Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War

By: Charles Bracelen Flood

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Synopsis: This dual Civil War biography presents “[a] powerful and illuminating study of a military collaboration that won the war for the Union” (Josiah Bunting III, Washington Post).“We were as brothers,” William Tecumseh Sherman said, describing his relationship to Ulysses S. Grant. They were incontestably two of the most important figures in the Civil War, but until now there has been no book about their victorious partnership and the deep friendship that made it possible.They were prewar failures: Grant was forced to resign from the Regular Army because of his drinking, and Sherman had moved from one job to the next in the years before the conflict. But heeding the call to save the Union, each struggled past political hurdles to join the war effort. And after taking each other’s measure at the Battle of Shiloh, they began their unique collaboration.Often together under fire on the war’s great battlefields, they also supported each other in the face of mudslinging criticism by the press and politicians. Sharing the demands of family life and the heartache of loss, they built a mutual admiration and trust which President Lincoln increasingly relied upon. Though their headquarters were hundreds of miles apart, they communicated almost daily, strategizing the final moves of the war and planning how to win the peace that would follow.