Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (31 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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At Chickamauga, the Union commander, William Rosecrans, was saved from disaster only through the heroic stand made by Major General George Thomas, a Virginian who had chosen to fight for the Union. Because of the skillful rear-guard action under Thomas, who became known as “the Rock of Chickamauga,” the demoralized Union forces were able to retreat north to Chattanooga. In their flight, however, the Union regiments reached the city itself but failed to secure the arc of towering ridges just outside the city that hemmed it in from three sides. Bragg’s men, advancing behind them, soon looked down on the city from Raccoon Mountain, to the city’s west, Lookout Mountain on the south side, and Missionary Ridge to the east. Chattanooga was a vital communications hub, the principal southern rail center, an X that connected lines running southwest-northeast and northwest-southeast. If Chattanooga, only recently taken by Union forces, were recaptured by the Confederate Army, it would be both a great strategic loss for the Union and a rejuvenation for Southern morale after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
In Washington, it became clear that this new flaming area of war needed both troop reinforcements and some new commanders, and needed them swiftly. (Lincoln said that Rosecrans, whom he would soon remove from command, was “stunned and confused, like a duck hit in the head.”) Halleck, already sending a reinforcement of eighteen thousand men south from Meade’s Army of the Potomac under Joseph Hooker, ordered Grant to send another twenty thousand from his Army of the Tennessee and to go to Chattanooga himself.
For Grant’s forces, the movement of so many men, horses, artillery pieces, and supply trains was going to be exceptionally difficult. As the crow flies, Vicksburg is 340 miles southwest of Chattanooga. But Grant’s and Sherman’s divisions of troops would first go north by riverboat for 220 miles up the Mississippi to Memphis. Then, to reach Chattanooga, they would make their way east through 240 miles of country subject to Confederate raids. (One estimate was that the actual distance, counting river bends and winding roads, came to 600 miles.) Different units would have to use combinations of railways, some of them torn up by the enemy, roads that could deteriorate in bad weather, bridges the enemy would try to destroy, and riverboats steaming slowly on the meandering Tennessee River. Grant, in bed at Vicksburg with a severe leg injury sustained in a fall from a horse during a brief trip to New Orleans, instructed Sherman to take five divisions, which would comprise the required twenty thousand men, and organize them for the movement to Chattanooga. Grant would start for Chattanooga himself as soon as he was able and would probably arrive there ahead of Sherman.
On September 27, Sherman shifted his headquarters to the steamboat
Atlantic
, loaded with troops, including those of the Thirteenth Infantry, ready to head north up the Mississippi. His family was with him. The plan was for Sherman, his staff, and the troops aboard to disembark at Memphis and prepare for the final part of the movement to Chattanooga. Ellen and the children were to go on to Cairo, Illinois, and then travel by train to her family’s house in Lancaster, Ohio. Sherman’s son Willy, wearing his sergeant’s uniform and carrying a shotgun, came aboard, still thinking of himself as a soldier bound for high adventures but complaining of diarrhea.
The ship cast off; as they went on upstream, leaving Vicksburg behind, Sherman stood at the rail, pointing out to Ellen and the children the places where his men had camped and fought. Glancing at Willy, he saw that his son’s face was pale and that he was feverish. Ellen hurried Willy to a bunk below. The word was passed that a doctor was needed. The regimental surgeon of the Fifty-fifth Illinois examined Willy, found symptoms of typhoid fever with possible complications of dysentery, and told Sherman that his son’s life was in danger. The important thing was to get to Memphis as soon as possible so that Willy could be treated by the physicians there, but the
Atlantic
was a slow riverboat, making its way upstream at the season when the water was low. For a week the ship moved as fast as it could, while Sherman, Ellen, and the doctor remained constantly at their suffering son’s bedside.
