Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (22 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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Possessing a measure of the mistrust that often existed between the navy and army, and worried that Grant might think of him more as a bon vivant than the fighting sailor he was, Porter soon found that the plainspoken Grant had only one thing on his mind: Vicksburg, and how to take it. As if the roast duck and champagne did not exist, for twenty minutes Grant spoke earnestly with Porter, indicating his need for all the help Porter and his ships could give him in the forthcoming campaign and telling him something of his plans. Impressed by Grant’s “determination” and “calm, imperturbable face,” Porter pledged him his fullest cooperation, and Grant walked off the ship.
In his journal, Porter also recorded the details of his first meeting with Sherman, some days later in Memphis. He first described Sherman’s headquarters in the Gayoso House, the best hotel in town. Struck by the sparse furnishings and the intense concentration displayed by the men at every desk, he noted that the officers were “bronzed and weather-beaten,” and dressed in the simplest of uniforms. Despite the air of efficiency, this naval officer on whom much depended had to wait an hour before Sherman appeared from an inner room. “He seemed surprised to see me, when I introduced myself, and informed me that he did not know I was there.” Having said that, Sherman began conferring with one of his quartermasters as if Porter were not present. “I was not, I must confess, much impressed with Gen’l Sherman’s courtesy.” Then Sherman finished his conversation. “He turned to me in the most pleasant way, poked up the fire, and talked as if he had known me all his life … He told me all he had done, what he was doing, and what he intended to do, jumping up every three minutes to send a message to someone.” Porter walked out of the Gayoso House liking Sherman and feeling confident that they would work well together. (They remained friends for the rest of their lives and died in the same month in 1891.)
As 1862 ended, Grant continued preparing for the Vicksburg campaign. More than ever, he came to rely on Sherman, and the tone of his letters differed from those he sent his other generals. Writing Sherman at a time when their headquarters were only ten miles apart, he enclosed a letter from Halleck, in which the general in chief, mistakenly informed that Grenada, Mississippi, had been captured by Union forces, told Grant that this “may change our plans in regard to Vicksburg.” Grant, thinking that the report was accurate, said to Sherman, “I wish you would come over this evening and stay to-night, or come over in the morning. I would like to talk with you about this matter.” Grant described two courses of action and added, “Of the two plans I look most favorably on the former.” He closed with, “Come over and we will talk this matter over.”
At a time when Grant needed to concentrate on military plans, more problems with “matters of public interest” arose. The first involved illegal trading in cotton, the South’s great export crop and the one so widely grown in the area of Grant’s and Sherman’s responsibility. Before the war, Southern cotton had flowed in constant great quantities to Northern textile mills and to those in England. Now, a year and a half into the war, that trade was disrupted. Not only did the Union naval blockade of the Southern ports and the seizure of New Orleans the past April deprive the English mills of virtually all of the commodity on which their production depended, but the war produced a similar crisis on the American scene. With armies fighting in the areas between the Northern mills and their source of supply, Northern textile operators were themselves desperate for cotton. The North needed cotton, and the South needed Northern-manufactured goods, as well as cash that was not in the form of the already depreciated Confederate dollar. Some patriotic Southern planters burnt their cotton to deny it to the North, but others stored hundreds of thousands of bales and waited to see what would happen.
A lot did. For months, speculators had been coming south, offering the highest prices for cotton that the South had seen in sixty years. In Washington, the Treasury Department thought that restoring the cotton trade would in effect bribe many Southerners back into loyalty to the Union, and indeed the case could be made that the Union Army itself needed shirts, bandages, tents, and other items made from cotton. The War Department, however, felt that these Northern dollars would end up financing the Confederate Army and took a negative view of this trade between enemies. A compromise reached within the federal government produced instructions to Grant. He was to permit the activities of these Northern traders, as long as they held permits, did not go into enemy territory, and did not offer gold to the cotton sellers. This became meaningless: the speculators attached themselves to Union army regiments, avoided any kind of regulation, and handsomely bribed federal officers and men to look the other way while they dealt with anyone they chose, in any way that suited them.
Both Grant and Sherman found the situation infuriating: as they saw it, while brave Northern boys died, profiteers poured into the South to trade with the enemy, ruining discipline in Union Army camps and creating bad feeling among the men, some of whom were making little fortunes working with the speculators, while others were not. (In Memphis, Sherman believed there was even some treasonous barter in which cotton was traded for Northern pistols and chemicals that were used for explosives.) Sherman tried to have Northern cotton buyers pay in such a way that the profits would be held by his quartermasters until the rebellion was over, thus guaranteeing that no Northern money could aid the Confederate military, but Halleck sent on to him a federal government order to desist. Sherman grudgingly obeyed, but he wrote: “Commerce must follow the flag, but in truth commerce supplies our enemy with the means to follow the [enemy] flag and the Government whose emblem it is.”
Grant wanted the speculators banned from his army’s camps and decided that the only way to accomplish that was to ban them from the entire area of his military department. Most of the speculators were not Jews, but a good number were, and both Grant and Sherman began to characterize them all as being Jewish. Sherman’s position on the “cotton order” was that he had tried to regulate the Memphis economy by forcing all Southerners to trade with one another in Confederate dollars, but this speculation in cotton with freelance Northern brokers was a different matter. He had already written Ellen that Memphis was “full of Jews & speculators buying cotton for gold & [federal] treasury notes, the very things the Confederates wanted, money. I am satisfied the [Confederate] army got enough money & supplies from this Quarter to last a year.” He also wrote an angry letter to the army’s adjutant general Lorenzo Thomas, who a year before had characterized Sherman’s attitude while in Louisville as being “insane” but now treated carefully the man who had done so much at Shiloh and been promoted to major general. In it, Sherman said: “If the policy of this government demands cotton, order us to seize it … This cotton order is worse to us than a defeat. The [surrounding] country will swarm with dishonest Jews who will smuggle powder, pistols, percussion caps, etc. in spite of all the guards and precautions we can give.”
