William Tecumseh Sherman

William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, 1864. It was the victory Lincoln needed before the November election, and Sherman had won it by railroad — a hundred-odd miles of single track back to Chattanooga, repaired as fast as Confederate cavalry could cut it.

Then he did something no commander had tried. On November 15 he burned what was useful to the enemy in Atlanta, abandoned his own railroad, and marched 62,000 men toward the coast with no supply line. His columns lived off the country and tore up the track as they went, heating the rails and twisting them around trees.

The portrait shows him on the roadbed with the smoke of that work on the horizon — a major general in a plain field coat, gloves in hand. Savannah fell five weeks later.

He stands on the shoulder of the roadbed with one hand on his hip and a pair of gloves crushed in the other. The face is the famous one — cropped red beard, creased forehead, eyes narrowed at something off the right edge of the picture.

The composition rides the diagonal of the track, from the lower left corner to a column of smoke on the horizon. Everything he has just done lies down that line. Nothing in his posture says he is going back for it.