Officials at Mississippi State University are looking to bring Civil War history to life through a new version of memoirs from prominent Union general William Tecumseh Sherman.
General Sherman’s first-person account of his controversial role in the war and some of his campaigns, including the Siege of Vicksburg, has been reviewed and expounded upon by some of the nation’s leading Civil War scholars at Mississippi State. The updated version comes 150 years after the work’s original publication.
“The Memoirs of General William Tecumseh Sherman — The Complete Annotated Edition” is a Harvard University Press publication edited by Mississippi State’s John F. Marszalek, along with Louie P. Gallo and David S. Nolen. The scholars’ work follows their 2017 release of a fully annotated version of Ulysses S. Grant’s historic memoirs.
Sherman was best known for his “March to the Sea” campaign in Georgia, an initiative that pillaged the Confederate economy and weakened the southern army’s ability to fight. The general’s forces also burned parts of Mississippi’s capital of Jackson during the Civil War.
“The newly annotated Sherman memoirs, along with the recent publication of the Grant memoirs, make it possible for those interested in the Civil War to learn in great detail about the two leading figures of the conflict,” Marszalek said.
A William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at Mississippi State, Marszalek served as the U.S. Grant Association and U.S. Grant Presidential Library’s executive director and managing editor from 2006 until 2022. The Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library is housed at Mississippi State.
Marszalek is a nationally renowned expert on both Grant and Sherman, and he is the author of the general’s premier biography, “Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order.” He also played a key role in helping bring the Grant Presidential Library and Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana to Starkville, which established the university as a national center of excellence for the study of Civil War-era history.
Due to the Grant memoirs being so well-received, according to officials, publishing an annotated edition of Sherman’s accounts was necessary, especially given Marszalek’s eminent scholarship on both Civil War figures.
