ECW Podcast: Sherman and His “Demon Spirit” (with Tim Smith)
William T. Sherman and John McClernand started off as effective partners under Ulysses S. Grant, but by the time Grant began his inland campaign against Vicksburg, Sherman considered McClernand his “demon spirit.” Historian Timothy B. Smith joins the Emerging Civil War Podcast to discuss the important Sherman/McClernanrd partnership/rivalry and Grant’s role in managing it.
Hosted by Chris Mackowski, The Emerging Civil War Podcast taps into ECW’s award-winning line-up of historians and great special guests—all of whom come from a wide variety of backgrounds with a wide variety of interests on a wide variety of topics.
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As I’ve said, the Grant/Sherman tag team was unbeatable, especially against those Union generals who rubbed them the wrong way. Lee would just send his Eastern Front undesirables out into the Romulan frontier; G/S kept turning the knife in their memoirs.
I’ve always found it interesting to see the way Grant’s relationship with Halleck evolves over the course of Grant’s memoirs. By the time Grant wrote them, he knew how that story had played out, but during the war itself, he had blinders on. The tension between those two perspectives plays out in an interesting way in Grant’s writing.
Ironically, by that point, the friendship between Grant and Sherman had cooled a bit, too, but loyalties nonetheless remained strong.