Excerpt from The Sherman Letters: Correspondence Between General and Senator Sherman From 1837 to 1891 IN the year 1836 William Tecumseh Sherman, then a lad of sixteen, entered West Point as a cadet. He was appointed from his native State, Ohio. He travelled east by stage, spent a week at Washington, a few days in Philadelphia, and another week in New York, thus becoming, for his age and time, a much-travelled boy. He is described as being a tall, slim, loose-jointed lad, with red hair, fair, burned skin, and piercing black eyes. He himself says that in New York some of his relations looked upon him as an untamed animal just caught in the Far West. He must indeed have had a rural look. That his strong individuality and intense interest in life were even then developed none who knew him later can doubt. His earliest letters are labored and boyish. He had not acquired a vocabulary or the fluency of pen which later developed itself to an almost wonderful degree. He was nervous and quick in all his thoughts and actions. He wrote a running hand, difficult to read, and rendered so by the race his pen had to run with his thoughts. His boyish letters are interesting, therefore, only because they are his, and I have quoted but few of them. He was three years older than his brother John. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.