Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (14 page)

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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction

BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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During the night, more than three thousand of the defenders escaped, including the two most senior generals and a cavalry force under the brilliant and dashing but then little-known Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest. (Ever resourceful, Forrest had a foot soldier swing up on a horse behind each of his seven hundred cavalrymen, thus doubling the number of troops he led away from certain capture.) Despite these escapes, Grant had demonstrated great military insight.
Before daylight, a Confederate soldier emerged from the enemy earthworks carrying a white flag of truce and a letter. It came from the general left in command, Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had been a year behind Grant at West Point, served with him in Mexico, and loaned him money when he passed through New York City in 1854, arriving by ship and out of funds after resigning from the army in California. In language that frequently governed arrangements for surrender, Buckner proposed “the appointment of Commissioners to agree upon terms of capitulation of the forces and fort under my command.”
Grant replied with a sentence that made him famous: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.”
“Unconditional surrender.” The North had been waiting to hear these iron words. U.S.: United States; U.S.: Unconditional Surrender Grant. The nation knew him now. As the day of surrender went on, the size of the victory became apparent: in addition to suffering greater casualties, fourteen thousand Confederate soldiers had been captured, along with twenty thousand muskets, sixty-five cannon, and more than two thousand horses. It was, as Grant wrote Julia during the day, “the largest capture I believe ever made on the continent.” The numbers exceeded those surrendered by the British at Yorktown, and the victory had an effect greater than simply the destruction of one Confederate army. Northern confidence soared,
The New York Times
saying of the Confederacy that “the monster is already clutched in his death struggle,” while the South realized that its heartland was suddenly vulnerable. Nashville was now within striking distance of these Union amphibious efforts, and between the actions at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson three of Foote’s lighter gunboats had ventured up the Tennessee as far as Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The news reached Europe, dampening support for the Southern cause in England, a sympathy connected in good part to British textile mills’ desperate need for the vast amounts of cotton usually exported by the South and now drastically reduced by the Union blockade.
As at Fort Henry, the details of the surrender had to be addressed. After Grant’s harsh words to Buckner, which Buckner referred to in his forced letter of acceptance as “ungenerous and unchivalrous,” when the two met later that morning the former cordiality between them returned. They agreed swiftly on procedures for burying the dead. Buckner explained that the cutoff fortress had run out of food, and Grant told him that his supply officers would provide rations for the thousands of captured Confederates. Seeing that Grant’s staff was overwhelmed with everything involved in handling fourteen thousand prisoners, including many wounded men, Buckner had his own staff help assemble them to board Grant’s ships that would take them downstream to be interned at Cairo.
Early in the day, as Grant and Buckner settled these matters, a Union Army surgeon, thinking there would be some formal surrender ceremony, with the Confederates parading up to a designated point to lay down their arms, asked when and where this would occur. Grant looked at him and said, “There will be nothing of the kind … We have the fort, the men, the guns. Why should we go through vain forms and mortify the spirit of brave men, who, after all, are our countrymen?” When it finally came time for Buckner to leave on a transport taking him as a prisoner to Cairo, Grant accompanied him down to the landing. Walking Buckner off to the side, Grant said, “You are separated from your people, and perhaps you need funds. My purse is at your disposal.” Buckner declined the offer with thanks, afterward remarking that they both had in mind the time when Grant was penniless in Manhattan.
As Grant reorganized his victorious force at Fort Donelson, congratulations as well as administrative paperwork poured in from every direction, but during the battle and its aftermath Grant received two communications that particularly impressed him. At a time when Union generals everywhere were quarreling about seniority and promotions, a message came from Sherman, who was senior to Grant. Sending it from Paducah late on the afternoon of February 15, when the results of the battle were in doubt, Sherman told Grant that he was rushing an additional regiment up the river to support him, and added that he would “do everything in my power to hurry forward to you reinforcements and supplies, and if I could be of service myself would gladly come, without making any question of Rank.” The same day Sherman telegraphed Grant, in reference to the enemy’s potential to reinforce Fort Donelson, “I feel anxious about you as I know the great facilities they have of concentration by means of the River & R [rail] Road, but have faith in you—Command me in any way.”
This began a flow of communications between Grant and Sherman. Grant later commented: “At that time he was my senior in rank and there was no authority of law to assign a junior to command a senior of the same grade. But every boat that came up with supplies or reinforcements brought a note of encouragement from Sherman, asking me to call on him for any assistance that he could render and saying that if he could be of service at the front I might send for him and he would waive rank.”
