Images Captured in Time

Originally published November-December 2022 · pp. 26

IMAGES CAPTURED IN TIME Sherman’s slouch hat possibly worn by him in this Atlanta photograph. Courtesy National Museum of American History.

SHERMAN ON “DUKE”

While photographing Sherman and his officers at Federal fort number 7 in late September, George Barnard took a separate picture of the commanding general on his horse. Sherman clearly liked it. “I sent you a few days ago some photographs, one of which Duke was very fine,” he wrote his wife Ellen on October 1. “He stood like a gentleman for his portrait, and I like it better than any I ever had taken.” About that time, on September 28, the Episcopal bishop of Arkansas, the Rt. Rev. Henry Lay, secured an interview with General Sherman as he sought a pass through Union lines. After dinner that evening the two stood on the piazza of John Neal’s house in Atlanta, enjoying cigars. Sherman brought up his recent correspondence with Confederate General Hood concerning a truce for a POW exchange and other matters, which Hood released to Southern newspapers. Sherman complained that Hood was trying “to excite unreasonable prejudice against him” about his order expelling Atlanta’s populace. Bishop Lay remembered what Sherman told him: “I have made war vindictively; war is war, and you can make nothing else of it; but Hood knows as well as anyone I am not brutal or inhuman.”