Wandering up the Mohawk Trail

Baseball playoffs, and my elder daughter's school experience, have been absorbing my spare time at the moment, but I have had a chance to look at this excellent blog entry about the western New York frontier during the American Revolution that appeared as part of the Military Carnival. The quote from Sherman appears the product of a mind of a man who has a prophet's sense of faith in the rightness of his mission. Yet this little extract from it:

General Sullivan obeyed his orders like a man and like a soldier

may hint to us something of the mental crisis that Sherman himself experienced in the autumn of 1861,when he became convinced of a large Rebel army concentrating against his own forces along the Ohio river. It was a personal setback from which only the existence of Sherman's friends and relations in high places enabled him to elude longer-lasting consequences.