A truly great biography reveals both the subject and the spirit of the times, and McDonough does both, tracing the tumultuous American adolescence through the life of General Sherman. Sherman was born in the Old Northwest of Ohio, named after the powerful Indian chief Tecumseh, who had lead a failed coalition against the Americans. After his father died, he was adopted into the influential Ewing family, and went to West Point, where he thrived as a cadet and in his early posting to Florida during the Seminole Wars, and California during the Mexican-American Wars. Early military posting across the South and Mississippi convinced him of the importance of the American heartland, and ironically in light of his later career, the basic friendship of Southerners. Sherman had a marriage to Ellen Ewing troubled by his wife's staunch Catholicism, and an uncertain career as a banker, when the Civil War broke out, and lifted Sherman to greatness.

Sherman struggled as a commander in the opening phases of the war, but he was never "insane", except in scurrilous newspaper columns, and after the Battle of Shiloh, repeatedly demonstrated his abilities as a strategist and logistician. Sherman excelled in operations along major rivers and railroads to dislocate strongpoints and force Confederate armies back without battle. His campaign to capture Atlanta was a masterpiece of maneuver.

Sherman's name will be forever connected with the March to the Sea, and scorched earth warfare. McDonough justifies the strategy as necessary in a framework of total war, and argues it was carried out as humanely as possible, without mass violence. Georgia howled, as Sherman burned anything with a potential military use, from railroads to cotton bales. In his use of economic warfare against the South and American Indians on the frontier, Sherman prefigured the worst of the 20th century.

Post-war, Sherman served as General-in-chief for over a decade, and took up a whirlwind of social engagements, speeches, and nights at the theater. The Sherman who comes across in his letters is a man of strong opinions: pro-Union, anti-Catholic, opposed to political nonsense and journalistic slander, confident in the superiority of white people, while still able to treat individual blacks and Indians humanely. As McDonough reveals through letters and archival research, Sherman was not above shading his memoirs in his favor, but in general he was scrupulously honest. A great biography of a fascinating man!