Ater causing great thread drift in Jeff's sports quote thread (for which I hereby apologize), I thought I'd start a separate thread to continue with actual factual material connecting the Sherman family with our beloved alma mater.  The connections are:

Cump Sherman's step father and father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, was in Ohio's first graduating class in 1815.  Sherman married Ellen Ewing, who was his step sister who he met while being raised by Ewings after his father untimely death.

WTS' oldest brother Charles Taylor Sherman had completed his junior year at Ohio University when their father died. He was also "shipped out" and ended up studying studying law in Dayton, and later practiced law in Mansfield, Ohio.

 

I thought this was a Richard Sherman thread before I opened it.

Thanks for the information OCF.  I have always greatly enjoyed Ohio history (both for our beloved university and our state).  My family tree has WTS in the older branches so he is of greater interest to me.  

In my opinion this thread (and other WTS threads on BA) lends praise to a figure of extremely dubious distinction:

I have limited time at the moment, so I'll only make a brief response.  First, I've studied Sherman during the Civil War to a much greater extent than his actions during the Indian Wars.  Prof. Marszalek, who has been mentioned in another thread, and who wrote what some considered the definitive biography of WTS, talks about his attitude toward Indians in part of his book. He says that Sherman saw Indians as inferior and stubborn, and that the two characteristics together he found particularly bothersome.  Marszalek says that in Sherman's view "Indians had to give up their culture and become more like whites if they wished to survive.  It was 'the law of the survival of the fittest,' he repeated on numerous occasions, expressing his belief in the social Darwinism that was so popular in the postwar years."  Though not dismissing the brutality of our Indian policy and pointing out that sometimes the army wiped out entire villages of Indians, Marszalek does put this period of our history in some perspective when he adds: "Compared to the gigantic battles of the Civil War, the one thousand or so engagements of the Indian wars and the approximately one thousand army loses and the three to six thousand Indian casualties were small."  Not to get too far off track, but Marszalek also points out that originally Grant was in agreement with Sherman's attitude that the best way to deal with the Indians was militarily but that once he became president his ideas underwent a metamorphosis and Grant became an exponent of a much more peaceful policy toward the Indians. 

Hey, did y'all know that Sherman led a little known military campaign through Siberia?  Temporarily took Chokurdakh for the minerals in the area but quickly found out that even the Siberian summers were worse than the winters Napoleon and Hitler faced. 

Not in this case.