Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (20 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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After passing the usual compliments, I inquired if it were true that he was going away. He said, “Yes.” I then inquired the reason, and he said, “Sherman, you know. You know that I am in the way here. I have stood it as long as I can, and can endure it no longer.” I inquired where he was going to, and he said, “St. Louis.” I then asked him if he had any business there, and he said, “Not a bit.” I then begged him to stay, illustrating his case by my own.Before the battle of Shiloh, I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of “crazy,” but that single battle had given me new life, and I was now in high feather; and I argued with him that, if he went away, events would go right along, and he would be left out; whereas, if he remained, some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place.He certainly appreciated my friendly advice, and promised to wait awhile; at all events, not to go without seeing me again, or communicating with me.
That very evening, Grant wrote Julia that “Necessity however changes my plans, or the public service does, and I must yeald [
sic
].” The next day he wrote to Sherman at Chewalla, saying, as Sherman put it, “that he had reconsidered his intention and would remain.” Later, Sherman could not find that note from Grant, but to the end of his life he kept a copy of the reply he sent Grant the same day. In it he went on to rail against the treatment they both had received from the press, but the part he chose to make public in his memoirs was this:
sic
].” The next day he wrote to Sherman at Chewalla, saying, as Sherman put it, “that he had reconsidered his intention and would remain.” Later, Sherman could not find that note from Grant, but to the end of his life he kept a copy of the reply he sent Grant the same day. In it he went on to rail against the treatment they both had received from the press, but the part he chose to make public in his memoirs was this:
Chewalla, June 6, 1862Major-General
GRANT.MY DEAR SIR: I have just received your note, and am rejoiced at your conclusion to remain; for you could not be quiet at home for a week when armies are moving, and rest could not relieve your mind of the gnawing sensation that injustice had been done you.
A letter from Grant that did survive is one he sent soon after that, not to Sherman but in reply to a letter from Ellen Sherman. Writing her from Memphis while Sherman was in another area, Grant tried to soothe the worries Ellen expressed concerning what Sherman described as “a touch of malarial fever” that he contracted during his inspection of the locomotives abandoned in the Tennessee swamps. In it he praised Sherman’s “indefatigable zeal and energy” and assured Ellen that he had suggested Sherman take a leave to recover fully, but that “he would not listen to it.” Grant said that “although Gen. Sherman’s place would be hard to fill,” he would again see “if he will consent to a leave,” and went on to say, “There is nothing that he, or his friends for him, could do that I would not do [for him] if it were in my power. It is to him and some other brave men like himself that I have gained the little credit awarded me, and that our cause has triumphed to the extent it has.”
The “happy accident” that Sherman hoped would happen for Grant occurred five weeks later: on July 11, after McClellan was completely outgeneralled by Robert E. Lee in the Seven Days’ Battles in northern Virginia, Lincoln ordered Halleck to Washington to serve in the reconstituted post of general in chief. Henry Halleck now commanded the entire United States Army. There would eventually be questions of how wise a promotion that was for the Union cause as a whole, but Ulysses S. Grant took over from Halleck more or less by default, becoming the commander of two of the three Western armies. He thought that he could finally begin to fight the war in the Mississippi theater of operations the way he wanted to do it. Halleck was still Grant’s superior, but he would be a thousand miles away, with much else on his mind.
The growing personal and military relationship between Grant and Sherman had reached a somewhat paradoxical moment. From the time of Shiloh, Grant strongly praised Sherman. Writing his official report of the battle two days after it occurred, Grant singled out Sherman for his highest commendation: “I feel it a duty however to a gallant and able officer Brig Genl W T Sherman to make special mention. He not only was with his Command during the entire two days action, but displayed great judgment and skill in the management of his men. Altho severely wounded in the hand the first day, his place was never vacant. He was again wounded and had three horses killed under him.”
