Article Review of The Theology of the Battlefield: William Techumseh Sherman and the U.S. Civil War - Essay Example

s well as in communicating his war experience, the Civil War was a religious war that religious people, conscious of forces of evil and good, which competed for men’s souls, waged for religious reasons (Bower, p1005). In response to Marszalek’s suggestion that Sherman exhibited a passion for order for most of his life, Bower argues that Sherman was passionate about order of a certain form derived from his faith in the Union, which in his view explains the reason behind Sherman’s much care about the war outcome or his decline to enlist in the Confederate cause.

Bower points out that hardly did Sherman drew the connection between the America he revered and the social disorder that perturbed him. Hirshson and Fellman, who share Marszalek’s assumption regarding irreligious Sherman, portrays him as one dragged down by his troubled personal life until his death. They however affirm rage, anxiety and frustration as the themes of Sherman’s life in place of a passion for order. To them, Sherman was a man in the trap of psychology, pestered by harassing goblins that freely roamed in his mind and almost an emotional cripple devoid of ability to loose himself from family debilitations and failed past humility.

Bower concurs with them and maintains that Sherman’s penchant for sowing disorder prevails over his concern for introducing order to society. Furthermore, his persistence was in perceiving a relationship between disorder and destructiveness levels and had an aching desire for order and social stability, which was intensifying as the war became harder since one would begat the other – a proposition that Sherman’s battlefield theology, which he worked out during the war, faithfully testifies on.

According to Fellman, Sherman was not only unhappy but also extremely angry, exploding at the seam with unexpressed rage. He describes him as a dangerous and unstable person whose fury was a reflection of the darker side of the character of America. In Sherman,