John Sherman

“ Below in the street passed by country people, townspeople, travellers, women with baskets, boys driving donkeys, old men with sticks; sometimes he recognized a face or was recognized himself, and welcomed by some familiar voice.
“You have come home a handsomer gentleman than your father, Misther John, and he was a neat figure of a man, God bless him!” said the waiter, bringing him his lunch; and in truth Sherman had grown handsomer for these years away. His face and gesture had more of dignity, for on the centre of his nature life had dropped a pinch of experience. ”

“ Sherman was more perfectly happy than he had been for many a day, and more ardently thinking. All nature seemed full of a Divine fulfilment. Everything fulfilled its law—fulfilment that is peace, whether it be for good or for evil, for evil also has its peace, the peace of the birds of prey. Sherman looked from the sea to the ship and grew sad. Upon this thing, crawling slowly along the sea, moved to and fro many mournful and slouching figures. ”

“ Soon after coming North, Sherman proceeded to Washington, where Lincoln had just been inaugurated as President, John Sherman was now a Republican leader in the Senate, having been appointed in place of Chase, who had entered the Cabinet. Washington was enough of a southern city to be filled with war talk. Sherman's old friend, Anderson, had just moved his troops from Fort Moultrie77 into Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, and had announced his patriotic determination to hold that post for the Government at all hazards. ”

“ Roger Minot Sherman, of New Haven, a nephew of Roger Sherman, a distinguished lawyer and a leading participant in the Hartford Convention. William M. Evarts, George F. Hoar and Chauncey M. Depew are descendants of Roger Sherman or of his brother.
Rev. John Sherman, the eldest son of Edmond Sherman, was born on the 26th of December, 1613, at Dedham, England. He graduated at Immanuel College, Cambridge, left college a Puritan and came over to America in 1634, as above stated. He preached his first sermon at Watertown, Massachusetts, under a tree, soon after his arrival in this country. ”

“ John Sherman, the fifth child of Samuel Sherman, was born at Stratford, Conn., February 8, 1650. He early moved to Woodbury. He died December 13, 1730.
2. John Sherman 2nd, the fifth child of John, was baptized June, 1687. He married Hachaliah Preston, July 22, 1714. He died 1727.
3. Daniel Sherman, the third child of John 2nd, was born August 14, 1721, and died July 2, 1799.
4. Taylor Sherman, the sixth child of Daniel, was born in 1758. He married Elizabeth Stoddard in 1787, and died in Connecticut May 15, 1815. His widow died at Mansfield, Ohio, August 1, 1848. ”

“ Blessed are the unsympathetic. They preserve their characters in an iron safe while the most of us poor mortals are going about the planet vainly searching for any kind of a shell to contain us, and evaporating the while.
Sherman began to mount the hill to the vicarage. He was happy. Because he was happy he began to run. Soon the steepness of the hill made him walk. He thought about his love for Mary Carton. Seen by the light of this love everything that had happened to him was plain now. He had found his centre of unity. ”

“ My friends, of course I am an old man now, passing off the stage of life. I realize that, and I assure you that I now think more of the days of the Mexican War, the old California days, and of the early days of the Civil War, than I do of what occurred last week, and I assure you that, let it come when it may, I would be glad to welcome the old 'Sherman Brigade' to my home and my fireside, let it be either in St. Louis or on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon. May God smile upon you, and give you his choicest blessings. You live in a land of plenty. ”

“ General Sherman always paid the most respectful attention to women in every rank and condition of life—the widow and the orphan, the young and the old. While he was often stern and abrupt to men, he was always kind and gentle to women, and he received from them the homage they would pay to a brother. His friendship for Grant I have already alluded to, but it extended in a lesser degree to all his comrades, especially those of West Point. No good soldier in his command feared to approach him to demand justice, and everyone received it if in his power to grant it. ”

