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This article explores how General William Tecumseh Sherman, attempting to deal with the uncertainties of his own past, left a legacy of conflicts to his son, Thomas. Struggling against his own feelings of dependency and failure, as well as his fear of being exposed as incompetent, and plagued throughout his life with the need to rely on his foster father for support of his family, General Sherman seems to have suffered from manic-depressive illness: collapsing into bouts of depression alternating with bursts of elation in which he strove to prove himself. His son, Tommy, stepping into the void created by the death of a favored older brother, found it very difficult to mediate his mother's religious devotion and his father's wishes for him to be a soldier. The author seeks to demonstrate that Thomas Sherman's entrance into the Society of Jesus was an attempt to mediate these parental wishes by becoming a soldier for Christ, ultimately in profound confusion between religious obedience and military discipline. Following a successful career as a charismatic preacher of an evangelical Catholicism, Thomas, whether for genetic or