Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (15 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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This exchange of communications between Halleck and Grant continued, with Halleck criticizing Grant while Grant forthrightly justified himself. As letters and telegrams moved back and forth, Grant told Halleck three times that if Halleck thought he was not doing his job properly, he should be allowed to resign his command. Grant was learning a bit about military politics himself: at one point he or his staff telegraphed a copy of one of Halleck’s complaints, and Grant’s answer, to Congressman Washburne in Washington. Washburne promptly went over to the White House and placed the matter before President Lincoln. This resulted in a message from Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to Halleck, informing him that the president was taking a personal interest in these allegations and requesting Halleck to spell out any charges of malfeasance and insubordination he had to make against Grant.
As this was going on, Sherman received the order to take his division up the Tennessee River as part of the expedition, led by General Smith, that Grant was being held back from commanding. On March 12 he wrote Ellen from Savannah, Tennessee, nine miles short of Pittsburg Landing on the opposite side of the Tennessee River.
Dearest Ellen,
Here we are up the Tennessee, near the Line [the South’s railroad corridor from Memphis to Chattanooga] with about 50 boat loads of soldiers. I have the fifth Division composed mostly of Ohio Soldiers about 9000—but they are raw & Green … The object of the expedition is to cut the Line … along which are distributed the Enemy’s forces.
Let what occur that may[,] you may rest assured that the devotion & affection you have exhibited in the past winter has endeared you more than ever, and that if it should so happen that I can regain my position and Self respect and should Peace ever be restored I will labor hard for you and for our children.
I am still of the opinion that although the blow at Fort Donelson was a terrible one to the Confederates they are still far from being defeated, and being in their own country they have great advantage … Today we shall move further up the river.
 
Despite the energetic and determined efforts made by Sherman and his men to cut the railway line east of Corinth, they were literally drowned out by rains that raised the Tennessee River fifteen feet in a single day. Sherman fell back down the river to Pittsburg Landing and began to prepare a vast encampment for the Union divisions that were to arrive there by ship and by road. At the moment, both Grant and Sherman thought of the place purely in terms of being a staging area for a march south to attack Corinth.
In the dispute between Grant and Halleck, by the time Halleck received the request from Lorenzo Thomas that he enumerate any formal charges he had to make against Grant, the entire high command of the Union Army had changed. Lincoln had vacated the position of general in chief by assigning McClellan to take active field command of the Eastern army, the Army of the Potomac. Although Lincoln was frustrated by McClellan’s delay in mounting a major offensive into Virginia, and some in Washington were referring to McClellan as the Great American Tortoise, at this time there was no official censure of McClellan; “Little Mac” was simply being removed from overall command of the Union Army so that he could devote himself entirely to winning the war on the front south of Washington.
With this reorganization, Halleck was given what he wanted: command of all the forces in the Western theater, in a new entity called the Department of the Mississippi. Halleck was now equal to McClellan, with Buell as his subordinate; no Union officer stood higher than he. Rejoicing in his elevation and eager to dispose of what now seemed to him a minor matter involving Grant, Halleck took the position that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding. He had no intention of losing the services of his most successful subordinate and sent Grant a telegram assuring him that “instead of relieving you, I wish you, as soon as your new army is in the field, to assume the immediate command and lead it on to new victories.”
Grant headed upstream on March 16 to take active field command of what was named the Army of the Tennessee. A month had passed since Fort Donelson fell and the South had begun scrambling to repair its strategic position. Johnston would soon have forty thousand men at Corinth, with more trying to get there, and the Confederacy’s leaders were in close touch with him. From the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, Jefferson Davis wrote, “You have done wonderfully well, and now I can breathe easier.” An equally encouraging but more specific message came from Johnston’s old West Point classmate and friend Robert E. Lee, who knew that, in addition to the Union force under Sherman that was by this time ashore at Pittsburg Landing, and some other divisions coming up the river, Don Carlos Buell was slowly marching his army across country from Nashville to add to Grant’s command. Lee wrote Johnston: “No one has sympathized with you in the troubles with which you are surrounded more sincerely than myself. I have watched your every movement, and know the difficulties with which you have had to contend … I need not urge you, when your army is united, to deal a blow at the enemy in your front, if possible before his rear gets up from Nashville. You have him divided, keep him so if you can.”
