First published in 1875, General William T. Sherman's memoir was one of the first from the Civil War and was offered to the public because, as Sherman wrote in his dedication, "no satisfactory history" of the war was yet available.



Although Memoirs has been revised and corrected many times over the years, Sherman famously never changed the original text of his recollections. He was not a historian, he said, and said that "any witness who may disagree with me should publish his own version of [the] facts...."