Some time this Sunday—probably in the evening, when the day’s duties are finished—Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman sits down to write a letter to his wife, Ellen Sherman, back in Lancaster, Ohio. Almost every paragraph is freighted with gloom. The “secessionists are armed and flocking” to the Confederate forces. Kentucky’s loyalists won’t fight. “The weather is now cold and miserable.” Because of selfish special interests, “honesty & qualifications are no longer the rule” in appointing officials. Ominously, Sherman writes that he is living in a house, “but am up all night” and “I don’t think I ever felt so much a desire to hide myself in some obscure place….” The question now is: How serious are his worries?
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