Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (30 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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PAIN AND PLEASURE ON THE LONG ROAD TO CHATTANOOGA AND MISSIONARY RIDGE
 
 
 
With Vicksburg’s fall, Grant began planning the overall exploitation of the position in which the campaign had placed the forces under his command, while Sherman headed east to find and attack Joseph E. Johnston. His men found themselves marching day after day through the blazing heat of a Mississippi summer. Private Leander Stillwell of the Sixty-first Illinois described their encounters with thunderstorms: “The dirt road would soon be worked into a loblolly of sticky, yellow mud. Thereupon we would take off our shoes and socks, tie them to the barrels of our muskets … and roll up our breeches. Splashing, the men would swing along, singing ‘John Brown’s Body’ or whatever else came handy.”
Pushing ahead swiftly, Sherman came once again to the Mississippi state capital of Jackson, where Johnston had paused in his retreat to consider whether to make a stand there with his thirty thousand men. By this time, Sherman’s exhausted soldiers had little heart for singing “John Brown’s Body” or anything else. On July 12, he tried to storm the city in a frontal assault. Although Sherman had twice the number of soldiers Johnston had, his troops were thrown back with losses he did not wish to repeat. He decided to put Jackson under siege, lobbing shells at the enemy every few minutes, but before he could encircle the city, Johnston slipped his army away on the night of July 16.
The following day brought Sherman and his men to a breaking point. As the siege of Vicksburg had come to a close, both Grant and Sherman had thought beyond the city’s fall: the plan was not only for Grant to capture Vicksburg but also for Sherman to complete months of campaigning by bringing Johnston to battle in the area east of the captured city. He was to find Johnston’s army and destroy it if possible. Sherman had found it and tried to encircle it, but Johnston was gone, again. Learning that Johnston had evacuated his men from Jackson during the night, Grant wired Sherman, “If Johnston is pursued, would it not have the effect to make him abandon much of his [supply wagon] trains and many of his men to desert?” Aware of the conditions under which Sherman’s men had been operating, Grant added, “I do not favor marching our men much but if the Cavalry can do anything they might do it.”
Sherman and his men had come to the end of their strength. He wired Grant that “the weather is too hot for a vigorous pursuit,” and in another telegram added that he would destroy enemy equipment captured in and around Jackson, but “I do not pursue because of the intense heat, dust & fatigue of the men.” Grant replied from Vicksburg, “Continue the pursuit as long as you have reasonable hopes of favorable results, but do not wear your men out. When you stop the pursuit return by easy marches to the vicinity of this place.”
Trying to explain that his army was in a state of near collapse, Sherman sent a telegram back at nine that evening, saying in part, “All of the Division Brigade & Regiments are so reduced and so many officers of rank sick & wounded determined on furloughs … Every officer & man is an applicant for furlough.” Half an hour later he sent yet another telegram, written without punctuation and saying that the force with him under Major General Edward Ord “is very much out of order & mine reduced by sickness Casualties & a desire for rest Genl W. S. Smith is really quite ill & says he must go home Cols. Giles, Smith, Tupper, Judy & others are urging their claims to furloughs & I repeat that all the army is clamorous for rest The constant stretch of mind for the past two months begins to tell on us all”
Hearing nothing more from Grant, Sherman closed the exchange with a telegram indicating that, after his men destroyed anything that was left of use to the Confederates in Jackson, he was bringing his spent army back toward Vicksburg. “Our march back, will be slow and easy, regulated by [camping where there is] water.”
With Johnston clearly beyond pursuit and posing no threat—he needed to rest his own men—Grant and Sherman settled down for a respite for themselves and their soldiers. Julia Grant and their four children came to be with him in what she described as “a large, white, colonial house” in Vicksburg that he was using for headquarters. Ellen Sherman brought their four oldest children to the vast camp Sherman’s divisions constructed beside the Big Black River, thirty miles east of Vicksburg. Writing to his stepfather Thomas Ewing, Sherman spoke of the encampment: “It combines comfort, retirement, safety and beauty … I have no apprehensions on the Score of health and the present condition of my command satisfies me on this score.” Headquarters was in a grove of large oaks. Two big hospital tents served as quarters for Sherman, Ellen, and their daughters, Minnie, now thirteen, and Lizzie, ten. Nine-year-old Willy and six-year-old Tommy stayed with their uncle Charley, now Sherman’s inspector general, in one of the regular military headquarters tents.
