Margaret Harris's Reviews > Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War

Charles Bracelen Flood was a masterful story teller and biographer. He chronicles the lives of these two Union generals better than each man did alone in his respective memoir—both very fine books in themselves.

Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman were each alternately idolized and vilified during their lifetimes. Mr. Flood humanizes them as men who experienced personal heartaches, sometimes struggled to succeed in private enterprise, did not hesitate to reflect upon their own failures, but who forged a resolute friendship with each other and joined in a mission to stop the war between states that had been so carefully Unionized, in President Lincoln’s famous words, “four score and seven years” earlier. Each man found “the talent and strength” to lead tens of thousands of other men in physical battles of devastating carnage. And when it was deemed possible to achieve military wins with less carnage, they agreed upon a strategy of siege of an enemy army while depriving it of needed replacement material goods: arms, food, clothing and blankets, and transport systems of road and rail.

There are many books describing the terrible four years of America’s Civil War, but this author adds details taken from personal letters of these men and members of their families to carry the reader back to the powerful real-time emotions of so many participants of those frightening years. He also includes the peripheral background of the usual jealousies among both politicians and other military officers, all willingly abetted by news “reporters.” By writing from the perspective of the two most effectively cooperating generals, as well as reminding the reader of how long it took (sometimes several days) for communications to reach across distances of several hundred miles, the author exquisitely draws the pictures of misunderstandings, premature interpretations of someone else’s actions, and oftentimes chaos in official behaviors.

The most satisfactory part of the book to me was The Grand Review, the two-day march through the city of Washington by surviving Union veterans, as endless bouquets of flowers carried by female spectators and tossed to the passing soldiers contrasted with the somber black crepe of mourning for President Lincoln still draped over windows and doorways of many buildings. Without saying so explicitly, it was a two-chapter metaphor of life’s hopes and disappointments, successes and failures, the inexorable joys and sorrows of flawed humanity. Those ideas are reinforced by the book's final quick synopsis of the future lifetimes that remained for the two victorious generals and their families.