A Carnival of Terror

...Both had also left the Army years before the War— Sherman to make money, Grant under threat of court martial for drunkenness—and rejoined when it began...

...Both the stolid, phlegmatic Grant and the emotional, sometimes unbalanced Sherman were deeply in love with wives they had courted long before they became famous...

...What accounts for this curious variation on the Stockholm Syndrome...

...Ulysses S. Grant, supreme commander of the United States Army, and William T. Sherman had known each other a long time...

...By any normal standard it was also a long series of war crimes, culminating in the sacking and burning of undefended Columbia, South Carolina, by a drunken Army...

...Perhaps the novelist can show its differing effects on a range of minor participants and victims who had no control over the storm, as Faulkner did with a child narrator in The Unvanquished or, on a modest level, as Margaret Mitchell did in Gone with the Wind...

...Why do so few Americans care much about the Revolutionary War, which had a far happier ending...

...Looting, burning, destroying for the sheer love of destruction, his troops met little organized resistance after Atlanta and instead made war against a helpless civilian population...

...Now they stopped a moment to throw some torches in the windows...

...When her fledgling lieutenant was transferred to Louisiana before he had a chance to propose—perhaps before he knew he was destined to propose—the determined Julia had her horse saddled and rode alone in the direction of his barracks...

...Juxtaposing them may help "humanize" Grant and Sherman for sentimental readers, but anyone familiar with 20th-century history knows that crueler men had touching love lives as well...

...Defenders of Sherman contend that his troops committed relatively few murders or rapes, at least of white women...

...Ironically, he considered their presence a nuisance, made little provision for their safety, and opposed the Administration's policy of enlisting black men as soldiers...

...But the political tide would be reversed by the success of the strategy Grant and Sherman had evolved at Nashville...

...Many hailed him as their savior...

...Before separating it was definitely understood that at a convenient time we would join our fortunes, and not let the removal of a regiment trouble us...

...North and South, that night was descending on the Confederacy...

...Like the Southern generals they would soon be engaging, both were West Point graduates...

...A detached European physician who becomes an army surgeon and, between amputations, prophesies the invention of X-rays and antibiotics...

...Morally speaking, that approach makes a certain rough sense, but without a deeper grasp of both slaves and masters than he possesses, the scheme never quite comes to life...

...It seemed quite possible in the spring and summer of 1864 that he could win...

...In three months of fighting that began with the Wilderness, Grant's Army suffered more casualties than his opponent had men, and the outcome was further stalemate...

...County courthouses, colleges, libraries, churches, houses, even a convent met the same fate...

...You will go to the public school and catch up quick as a flash with your mind...

...from a cold-blooded standpoint...

...In the cinematic final scene, the now engaged Pearl and Stephen set their course for the Big Apple, where he plans to read law while putting her through medical school as soon as she learns to read and write...

...By then, thanks in part to Sherman's exploits, the President had been re-elected, and the outcome of the War was no longer in doubt...

...A British reporter telegraphs his dispatches from Savannah before there was an Atlantic cable...

...The beating of my own heart was the only sound I heard...

...One of my superstitions," he wrote of the incident, "has always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished...

...What Grant and Sherman had in mind was outright conquest...

...Even after being turned back at Gettysburg, the South had a real chance to prevail just by holding out until Northern public opinion lost patience with the intransigent Abraham Lincoln Administration and demanded a negotiated settlement...

...Neither hell nor high water (he had to swim a flooded stream) would stand between him and his object...

...You I propose to move against Johnston's Army," Grant wrote Sherman, "to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources...

...A plantation owner's arrogant, spoiled sons...

...The model for the historical approach is the late Shelby Foote, himself originally a novelist, whose three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative helped create the most recent in a long series of Civil War booms...

...Or one can attempt to treat it as literature, bringing the novelist's concern with character and motive to the immense backdrop of historical catastrophe...

...That, at any rate, is one plausible interpretation of Sherman's attitude...

...Sherman's telegram to Lincoln offering that city and its treasures as a Christmas present is one of the Civil War's most famous documents...

