at Appomattox. Sherman accepted the surrender of all the Confederate armies in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida in April 1865, but the terms that he negotiated were considered too generous by U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who ordered General Grant to modify them. When Grant became President of the United States in March 1869, Sherman succeeded him as Commanding General of the Army. Sherman served in that capacity from 1869 until 1883 and was responsible for the U.S. Army's engagement in the Indian Wars. He steadfastly refused to be drawn into party politics and in 1875 published his memoirs, which became one of the best-known first-hand accounts of the Civil War. Early life Sherman was born in 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, near the banks of the Hocking River. His father, Charles Robert Sherman, a lawyer who was a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court, died unexpectedly of typhoid fever in 1829. He left his widow, Mary Hoyt Sherman, with eleven children and no inheritance. After his father's death, the nine-year-old Sherman was raised by a Lancaster neighbor and family friend, attorney Thomas Ewing. Ewing was a prominent member of the Whig Party who became U.S. senator for Ohio and the first Secretary of the Interior. Sherman was distantly related to US founding father Roger Sherman. Sherman's older brother Charles Taylor Sherman became a federal judge. One of his younger brothers, John Sherman, was one of the founders of the Republican Party and served as a U.S. congressman, senator, and cabinet secretary. Another younger brother, Hoyt Sherman, was a successful banker. Two of his foster brothers served as major generals in the Union Army during the Civil War: Hugh Boyle Ewing, later an ambassador and author, and Thomas Ewing Jr., who was a defense attorney in the military trials of the Lincoln conspirators. Sherman's given names Sherman's unusual given name has always attracted attention. According to Sherman's Memoirs, he was named "William Tecumseh", his father having "caught a fancy for the great chief of the Shawnees, 'Tecumseh". However, Lloyd Lewis's 1932 biography claimed that Sherman was originally named only "Tecumseh" and that he acquired the name "William" at the age of nine or ten, when he was baptized as a Catholic at the behest of his foster family. According to Lewis's account, which was repeated by later authors, Sherman was baptized in the Ewing home by a Dominican priest who