Three weeks later he wrote to Julia, “In Gen. Sherman the country has an able and gallant defender and your husband a true friend,” and in a later letter to her said, understating his role in Sherman’s rise, “Although Gen. Sherman has been made a Maj. Gen. by the battle of Shiloh I have never done half justice by him. With green troops he was my standby during that trying day of Sunday, (there has been nothing like it on this continent—nor in history.) He kept his Division in place all day, and aided materially in keeping those to his right and left in place—He saw me frequently and received, and obeyed, my directions during that day.”
In these five months that had brought them together, Sherman made varying estimates of Grant. After Fort Donelson, he wrote his brother John that “Grant’s victory was most extraordinary and brilliant.” After Shiloh, preferring to speak of Grant’s earlier victory at Fort Donelson while controversy surrounded the recent battle, Sherman told Grant in a letter that “you obtained a just celebrity at Donelson, by a stroke of war more rich in consequences than was the battle of Saratoga.” On the same day, he wrote Ellen that “he is brave as any man should be, has won several victories such as Donelson which ought to entitle him to universal praise …” but added, “He is not a brilliant man … but he is a good & brave soldier tried for years, is sober, very industrious, and as kind as a child.”
By comparison, when Sherman learned that Halleck was ordered east as general in chief, with Grant to be his successor in the West, he wrote Halleck this:
I cannot express my heartfelt pain at hearing of your orders and intended departure … That success will attend you wherever you go I feel no doubt … I attach more importance to the West than the East … The man who at the end of this war holds the military control of the Valley of the Mississippi will be the man. You should not be removed. I fear the consequences …Instead of that calm, steady progress which has dismayed our enemy, I now fear alarms, hesitation, and doubt. You cannot be replaced out here.
This letter, written by Sherman to the man who gave him the chance to come back from disgrace to prominence and promotion, combined genuine admiration with flattery and perhaps a measure of duplicity. Telling Halleck, “You should not be removed” and “You cannot be replaced,” indicated a preference for his leadership over that of Grant. To characterize Halleck’s glacial military movements as “calm, steady progress” flew in the face of the squandered opportunities Sherman had witnessed. For Sherman to add that, with Halleck gone, he feared there would now be “hesitation, and doubt” was astonishing: those characteristics had marked all of Halleck’s command in the West and were the antithesis of Grant’s approach to war.
And yet it appeared, from other letters Sherman wrote, that he was not only grateful to Halleck but truly admired him, perhaps because of his orderly, methodical approach to so many matters. (Sherman was not alone in praising Halleck: many of Halleck’s officers and men saw the fall of Corinth as an intelligently planned bloodless taking of an important strategic point and gave Halleck the nickname “Old Brains.”) No one ever doubted that Sherman had a complicated personality: those words of praise for Halleck came from the same man who had supported Grant in every way since the war had brought them together. First, Sherman had done an outstanding job in forwarding men and supplies to Grant at Fort Donelson and in handling the movement of wounded and prisoners resulting from that battle. At Shiloh he outperformed Grant’s other generals. Then Sherman, who had reason to avoid the attention of newspapers that could quickly remind their readers of his earlier failure of nerve in Kentucky, threw himself into defending Grant in his replies to an attack in which he himself was not initially named. Finally, as a newly promoted major general who could have regarded the departure from the army of another man of the same rank as an opportunity to advance himself, Sherman had talked Grant out of leaving the army.
What developed next between Grant and Sherman would influence both the military and political aspects of the war, and its results. Sherman had more to learn about Grant, and himself. Through conversations and letters they would, often without realizing it, teach each other about the nature of the war they were experiencing. Between them they would evolve a harsh and efficient philosophy of war that would affect the South’s civilian population as well as its armies, and begin to apply those measures.
Fifteen months into the war, after Donelson, after Shiloh, at times both men thought it would soon end. Speaking of the Confederacy, Sherman wrote his brother that “the People are as bitter against us as ever, but the Leaders must now admit they are defeated.” A week after Shiloh, Grant told Julia that he expected “one more fight and then easy sailing to the end of the war. I really will feel glad when this thing is over.” Reflecting on the battle, Grant later concluded that “it is possible that the Southern man started in with a little more dash than his Northern brother; but he was correspondingly less enduring.” In midsummer of 1862, both Grant and Sherman still had a lot to learn about Southern endurance, and about each other.
