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Famous Ohio Soldiers
by
William Tecumseh Sherman, who was born at Lancaster, Fairfield County, in 1820, was like his comrade and beloved friend Grant in the poverty he was born to. But his family was of historical distinction, while Grant’s had always been obscure, and his father died a judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio. As he died poor, his large family of children were left to their mother, whose means were not equal to their maintenance and education. Thomas Ewing, the great man of the place, had been the father’s friend, and he wished to adopt “the smartest of the children.” It is not known how his choice fell upon Sherman, who was playing with some other boys on a sand bank near Ewing’s house when it was made, and had apparently nothing to do with it.
His father had called him Tecumseh because he admired the Indian chief’s noble character and his merciful treatment of prisoners, and because he wished the boy to be a soldier. Ewing fulfilled the father’s wish by appointing the son to a West Point cadetship at sixteen. Sherman had meantime fallen in love with Miss Ellen Ewing, and he married her in 1850. Then he left the army and tried banking and the law, but liked neither, and he was President of the Louisiana state military academy when the Civil War began. With his frank, bold, impetuous nature, he forewarned the governor that he should side with the Union, and he asked to be notified in time before the state seceded.
He received the surrender of the last great Confederate army, after a series of the most splendid strokes of generalship. His March to the Sea will be forever famous. The highest British military criticism pronounced his attempt “the most brilliant or the most foolish thing ever attempted by a military leader,” and we all know how it turned out. Grant called him “the best field officer the war had produced,” and there has been nothing in history more sweet and beautiful than the friendship between these two great men. They were unlike in everything but their unselfishness and single-hearted patriotism, and they trusted as wholly as they loved each other.
Irvin McDowell, born at Franklinton, Franklin County, in 1818, was the brave and gifted officer who lost the first battle of Bull Run, where he failed less ruinously than any other general of that moment of the war would have done. His name and fame have outlived that disaster, though the people did not then know enough to forgive him for his army’s defeat. He was again of that tough Scotch-Irish breed that so many Ohioans are of; like our other great generals, he was a West Pointer, and he was of the high and kindly personal character common to them.
George A. Custer put into his life of vivid action the splendor of romance. His figure stands foremost in any picture of the war as that of the most dashing and daring cavalier of his time; but if his bearing was that of a young hero of fiction, his deeds were those of an accomplished and disciplined modern soldier. He was born at New Rumley in Harrison County, of a Hessian ancestor who had come over to fight for King George against the country which Custer lived and died to serve, and he inherited from him the blue German eyes, and the yellow German hair which he loved to wear long, and flying about his neck in his gallant charges. But otherwise he was of the simple matter-of-fact Ohio character. He got himself sent to West Point by means of a letter which he wrote to the congressman of his district. He frankly owned himself “a Democrat boy,” and though the congressman was a Republican his fancy was taken with the honesty of the youth, whom he never saw till one day a young officer “with long yellow hair, hanging like Absalom’s,” presented himself at his house in Washington as Lieutenant Custer. “Mr. Bingham, I’ve been in my first battle,” he said, “and I’ve come to tell you I’ve tried not to show the coward.” After that, in numberless bold forays and fierce battles, he displayed such dauntless bravery, such brilliant prowess, that General Sheridan, in sending Mrs. Custer the table on which Lee signed his surrender, could write, “I know of no person more instrumental in bringing about this desirable event than your own most gallant husband.” All the world knows how this glorious hero fell in the West, long after the war, before an overwhelming force of Indians.