William Tecumseh Sherman was a prominent nineteenth century military leader from Ohio.
William T. Sherman was born on February 8, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio. His younger brother was John Sherman who later became a United States Senator. He was named after Tecumseh, the famous Shawnee leader. Sherman's father died in 1829. Sherman's mother could not take care of all of her children and had several of them adopted into other families. Thomas Ewing, a neighbor and close family friend, raised William Sherman as a foster son.
Sherman attended common schools and received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1836. He graduated in 1840, ranking sixth in a class of forty-two students. He was commissioned a second lieutenant of artillery. He participated in the Seminole War from 1840 to 1842. During the late 1840s, he was stationed in California and helped Californians secure their independence from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. By 1850, he was in St. Louis, Missouri, and then New Orleans, Louisiana, on commissary duty. In 1850, he married Eleanor Boyle "Ellen" Ewing, the daughter of Thomas Ewing of Lancaster. The couple had eight children and a thirty-eight year marriage. Sherman resigned his commission with the rank of captain in 1853.
After leaving the military, Sherman moved to San Francisco, California and became the manager of a banking firm. The company made some unsound investments and lost most of their investors' money. Sherman refunded all of the money that his investors lost from his own savings. In 1857, he joined a bank in St. Louis, Missouri. It failed as well, and Sherman began to practice law in Leavenworth, Kansas.