William Tecumseh Sherman – 1820-1891

During the last year of the Civil War, Sherman was Ulysses S. Grant’s top lieutenant. His “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah in 1864–1865 brought the war to the Confederate civilian population by cutting a wide swath of total ruin. Sherman was a brutal realist who believed the object of war was to create maximum devastation to achieve total victory as rapidly as possible. After the Civil War, he applied this approach to the Indian Wars, often with tragic results.