The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 10: The Armies and the Leaders.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

Sherman's law career, as he described it, was rather humorous. He lost his only case, a dispute over the possession of a shanty, but joined with his client to defeat the judgment by removing the house at night. Afterward, he undertook army contracts for constructing military roads and opened a large tract of Kansas wild land for Senator Ewing. Disgusted with business life, Sherman decided to reenter the army, and applied for a paymastership. But his friends of the War Department recommended him instead for the superintendency of the Louisiana State Seminary (now the Louisiana State University), then being organized. He was elected to that position in August, 1859, and for a third time he made his home in the South.

He was an efficient college executive; the seminary was soon organized and running like clockwork, students and instructors all under the careful direction of the superintendent, who very soon became a general favorite, not only with ‘his boys’ but with the faculty of young Virginian professors. He had no regular classes, but gave episodical instruction in American history and geography, and on Fridays conducted the ‘speaking.’ He was a good story-teller, and frequently his room would be crowded with students and young professors, listening to his descriptions of army life and of the great West.

He was a firm believer in expansion and ‘our manifest destiny,’ and frequently lectured to students and visitors on those events in American history which resulted in the rounding–out of the national domain. It was due, perhaps, to his long residence in the far West that he regarded slavery as in no sense the cause of the sectional troubles of 1860-61. It was all the result, he maintained, of the machinations of unscrupulous politicians scheming for power, working upon a restless people who were suffering from an overdose of Democracy. It is clear that Sherman, while appreciating both the Northern