William Tecumseh Sherman was born on May 8, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio, the son of one of the state’s Supreme Court justices. Sherman was later adopted and raised by a wealthy friend of his father’s, Thomas Ewing, Sr., a U.S. senator. Sherman entered West Point Military Academy, where he had a reputation as an honorable individual with a forceful and high-spirited personality who took his studies seriously. He emerged from the Civil War as one of its greatest heroes, if you were a Union supporter, and perhaps its greatest villain to those who had fought and sacrificed for the South.
