1. He was named for a Shawnee chief.
William Tecumseh Sherman (known as “Cump” to his friends) was born in Lancaster, Ohio, on February 8, 1820. His father gave him his unusual middle name as a nod to the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, a magnetic leader who built a confederacy of Ohio Indian tribes and fought with the British during the War of 1812. A relative later wrote that Sherman’s father always shook off concerns that he had given his son a “savage Indian name” by arguing, “Tecumseh was a great warrior.”
2. He married his foster sister.
After losing his father at the age of 9, Sherman was sent to live with Thomas Ewing, a renowned Ohio attorney and family friend who later served as a senator and the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. The young Sherman grew close with Ewing’s eldest daughter, Ellen, and they regularly corresponded through letters during his tenure at West Point and his early military career. Following a long engagement, the two were married in 1850 in a Washington, D.C., ceremony attended by the likes of President Zachary Taylor, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The couple later had eight children, two of whom died from sickness while Sherman was serving in the Civil War.