Soon after this, and his promotion to major general of Volunteers that followed it, Grant, wanting to seize the opportunity to move up the river from Fort Donelson toward Nashville, told Sherman, “Send all reinforcements up the Cumberland,” and added, “I feel under many obligations to you for the kind tone of your letter, and hope that should an opportunity occur you will win for yourself the promotion, which you are kind enough to say belongs to me. I care nothing for promotion so long as our arms are successful, and no political appointments are made.” In saying that he cared “nothing for promotion,” Grant was being disingenuous—four months before this, he had written Julia to see if she could do a little quiet lobbying with Congressman Washburne’s wife to increase Washburne’s interest in having him made major general, and the previous September he had engaged in a dispute over seniority with Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss—but he was touched by Sherman’s eagerness to help in any capacity.
On the same day Grant thanked him for his congratulations, Sherman wrote that he was sending up a riverboat loaded with grain, and told Grant he was coping with the many family members who were converging on his headquarters, seeking news of men who had been in the battle. He added, “Some of your wounded are here, and no efforts have been or will be spared to make them as comfortable as possible … The whole [surrounding] country is alive to the necessity of caring for the wounded.” After explaining that he was forwarding some of the wounded on to hospitals as far away as Cincinnati, Sherman asked Grant to tell him what more he needed. “Do you wish surgeons, nurses—the wives of officers, Laundresses or any thing?” Even in the midst of everything else he had to do, Grant, a former supply officer, realized that this former supply officer down the river knew how to get things done and was even anticipating his needs.
As the news of the big victory came to St. Louis, Halleck telegraphed McClellan, “Make Buell, Grant and Pope major generals of Volunteers, and give me command in the West. I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.” He claimed Grant’s two victories as if he had won them himself and virtually demanded a far larger command that would keep Grant under him and place him above his rival Buell. Halleck never directly congratulated Grant, simply commending Grant and Commodore Foote strongly for their victories in his general orders while continuing to portray himself as the paramount leader in the West.
In Washington, Lincoln knew exactly who had won Fort Donelson. The day after the victory, when Secretary of War Stanton brought him the papers nominating Grant for promotion to major general of Volunteers, a rank still junior to Halleck’s commission as a major general in the Regular Army, the president from Illinois signed them and said, “If the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or Western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.”
 
THE BOND FORGED AT SHILOH
 
 
 
With the fall of Fort Donelson. the South became vulnerable. Grant was eager to move on up the Cumberland and take Nashville. If he and other Union commanders could “keep the ball moving as lively as possible,” pushing south into enemy territory, the Northern spearhead would cut the South’s east-west railroad lines, which Jefferson Davis called “the vertebrae of the Confederacy.” Unless the Confederate Army blocked the coming offensive, the way would be open for Union columns to march down to the Gulf of Mexico. The South could be split in two.
It became a race against time. Albert Sidney Johnston, the general entrusted by Jefferson Davis to organize the Confederate defense in the Western theater, was a handsome mustachioed West Pointer who had been a cadet with Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston. At the age of fifty-eight he was the South’s oldest general, admired by his contemporaries and his troops. He had formed an east-to-west defensive line that Grant had now fractured. After Fort Donelson fell, Johnston’s headquarters at Bowling Green, Kentucky, to the northeast, was in danger of being cut off from Confederate territory and armies to the south; Johnston abandoned Bowling Green and was managing to bring his troops, many of them sick from the winter weather, safely south in a difficult circuitous retreat, picking up additional brigades and regiments along the way until he had seventeen thousand men with him.
The Confederacy was throwing in its reserves. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Joseph E. Johnston continued as leaders in the Eastern theater of war, but Jefferson Davis sent Beauregard from Virginia to be Albert Sidney Johnston’s second in command. General Braxton Bragg was coming up from Mobile, Alabama, with ten thousand men, Leonidas K. Polk was retreating from Kentucky with another ten thousand, and five thousand were on the way from New Orleans. General John C. Breckinridge reported in to Johnston; William J. Hardee was already serving with him. There was a chance that as many as twenty thousand Confederate soldiers could come from Arkansas to join Johnston.
The potential number of Southern defenders was large, but Johnston knew that Grant could have as many as forty thousand men, confident after taking Forts Henry and Donelson, and Don Carlos Buell was marching slowly from Kentucky with more than twenty-five thousand. There would be an epic collision, somewhere. Speaking of the white population of the South, Johnston proclaimed to his soldiers that “the eyes and hopes of eight millions of people rest upon you.” In the days to come, as more units from across the South rallied to him, Johnston decided to gather his forces at the important railway center of Corinth in northeastern Mississippi, just below the Tennessee border. The South could ill afford to lose this hub, which was a true railway crossroads: the Memphis and Charleston Railroad line, coming from Memphis eighty miles to the west, passed through Corinth going east to Decatur and Huntsville in Alabama, and on to Chattanooga; the north-south Mobile, and Ohio line also ran through there, connecting trains moving to and from the Gulf of Mexico. If the Union Army seized Corinth, a critical portion of the South’s railway system would fall under Northern control.