At ten-thirty on the night of October 2, Willy was carried ashore at Memphis. Every soldier in the battalion of the Thirteenth Infantry wanted to help the nine-year-old boy who was their little mascot, and none could. Sherman summoned two more doctors, who hurried to a room at the Gayoso House and examined their patient as he lay pale in bed. The following morning, Ellen Sherman called in Father J. C. Carrier, a French priest from the University of Notre Dame who was serving as a chaplain for troops who were Catholics. When he visited Willy and they were alone together, “Willy then told me in very few words,” the priest recalled, “that he was willing to die if it was the will of God
but that it pained
him to leave his father & mother.” Trying to reassure him, the priest “told him it was not certain he would die.” Willy seemed unconvinced, and Father Carrier finally promised him that “If God wishes to call you to him—now—do not grieve for he will carry you to heaven &
there
you will meet your good Mother & Father again.” Ellen entered and began crying; Willy reached up and patted his mother’s face.
At five o’clock on the afternoon of October 3, eighteen hours after the Shermans reached Memphis, Willy died. Sherman said, “Mrs. Sherman, Minnie, Lizzie, and Tom were with him at the time, and we all, helpless and overwhelmed, saw him die.” At noon the following day, the battalion of the Thirteenth Infantry, marching to the beat of muffled drums and carrying their rifles reversed in a military funeral march, escorted Willy’s body, in a steel casket, to the waterfront. There the
Grey Eagle
had steam up, ready to depart for Cairo, from where the Shermans would go on to Lancaster. Sherman went aboard with Ellen, Minnie, Lizzie, and Tom, said good-bye to them, and returned to his headquarters at the Gayoso. That night he wrote Grant that “this is the only death I have ever had in my family, and falling as it has so suddenly and unexpectedly on the one I most prized on earth has affected me more than any other misfortune could. I can hardly compose myself enough for work but must & will do so at once.” He then proceeded to add a report of approximately 750 words, telling Grant in Vicksburg what the situation was at Memphis and his plans for readying his forces for the movement east to Chattanooga. (Three days later, Grant had one of his generals forward to Sherman, who was still in Memphis, what Grant referred to as a “private letter.” The contents are unknown.)
Having momentarily discharged his military responsibilities with his report to Grant, Sherman gave way to his emotions in a letter to Captain C. C. Smith, commander of the battalion of the Thirteenth Infantry, which had made Willy an honorary sergeant and had furnished the troops that gave him full military honors as his body left Memphis earlier in the day. Dated “October 4, Midnight,” it began with a salutation not usually found in communications from major generals to captains.
My Dear Friend:
I cannot sleep tonight till I record an expression of the deep feelings of my heart to you, and to the Officers and Soldiers of the Battalion, for their kind behaviour to my poor child. I realize that you all feel for my family the attachment of kindred; and I assure you of full reciprocity. Consistent with a sense of duty to my profession and my office, I could not leave my post, and sent for my family to come to me in that fatal climate, in that sickly period, and behold the result! The child who bore my name … now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land, with a weeping mother, brother, and sisters clustered about him …
But, my poor WILLY was, or thought he was, a Sergeant of the 13th. I have seen his eyes brighten and his heart beat as he beheld the Battalion under arms … Child as he was, he had the enthusiasm, the pure love of truth, honor, and love of country, which should animate all soldiers. God only knows why he should die thus young …
Please convey to the Battalion my heartfelt thanks, and assure each and all, that if in after years they call on me and mine, and mention that they were of the 13th Regulars, when poor WILLY was a Sergeant, they will have a key to the affections of my family that will open all it has, that we will share with them our last blanket, our last crust. YOUR FRIEND,
W. T. SHERMAN
MAJOR GENERAL
 
So many of Captain Smith’s men wanted copies of the letter that he had it printed and gave each man in the battalion a copy.
