Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (27 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 man paid no attention, but when the Minnesotan started to shout again, his captain grabbed him and said, “That’s General Grant!”
While he was stationed on the northern end of besieged Vicksburg, Sherman kept up with developments in Washington. He learned that the federal government, needing ever-greater numbers of soldiers to add to the dwindling number of volunteers for the Union Army, intended to introduce conscription and draft three hundred thousand men into the service. Sherman saw that as necessity, but the plan for how these new troops were to be used shocked him. One hundred thousand would be trained and sent forward to fill up the ranks of the existing regiments, many of which by now had an excellent level of combat experience shared by veteran officers and men, but the remaining two hundred thousand were to be formed into entirely new regiments. This was to be 1861 all over again: new colonels would be commissioned from civilian life by political appointment, and recruits with a few weeks’ training would march to unnecessary deaths in a military version of the blind leading the blind. Any of the experienced, proud old regiments whose casualties had caused their numbers to fall below three hundred were arbitrarily to be consolidated with other old regiments, instead of receiving recruits who could fill their ranks and immediately profit from the experience to be gained by serving with combat veterans.
As a man with a penchant for order who frequently found the workings of a democracy incompatible with the realities of raising an efficient army and fighting successful campaigns, Sherman was appalled by the prospect of having more “political colonels” and sending into battle more than a hundred untried regiments. On June 2, he wrote Grant a letter on the subject.
Dear General:
I would most respectfully suggest that you use your personal influence with President Lincoln to accomplish a result on which it may be, the Ultimate Peace and Security of our Country depends.
… All who deal with troops in fact instead of theory, know that the knowledge of the little details of Camp Life is absolutely necessary to keep men alive. New Regiments for want of this knowledge have measles, mumps, Diarrhea and the whole Catalogue of Infantile diseases, whereas the same number of men distributed among the older Regiments would learn from the Sergeants, and Corporals and Privates the art of taking care of themselves … Also recruits distributed among older Companies catch up, from close and intimate contact, a knowledge of drill, the care and use of arms, and all the instructions which otherwise it would take months to impart.
… I am assured by many that the President does actually wish to support & sustain the Army, and that he desires to know the wishes and opinions of the officers who serve in the woods instead of the “Salon.” If so you would be listened to … I have several Regiments who have lost … more than half their original men … Fill up our present ranks, and there is not an Officer or man of this Army, but would feel renewed hope and courage to meet the struggles before us.
I regard this matter as more important, than any other that could possibly arrest the attention of President Lincoln and it is for this reason, that I ask you to urge it upon him at the auspicious time.
 
Grant forwarded Sherman’s letter to Lincoln, along with his own letter endorsing Sherman’s facts and reasoning, and told the president, “I would add that our old regiments, all that remains of them, are veterans equaling regulars in discipline … A recruit added to them would become an old soldier, from the very contact, before he was aware of it.” He went on to point out that the existing regiments already had their encampments, garrison equipment, and supply trains, and that in addition to considerations of military efficiency and morale, it would cost the government far less to put new recruits into existing regiments than to buy and construct everything necessary to organize new ones. What he and Sherman got for their trouble was a letter to Grant from Halleck, saying that, as planned, two hundred thousand men would go into new regiments. Lincoln was still making military appointments as political favors.
As the siege went on, new developments in other matters continued to occur. On June 7, an unusual battle took place at Milliken’s Bend. Four understrength and outnumbered regiments of virtually untrained black Union Army soldiers, newly freed slaves from Louisiana and Mississippi who had volunteered only since the siege began, using obsolete Belgian muskets and supported by one of Admiral Porter’s gunboats, drove off a Confederate brigade that was trying to raid a Union supply line. There were reports that the Confederates murdered some of the black soldiers they captured, and two of the white Union officers who led the men were apparently also executed.
This battle, though brief and small in size, changed the minds of many Union Army commanders concerning blacks’ willingness and ability to fight. Charles Dana, still with Grant’s army, had this to say:
A force of some two thousand Confederates engaged about a thousand negro troops defending Milliken’s Bend. This engagement at Milliken’s Bend became famous from the conduct of the colored troops. General E. S. Dennis, who saw the battle, told me that it was the hardest fought engagement he had ever seen. It was fought mainly hand to hand. After it was over many men were found dead with bayonet stabs, and others with their skulls broken open by the butts of muskets. “It is impossible,” said General Dennis, “for men to show greater gallantry than the negro troops in that fight.”
The bravery of the blacks at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.
 
