Memoirs.

* SHOOTING STAR. W. T. Sherman's Memoirs are notable in part for what the author left out, and a chief virtue of the new Library of America edition is its inclusion of a detailed year-by-year chronology of Sherman's life.

WTS doesn't tell us that he was born Tecumseh (Mencken wrote that Sherman's wife always called him Cump); that "William" was added at his Catholic baptism when he was ten. He does tell us that upon his father's death, his mother, near penniless and unable to care for ten children, had to scatter" all but the three youngest. Cump went to live with the family of Thomas Ewing. It was Mrs. Ewing who arranged his baptism; Mr. Ewing, Ohio's junior senator, arranged his appointment to West Point, about which Sherman knew little, except that it was very strict, and ... the army was its natural consequence." He graduated in 1840 and spent the next 13 years in uniform, serving at posts in several Southern cities, and in northern California during the Mexican War. After he quit the army, he tried and failed at banking in San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York. In 58 he and two of the Ewings' sons started a law firm in Kansas. (WTS had not been an attorney, had not formally studied law, but was admitted to the bar "on the ground of general intelligence.") In '59 he became founding superintendent of what is now LSU. Then came the war.

'I gave no heed to the political excitement of the day," Sherman writes, and vigorously apolitical he was. Not only did he avoid presidential politics (to the 84 Republican convention: I will not accept if nominated and win not serve if elected"), he voted for President only once-in 56 for Buchanan. But in letters to his brother John, a congressman and later senator (he of the Sherman Antitrust Act), he admonished against anti-slavery pronouncements m Congress. And politics clearly intruded in other quite personal ways. For instance, he built a house in Louisiana, but prudently had not sent for my family ... because of the storm that was lowering heavy on the political horizon." In fact, his abolitionist wife (a Ewing) refused to bring their children south. WTS thought Southerners entitled to their human property, and would later oppose the enlistment of blacks in the Union army, but he thought secession intolerable, and, after turning down several commissions (which led to speculation in Washington that he might join the Confederacy), he became again Colonel Sherman, 13th U S. Infantry, on May 14, 1861. He got his first-ever taste of combat at Bull Run.

War. "It is all hell," and it nearly drove him mad. He does not record it, but he became a drunk and, relieved of his first command, suicidal. But, with U.S. Grant as his angel, he endured, distinguished himself at Shiloh, and burned down his first Southern town in the fall of 1862. Vicksburg, Chattanooga, Missionary Ridge, Atlanta, and then the March to the Sea: ten miles a day, scorching a path fifty miles wide. Total war, and then victory.

He remained in the army for another two decades, most of it as commanding general. If the Memoirs were a highlight of his later years, the low point may have been his son Tom's decision to become a priest, although they were reconciled, and the son officiated at the father's funeral in 1891.

Sherman's Memoirs present a riskier America: ships sank, banks failed, children died. WTS had the heart of a warrior, the mind of an accountant. He was reading Great Expectations when he died. Tecumseh is Shawnee for Shooting Star.