More than any other Union general, Sherman was capable of conducting mass psychological warfare in order to break the heart of the Confederacy. Sherman succeeded in large measure because he could plumb and enact his own rage with ruthless clarity. The inner nature of Sherman's genius for destruction forms the center of Citizen Sherman. But this biography is much broader than an analysis of war from Sherman's perspective, for Michael Fellman seeks to illuminate the emotional as well as the intellectual, ideological, and occupational lives of this extraordinary, but at the same time representative, American Victorian man. It was men like Sherman, statesmen of the sword, who beat the Confederacy and destroyed the Indian nations, and Michael Fellman examines, with both detachment and compassion, how such men equipped themselves to secure American nationalism.
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