I finished off William Tecumseh Sherman’s Memoirs last night. It was a good read for students of the Civil War but, like I mentioned in an earlier post, certainly not the best there is.
The specific weaknesses? 1) It merely covers Sherman’s own involvement rather than the whole war.
2) It covers even Sherman’s portion of the conflict inconsistently. For instance, battle strategy and action frequently go underreported while he goes (frustratingly) into great detail regarding such things as the officers’ list and supplies.
3) There is an awful lot of repetition and useless detail given in official letters written to and from Lincoln, Grant, Halleck, Stanton and others. These military reports make up a large portion of the book.
4) Finally, not only does Sherman omit an awful lot that the reader would most like to know, his version is not always in complete keeping with the facts. That’s hardly surprising, of course, but there are histories that are more accurate, more complete…and much more interesting.
So, yes, there is much that is of interest in Sherman’s Memoirs and I am very glad I finally got around to reading the whole 832-page project, but my much higher recommendations of Civil War history would remain the Memoirs of U.S. Grant, the huge (but terrific) 3-volume The Civil War: A Narrative by the incomparable Shelby Foote, and The Army of the Potomac trilogy by Bruce Catton.