...It is, rather, a straightforward account of the relations between the two leading Union generals, with emphasis on the romantic side of these extremely realistic soldiers from the Midwest...

...No military end was served by this gleeful five-month carnival of terror...

...You take what you need from where you happen to be, like a lion on the plains, like a hawk in the mountains, who are also creatures of God's making, you do remember...

...Doctorow seems to have had these intentions...

...A gentle, earnest Irish lad named Stephen from the slums of New York...

...The best war novels grapple with the moral implications of actions in which human beings appear helpless to do more than preserve the possibility of a better future...

...Part of the problem is that Doctorow has less imaginative understanding of the time and place than his task requires...

...The negro should be a free race, but not put on any equality with the Whites," he wrote from Savannah to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase...

...One can approach it as a historian, filling out the big picture with vivid factual details (it was well documented by both perpetrators and victims...

...How can fiction illuminate this kind of gaudy, gruesome material better than a good historian...

...A bright, uppity slave girl named Pearl who, guess what, turns out to be the daughter of her master...

...Four years later, after the Mexican War had intervened, they were finally married...

...On the march is the new way to live...

...In the first election after the War, Grant was elected President...

...Is persistence in love a harbinger of ruthlessness in war...

...Faulkner would have blushed...

...The obvious model for fiction in this case, apart from the unreachable Leo Tolstoy, is William Faulkner, who touched on the Civil War in many novels and confronted it at length in Absalom, Absalom...

...and The Unvanquished...

...Civilians of any race simply got in the way...

...Ulys," as she called him, was actually already on his way to see her...

...Leading a force that ranged at various times from 60,000 to 90,000 strong, Sherman devastated Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah, then turned his attentions even more brutally to South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union...

...It is only the dead in their graves who should live like that, Arly said to the gasps and urgent prayers and implorings for water rising into the warm December morning.' General Sherman's own portentous consciousness is no easier to interpret: "He had sworn to wreak terror, hadn't he...

...Locating this novel's center of gravity is not easy...

...the strategically important fact is that Sherman was able to move his men at will through the interior South, cutting off supplies to the Confederate forces...

...It was West Pointer against West Pointer," the literary critic Cleanth Brooks once pronounced cryptically, taking for granted that his hearer would realize he meant the Civil War...

...In writing The March (Random House, 363 pp., $25.95), E.L...

...But would Northern public opinion tolerate the butchery long enough for it to take effect...

...So I rode slowly and sadly home...

...Sherman wanted to convince every adult white Southerner that continuing to fight for the cause of secession would result in personal catastrophe and ruin__Speaking of Georgia, he said that 'the utter destruction of its roads, houses and people will cripple their military resources.'" Afterburning Atlanta, he carved out a swath of ruin 60 miles wide, leaving destitution and starvation in his wake...

...A former war hero, George B. McClellan, was running for President as a peace candidate on the Democratic ticket...

...Flood recounts the romantic lives of his heroes at length—as if persuaded by the Victorians' habit of recording their emotions in detail that such material is simply too good to leave unused...

...I never was much good for settling down with the same view out the window every morning and the same woman in bed every night...

...There appear to be two distinct ways of writing about such a horrific large-scale event...

...It teems with anachronisms of fact and idiom that, deliberately or not, should help its intended audience feel at home—"up and running," "gender" (as a synonym for sex), "combat situation," "European Americans" (so labeled by an elderly slave), even "empower...

...Joseph Johnston was the Confederate commander in Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas...

...From Shiloh to Vicksburg to the Wilderness, Flood follows the natural contours of his story, foothills rising by degrees to the great range of Armageddon...

...His orders were being followed...

...Since novels about famous historical figures almost never convince, that means inventing lesser figures, who must seem at home in the time and place while being internally knowable as only fictional characters can be...

...Robert E. Lee, of course, commanded the Army of Northern Virginia that protected Richmond and had won so many victories against superior Union forces...

...One spectacular feature of Sherman's march was the thousands of slaves who left ruined plantations to follow his army...

...Despite the manifest influence of Faulkner and arty gimmicks like dispensing with quotation marks, The March has the feel of a popular novel written with an eye on Hollywood...

