Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman.

William Tecumseh Sherman The Library of America, $35, 1,136 pp.

In 1885, after General Sherman had finished revising his Memoirs, first published in 1875, he asked his publisher to hold them until after the dying Grant finished his memoirs. It was a gesture, like his later defense of Grant over Lee as a strategist (North American Review, May 1887), that reaffirmed the closeness of the two men. Their friendship may have been a bit strained during Grant's years in the White House, but it is difficult to imagine two dissimilar men (Sherman's austere intellectuality so foreign to Grant's way of thinking) who were so much alike in so many ways. The letters they exchanged in March 1864, when Grant was called to Washington to take command of all the Union armies, are mutual admiration testimonials at their finest. It is appropriate that the memoirs of both men were issued at the same time by The Library of America, the shorter Grant volume fattened by a selection of his letters.

Civil War buffs and military enthusiasts will presumably be drawn to these works to read (or read again, more likely) the accounts of the battles and the campaigns. For me, who occasionally gets lost in the details of combat, the appeal of the volumes lies in their authors and what they have in common. Both men cut their military teeth under Zachary Taylor--Sherman against the Seminoles in Florida, Grant in the Mexican War. This "blunt, honest, and stem character," as Sherman called Taylor, apparently taught them what was expected of a soldier, an officer (lessons neither learned at West Point), and, as Grant's account of the Mexican War indicates, taught them how to organize a campaign. Both Grant and Sherman believed that wars could be fought successfully only when there was a single command with subordinates who were in their turn in control of their own operations and an overall plan of action into which all the elements fit. For this reason, although both men were more ambitious than their comments sometimes suggest, they distrusted officers who were dilatory or uncertain or self-aggrandizing; General John A. McClemand, whom both considered an amateur, is an example of the latter with his exclamation at the fall of Fort Hindman (reported by Sherman), "Glorious! Glorious! My star is ever in the ascendant!" It wasn't.

McClemand, a former Illinois congressman, was a political general, a breed that Sherman and Grant distrusted, even when they were efficient and dedicated to the Union cause. Too often, both men felt, the political general had to keep one eye on the war at hand and the other on public opinion to the rear, and civilian politicians were even less reliable. Early in his memoirs, Grant describes an incident in which the howling of two wolves sounded to him like a large and menacing pack. "I have often thought of this incident since when I have heard the noise of a few disappointed politicians who had deserted their associates." Sherman, who early recognized that the war would be long and bloody and who chafed mightily at the North's failure to prepare, was horrified at his first meeting with Lincoln, shortly before hostilities began, when the president responded to Sherman's concern with, "Oh, well! I guess we'll manage to keep house." Sherman left the White House "sadly disappointed" and "d--mning the politicians generally." Later he came to admire Lincoln as one of a kind with him and Grant, a politician who was almost a soldier, but that did not keep him from warning Grant, "For God's sake and for your country's sake, come out of Washington!" Ironically, both men spent an inordinate amount of their postwar life in the city of politicians.

Even less reputable than politicians were the newspapermen--"the dogs of the press," as Sherman called them--"the world's gossips." Grant recalls his youth when "there were no reporters prying into other people's private affairs," and in a note to his doctor the month before he died, he wrote, "I see the Times man keeps up the character of his dispatches to the paper. They are quite as untrue as they would be if he described me as getting better day to day." Both men had reason to hate the press since, particularly early in the war, Grant was often attacked as an incompetent drunk, Sherman as insane. The more serious charges against the papers were that they repeated Southern evaluations of Northern military actions, thus undermining support for the cause, and they printed information on troop movements that the South could use. Both generals tried to banish reporters from their territories or to restrict the information that could be sent back.

They differed somewhat on the art of war. Although both men hated the heavy casualties that their troops suffered, Sherman was much more obviously a scientific military man. In his early letters to Julia Dent, who would become his wife, Grant joked about how she might want to hear about his exploits, but as soon as he hit battle, he said, "There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one." He never changed his opinion. Sherman, who would make his celebrated remark about war as hell in 1880, could describe Chattanooga as "a magnificent battle in its conception, in its execution, and in its glorious results," and the capture of two Union gunboats by the cavalry of his enemy General Forrest as "a feat of arms which, I confess, excited my admiration." He was always a professional soldier in a way that Grant was not. Characteristically, he has a chapter at the end of his memoirs, "Military Lessons of the War," in which he speaks in detail about how armies should be organized, moved, supplied. Grant, on the other hand, wrote that "this war was a fearful lesson, and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future."

Although neither Grant nor Sherman is a literary stylist in the great tradition, both are appealing writers when they are not smothered by the statistics (the body count) and the avalanche of names necessary to an account of the war. Grant is a humorist of sorts as when he describes the "moral courage" of those who proclaimed that disabilities kept them from fighting in the Mexican War, "but they did not always give their disease the right name." Sherman had an eye and an ear for anecdotes that give human texture to what might have been a leaden military report.

There are things not to admire in both men: the casual anti-Semitism in their distress over the cotton traders; Sherman's belief in the inferiority of the blacks; his pride in having contributed to "the subjugation and civilization of the Indians." These are not unimportant matters, but it would be a mistake to dwell on them at the expense of so much that is intelligent and honorable and compassionate in both memoirs.

Toward the end of the war Sherman went to City Point to meet Grant and both of them visited Lincoln on a steamer, lying at the wharf. When Mrs. Grant learned that they had not even asked about Mrs. Lincoln, who was also on board, she said, "Well, you are a pretty pair!" And so they are.