When Grant took over the forces gathering at Pittsburg Landing, where Sherman had arrived with his division, he also became the superior officer of General Charles Smith, the hero of Fort Donelson, who had badly scraped his leg getting into a small boat; while still with the expedition he had led up the river, Smith was suffering from an infection that would cause his death five weeks later. Grant soon inspected the place where Sherman was continuing to prepare the encampment for the rapidly arriving Union divisions. Stretching inland from the wharf and seveny-foot-high bluff on the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing, the slightly rolling area combined dense woods and some open fields and orchards, with a number of streams running through it. Laid out like a huge triangle encompassing eighteen square miles, the river formed its eastern side, while the southern side had sentry posts facing in the direction of the enemy, twenty miles away at Corinth. The arriving regiments placed their tents along this line. The final leg of the triangle, nearly six miles long, led back from the inland corner of the encampment to the wharf and wooden warehouses at the landing.
Sherman’s headquarters and sleeping tent stood next to the seldom-used Shiloh Church, at the triangle’s inland corner, in the woods beyond a field serving as a parade ground. In a written report to Grant, who set up his headquarters nine miles downstream to the north at Savannah, Sherman described the camp as being located on a “magnificent plain for camping and drilling, and a military point of great strength.” Confederate cavalry patrols often came up from Corinth, approaching the camp through the woods, and there had been clashes with them.
Even though Halleck had given Grant the day-to-day command of these divisions, Halleck’s slow, cautious nature constantly affected this situation. From hundreds of miles away, he ordered Grant “not to advance” until Buell’s army joined him. Reverting to the philosophy of Jomini, who saw a campaign as being more of a chess game than an all-out attack, Halleck told Grant that “we must strike no blow till we arc strong enough to admit no doubt of defeat” and added that until that time, no one was to bring on “an engagement.” This stricture not only inhibited the Union responses to the increasingly frequent Confederate cavalry probes, but also created worries about what degree of response to
any
provocation might bring on “an engagement.”
Although Grant wanted to move against Johnston’s army at Corinth, he also wished to avoid another dispute with the ever-bureaucratic Halleck. (An example of Halleck’s overzealous attention to detail was a rebuke to Grant on March 24 for allegedly having as his departmental medical director a doctor who was not also an army officer. Halleck ordered Grant “to discharge him.”) Confident after his victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Grant felt that in any case he held the initiative in the area. He was prepared to obey Halleck and wait for Buell’s large reinforcements before marching the twenty miles to attack Corinth, but he wrote General Smith that “I am clearly of the opinion that the enemy are gathering strength at Corinth quite as rapidly as we are here, and the sooner we attack, the easier will be the task of taking the place.” Still sure that it was he who would bring on the battle, Grant, who later said that he “had no expectation of needing fortifications” at Pittsburg Landing, built no earthworks.
Grant’s letters to Julia reflected both his confidence and his certainty that his army would soon be in a major battle. He told her, “When you will hear of another great and important strike I can[’]t tell you but it will be a big lick as far as numbers engaged is concerned. I have no misgivings myself as to the result and you must not feel the slightest alarm.” In a later letter to her written on March 29, he mentioned that he had been suffering from what he spelled “Diaoreah” (as had Sherman and many others), and added that he thought the impending battle “will be the last in the West. This is all the time supposing that we will be successful which I never doubt for a moment.” A few days later, referring to Halleck’s long-distance restraint upon him, he told Julia, “Soon I hope to be permitted to move from here and when I do there will probably be the greatest battle fought of the War. I do not feel that there is the slightest doubt about the result … Knowing however that a terrible sacrifice of life must take place I feel conserned [
sic
] for my army and their friends at home.”
