Country Mouse

Despite Sherman’s strong affinities for the white aristocratic South, there were parts of Southern life that he seemed to dislike, and even despise. He enjoyed, for example, socializing in the 1840s with the better people of Charleston, but he at least once called their scions “worthless sons of broken down, proud Carolina families.” After the war, as the South struggled to rise above the devastation and impoverishment it had suffered, Sherman admonished Boyd to leave Louisiana for a teaching position in the North. “The commonest of the common schools of Iowa outrank in public estimation your university,” Sherman unkindly informed his friend, somehow overlooking that he was referring to the same college he himself had helped found and was otherwise often proud of. It’s not clear, though, how seriously to take these attacks: Sherman’s relationship with the South, like so many other areas of his life, was marked by a penchant for overheated rhetoric and a shifting array of firmly held opinions that can be hard to reconcile.