POLITICAL PROBLEMS, MILITARY CHALLENGES: THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN DEVELOPS
When Halleck went east to take command of the entire United States Army, Grant inherited a situation in which Halleck had, as Sherman put it, “scattered” eighty thousand men into small garrisons all over northern Mississippi and western Tennessee. This was a time when the aggressive Grant and newly confident Sherman should have been able to take the experienced divisions that had fought at Shiloh and use them to seek out and attack the enemy. Instead, they found themselves inheriting a situation in which Halleck had tasked his forces with the duty of occupying cities and towns and guarding railroad lines, rather than engaging the Confederate generals they had recently defeated.
Sherman, newly promoted to major general of Volunteers, became the military governor of Memphis, then a city of twenty-three thousand, while his superior Grant made his headquarters at Corinth, a hundred miles to the east. Grant now commanded a military department that was geographically composed of northern Mississippi and the western parts of Tennessee and Kentucky; his spread-out field command consisted of the Army of the Tennessee, which he had commanded at Shiloh, and the army now under the command of Major General William Rosecrans that had been known as the Army of the Mississippi. In this period of flux, Grant was trying to rebuild a central striking force while dealing with Confederate guerrilla raids supported by the population of a large territory loyal to the Confederacy. He encouraged Sherman to send him not only military reports but also to “write freely and fully on all matters of public interest.”
Memphis, initially paralyzed by the Union victory at Shiloh and the sight of long federal columns marching into the city, quickly provided Sherman with many such “matters of public interest.” Soon after arriving at the city on the Mississippi in late July, he and his staff attended Sunday services at Calvary Episcopal Church. The intention was to appear quietly, in a neutral, peaceful setting. However, Sherman noticed that the clergyman omitted the prayer always said in prewar times for the president of the United States. Instantly, Sherman rose in the midst of the congregation and said the prayer in a loud, authoritative voice. The following day he decreed that the prayer would be offered at the next service, or the church would be closed. The prayer was duly said, and the church remained open.
That set the tone for Sherman’s conduct of the Union occupation of Memphis and the city’s response. Telling the mayor that “the Military for the time being must be superior to the Civil authority but does not therefore destroy it,” he reorganized the police force, established order, reopened everything from schools to theaters and saloons, and encouraged the resumption of all commercial activity including local riverboat trade in nonmilitary items. The former California banker even organized a real estate department in which his quartermasters opened up buildings vacated due to the war, rented out the space, and held the profits to be paid out later to owners willing to declare their loyalty to the federal government. Even though, as one of his officers wrote home to his mother, “Sherman never utters a word to bring the blush to the cheek of a maiden,” he let the city’s famous bordellos, known as “parlor houses,” continue their activities. Perhaps he learned of the attitudes of the many black prostitutes, who until then had only Southern white men as clients: a Union cavalryman said those women “felt loving towards us because they thought we were bringing them freedom, and they wouldn’t charge us a cent.”
During this time, Sherman and Grant had to develop ways to implement the evolving federal policies on the treatment of slaves. When the war began, the issue of secession, rather than the abolition of slavery, dominated the minds of most Northerners. Now, with Union armies controlling Southern communities, farms, and plantations, tens of thousands of slaves sought federal protection.
This reality—masses of slaves, many of them fugitives and all of them desperate for help and needing a new civil status—forced Abraham Lincoln to reconsider the issue. Although he wanted to free the slaves, he saw as his highest duty the preservation of the United States as one nation. At the war’s outset, trying to keep the border states out of the Confederacy, he had skirted the slavery issue to avoid antagonizing the many slaveholding families in those states. As the war progressed, Lincoln still had hopes of negotiating an early end, and he hesitated to put the abolition of slavery foremost—the position of the Radical faction of the Republicans in Congress—while he explored the possibilities of reaching peace at a table with Confederate leaders. Now, however, there were slaves to be cared for, a negotiated peace seemed beyond reach, and yet there was no law protecting the freed slaves. Their status was in such a legal limbo that earlier in the year, in March, Congress had enacted an article of war expressly forbidding the Union Army to return fugitive slaves to their masters.
