Wit & Attitude Quote by William Tecumseh Sherman

Sherman isn’t predicting conflict so much as normalizing it. The sentence reads like a weather report, but the imagery is pure siege: “shot and shell,” “gun-powder and cannon.” Coming from a man who made war feel industrial - who treated infrastructure and morale as targets - the rhetoric lands as a transfer of battlefield logic onto domestic politics. Labor unrest is framed not as a grievance to be negotiated, but as an enemy formation to be broken.

The intent is disciplinary. Sherman sets up a binary: capital and labor, “better classes” and “lower strata,” sanity and “insane howling.” That last phrase does a lot of work. It strips workers of reason, recasting speech as noise and protest as pathology. Once you’ve declared your opponents irrational, you’ve already moved past persuasion; coercion becomes “restoring order,” not choosing violence. The line “they mean to stop them” is chilling in its calm certainty, a hint that elites aren’t merely anxious but prepared, even eager, to treat social demands as insurrection.

Context matters: late-19th-century America is roiling with strikes, rapid industrialization, and the aftershocks of the Civil War. Sherman’s generation had seen what mass mobilization and modern weaponry could do, and the country’s new corporate fortunes were building private and state capacities to suppress unrest. His subtext is class solidarity masquerading as realism: a warning to workers that the state’s monopoly on force will align with property, and a reassurance to “better classes” that violence can be justified as self-defense against the unruly many.