Two mornings later, in a letter to “Dearest Ellen” dated as being written at seven a.m., Sherman began:
I have got up early this morning to Steal a short period in which to write you but I can hardly trust myself. Sleeping—waking—everywhere I see Poor Little Willy … Why oh Why should that child be taken from us? … I will always deplore my want of judgment in taking my family to so fatal a climate at so critical [a] period of the year … If human sympathy could avail us aught, I Know and feel we have it—I see it in every eye and in every act—Poor Malmbury, an old scarred Soldier, whom the world would Style unfeeling, wept like a babe as he came to See me yesterday, and not a word was spoken of Poor Willy …
I follow you in my mind and almost estimated to the hour when all Lancaster would be shrouded in gloom to think that Willy Sherman was coming back a corpse.
 
Four days later, in his third letter to Ellen since they parted, he continued his lament and self-recrimination. “The moment I begin to think of you & the children, Poor Willy appears before me as plain as life. I can see him now, stumbling over the Sand hills on Harrison Street [in] San Francisco … running to meet me with open arms at Black River & last, moaning in death in this Hotel.” Of their children, he said, “Why should I ever have taken them to that dread Climate? It nearly kills me to think of it. Why was I not killed at Vicksburg and left Willy to grow up to care for you?”
Ellen was equally distraught and unable to comfort her husband. “My heart is now in heaven,” she wrote him, “and the world is dark and dreary.” Everything threatened and frightened her. “Since we lost our dear Willy, I feel that evils of all sorts are likely to come upon us.” More earnest a Catholic than ever, she begged Sherman to embrace the religion in which he had been baptized but had never believed in or practiced, so “that you will die in the faith that sanctified our holy one whom we have just given up to God.” Sherman made no known response to that, but he soon wrote Ellen of Willy, “He knew & felt every moment of his life our deep earnest love for him … God knows and he knows that either of us and hundreds of others would have died to save him.” To his daughter Lizzie he wrote, “We must all now love each other the more that Willy watches us from Heaven,” and told her always to appreciate “the Soldiers who used to call Willy their brother. I do believe Soldiers have stronger feelings than other men, and I Know that every one of those Regulars would have died, if they could have saved Willy.” Usually he signed his letters to his children simply with W. T. Sherman, but in this one he added above that, “Yr. Loving Father.”
As Sherman remained in Memphis, grieving for his son as he prepared his forces for the long and difficult move east to Chattanooga, Grant, who said in a letter to another general “I am very glad to say that I have so far recovered from my injuries as to be able to move about on crutches,” started his own painful journey from Vicksburg to the besieged but not entirely surrounded city. Even from the outset, his route was a roundabout one. On October 14, he passed Memphis by boat, going on up the river to Cairo, and on October 16, reaching Indianapolis by train, found no less a person coming aboard than Secretary of War Stanton. On their ride to Louisville, Stanton handed him orders that named him commander of all Union forces between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. In this reorganization, directed specifically by Lincoln, Grant would have three subordinates. Sherman would take over Grant’s position as commander of the Army of the Tennessee. Stanton told Grant that he could replace the defeated Rosecrans as commander of the battered Army of the Cumberland that was now at beleaguered Chattanooga, and Grant decided to give that command to George Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga.”
The third force, the Army of the Ohio, would continue under the command of Ambrose Burnside, who had succeeded McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac, only to be replaced by Lincoln after he failed abysmally when he opposed Lee at Fredericksburg. Burnside was not part of the crisis at Chattanooga; in command at Knoxville, eighty-five miles northeast of Chattanooga, he had a crisis of his own. Facing strong Confederate forces in eastern Tennessee, Burnside was begging for supplies and men; Grant, now responsible for that area as well, felt a great responsibility to save Chattanooga quickly, if it could be done at all, so that he could release forces to come to Burnside’s aid. There were questions too about Joseph Hooker, the Union general bringing the twenty thousand reinforcements from the Eastern theater by a circuitous route. Called in to replace Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Hooker had been soundly outgeneraled by Lee at Chancellorsville. Lincoln had in effect demoted him, giving command of the Army of the Potomac to George Meade, the victor at Gettysburg. “Fighting Joe” Hooker—a nickname he never liked—was in effect on a form of high-level probation.

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