Wars

MORNING GLORY: Will President Trump go full Sherman in the war on Iran?

The famed Civil War general didn’t want to do what he did, but it was necessary

By Hugh Hewitt Fox News

Published April 7, 2026 5:00am EDT

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If James McPherson’s 1988 classic history of the American Civil War, "Battle Cry of Freedom," has been translated into Farsi, the remaining leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps may want to read it quickly, especially the chapters about General William Tecumseh Sherman’s two famous marches. 

The first was the fabled "March to the Sea" from Atlanta to Savannah. The second was the less well known but longer, more difficult and far more devastating for the locals march from Savannah to North Carolina, a march that ravaged the home of secessionist fanaticism, South Carolina, and did so in a way that the state’s people did not think possible given the geography of its marshy lowlands. 

Of course, America has waged and won wars against tyrants before, but we do not love to wage war. We have never been a conquering empire, but when necessary, our leaders have been ruthless when it comes to concluding war.

MORNING GLORY: PRESIDENT TRUMP’S BIG SPEECH ON IRAN — WHAT WILL IT DO?

"If we can march a well appointed army right through Jefferson Davis’ territory," Sherman appealed to a skeptical General Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln, it would be "a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power that Davis cannot resist."

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"I can make the march and make Georgia howl," Sherman added to the doubters, Grant and Lincoln. Sherman was proposing something not done before in the long years of war to preserve the Union and free the enslaved — abandoning his lines of supply and living off the land his army would despoil.

Like Lincoln, Sherman "believed in a hard war and a soft peace," writes McPherson, and once approved by his chain of command, Sherman delivered on the "hard" in devastating fashion. 

"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," Sherman said.

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