The March to the Sea, upon which Sherman's fame as a soldier so largely rests, was by no means the greatest or most significant of his many achievements. His record as a soldier is filled with examples of his courage, his shrewdness, and his tenacity, while his mingling of gentle ways and grim determination, of restlessness and calm, of forethought, fearlessness, and frankness, make him at once a unique and central figure in the decade of war and reconstruction that forms so important a chapter in the story of the United States of America. William Tecumseh Sherman was born on February 8, 1820, in the town of Lancaster, the county-seat of that fair and fertile section known as Fairfield County, in the southern part of the State of Ohio--the busy commonwealth that furnished 300,000 men to the armies of the Union, and gave to the Civil War its three greatest generals; for Grant and Sherman were Ohio born, and Sheridan's boyhood was spent in the same State. But Sherman's ancestors were of stout Puritan stock, dating back almost to the days of the Mayflower. His first American "forebear" was a Puritan minister, Rev. John Sherman, an emigrant to the Connecticut colony from Essex in England. Of one of the collateral branches was Roger Sherman, drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence. The father of the soldier was Judge Sherman, of the Ohio Supreme Court; his mother was "a Hoyt of New England." William Tecumseh Sherman was the sixth of eleven children, a younger brother being the lad who, later, became Senator John Sherman of Ohio. Judge Sherman, the father of the boys, died in 1829, and William was adopted into the family of Senator Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, a resident of Lancaster, and a notable figure in American history, for he was senator and cabinet minister for nearly forty years. Sherman's training was that of a soldier from boyhood. At sixteen, he was entered as a cadet at the Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1840, standing sixth in a class of 42. Engineering was his favorite study, but devotion to his books seems not to have kept him out of mischief. He was not, he himself admitted later, "a Sunday-school cadet," his record for behavior being 124 in the Academy standard--not so very far from the foot. But Grant, it must be remembered, ranked even lower in his behavior record, standing at 149.