Apart from the ideal of ending slavery, the North began to see that freeing the slaves, hitherto considered to be their owners’ legal property in the way that a horse or a house was, could be an economic weapon that also produced military advantages. Unpaid labor of slaves was an integral, vital part of the Southern economy, and to take slaves away from their owners would undermine the Confederacy’s infrastructure in ways that would also reduce its ability to continue the fight. On July 17, four days before Sherman arrived to rule Memphis, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act. Motivated by a combination of idealism and practicality, this law freed the slaves of “persons engaged in or assisting the rebellion” and also provided for the seizure and sale of other property belonging to those actively supporting the Southern cause. On September 22, while Sherman still governed Memphis, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This statement declared that unless the Confederate states ceased their rebellion by the end of the year, as of January 1, 1863,
all
slaves in those states, not just those belonging to Confederate supporters, would be freed. In a continuing effort to keep the border states on the Union side, it did not declare that slaves outside of the seceded states would automatically be freed, but pledged a form of compensation for border states that adopted either immediate or gradual emancipation. (When the Emancipation Proclamation became operative, it also provided for the enlistment of black men in the army.)
all
slaves in those states, not just those belonging to Confederate supporters, would be freed. In a continuing effort to keep the border states on the Union side, it did not declare that slaves outside of the seceded states would automatically be freed, but pledged a form of compensation for border states that adopted either immediate or gradual emancipation. (When the Emancipation Proclamation became operative, it also provided for the enlistment of black men in the army.)
The point came home to the entire white South: the war was now being waged not only on the military front; it would reach right into every part of the Confederacy’s economic life. In addition to their many other duties and concerns, Grant and Sherman started turning law into reality. On August 17, Sherman wrote Grant, concerning the Southern whites’ reaction, “Your orders about property and mine about niggers make them feel they can be hurt,” and in a letter of October 16 he added this thought: “We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”
On the one hand, Sherman continued to see things as he had while living in prewar Louisiana. He thought that blacks were inferior beings, and, while regretting that slavery as an institution existed, he had no personal desire to force its abolition. Nonetheless, he was a soldier who intended to carry out his government’s policy: the Southern civilian population must cooperate with federal rule, as most of the people of Memphis were doing. As for Grant, whose wife and Missouri in-laws still owned slaves, he had recently written his strongly antislavery father that “I have no hobby of my own with regard to the negro, either to effect his freedom or continue his bondage. If Congress pass any law and the President approves, I am willing to execute it.” Echoing Sherman’s view that the South was beginning to “hurt” in ways besides suffering militarily, he wrote this to his sister Mary: “Their
institution
[the slaves] are beginning to have ideas of their own and every time an expedition goes out more or less of them follow in the wake of the army and come into camp. I am using them as teamsters, Hospital attendants &c. thus saving soldiers to carry the musket. I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end but it is weakning [
sic
] the enemy to take them from them.”
institution
[the slaves] are beginning to have ideas of their own and every time an expedition goes out more or less of them follow in the wake of the army and come into camp. I am using them as teamsters, Hospital attendants &c. thus saving soldiers to carry the musket. I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end but it is weakning [
sic
] the enemy to take them from them.”
By November of 1862, following the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Grant began issuing specific orders concerning the treatment of “contrabands,” as fugitive slaves were known. They were to be cared for and the men put to work except for “such men as are not fit for active field duty.” For the first time in their lives, they would be paid. Grant set forth those conditions: “It will be the duty of the Superintendent of Contrabands to organize them into working parties in saving cotton, as pioneers [laborers assisting engineer troops] on railroads and steamboats, and in any way where their service can be made available … The negroes will be clothed, and in every way provided for, out of their earnings as far as practicable … In no case will negroes be forced into the service of the Government, or be enticed away from their homes except when it becomes a military necessity.”