In times of peace, one of the ways that goods reached Corinth from the Tennessee River was by way of a road from Pittsburg Landing, a steamboat wharf twenty miles to the northeast. Three miles in from the high bluff above the wharf, on a ridge in the woods, stood a one-room Methodist church, a log meetinghouse with the biblical name of Shiloh—“Place of Peace.”
As days passed and Johnston’s force at Corinth grew, he had no idea of how much time he had to organize a defense, or whether he might possibly have enough time to prepare his green but eager troops to launch an offensive. It appeared that time was not on Johnston’s side. If Grant could keep his momentum and take Tennessee’s virtually undefended capital of Nashville, his next step would be to move his victorious army swiftly over from the Cumberland River to the Tennessee. If Grant could then steam up to Pittsburg Landing to attack and defeat Johnston’s army at Corinth, and there might be no limit to how much farther federal columns could then penetrate the South.
Grant’s superior General Henry Halleck gave Albert Sidney Johnston the time he needed. At a time of success, a time when Grant should indeed have been allowed to “keep the ball moving,” Halleck hesitated to authorize Grant to do just that, partly for fear that Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard might be able to cut north and retake either Fort Henry or Paducah, Kentucky; he even went so far as to call this doubtful threat “the crisis of the war in the west.” As for the intellectual underpinnings of this caution, Halleck was following concepts he had put forth in his book
The Elements of Military Art and Science,
ideas based on those of the French military theorist Antoine Henri Jomini and others who believed that victories could best be won by maneuver and mass, rather than by aggressive frontal attacks. Halleck’s ambition worked in tandem with his caution; intent on his vision of the war and his central place in it, Halleck felt he could delay any Union offensive long enough to bargain with Washington for the supreme command in the West.
In contrast to Halleck, Grant, who after Fort Donelson immediately sent naval and then land forces up the Cumberland to take unopposed possession of Clarksville, Tennessee, forty-five miles from Nashville, wired Halleck’s headquarters for permission to go on, saying that he could “have Nashville” within ten days. To his surprise, Halleck shot back a telegram ordering him not to advance with his reorganized victorious army, which now numbered thirty-six thousand men, including twelve thousand just sent up to him by Sherman.
This was all difficult to fathom for men of action like Grant and Commodore Foote, but they were unaware of the extent to which Halleck’s ambition was controlling the situation. Halleck apparently felt that he could dictate his terms for advancement and sent the Union general in chief McClellan a message saying that “I must have top command of the [Western] armies,” adding that “hesitation and delay are losing us this golden opportunity,” when in fact the only “hesitation and delay” were his own. He finished this with a peremptory, “Lay this before the President and Secretary of War. May I assume command? Answer quickly.”
As Grant waited, McClellan refused to give Halleck what he wanted and refused to draw Lincoln and Stanton into the decision, but McClellan’s reason for doing this showed yet another aspect to the game of military politics. McClellan, who at the time was giving lavish dinner parties in Washington while allowing the Confederates time to fortify and reinforce their positions in northern Virginia, and who was issuing few orders that would start a Union offensive in any theater of operations, wanted no rivals for his position as general in chief. In turning down Halleck, McClellan pointed out that Buell, who had replaced Sherman at Louisville and held equal rank with Halleck, was marching toward the scene of impending action. There was no reason to place Halleck above him.
Thwarted by McClellan, Halleck bypassed him, going out of the chain of command and approaching Secretary of War Stanton directly with a message that said, “One whole week has been lost by hesitation and delay. There was, and I think there still is, a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow, but I can’t do it unless I control Buell’s army.” When Stanton replied flatly, “The President does not think any change in the organization of the army or the military departments advisable,” Halleck turned back to matters that were his to control and continued to hold Grant at Clarksville. (Writing to Halleck’s chief of staff Brigadier General George W. Cullum, Grant said, “It is my impression that by following up our success Nashville would be an easy conquest,” but he did not express the frustration shown by Commodore Foote, who wrote his wife that “I am disgusted that we were kept from going up and taking Nashville. It was jealousy on the part of McClellan and Halleck.”)
While keeping Grant from seizing Nashville, Halleck continued to rehabilitate Sherman. Always mindful of Sherman’s powerful connections in Washington and impressed by the job that he had done since his return from his breakdown and forced twenty-day leave, first in training thousands of troops and then in supporting Grant’s efforts, Halleck told Sherman that he could start organizing various regiments into a division of his own, to lead in future battles.
