Guns, Sherman, and Steel

The March
By E. L. Doctorow
Random House, 363 pp., $25.95

American political sensibility has evolved to the point that to understand just how unsympathetic a figure General William Tecumseh Sherman has been and can still be in some regions of this country, it is better to pass over his devastating march through the Deep South to the sea and consider instead his solution to the problem of hostile Plains Indians, a few years after the end of the American Civil War. Kill off the buffalo, Sherman advised, and Indian resistance will wither and blow away. That deed was done -- perhaps by coincidence -- but once white frontiersmen had hunted the vast herds of buffalo to the edge of extinction, the whole way of life of the Plains Indians had been destroyed. The warrior Sioux had been cut down at the knees by the time they wiped out Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, who just hadn't figured it out quite yet, at the Little Bighorn.

Never mind the warriors, Sherman reasoned, but bring war to their wives and children and families by destroying their homes and food supplies (not to mention rape and other collateral atrocities). The warriors, severed from their destroyed roots, will lose all morale and finally give up. This radical and ruthless strategy worked as well in the heart of the Confederacy as it did later, on the great Western Plains.

Sherman never really seemed to enjoy his work. In early days, after the easy Confederate victory at First Manassas, when many people on both sides still saw the war as a carnival or a sort of chivalric tournament, Sherman crumpled into a funk so profound that he was briefly relieved of his post and accused in the newspapers of insanity. In retrospect, it's imaginable that Sherman had foreseen at the start that the South could never win the war, and the North could win only at a terrible cost, which it was as yet unwilling to pay, and that Sherman had a vision of all the horrors of the future (and the part he would likely play in them), a vision that drove him to distraction. He did not come into his own as a commander until the federal government reluctantly recognized that the most extreme measures had indeed become necessary, if the war was to be won.

Sherman appears for the first time on Page 74 of E. L. Doctorow's marvelous novel ''The March," trying to calm a hysterical young slave girl who since being freed by the federal invasion has managed, thanks to her light skin, to pass as a Union drummer boy. His first words to her, practically, are ''Sometimes I want to cry, too." It's not only Doctorow's great skill but also a real complexity in the character of the historical Sherman that makes this moment believable.

Sherman is not exactly the hero of this novel, which doesn't have any single hero or heroine. There is a cast of dozens, drawn from all races and classes and conditions into the vortex of the Union campaign from Atlanta through Milledgeville to Savannah in Georgia, then north through the Carolinas, Columbia and Fayetteville, and finally to the farmhouse outside Raleigh, where Sherman (who would later be reproached by his government for it) gave more generous terms for surrender to General Joe Johnston than Grant had offered to General Robert E. Lee. Sherman gets roughly equal time with the rest. Some are also historical figures -- Doctorow brings off a winning sketch of General Judson ''Kil" Kilpatrick, among others, and his glimpse of Lincoln is brief but unforgettable. But more are of the author's own invention. Despite Doctorow's diligence in creating characters to represent all the myriad groups involved in this action, none reads like a stereotype, which is in itself a remarkable achievement.

''The March" may be the first Civil War novel to give equal time to the white players on either side and to the hundreds of thousands of black and colored slaves who were liberated by Sherman's tour of the South. It's rare to get both in the same book. ''We don't want your Negroes," Sherman had written in a letter to the citizens of Atlanta, shortly before that city was burned, and in fact the freed blacks were an encumbrance to his army. Doctorow (fairly enough) presents the famous Field Order No. 15 (which promised a mule plus 40 acres of land confiscated from white proprietors to all free blacks who would stop following the army to claim them) as a typically radical solution to this logistical problem. Pearl, the half-white freedwoman whom Sherman meets in the guise of a drummer, is the most important ex-slave in the book, but Doctorow introduces several other black characters well worth knowing.

Both the black and white people are brought to vivid life by the most finely tuned details, like the surgeon who uses one of his tools to snip his nurse's maidenhead before making love to her for the first time -- and the nurse herself, who manages to see this procedure as ''solicitous." And Doctorow moves smoothly from these deft miniatures in and out of panorama -- his battle scenes recall the magisterial authority of those by the late Shelby Foote. But this novel isn't meant to be an epic on the scale of Foote's three volumes. It is a mosaic composed of ''little" lives, each with its uniquely human value, destroyed or saved by the hazards of war.

Doctorow implies in his portrayal that Sherman must have had an unexpected sensitivity to the value of human life -- that having suffered his own grave losses helped him know how to hit others where it hurt. In the same letter where Sherman warned Atlanta that ''war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it," he also said, ''But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker." And Doctorow leaves us feeling that he would have done that too.

Madison Smartt Bell is the author most recently of the novel ''The Stone That the Builder Refused."