Grant soon had a personally embittering experience involving Jews, in which he felt that his father betrayed him. A year before, when his father had asked him to use his influence in getting an army contract for the manufacture of harnesses, Grant told him firmly in a letter that “I cannot take an active part in securing contracts” and tried to explain to his dyed-in-the-wool businessman father the concept of conflict of interest. Now his father arrived at his headquarters at Holly Springs, Mississippi, to visit him, accompanied by three of his business acquaintances, brothers from Cincinnati named Henry, Harmon, and Simon Mack. The Macks, who were Jewish, had a trading enterprise known as Mack and Brothers, and had entered into some form of partnership with Jesse Grant.
Grant was happy to see his father, with whom he had always had a difficult relationship, and thought that he had come on a purely personal visit. He soon saw how wrong he was: his father and the Macks wanted him to use his influence to get them one of the prized permits to buy cotton and ship it north. Grant had the three Macks put on the next train going north, and Jesse Grant also left.
Just how much this confrontation influenced Grant cannot be said, but on December 17, 1862, Grant had published for the guidance of his entire military department his General Orders No. 11.
The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also [War] Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.
Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave, and anyone remaining after such notification, will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners unless furnished with permits from these headquarters.
 
It took a while for the contents of this order to reach the North, but apparently the first person to act was Cesar J. Kaskel, of Paducah, who led a delegation of Jews to Washington and met with President Lincoln. Hearing what his visitors had to say, Lincoln commented, “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Kaskel replied, “Yes, and that is why we have come to Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.” Lincoln said, “And this protection they shall have at once.”
Halleck had the duty of informing Grant that the order must be “immediately revoked” and later explained to him that “the President has no objection to your expelling traders and Jew pedlars, which I suppose was the object of your order, but [because] it prescribed an entire class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.” Grant grudgingly complied, but the story reached the press:
The New York Times
, which previously had praised Grant, now condemned him for issuing an order in “the spirit of the medieval age.” Congress voted along party lines on a measure to censure Grant. The Democrats nearly prevailed in the House, losing by three votes, fifty-three to fifty-six, but the Republican-controlled Senate defeated it thirty to seven.
This controversy faded; now Grant became involved in a new chapter of the old story of political appointments of military officers. Readying his army for the campaign down the Mississippi toward Vicksburg, with Sherman slated for a vital role in that, Grant learned of the recent activities of Major General John McClernand. It was McClernand’s division that had collapsed and run at Fort Donelson, requiring Grant to restore order in its ranks, and at Shiloh, while McClernand stood his ground, Grant formed an opinion he later expressed that McClernand was “incompetent.”
As was the case with so many political appointments, McClernand was entirely unqualified to be a general. An influential lawyer and politician from Illinois, he had served three terms in the Illinois legislature and had represented Abraham Lincoln’s congressional district in the House of Representatives. His sole military experience prior to being commissioned as a brigadier general of Illinois Volunteers at the outset of the Civil War had been three months’ service, thirty years before, as a private during the campaign against the Sac and Fox Indians in northern Illinois known as the Black Hawk War. During that conflict, he had displayed courage and resourcefulness in taking a dispatch through a hundred miles of territory held by hostile warriors, but he had never commanded even a squad of soldiers. Although a Democrat, McClernand had been a good friend to Lincoln, who always took care of those from the state in which he rose politically. Second in seniority within Grant’s military department because of his date of rank, in September McClernand had taken a long leave, which Grant was happy to approve. Now Grant learned that McClernand had gone to Washington and talked his friends Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton into letting him go to Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, to recruit a large and entirely separate force of Volunteers, which he would then command, taking over the expedition to capture Vicksburg. McClernand was now successfully raising those many regiments. Grant and Sherman, who were emerging as the two ablest officers in the Western theater and were presumably the leaders who might be able to take Vicksburg if it could be done at all, had been told none of this.
It had been a stunning lapse on the part of Abraham Lincoln, whose military judgment was frequently better than that of his generals. In this case, politics completely dominated the president’s thinking. Lincoln had needed the support of McClernand and other prominent “War Democrats” to support his Republican administration’s decision to enter the war. In the recent midterm congressional elections, the Republicans had fared badly. As the casualty lists lengthened, the war was becoming increasingly unpopular in just those Democrat-leaning states in which McClernand proposed to enlist many thousands of needed soldiers. The vision that McClernand had presented to Lincoln and Stanton was of himself, a well-known Democrat from Lincoln’s home state, giving a bipartisan flavor to a new Western army that he would lead to an enormously significant victory that would strengthen Lincoln’s position as well as his own.
Halleck had the most serious reservations about McClernand and the entire scheme, and shared Grant and Sherman’s dismay about it. For a change, Halleck moved swiftly. He saw the thorniest part of the problem: incompetent or not, McClernand was senior to Sherman, and McClernand’s letter from the president authorizing his actions could give him the power to override Grant. If McClernand got down to Memphis with what was in effect a newly raised private army, it would be hard to stop him from wrecking Grant’s plans. He might be able to proceed to Vicksburg and lose every man of his untrained force. The stage was set for a spectacular disaster.

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