It was a happy time. Soon after Julia Grant arrived, she and Grant drove out to call on Sherman and Ellen. Lest Grant take himself too seriously after what he had achieved in capturing Vicksburg, Julia began calling him “Victor” when they were among close friends. She enjoyed Sherman’s witty conversation and appreciated his loyalty to Grant. All the Shermans occasionally went into Vicksburg and visited with the Grants and their children; Sherman took his family on a tour of the recently surrendered fortifications and let his children pick up battlefield souvenirs. Out at the Big Black River encampment, the atmosphere was often that of an outing under the trees. In the evenings, a black man known as “Old Shady” sang songs for the Shermans and their guests, and military bands frequently gave concerts. A battalion of the United States Thirteenth Regular Infantry Regiment—the regiment that Sherman was assigned to command at the beginning of the war but that he never led as a colonel because of his duties inspecting the defenses of Washington—treated Willy and Tommy as their own. Tommy had his corporal’s uniform from an earlier visit, and a regimental tailor now made Willy a uniform with sergeant’s chevrons. The boys were happy in the midst of camp life. Willy, his father’s favorite child and a boy who showed real enthusiasm for the military, frequently rode on a pony to accompany his father on inspections and reviews.
During this quiet time, Grant and Sherman each received a letter from General Halleck in Washington, asking them for their views on what forms of civil government should be set up in the areas of the South now firmly under Union control. Halleck added, of the answers he was soliciting, “I may wish to use them with the President.”
Although the question was framed in terms of the immediate situation, it opened the subject of how the entire South should be dealt with in the event of a final Union victory. While Grant and Sherman had been making their great contributions toward achieving such a victory, Lincoln had been trying to balance and control the political progress of the war. In Washington, he had his continuing differences with the Radical Republicans, who were adamant in their efforts not only to free every slave swiftly, but looked forward to giving these freedmen the vote as soon as possible in a conquered South that was to be governed under a strict federal rule that would rearrange its entire society. For the Radicals, the question was not whether the freed slaves should be given the vote, but whether white Southern men who had fought against the federal government should not be placed on a form of probation before they were allowed to reenter the political process. Lincoln, while firmly committed to a vigorous prosecution of the military effort and to the eradication of slavery, had as his priority the return of the rebellious states to the Union and took a more measured and conciliatory approach to reaching that goal.
It was a time in the war when much was being tried. In June, the forty-eight counties of western Virginia had been admitted to the Union as the new state of West Virginia. Earlier in the year, the experimental government set up in areas of Louisiana under federal control resulted in two congressmen from that state being seated on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington, but they were later disqualified. On June 30, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission created by the War Department had issued its report titled “A Social Reconstruction of the Southern States.” Its three members, all prewar abolitionists, had toured the parts of the South occupied by the Union Army and recommended the creation of a Bureau of Emancipation to safeguard the interests of the slaves, an idea that eventuated in the later Freedmen’s Bureau. In addition, the commission called for complete equality for the freed blacks: one member recommended that the lands of Southern planters should be confiscated and redistributed among former slaves—an idea popular among many Radicals.
Answering Halleck’s request for ideas on what measures should be instituted in occupied areas, Grant took a conciliatory line. Although the man famously linked with “unconditional surrender” believed that the Confederate Army must be destroyed, he said of the white population now under Union control in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, “The people of these states are beginning to see how much they need the protection of Federal laws and institutions. They have experienced the misfortune of being without them.” In essence, Grant believed that the white civilian population could be brought back into the Union as full citizens; as for the men of the rebel armies, they must indeed be defeated, but “I think we should do it with terms held out that by accepting they could receive the protection of our laws.” As Grant saw it, if these soldiers surrendered and swore allegiance to the United States of America, they too should regain their status as citizens.
