He visited his mother, then living at Mansfield, Ohio, and on the 1st of May, 1850, married, after an engagement of some years, Miss Ellen Boyle Ewing, daughter of the man who had adopted him in his childhood. Mr. Ewing was then Secretary of the Interior, and, of course, the wedding, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, was a brilliant one. President Taylor and his cabinet, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and other leaders were present. In the fall of 1851 Sherman was made a captain in the Commissary Department, and ordered to St. Louis. The following year he was sent to New Orleans, to which city Mrs. Sherman went with her two children. Seeing little prospect of advancement in the army, in 1853 Captain Sherman resigned his position, and became manager of a bank in San Francisco, a branch of a house in St. Louis. On his way to California, when near the Pacific coast, the ship Lewis struck on a reef, and all came near losing their lives. Sherman, with his usual mastery over circumstances, sat on the hurricane deck with the captain, and while others prayed, or called for help, waited calmly, and was among the last to leave the ship. When all were safely on the beach, he scrambled up the bluff, and finally saw a schooner loaded with lumber, on which he asked a passage to the city of San Francisco, that he might send help to the wrecked. This schooner capsized, and Sherman found himself in the water, mixed up with planks and ropes, steadily drifting out to sea. He was finally picked up by a boat, and as soon as possible he sent two steamers to the relief of the passengers of the Lewis, which went to pieces the night after they got off. In the unsettled state of the country, the bank did not prove a success, and was closed May 1, 1857. Mrs. Sherman and her three children, Minnie, Lizzie, and Willie, returned to Lancaster, Ohio. For a time Sherman became agent in New York for the St. Louis house; but the latter failing in the financial disturbances of the country, his business ventures seemed at an end, and Sherman returned to Lancaster, July 28, 1858. "I was then perfectly unhampered," he says, "but the serious and greater question remained, what was I to do to support my family, consisting of a wife and four children, all accustomed to more than the average comforts of life?" Like General Grant, he had resigned from the regular army that he might earn enough to support his family. Banking had been no more successful than Grant's leather business. Two sons of Mr. Ewing had gone to Leavenworth, Kansas, where they had bought some land, and opened a law office. They offered Sherman a partnership, as he had read law considerably. He accepted the position, but soon found that he did not earn money enough, so began to manage a farm, forty miles west of Leavenworth, for his father-in-law.