“ Sherman was down before her son. A spare, delicate-featured woman, with somewhat thin lips tightly closed as with silent people, and eyes at once gentle and distrustful, tempering the hardness of the lips. She helped the servant to set the table, and then, for her old-fashioned ideas would not allow her to rest, began to knit, often interrupting her knitting to go into the kitchen or to listen at the foot of the stairs. ”

“ For several days the Shermans saw little of their guest. He had friends everywhere to turn into enemies and acquaintances to turn into friends. His days passed in visiting, visiting, visiting. Then there were theatres and churches to see, and new clothes to be bought, over which he was as anxious as a woman. Finally he settled down.
He passed his mornings in the smoking-room. He asked Sherman’s leave to hang on the walls one or two religious pictures, without which he was not happy, and to place over the mantlepiece, under the pipe-rack, an ebony crucifix. ”

“ It is not to be denied that as this love grew serious it grew mercenary. Now active, now latent, the notion had long been in Sherman’s mind, as we know, that he should marry money. A born lounger, riches tempted him greatly. When those eyes haunted him from the fourteen flies on the ceiling, he would say, “I should be rich; I should have a house in the country; I should hunt and shoot, and have a garden and three gardeners; I should leave this abominable office.” Then the eyes became even more beautiful. It was a new kind of belladonna. ”

“ No man cared for old Michael Sherman. Every one liked John. Both were silent, but the young man had sometimes a talkative fit. The old man lived for his ledger, the young man for his dreams.
In spite of all these differences, the uncle was on the whole pleased with the nephew. He noticed a certain stolidity that was of the family. It sometimes irritated others. It pleased him. He saw a hundred indications besides that made him say, “He is a true Sherman. We Shermans begin that way and give up frivolity as we grow old. We are all the same in the end.” ”

“ It was seen that, with or without victory, and at whatever cost, he had moved relentlessly forward. His grim, irresistible persistence oppressed, as with a sense of destiny, those who tried to confront it; every one felt that he was going to "end the job." He was now beleaguering Petersburg, and few Southerners doubted that he was sure of taking it and Richmond. In the middle country Sherman, after taking Atlanta, had soon thereafter marched cheerily forth on his imposing, theatrical, holiday excursion to the sea, leaving General Thomas behind him to do the hard fighting with General Hood. ”

“ Sherman, a few days before leaving, was returning for the last time from his office when he saw, to his surprise, Howard and Miss Leland carrying each a brown paper bundle. He nodded good-humouredly, meaning to pass on.
“John,” she said, “look at this brooch William gave me—a ladder leaning against the moon and a butterfly climbing up it. Is it not sweet? We are going to visit the poor.” ”

“ It is one of the great epochs in the march of time, which, as the years go by, will be, by succeeding generations of freemen, classed in importance with the discovery of America and our Revolutionary War. It was the good fortune of General Sherman to have been a chief actor in this great drama, and to have lived long enough after its close to have realized and enjoyed the high estimate of his services by his comrades, by his countrymen, and by mankind. ”

“ Sherman looked at her, and went on in a bewildered, mechanical way—“My betrothed is a Miss Leland. She has a good deal of money. You know my mother always wished me to marry some one with money. Her father, when alive, was an old client of Sherman and Saunders. She is much admired in society.” Gradually his voice became a mere murmur. He did not seem to know that he was speaking. He stopped entirely. He was looking at Mary Carton. ”

“ Sherman had lifted a corner of the blind and was gazing over the roofs shining from a recent shower, and thinking how on such a night as this he had sat with Mary Carton by the rectory fire listening to the rain without and talking of the future and of the training of village children.
“Have you seen Miss Leland in her last new dress from Paris?” said Howard, making one of his rapid transitions. “It is very rich in colour, and makes her look a little pale, like St. Cecilia. She is wonderful as she stands by the piano, a silver cross round her neck. ”

