Diary of Orrin Brown, Savannah, Georgia
Sunday–Jan 8th
We found the ground white with frost again this morning and ice in the numerous mudholes around our camp. We were on the road about 7 Oclock marched out 7 miles and haulted about 10 AM behind a line of breastworks. There is quite a chilly wind blowing today. Jim Gifford and I bought an overcoat in Co today. Read 5 Chapt. in Testament today.
William Tecumseh Sherman’s first experience in combat came during the Second Seminole War after graduating from West Point. The six year conflict began in 1835, when the U.S. government tried to remove the native Seminole. This included the young war leader Osceola, named Billy Powell at birth (his great-grandfather was a Scotsman, his mother Muscogee Creek). Osceola was seized under a white flag of truce at a parley October 21, 1837, and died a prisoner in Ft. Moultrie, at Charleston, SC, in January 1838. The unconquered Seminoles in Florida never signed a peace treaty with the United States.
Sherman was posted at Ft. Pierce in Florida in October 1840. This was irregular warfare, not the sweeping battles of European land armies he had studied at the academy. The Federal troops spent the mild winters searching out isolated bands of indians scattered throughout the peninsula, retreating to the Coast during the hot humid summers. The experience would serve him later, chasing Confederate cavalry up and down the Mississippi valley. In November 1841, Sherman was promoted to First Lieutenant, and served briefly at St. Augustine and Mobile, Alabama.
Read More:
- The Seminole Wars: America’s Longest Indian Conflict (The Florida History and Culture Series) by John & Mary Lou Missall (University Press of Florida, 2004)
- Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell (Random House, 2014)
- The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns by Joseph T. Glatthaar (New York University Press, 1985)
- The Memoirs Of General William T. Sherman by W.T. Sherman (Library of America, 1990)
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