In addition to implementing federal policies concerning slaves, Sherman had a variety of experiences with white citizens of Memphis who tested Union vigilance. Smuggling became pervasive: military supplies for Confederate forces left the city in coffins and in the carcasses of slaughtered cattle and hogs. Salt, badly needed to preserve and flavor Confederate rations, went out in barrels labeled as being something else. Sherman classified the sending of salt, chloroform, and medicines to the enemy as a treasonable activity punishable by penalties including death, but he used discretion in these cases. When two women, one aged and the other pregnant, tried to sneak out of Memphis together, carrying banned goods as well as a trunk of their clothes and two dresses, Sherman ruled that “the commanding General directs that the goods except the trunk and two dresses be confiscated. The ladies will go home and not attempt this again.”
Sherman and most of the citizens of Memphis continued on good terms, but outside the city, guerrillas wearing nothing that would identify them as Confederate soldiers fired on the Mississippi riverboats that Sherman allowed to move up and down the river. In late September, one of these vessels, not a Union gunboat or transport but a regular packet boat carrying nonmilitary goods and civilian passengers of both sides, was shot at near the rebellious small town of Randolph, Tennessee. Everyone in and near there got a taste of what Sherman was capable of doing. He had two infantry companies go into the town and burn it down. To make the scene of wreckage more dramatic, Sherman ordered that it be done “leaving one house,” and reported to Grant’s chief of staff John A. Rawlins that “the regiment has returned and Randolph is gone.” (In a letter to Ellen, he disposed of the matter in twenty words: “The Boats coming down are occasionally fired on. I have just sent a party to destroy the town of Randolph.”) Then he decreed that ten families would be expelled from Memphis every time such an attack occurred.
When a Confederate general sent him a letter under a flag of truce criticizing these actions, Sherman, never at a loss for words, replied that the general’s protest “excites a smile” because he knew full well that the general himself would not countenance men “without uniform, without organization except on paper, wandering about the country pillaging friend and foe, firing on unarmed boats filled with women and children … always from ambush or where they have every advantage.” The Confederate general persisted in the exchange, threatening to hang a captured Union officer. Sherman responded that when the guerrillas “fire on any boat, they are firing on their [own] Southern people, for such travel on every boat” and added that if a Union officer were hanged, “You initiate the game, and my word for it your people will regret it long after you pass from the earth.” To Grant, Sherman wrote, “They cannot be made to love us, but may be made to fear us.”
Other Northerners also were seeing the conflict in a harsher light. Senator John Sherman concurred with his brother, stating that “it is about time the North understood the truth, that the entire South, man woman & child is against us, armed and determined.” Ellen’s anger at the South took her even further than that. Two of her four brothers, Hugh and Charles, were now in the Union Army, with Charles serving as a lieutenant in one of Sherman’s infantry regiments and Hugh a colonel of an infantry regiment in the Eastern theater of war. Worried about her husband and two brothers, she apparently began to see Southern whites as doing the work of the devil. Ellen wrote Sherman that “I hope this may be not only a war of emancipation but of extermination & that all under the influence of the foul fiend may be driven like the Swine into the Sea. May we carry fire & sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.”
While Sherman spent these months dealing with the complicated situation in and near Memphis, Grant remained at his headquarters in Corinth. Still without sufficient force to take the offensive while he tried to consolidate his units that had been “scattered” by Halleck, he was fortifying that railroad hub against an expected Confederate attack. None came, for the time being, and he sent for Julia and their four children to join him. She wrote of their arrival by train, at dusk.
We found the General’s ambulance awaiting us at the depot. The General and two or three of his staff officers accompanied us on horseback to headquarters. The General was so glad to see us and rode close beside the ambulance, stooping near and asking me if I was as glad to see him as he was to see me. He reached out and took my hand and gave it another and another warm pressure …As we entered the encampment, which extended from near the depot to beyond the headquarters, the campfires were lighted, and I do not think I exaggerate when I say they numbered thousands. So it seemed to me. The men were singing “John Brown.” It seemed as though a hundred or so sang the words and the whole army joined in the chorus [“Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!”]. Oh, how grand it was! And now when I hear “John Brown” sung, that weird night with its campfires and glorious anthem and my escort all come back to me.
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