...Don't forget that when you cross the Savannah River you are in South Carolina," he told one of his division commanders...

...Sherman preferred to continue his path of devastation through the helpless Carolinas...

...Persevering, he reached the Dent farm and was entertained for several days...

...Many Northerners had come to consider this unreasonable and impractical...

...In other words, the day for worrying about Southern hearts and minds was past...

...We may have dominion over them, but it don't hurt to pick up a pointer or two...

...Unfortunately, the result is less impressive than the design...

...and I was to go for Joe Johnston...

...Grant could afford his huge losses better than Lee could afford his smaller ones...

...The Battle of Shiloh in 1862, a bloody, equivocal victory for the Union, had made them an effective team...

...All these riotous, drunken arsonists, these rapers and looters—here were some, coming out of this fine house now, their arms filled with sacks of silver plate, loops of pearl and watches on fobs hanging from their hands— what were they but men who needed a night of freedom from this South-made war that had disrupted their lives and threatened still to take them...

...The professionals were a caste apart, blood brothers regardless of the side they fought on...

...Well, it ain't exactly that new...

...And yet when Johnston finally surrendered two weeks after Appomattox, Sherman granted him such generous terms that the War Department repudiated them, and the two former adversaries remained friends for life...

...In sometimes powerful scenes, he repeatedly balances the wrongs of Sherman's troops against the wrongs of slaveholders...

...Before I returned," he wrote laconically, "I mustered up the courage to make known, in the most awkward manner imaginable, the discovery I had made on learning that the 4th Infantry had been ordered away from Jefferson Barracks...

...If he could march from Atlanta right to the sea," in Flood's words, "this demonstrated ability to move through the heart of the South on a path of the Union Army's choosing would show everyone...

...Enter Sherman...

...The more of it you destroy the better it will be...

...Two years later, however, the War still appeared to be a draw...

...It was one of the reasons, too, that so much of Dixie remained poor, Democratic, segregated, and defiant for another century...

...The book is populated with stock characters reassuringly familiar from fiction and movies: An angelic teenaged Southern belle who proves to be an experienced nymphomaniac...

...In its outlines, this was a simple plan to end the War and save the Union...

...But as Scarlett O'Hara, herself a survivor of Sherman's rampage, declared so memorably, tomorrow is another day...

...It was a bold and brilliant campaign...

...He follows Sherman's legions all the way from Atlanta to Johnston's surrender, portraying the action through the eyes of the commander himself and a host of Union soldiers, white civilians and slaves suddenly liberated into an unknowable new world As in Doctorow's earlier novel Ragtime, the range of characters and their ways of experiencing the same events is quite broad...

...I halted my horse and waited and listened, but he did not come...

...A pair of redneck clowns...

...How seriously are we supposed to take portentous passages such as the following disquisition on the march's ultimate destination from the mouth of a Confederate deserter temporarily disguised in a blue uniform: "To all the way to Richmond, maybe, and I wouldn't mind if to the North Pole...

...As Sherman later put it, "He was to go for Lee...

...Sherman's subsequent march through Georgia and South Carolina was a major reason the Confederacy collapsed in early 1865...

...What should one make of this material in a work of history...

...CHARLES Bracelen Flood's new historical narrative, Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War (Farrar Straus Giroux, 435 pp., $26.00), does not follow the large-canvas pattern...

...Relating this aspect of the two men's lives to the brutal careers that made them legendary, though, seems beyond his powers— perhaps beyond those of any historian...

...A few days later, Sherman was appointed commander of the Army and remained in that post until 1884, during the crudest period of Army policy toward the Indians in the West...

...Southern forces were being ground down in a war of attrition...

...Grant now wanted Sherman to join him in Virginia for the kill...

...Grant's devotion to the young Julia Dent of Missouri, whose affluent family owned slaves, was recorded in each of their memoirs...

...At the end of 1864, the year in which Grant had hoped to finish the War, both sides still faced each other in the trenches around Petersburg...

...Lincoln's policy was that there would be no compromise, no peace process, nothing short of complete surrender by the South...