“ Sherman was solitary because silent. In this room the dressmaker sat twice a year, and here the rector’s wife used every month or so to drink a cup of tea. It was quite clean. There was not a fly-mark on the mirror, and all summer the fern in the grate was constantly changed. Behind this room and overlooking the garden was the parlour, where cane-bottomed chairs took the place of mahogany. Sherman had lived here with his mother all his life, and their old servant hardly remembered having lived anywhere else ”

“ Born in 1820, he reached the mature age of seventy-one, and died at his home in New York on the 14th day of February, 1891. The event produced a profound impression. Sherman, more than any other great military captain of his time, had shunned and put aside political ambition. Of his sterling patriotism there was never a doubt. As to his wonderful abilities, all men were agreed. His remains were taken under escort from New York to St. Louis, where they were deposited in the family burying grounds in Mount Calvary cemetery.
Death of General Johnston. ”

“ Resolved, That we hereby record the high appreciation in which the American people hold the character and services of General Sherman, as one of the greatest soldiers of his generation, as one of the grandest patriots that our country has produced, and as a noble man in the broadest and fullest meaning of the word. ”

“ The firm of Sherman and Saunders, ship brokers, was a long-established, old-fashioned house. Saunders had been dead some years and old Michael Sherman ruled alone—an old bachelor full of family pride and pride in his wealth. He lived, for all that, in a very simple fashion. His mahogany furniture was a little solider than other people’s perhaps. He did not understand display. Display finds its excuse in some taste good or bad, and in a long industrious life Michael Sherman had never found leisure to form one. He seemed to live only from habit. ”

“ It used to seem to [331] me that a deaf man could understand all that Sherman was saying. He was one of the few talkers who could interest all sorts and conditions of hearers, from wise men and women, to simple boys and girls. Speaking of girls, reminds me of a story that General Sherman told one day at a dinner I attended with my friend Col. John A. Cockerill:
“When I was driving one day with General Grant, I asked him what he was going to have as a hobby, now that the war was over. ”

“ The 'seven financial conspiracies' are the seven great pillars of our financial credit, the seven great financial measures by which the government was saved from the perils of war and by which the United States has become the most flourishing and prosperous nation in the world. ”

“ He would live in his love and the day as it passed. He would live that his law might be fulfilled. Now, was he sure of this truth?—the saints on the one hand, the animals on the other, live in the moment as it passes. Thitherward had his days brought him. This was the one grain they had ground. To grind one grain is sufficient for a lifetime.
II.
A few days later Sherman was hurrying through the town of Ballah. ”

“ The seminary was made a State Arsenal, under the title of State Central Arsenal, and I was allowed five hundred dollars a year as its superintendent. These matters took me several times to Baton Rouge that winter, and I recall an event of some interest, which most have happened in February. At that time my brother, John Sherman, was a candidate, in the national House of Representatives, for Speaker, against Bocock, of Virginia. In the South he was regarded as an "abolitionist," the most horrible of all monsters ”

“ The monument speaks for itself— simple in form, admirable in proportions, composed of enduring marble and granite, resting upon foundations broad and deep, it rises into the skies higher than any work of human art. ”

“ Certainly I shall not marry for money, for I hold the directness and sincerity of the nature to be its compass. If we once break it the world grows trackless.”
“Good-bye,” said Sherman, briskly; “I have baited the last hook. Your schemes suit you, but a sluggish fellow like me, poor devil, who wishes to lounge through the world, would find them expensive.”
They parted; Sherman to set his lines and Howard to his hotel in high spirits, for it seemed to him he had been eloquent. The billiard-room, which opened on the street, was lighted up. A few young men came round to play sometimes. ”

“ Who can look over our broad country, rich in every resource, a climate and soil suited to every production, a home government for every community, a national government to protect all alike, and not feel a profound sentiment of gratitude, first of all to the great Giver of all gifts, and next to our Revolutionary fathers who secured, by their blood and sacrifices, the liberty we enjoy, and by their wisdom moulded the people of the United States into one great nation, with a common hope and destiny? ”