Sherman took a harsher line, although he sometimes remembered his happy prewar times in the South and, the past spring, had even written Ellen a letter in which he conjured up the image of his own army being “Rude Barbarians” invading from the north. He was at the moment trying with mixed success to keep his own troops from looting and was distributing food to civilians in the areas under his control, but he kept thinking in terms of a hard policy. Knowing that savage fighting lay ahead, he had little patience with what he had increasingly seen of the hostile attitude of all Southerners, both soldiers and civilians. Ten weeks before, he had written to Ellen, “I doubt if History affords a parallel of the deep & bitter enmity of the women of the South. No one who sees them & hears them but must feel the intensity of their hate.”
Now, in a twenty-seven-hundred-word reply to Halleck, Sherman carefully considered many of the problems of dealing with the conquered portions of the Confederacy. As for restoring civil rights to the people who had seceded from the Union, he saw all of those individuals as traitors and said that to give them “a Civil Government now … would be simply ridiculous.” He added, “I would not coax them, or even meet them halfway, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass” before they thought of taking up arms as a solution to a political problem.
Apart from the questions put to him by Halleck, Sherman had begun to realize that he, whose ideas were solicited by Halleck with the thought that “I may wish to use them with the President,” was becoming a national figure himself. With all his fondness for Grant and his occasional paeans of praise for Grant’s achievements, Sherman still had some reservations about the man with whom he had, in every sense, come so far. Even after Vicksburg, Sherman seemed not to understand that Grant had intuitive military gifts that simply exceeded his own great abilities. Sherman was better read, a frequently brilliant conversationalist, brave, imaginative, energetic, ambitious, a man who Grant said “boned” [studied hard in planning] his campaigns—how could one have and be and do more than that? After Shiloh, he had written Ellen, of Grant, “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.” More than a year later, writing to Ellen the day after Vicksburg fell, he said that “we have in Grant not a great man or a Hero—but a good, plain, sensible, kind-hearted fellow.” Two paragraphs later, he tried to do Grant justice, but it was hard for him: “I am somewhat blind to what occurs near me, but have a clear perception of things & events remote. Grant possesses the happy medium and it is for this reason I admire him. I have a much quicker perception of things, but he balances the present & remote so evenly that results follow in a normal course.”
The man who later said of Grant, “To me he is a mystery,” was demonstrating that this remained true, but he sounded happily confident when he spoke of their demonstrated ability to work together. Looking back on a planning session for the Vicksburg campaign that he and Grant had held the year before, in this same letter he told Ellen, “As we sat in Oxford [Mississippi] in November we saw in the future what we now realize and like the architect who sees the beautiful vision of his Brain, we feel an intense satisfaction at the realization of our military plans.” He did not mention that on several occasions, questioning Grant’s intuitions, he had wanted to change those blueprints, but their partnership was working. Grant and Sherman were developing an ever-greater respect for each other’s views and often listened patiently to each other, but these two West Pointers understood that, once Grant reached a decision, discussion ceased and vigorous action began.
 
The idyll for the Grant and Sherman families, the Grants in Vicksburg and the Shermans at the encampment on the Big Black River, and the needed rest for the troops themselves came to a sudden end. On September 18, Braxton Bragg threw sixty-two thousand Confederate soldiers at badly positioned Union forces in the mountainous Georgia countryside eleven miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The battle, centering on Chickamauga Creek, went on for three days. At its close, the total casualties suffered on both sides came to thirty-four thousand; among the Confederates killed was Lincoln’s brother-in-law Brigadier General Ben Hardin Helm, a Kentuckian who had married Mary Todd Lincoln’s half-sister Emilie Todd. (Lincoln’s family was torn apart by the war; in addition to the loss of Helm, three of Mrs. Lincoln’s half brothers were killed fighting for the South.)

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