While Grant felt in control of events, Sherman had a few moments of uncertainty. On one occasion, when he admitted to visiting war correspondents that the huge camp was vulnerable and they asked why he did not speak up about it, Sherman replied with a shrug, “Oh, they’d call me crazy again,” but most of the time he thought as Grant did. Writing Ellen of the frequent sightings of enemy patrols in the woods just south of the encampment, Sherman told her, “We are constantly in the presence of the enemy’s pickets, but I am satisfied that they will await our coming at Corinth.”
The Confederates at Corinth had no intention of letting Grant decide the time and place of attack. While Grant waited for Buell’s army to join him, Albert Sidney Johnston knew that his friend Robert E. Lee was right: he had to attack Grant before Buell reached Pittsburg Landing. At ten o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, April 2, 1862, Johnston’s second in command, P.G.T. Beauregard, received an intelligence report telling him that the first regiments of Buell’s column of twenty thousand or more men would reach Grant’s army within the next few days. Beauregard immediately sent an orderly to Johnston’s nearby headquarters, carrying this penciled message: “Now is the moment to advance and strike the enemy at Pittsburg Landing.” By midnight, commanders throughout the forty-four-thousand-man Confederate camp started receiving orders: the army had to set out at dawn, march twenty miles during the day, and make a surprise attack on Grant’s unfortified camp early on the following morning of Friday, April 4.
Johnston and his experienced Confederate generals liked the fact that forty thousand federal troops were packed into the triangle by the river at Pittsburg Landing. There were no defensive entrenchments; the hundreds of rows of tents placed just behind the picket line would hinder any swift effort to assemble and face the enemy, when the defenders finally saw thousands of Confederate infantrymen rush at them from the woods. After weeks of this strange situation—two opposing armies, twenty miles apart, spending most of their time carrying out the routine activities of camp life—Johnston’s men had the chance to overrun the camp and drive Grant’s army into the swamps away from Pittsburg Landing.
It was one thing to plan a swift march toward the enemy, and another to execute it. In what proved to be an unwise decision, Johnston decided to lead the march, while Beauregard would for the time being remain at the rear, directing the complicated sequence in which he wanted the different divisions to leave Corinth and move up to Pittsburg Landing. Beauregard told his corps commanders to start the march while his adjutant colonel, Thomas Jordan, began preparing written orders for the movement, but Confederate general William J. Hardee refused to start off before he had his orders in writing. Because Hardee’s corps was the first major column in Beauregard’s planned line of march, no large force left camp until past noon that day, April 3, and Beauregard postponed the attack from the morning of April 4 until sunrise on Saturday, April 5. On Friday night, a heavy cold rain began to fall on Johnston’s army as his men tried to hurry forward to be ready for the dawn attack. The same kind of downpour that had raised the Tennessee River fifteen feet in a day now turned roads into bogs in which the Confederate artillery pieces and supply wagons sank to their axles. It became clear that no surprise attack could be made the next morning.
This same rain was also falling that night farther to the north, severely slowing Buell’s effort to reach and support Grant. As for Grant, there had been so many minor skirmishes during the past two days that he did not go down the river by boat to spend the night at his headquarters at Savannah “until an hour when I felt there would be no further danger before the morning.” Riding through the dark to learn more about a clash with some Confederate cavalry that had been reported to him in a quickly written report from Sherman, Grant had trouble.
The night was one of impenetrable darkness, with rain pouring down in torrents; nothing was visible to the eye except as revealed by the frequent flashes of lightning. Under these circumstances I had to trust the horse, without guidance, to keep the road … On the way back to the boat my horse’s feet slipped from under him, and he fell with my leg under his body. The extreme softness of the ground, from the excessive rains … no doubt saved me from a severe injury and protracted lameness. As it was, my ankle was very much injured, so much so that my boot had to be cut off. For two or three days thereafter I was unable to walk except with crutches.

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