Grant was among those persuaded. In a letter to Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, he made this comment on a reorganization of the black regiments that were coming into existence: “I am anxious to get as many of these negro regiments as possible and to have them full and completely equipped.” In a letter to Halleck he said, “The negro troops are easier to preserve discipline among than our White troops and I doubt not will prove equally good for garrison duty. All that have been tried have fought bravely.”
Sherman had a different attitude. Months after Milliken’s Bend, he was still expressing his mistrust of the abilities of black troops. In a letter to Ellen he told her, “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed, but we are in revolution and I must not pretend to judge. With my opinions of negroes and my experience, yes, prejudice, I cannot trust them yet.”
At this point in the siege, Grant’s nemesis, alcohol, reentered the picture. The evidence on the point is an in-headquarters letter to Grant from his chief of staff Rawlins. Saying that his motivation was “the great solicitude I feel for the safety of this army,” Rawlins made reference to a report that Grant had been drinking with a military surgeon at Sherman’s headquarters “a few days ago,” but concentrated on this: “Tonight when you should, because of the condition of your health if nothing else, have been in bed, I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company with those who drink and urge you to do likewise, and the lack of your usual promptness and clearness in expressing yourself in writing tended to confirm my suspicions.”
Years later, Charles Dana said that he had been present when Rawlins “delivered that admirable communication. It was a dull period in the campaign. The siege of Vicksburg was progressing with regularity. No surprise from within the city or from without was to be apprehended; and when Grant started out in drinking, the fact could not imperil the situation of the army or any member of it except himself.” At the time, Dana clearly maintained the policy he had adopted: this incident was just what he was supposed to report to Washington in the special telegraphic code devised for him to use, but he believed in Grant and intended to tell Lincoln and Stanton about Grant’s drinking only after the critical situation at Vicksburg came to its end.
As if Grant did not have problems enough, his ambitious, fractious subordinate McClernand now sought to further his own reputation with the public in a way that broke army regulations and was guaranteed to anger Grant and Sherman, both of whom had suffered at the hands of the press. McClernand was already on the thinnest of ice: through Dana, Secretary of War Stanton had recently passed the word to Grant that he was free to relieve McClernand at any time and send him north for reassignment. Unbeknownst to Grant, on May 30 McClernand had written what he called his “General Orders 72.” Ostensibly a document congratulating his troops for their bravery, it was in fact an astonishing piece of self promotion, which, in addition to being circulated among his units, McClernand had sent to St. Louis to be published in the Missouri Democrat. He presented himself as the hero of the failed attacks on May 22 that he had in fact made worse by urging an additional attack—the one that Grant said “only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit whatever.” The text of McClernand’s order implied that Sherman, on his right, and McPherson, on his left, had failed to support him, and that Grant, by not sending him reinforcements, had lost the opportunity to take Vicksburg that day.
The piece appeared in St. Louis on June 10, and a copy arrived at Grant’s headquarters three days later, where its effect was symbolically like that of an incoming Confederate salvo. Not only did it misrepresent the costly support McClernand had received—Grant said that it “did great injustice to the other troops engaged in the campaign”—but its publication violated the rules of both the War Department and Grant’s military department, which required that no document of this sort could appear in the press without the permission of the departmental commander, i.e., Grant.
Even now, Grant postponed action on the matter; a letter he sent to McClernand two days later speaks only of troop movements. On June 17, Sherman saw a copy of the
Memphis Evening Bulletin
reprinting McClernand’s orders and sent a blazing letter to Rawlins. Sherman said that on May 22 McClernand had lied about the extent of his advance in order to convince Grant to support a further effort, and when that effort was made, swiftly and fully, “we lost, needlessly, many of our best officers and men.” One account had it that Sherman also appeared at Grant’s headquarters, holding the Memphis newspaper and so angry that he could not speak for several minutes. On that day, Grant wrote a peremptory note to McClernand demanding that he either confirm or deny that Orders 72 was his work. The following day, McClernand telegraphed that he had written it, and stood by it, but thought it had been sent to Grant before being published. Within hours, Grant relieved McClernand of command; in a telegram to Halleck telling him of his action, Grant said, “I should have relieved him long ago for general unfitness for his position.” The next day, Dana wired Stanton that Grant’s most pressing reason for removing McClernand was that, if Grant were incapacitated, McClernand would outrank both Sherman and McPherson, which would have “most pernicious consequences to the cause.”
Other than saying of McClernand’s departure that “not an officer or soldier here but rejoices he is gone away,” Sherman had little time to think about anything but the campaign at hand. Worried about reports that the elusive and skillful Joseph E. Johnston was leading an army of thirty thousand toward Vicksburg from the east, Grant ordered Sherman to ready himself to move out immediately toward the Big Black River. Feeling that Sherman was the best man to find Johnston and oppose him, he used characteristically concise instructions: “You will go and command the entire force.” To Admiral Porter, Grant wrote of Johnston, as if he could see it happening, “I have given all the necessary orders to meet him twenty-five miles out, Sherman commanding.”
Grant knew that Sherman had hoped to take part in a final victorious entry into the city, riding in at the head of his troops and perhaps becoming for a time the military governor of Vicksburg, as he had been of Memphis. Disappointed, Sherman would write Ellen, “I did hope Grant would have given me Vicksburg and let some one else follow up the enemy inland.” But he obeyed without discussion and headed out with thirty-four thousand men. (Describing the closeness of his relationship with Grant, Sherman wrote his brother John that “with him I am as a second self. We are personal and official friends.”)
As Sherman moved his force through the countryside, seeking to find and engage Johnston, Grant expressed the strength of his support for him in a letter he wrote on June 23. Grant referred to troops he had with him at a place “Near Vicksburg” and others at nearby Young’s Point, and listed the units he had ready to reinforce Sherman if he should need them, closing with, “Use all the forces indicated above as you deem most advantageous, and should more be required, call on me and they will be furnished to the last man here and at Young’s Point.”
The shortage of food caused by the siege began to take its toll on Vicksburg’s defenders. Meat sold as beef was described in one account as “very often oxen killed by the enemy’s shells, and picked up by the butchers.” A bitter Vicksburg resident invented a fictional “Hotel de Vicksburg” and wrote out a bill of fare that began with Mule Tail Soup, offered Mule Rump Stuffed with Rice as a roast, and included among its entrées Mule Spare Ribs Plain and Mule Liver Hashed. Sergeant William H. Tunnard of the Third Louisiana Infantry, entrenched in the besieged city, recorded this in his regimental history: “How the other troops felt, we know not, but the boys of the Third Regiment were
always hungry.
” Soon dogs and cats began disappearing; the city’s stoic citizens and soldiers made jokes about “What’s become of Fido?” but no one doubted the animals’ fate. While Vicksburg was running out of food, hundreds of tons of ammunition were available.

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