Caroline Ailanthus's Reviews > Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War

I docked this book an extra star for not being nearly as cool as its title implies. Also, the thumbnail description contains a factual error.

As a Grant-and-Sherman-themed description of the Civil War, it is not flawless but is good. The author strikes a good balance, providing enough breadth and depth to make clear what was happening and why, without overwhelming me with detail that would have left matters unclear (I don't mean that a more comprehensive treatment of the war would have been bad--I might not enjoy such a thing, but plenty of other people would and do). And there are plenty of lovely little stories that provide a clear and engaging picture of who these men were and what they were about. I particularly appreciated descriptions of how they moved and looked and what impressions they made on those who met them--it gets them out of the black-and-white studio shots and the lists of battles won and shows them as real and whole people.

But the title is not "Grant and Sherman's Civil War," or some other vague indication of topic. Instead it tells us that this is a book about a friendship, and that this friendship won the Civil War.

It's not unreasonable for a reader to therefore expect the book to address certain questions:

When and why and how did these men become friends?

Was this friendship qualitatively different from the men's other relationships--were they something to each other nobody else was, or did each have a lot of close friendships, with this one being notable only because it won the war?

How did this friendship win the war? That Grant and Sherman were both key to the Northern victory is obvious to anyone who knows even a little Civil War history, but could the war have been won if one or the other or both had been missing? How did their friendship contribute to the victory--could the war have been won by generals who were brilliant in all the same ways individually but had no personal connection to each other?

The author, Flood, addresses some of these questions briefly and partially in a two-page afterword. Others he does not address at all, except possibly by vague implication.

For example, he never says how this friendship got started--he acknowledges that Grant and Sherman met as cadets at West Point, but does not say whether they befriended each other then. Flood implies that they were mere acquaintances until they began fighting together in 1862, but Sherman himself says otherwise in his memoir (which Flood obviously read as he quotes extensively from it). Now, it's possible that their earlier friendship is nowhere documented--Sherman, in his memoir, is characteristically reticent about his most personal connections, and while he mentions that they were close since 1839, says nothing else on the subject. Grant could be similarly closed-lipped in his memoir (which I haven't read yet), and it's possible that their friendship left no paper-trail for its first twenty years. But if that is the case, Flood should say so.

Were Grant and Sherman mere acquaintances when they met on the battlefield at Shiloh, or had they been true friends for twenty years, or something in the middle? For Flood not to even frame the question is extraordinary.

So much for the one star I docked.

The other star came off because of the "flawed" part of my "flawed but good" assessment. Flood is prone to digressions, some of which are interesting, but others seem mere pointless abstraction. And while his writing is, for the most part, clear, he occasionally lets loose with phrases that are clunky, ambiguous, or just stylistically bizarre. Worse, he's sometimes wrong--or, at least he sometimes makes statements that appear to contradict the evidence he himself provides.

For example, he repeatedly characterizes Sherman as having been "a failure" prior to the war, but all the evidence Flood himself provides suggests that's not true. While Sherman didn't achieve any notable success prior to the war and did experience multiple setbacks in business in quick succession, Flood does not indicate that any of those setbacks were his fault. On the contrary, he handled a series of unfortunate events very competently. To be a failure, one has to fail; Sherman didn't, and Flood doesn't say he did, so why does he repeat the pre-war failure narrative?

Throughout, Flood does not ever indicate when there isn't enough evidence to be sure of something. He either leaves the question (whatever it is) unaddressed, or he speculates, without clearly saying that he is speculating or explaining why he believes a speculation to be correct. That, plus the aforementioned errors, means that I can't really trust Flood's accuracy except where he quotes or directly paraphrases primary sources.

All in all, I'd say the book is worth reading, but it's not as good a read as it could have been.