Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (19 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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The Battle of Shiloh had ended, and the battle about what happened there now began. For the South, the process was simple. After Beauregard’s first triumphant telegram to Jefferson Davis, joy and relief pulsed through the Confederacy. Then came the news of the death of Albert Sidney Johnston, then the fact that some of the South’s finest generals had been forced to retreat back to Corinth, and then the casualty figures: 1,723 dead, 8,012 wounded, 959 missing. The Union losses were marginally higher, but, with no more talk about each Southern man being able to beat three, four, five Yankees, it was clear that the South had lost more blood than it could afford to lose. Strategically, so much had been at stake for the Confederacy at Shiloh: it was the South’s chance to reverse Grant’s victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, the opportunity to fight back into Tennessee and Kentucky, the chance to become equal again in the Mississippi River theater of operations that Grant and Sherman knew held the key to the war. All that was gone.
And there was morale. Memories of the rout inflicted on the North at Bull Run were no comfort to Southerners hearing the realities of the biggest battle fought on the North American continent to that date. The Southern public learned of a pond in Shiloh’s woods that turned red from the blood of men killed and wounded around it, of fields you could not walk across without stepping on bodies, of seven hundred Confederate soldiers buried in a mass grave, of the carcasses of five hundred horses that had to be burnt where they fell, of a large and growing pile of amputated arms and legs in the courtyard of the makeshift hospital hastily set up in the Tishomingo Hotel at Corinth. The Confederacy was determined to fight on, but as one of its soldiers, the writer George Washington Cable, said, “The South never smiled after Shiloh.”
In the North, the first news was of a tremendous, categorically successful victory. Bells rang; Congress recessed for a day; President Lincoln proclaimed a national day of prayerful thanksgiving. Beauregard had called off the battle on Monday, April 7; on April 9,
The New York Times, The New York Herald
, and the
New York Tribune
came out with headlines proclaiming a tremendous victory. Grant was the man of the hour. The next day’s edition of the
Tribune
was filled with stories of his courage and skill: splendid, determined soldier; smokes cigars; man of few words but magnificent results.
The next day’s
Tribune
struck a different note, echoed in other cities as reporters arrived at Pittsburg Landing and began buttonholing anyone in sight for stories of the battle. Grant’s army had been taken by surprise. Why was he having breakfast nine miles away, when his men were attacked while they were asleep in their tents? Thousands of men ran away from the battle. There was confusion everywhere, throughout the battle.
The casualty lists came in, with totals higher than the four previous biggest battles of the war combined, and the journalistic hunt was on in earnest. The Confederates had dashed into the Union soldiers’ tents and bayoneted them in their sleep. The
Tribune
came out with an editorial, “Let Us Have the Facts.” There had been no preparations for anything at Pittsburg Landing. Grant was drunk. Was it a victory at all? A. K. McClure, a nationally prominent Republican supporter from Philadelphia, went to see Lincoln in the White House and urged him to remove this questionable figure Grant from command. Lincoln listened to everything McClure had to say, and thought for a while. Then he shook his head. “No, I can’t do it. I can’t lose this man. He fights.”
Initially, the criticism focused on Grant. Then a paper in Ohio published an article by Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Stanton (no relation to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton). In a piece of political grandstanding, Stanton had arrived at Pittsburg Landing soon after the battle, bringing with him five thousand dollars to help troops from Ohio. Stanton heard the same inaccurate and exaggerated tales the reporters were getting and, when he met Sherman, the senior officer from Ohio present at Shiloh, never asked him a single question about the battle. Returning home, Stanton wrote a diatribe against the Union generals, not mentioning Sherman by name but referring to “the blundering stupidity and negligence” of Grant.
An incensed Sherman entered the fray with a letter to Stanton. Early in it he set the tone: “The accusatory part of your statement is all false, false in general, false in every particular, and I repeat, you could not have failed to know it false when you published that statement … Grant just fresh from the victory of Donelson, more rich in fruits than was Saratoga, Yorktown, or any other fought on this Continent, is yet held up to the people of Ohio … as one who in the opinion of intelligent cowards is worthy to be shot … Shame on You!” Sherman added that no colonel of the Ohio regiments had any idea of how Stanton spent the five thousand dollars that was supposed to benefit the soldiers from Ohio.
Stanton replied to this with another diatribe, this time mentioning Sherman by name, and the fight was on. The Sherman team went to work: Sherman’s brother Senator John Sherman, Sherman’s famous and well-regarded father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, and Ellen’s brother, the influential lawyer Philemon Ewing, all Ohioans, filled newspaper columns with criticism of Stanton, with Stanton responding every time; before the storm ran its course, both sides were printing pamphlets setting forth their views.
As for Grant, he was heartsick about the slurs on his reputation, writing Julia that he had been “so shockingly abused” by the press, but he preferred to remain silent. Grant’s father decided to go to the support of his son, releasing to the press a brief, entirely personal letter he received from Grant defending his conduct at Shiloh, and a long letter from Captain William S. Hillyer of Grant’s staff that praised Grant’s actions and asked the rhetorical question, “Is
success
a crime?” Grant complained to Julia that the publication of these letters “should never have occurred.” His father made other efforts, which included two letters in the
Cincinnati Commercial
signed by a close friend of the elder Grant but possibly written by Jesse Grant himself. Grant’s father also wrote Congressman Washburne to thank him for a speech he made on his son’s behalf, and wrote the governor of Ohio, saying of Lieutenant Governor Stanton, “Shame on such a Demagogue.”
Realizing that his father was defending him in part by criticizing the performance of other Union commanders, Grant sent him an angry letter saying that there was “not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts in my defense. I Require no defenders and for my sake leave me alone … Do nothing to correct what you have already done but for the future keep quiet on this subject.” He closed the letter with, “My love to all at home. Ulys.”
Julia, staying with her father-in-law in Covington, Kentucky, at the time Shiloh was fought, was reading a Cincinnati paper a few days after that. She had just finished an article that said Grant was at a “dance house” instead of being on the battlefield, when an unexpected guest arrived.
A tall, handsome woman, clad in deepest mourning, entered the little parlour … Coming directly up to me, she said, “Mrs. Grant, I am an entire stranger to you, and I have come an entire day’s journey out of my way to tell you this.” She paused a moment, choking down a sob, and said, “I am the widow of Colonel Canfield. I have just lost my husband at Shiloh. I must tell you of your husband’s kindness to me.”
 
