still, he was confident that he had picked a site free of these dangers. "I have no apprehension on the Score of health," he wrote home on Aug. 13, "and the present condition of my command satisfies me on this score." In another letter to his brother, he noted flatly that "here I fear not yellow fever or any other epidemic."
Because of the confidence he had in his location, and because he was unable to take a furlough home, Sherman violated his own policy against officers' bringing their families into camp. He thought the practice contributed to laxity, but he decided in this case to send for Ellen and four of their six children, including his beloved Willie. The family joined him in late August. On Sept. 9 a contented Sherman wrote his brother about the arrangements he had made for them all. He and Ellen were together in adjoined hospital tents, with the children nearby in two other tents. "You would be surprised to see how well they get along," he happily reported. "All are well and really have improved in health down here."
Unsurprisingly, in his memoirs Sherman records nothing about his other children's experiences in camp, while he says a great deal about Willie's. He remembered that his son "was well advanced for his years, and took the most intense interest in the affairs of the army." A favorite of the 13th Regulars, the battalion assigned to guard Sherman's headquarters, Willie was made an honorary sergeant in the unit, wore a specially made uniform and regularly attended its parades. Sherman would remember years after the war how much pleasure Willie and he took in horseback rides and in observing the drills and reviews of his troops.
For a few weeks Sherman enjoyed life with Willie and the others, but that time ended in late September due to events in far-off southeastern Tennessee. After the Union defeat at Chickamauga, Sherman was ordered to take command of forces gathered in nearby Chattanooga. On Sept. 28, Sherman moved his headquarters and family to a riverboat at Vicksburg. When Willie that night complained of diarrhea, a regimental surgeon was sent for. He concluded that the boy was suffering from dysentery and malaria.
Willie's condition had worsened by the time the boat arrived in Memphis on Oct. 2. Sherman's family took rooms at the Gayoso Hotel and another doctor was brought in. Typhoid fever was finally diagnosed, but nothing could be done to help Willie. "We were with him at the time," Sherman wrote later, "and we all, helpless and overwhelmed, saw him die."
Ellen and the surviving children returned home to Ohio while Sherman tried to throw himself into his duties as a way to escape his grief, but his letters from this time are filled with terrible self-recrimination. Three days after Willie's death, he wrote to Ellen that "I will always deplore my want of judgment in taking my family to so fatal a climate at so critical a period of the year." On Oct. 14 he wrote again to say that he occasionally gave in to "the wish that some of those bullets that searched for my life at Vicksburg had been successful, that it might have removed the necessity for that fatal visit."
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Time did nothing to lessen Sherman's self-blame. "The blow was a terrible one to us all," he would write years later in his memoirs, "so sudden and so unexpected, that I could not help reproaching myself for having consented to his visit in that sickly region in the summer-time." It's striking that here Sherman seems to shift responsibility for Willie's presence in Mississippi to an unnamed other, with Sherman merely "consenting" to his family's joining him there.
Willie haunted Sherman through the rest of the war. In 1864, during his assault on Atlanta and then the long march across Georgia to the sea, Sherman's letters to his wife are filled with obsessive, endlessly searching discussions of their dead son. In particular, Sherman's sorrow takes the form of wishing that Willie were able to rejoice in his father's accomplishments. In late October 1864, for example, as plans for the devastating march across Georgia were being finalized, Sherman's thoughts turned toward imagined praise from Willie: to be able to see Willie's "full eyes dilate and brighten when he learned that his Papa was a great general would be to me now more grateful than the clamor of millions." At the war's end, on April 5, 1865, assured of his place in history from helping to vanquish the Confederacy, Sherman wished only that Willie "could hear & see — his proud little heart would swell to overflowing."
Sherman and Ellen had eight children, including three sons in addition to Willie, but none came close to replacing him in their father's affections. One, Charles, was conceived during the ill-fated visit to Mississippi; he died of pneumonia at the age of 5 months, without Sherman's ever seeing him. In his memoirs Sherman puts the child's name in quotation marks, as if his son weren't really a person to him. His youngest son Philemon's achievements in law and business gave Sherman a small measure of satisfaction late in his life. Thomas Sherman was a source of conflict and rage for the general, rejecting his father's dictate that he study law and opting for the priesthood instead. After long periods of mental instability, Thomas died in 1933 in a New Orleans nursing home.
Sherman had close, loving relationships with his daughters, but even so, to the end of his life his heart remained really only Willie's. The boy's body had originally been buried in Sherman's hometown of Lancaster, Ohio. In 1867 Sherman had it moved to St. Louis, where he and his family had taken residence after the war. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, less than a year before he died, Sherman instructed the St. Louis post of the Grand Army of the Republic as to where he wished to be buried. "Deposit my poor body in Calvary" Cemetery, the warrior father requested of his old army comrades, "alongside my faithful wife and idolized 'SOLDIER BOY'."
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Sources: Michael Fellman, "Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman"; John Marszalek, "Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order"; William Tecumseh Sherman, "Memoirs": Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, "Sherman's Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865."
Thom Bassett is writing a novel about William Tecumseh Sherman. He lives in Providence, R.I., and teaches at Bryant University.
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