Sherman went to work. As he wrote Ellen, “Learning some days past that the Confederates are simply abandoning Columbus [Kentucky, across the Mississippi River from Belmont, Missouri, the scene of Grant’s first battle] I sent a party of cavalry to go as near as possible.” In addition to this, Sherman embarked a regiment of nine hundred men on a large steamboat at Paducah and took them down there. At Columbus he encountered another example of Halleck’s failure to take advantage of opportunities. Not only was the place empty, but Sherman found that the Confederates had been given so much time that “they carried off nearly all their [artillery] guns, and materials, burned their huts and some corn and provisions.”
Landing and leaving troops to establish a garrison there, Sherman returned to Paducah. In one sense, it had been a venture with little military result, but for the first time in months he had been in active command of troops away from a headquarters, had planned the entire amphibious operation, and had executed it with precision. The man who had begged Lincoln to keep him always in a subordinate position had succeeded in an independent command, entirely on his own. Back at Paducah he continued to assemble his division, which soon numbered nine thousand men.
Earlier, tethered though Grant was, forty-five miles short of Nashville and with no idea of the reasons for being held there, he once again saw an opportunity to move Union troops forward. Don Carlos Buell had dispatched a division from Kentucky to support Grant at the time he was moving to attack Fort Donelson; now, as they arrived aboard a large fleet of paddle-wheelers a week after the battle, Grant realized that these thousands of men were not under Halleck’s control. Telling their commander, Brigadier General William Nelson, not to bring his regiments ashore, he ordered him to proceed on with them and take Nashville, which they did, quickly and without bloodshed.
As a result of his quick thinking, Grant now had two commanders angry with him. Buell, who soon arrived at Nashville with the rest of his army, felt that Grant had commandeered some of his forces with an unauthorized order, robbing him of the chance to enter the city at the head of his troops. Halleck felt that Grant had broken the spirit if not the law of his own orders to stay where he was.
Next came a serious breakdown in communications between Grant and Halleck. This began when Grant, who had no orders to do so and normally should have stayed with his army, went to Nashville briefly to confer with Buell. Unknown to Grant or Halleck, the civilian telegraph operator at the Union headquarters in Cairo, Illinois, was certainly a Confederate sympathizer and possibly an active spy; in any event, the man threw away the messages and reports from Grant that were to be sent on to Halleck in St. Louis. As a result, Halleck heard nothing from Grant for a week and did not know how much of that time Grant spent in Nashville, away from his command.
With no response to several requests that Grant send him various types of information, Halleck dispatched a complaining report of this to McClellan. Halleck said in part, “It is hard to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he richly deserves it … Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it without any regard to the future. I am worn-out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency.”
This time Halleck had McClellan on his side. Perhaps for a moment thinking of Grant only as the captain who had been on one of his “sprees” while outfitting McClellan’s expedition to explore the Cascade Range in the Oregon Territory in 1853, and possibly with an eye to keeping in check a fast-rising potential rival, the general in chief replied the next day. “The future success of our cause demands that proceedings such as Grant’s should at once be checked.” McClellan told Halleck. “Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers. Do not hesitate to arrest him at once if the good of the service requires it.” McClellan added that if Grant were removed, his replacement should be General Charles F. Smith, whose brave leadership storming a slope at Fort Donelson had done so much to win that day.
Halleck was still angry with Grant and thought that McClellan might have memories of the old army gossip about Grant’s drinking. The next day, still delaying meaningful action fifteen days after the fall of Fort Donelson, Halleck spent still more time writing to McClellan: “A rumor has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson General Grant has resumed his former bad habits. If so, it will account for his neglect of my oft-repeated orders. I do not deem it advisable to arrest him at present, but I have placed General Smith in command of the expedition up the Tennessee.” Halleck was not replacing Grant, but leaving him in command in the rear while Smith, whom Grant greatly admired, was to come back down the Cumberland River where Fort Donelson stood and lead a portion of Grant’s forces on amphibious raids up the Tennessee.
Until Grant received the order from Halleck spelling this out, he had no idea that Halleck was, as Sherman observed, “working himself into a passion” about his subordinate’s seemingly defiant disregard of orders and command authority. He quickly replied to Halleck that he was sending Smith up the Tennessee as ordered and added that, based on intelligence reports, “Forces going … must go prepared to meet a force of 20,000 men. This will take all of my available troops.” That last comment was an effort to regain lost momentum through others. Even though now tied by Halleck’s order to his own rear headquarters, Grant was attempting to change the concept of a small raiding force into a major movement by his entire command. Then, addressing Halleck’s overall complaint, he told Halleck, “I am not aware of ever having disobeyed any order from Head Quarters, and certainly never intended such a thing.”

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