Feeling a premonition, this woman had managed somehow to get herself to Pittsburg Landing at the end of the first day of the Shiloh fighting. There at the waterfront she was told that her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Herman Canfield of the Seventy-second Ohio, had been wounded and was in a hospital down the river at a place she had passed on her way up to the battle. At that moment she saw Grant and his staff ride onto the pier and watched him being assisted off his horse because of his injured ankle and helped aboard his headquarters riverboat the
Tigress
, where he began writing dispatches. Warned by the sentries that she could not come aboard, she swept by them, found Grant, and explained her plight. Grant told her that she could stay on the
Tigress
, which would soon be taking the report he was writing downriver, and made out the appropriate passes to get her ashore and into the hospital where her husband lay.
Julia asked her, “Did you reach your husband in time, Mrs. Canfield?”
“Oh, no,” she sobbed. “I was late, too late. I was conducted down the aisle between the cots in the hospital, and my escort paused and pointed to a cot, the blanket drawn up so as to cover the face. I knelt beside it and drew the covering down.
“He was dead—my husband, my beloved, my noble husband. I thrust my hand into his bosom. It was still warm, but his great heart had ceased beating.
“The blood was clotted on his beard and breast. I think he might have lived if I had been near,” she sobbed. “I have determined to devote my time to the wounded soldiers during the war. My husband needed only the services of a kind nurse.”
 
The ladies parted. Mrs. Canfield did indeed throw herself into nursing wounded soldiers, and Julia would see her next in three years, under supremely dramatic circumstances.
On April 11, four days after the large-scale fighting at Shiloh finished, Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing. Being senior, according to plan he took over Grant’s field army and placed Grant in a meaningless role as his assistant commander of the armies of the West. It was in effect a demotion for Grant. At a time when Grant and Sherman felt that their army was sufficiently recovered from the battle to march the twenty miles to Corinth and finish the destruction of Beauregard’s remaining force, Halleck began to plan his version of how to proceed. No one was going to catch Halleck by surprise or undermanned. Learning that Beauregard had received reinforcements at Corinth that brought the Confederate strength back up to sixty-six thousand, he did not begin his march until he had one hundred thousand men and two hundred cannon assembled at Pittsburg Landing. Then Halleck started the twenty-mile trek. He would march the army two or three miles in a day, stop and construct elaborate earthworks, camp there two or three days, and move on another few miles and do the same thing.
Although Sherman admired Halleck at this time, he recalled that his division “constructed seven distinct entrenched camps” in this astonishingly slow movement toward Corinth; a newspaper reporter who accompanied the Union force said that “Halleck crept forward at the rate of about three-quarters of a mile per day.” (Grant, watching this without the authority to change a single detail, referred to it as a siege on the move.)
Halleck finally reached Corinth on May 28—seven and a half weeks after the last day of fighting at Shiloh—and the next day began a massive artillery bombardment of the town. From time to time trains moved in and out of Corinth, to the sounds of cheering, and Halleck saw this as proof of the arrival of more and more enemy troops and the Confederate determination to hold that essential transportation crossroads at all costs. In fact, Beauregard was evacuating his last units from Corinth, having the trains come back empty and ordering everyone left in the town to shout as they arrived. When Halleck finally sent foot soldiers into Corinth on May 30, they found not a single enemy soldier. (In a final touch, when Halleck rode in himself, his horse tripped over a telegraph wire hanging just above the ground.)
During this time, Grant remained with the army, doing nothing because as Halleck’s second in command there was nothing for him to do. In addition to his feelings about the press controversy over his leadership at Shiloh, Grant was dismayed by the way Halleck so signally failed to exploit the battle in which so many men suffered and gave their lives. At one point during the ponderous march to Corinth, he wrote a formal request to Halleck, whose tent was only two hundred yards from his, asking that he be given a field command, or be relieved from further duty. Halleck, who recently had sent out a petulant order emphasizing that all letters on military matters “
should relate to one matter only, and be properly folded
,” refused to do either.
Sherman, whom Grant had praised and commended during and after the battle, stumbled upon the chance to save Grant for the Union cause. When Sherman paid a call on Halleck before leaving Corinth to see if it was possible to salvage some locomotives and railroad cars that had been abandoned in the swamps west of Chewalla, Tennessee, Halleck “casually mentioned to me that Grant was going away the next morning.” When Sherman asked why, Halleck said that he did not know, but Grant had asked him for a thirty-day leave, and he had agreed.
Sherman knew why. For himself, he had reason to be grateful to Halleck, who had given him the division he led so well at Shiloh that he was now being promoted to major general, but he had seen Grant “chafing under the slights of his anomalous position” and decided to go and see him before he left for Chewalla. Arriving at Grant’s headquarters, which “consisted of four or five tents, with a sapling railing around the front,” he saw packing going on that indicated Grant was not simply going on leave, but leaving the army. Shown into Grant’s tent, he found him “seated on a camp-stool, with papers on a rude camp-table,” methodically sorting out letters and putting bundles of them aside.

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