A class war: how the Civil War squashed aristocracy in America.

General William Tecumseh Sherman--a quirky, difficult, and much misunderstood man--deserves a place on the roll call of great liberators in human history. More than any other person, he destroyed the institution of American slavery and the Southern aristocracy that was interwoven with it. In the late fall of 1864 he marched an army of over 60,000 rural, voting Americans--mostly farmers from the Midwest--into the heart of the Confederacy, a patrician society based on bound labor. Sherman's agrarian citizen-soldiers upended that world of slaves and masters, instantly liberated tens of thousands, and helped therein to destroy forever the idea of privileged nobility in ...