Sometimes a handgun can impart the resonances of a bygone era, giving a hands-on impression of the past. In the NRA National Firearms Museum collection are many such historical pieces, but only one can connect us to a man who blazed through the American South.
William Tecumseh Sherman hailed from Lancaster, Ohio, and his four years at the United States Military Academy at West Point were marked with an annual accumulation of about 150 demerits each year. Despite this, Sherman became an officer assigned to the 3rd U.S. Artillery and served in the Second Seminole War.
At the end of the Mexican War, Sherman was in the West, serving in California and later assisting in the Gold Rush surveying for what would become the capitol of Sacramento. Life in the West suited the now-married Sherman, and as a captain, he resigned his commission to serve as a bank manager — but also as a major general of the California militia. He left California for the Midwest, trying his best to become a lawyer in Kansas, but abandoned that effort to be the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy.
In 1861, states were seceding from the Union, and Sherman was placed in the less-honorable position of accepting the receipt of arms surrendered by the Baton Rouge Arsenal to the Louisiana State Militia. It didn’t sit well with him, and he departed for Washington D.C. to return to the military world once more.
As colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry, he served at First Bull Run in charge of a unit filled with three-month volunteers. Sherman continued to climb the Army’s ranks, finally fulfilling his desire to serve under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant as commander of the 5th Division of the Army of West Tennessee. At the battle of Shiloh, he had three horses shot out from under him and was wounded twice.
The national opinion of Grant and Sherman, as expressed in the newspapers of the time, characterized one as a drunkard and the other as a lunatic. After successes at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Sherman was at the point he had dreamed of – Grant had been pulled to campaign in the East, and Sherman received the military command of the federal armies in the West.
Sherman’s campaign through the South – his “March to the Sea” — cut Confederate supply lines and caused more than $100 million in property damages. While Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces were harassing Grant in Virginia, Sherman sliced and diced the rest of the secessionist army. Continuing his path of destruction through the Carolinas, Sherman met up again with Grant at City Point, Virginia — a meeting that also united President Abraham Lincoln together with his generals in March of 1865.
Throughout the war, Sherman knew well the advantages of superior arms, and in 1869, he ascended to the rank of Commanding General of the Army. When Grant won the Presidency, Sherman received a special presentation firearm from his staff.
Sherman’s Smith & Wesson No. 2 was a .32-caliber rimfire revolver, a six-shot handgun with a spur trigger design. Like Sherman himself, his revolver was an unremarkable blued finish piece, not glorified by engraving or fancy grip panels but bearing only a simple inscription on the backstrap. During the Civil War, many of Sherman’s troops were armed with the best repeaters of the day, such as the seven-shot Spencer carbine that used metallic cartridges like his Smith & Wesson.
The difference in loading time between Colt cap-and-ball sixguns and the sleek S&W that broke open to load efficiently with self-contained ammunition was considerable. Many other Union officers chose the Smith & Wesson No. 2, and almost 50,000 were manufactured prior to the close of the war.
The presentation of this revolver to General Sherman followed countless earlier gifts to unit commanders from their men, but still, this was an apt present for the man characterized as the first modern general. Cased in a plain factory wooden box that was cloth-lined, this .32 revolver was likely with Sherman until his death in 1891.
Want to see this and other amazing firearms from American military history and beyond? Visit the NRA Museums in person or online!
BJI CUT THE HORSE SH*T FED DRAMA. THEY ALL NEEDED EACH OTHER TO SURVIVE. I’M SO TIRED OF HEARING THIS REPARATIONS HORSES*IT. LETS MAKE AMENDS TO THE IRISH FIRST.
POS DEMOCRATS CREATED AND HAVE SPOON FED THE TRAVESTY AGAINST BLACKS FOR 200 YEARS.
DON’T BE A LIAR OR STUPID.
Why does raping, burning, and pillaging the civilian populace make Sherman our “first modern general”, when the likes of Attila and Genghis Khan had routinely done that centuries before?
It’s so predictable that those who are PC want to judge all previous eras according to today’s PC standards, whie they themselves can’t stand up to their own standards. For example how the “tolerant” party had been throwing fits ever since the election, yet overlooks all transgressions of Obama and HilLIARy. They’ll believe every bad thing they hear, no matter the source, if it’s about someone they don’t like, and simultaneously disbelieve anything bad about those they like, regardless of how strong the proof. That makes their opinion on historic matters pretty much worthless, they have no objectivity. That might… Read more »
WOW. DOESN’T TAKE MUCH TO GET COMMENTS SHOT DOWN IN THIS JOINT.
WITH ALL THE MEN UP NORTH THIS COWARD HAD EASY PICKINGS. LOSER AND COWARD AT BEST. MAY HIS MURDEROUS SOUL ROT IN HELL. I CONCUR HITLER AND MAO WERE MORE HONORABLE. I’D HAVE TO ABSTAIN ON THAT MOST MURDEROUS PRICK STALIN.
Sherman was a thug and a murderous insane idiot. He persecuted women and children and destroyed their lives, burned their properties and stole their money and goods.
He should have been arrested and sent to prison.
There was NOTHING “honorable” about him.
Mao , Stalin and Hitler were more honorable.
OK, Cg. What you forget is that MOST of those same women and children treated ALL black people like SLAVES with cruelty and NO RESPECT!!!
Sherman treated slaves/ex-slaves much worse than southerners did. Read some history instead of books with revisionist history out of NYC.
You better brush up on your history. FYI The largest slave owner in the South was an EVIL Black who treated his slaves poorly. Many blacks fought with the Confederacy and went back to the plantations that they came from after the war ended. They were free men and women. Obviously they were not abused if they returned to the Plantations that they came from . The Civil was more about Taxation and tariffs than Slavery. Slavery was a non issue. Slavery was used to capture the compassion of the people in the North. Blacks were treated worse in the… Read more »
SiX year old comments.
Sherman had flaws but he was a product of his times. For him, ending the war as soon as possible was the most humane thing. I’m sure all of you criticizing his actions offer similar hatred and bile for Curtis LeMay and the firebombing of Japan, which killed far more than both atomic bombs combined. You must hate Mush Morton, who machine-gunned Japanese survivors of the military transport ship he’d sunk. Clearly, you wouldn’t be hypocritical because your emotions are based on Confederate sympathies.