General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891)

Neoclassical sculptor Franklin Simmons specialized in personifying heroic ideals in public statuary. During the last two years of the American Civil War (1861–1865), Simmons lived in Washington, D.C., where he sculpted a series of Union Civil War heroes and members of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. This bust is rendered in Simmons’s naturalist style, which was influenced by the realism of contemporary portrait photographs.

William Tecumseh Sherman attained the rank of general in the Union Army during the Civil War and was named Commanding General of the Army in 1869, after U.S. Grant was elected president. Heralded as a brilliant strategist, Sherman became famous for conducting what he termed “hard war” during his famous “March to the Sea” through the Confederate state of Georgia. Stating that “war is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman ordered his troops to destroy government and military property and to consume local resources, thus hastening the defeat of the Confederacy.