Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (32 page)
Read Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Online
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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Grant’s responsibilities had just been greatly multiplied, but he had no time to dwell on his rise in the Union Army hierarchy. Staying at the Galt House in Louisville, where he heard reports that the federal forces might be giving up Chattanooga at any time, on October 19 Grant fired off a telegram to General Thomas: “Hold Chattanooga at all hazards. I will be there as soon as possible.” The next morning he was assisted onto a train for Nashville, continuing on toward Chattanooga. A Union soldier who looked into the window of the train as it passed through Murfreesboro wrote home that Grant “was seated entirely alone on the side of the car next to me. He had on an old blue overcoat, and wore a common white wool [cap] drawn down over his eyes, and looked so much like a private soldier, that but for the resemblance to the photographs … it would have been impossible to have recognized him.” At Bridgeport, Alabama, the railroad line had been torn up by Confederate raiders; the only way left open to Chattanooga was to go by foot or on horseback through mountain passes. Grant was placed on a horse, with his crutches strapped to the saddle. In a letter to Julia, he said of the next two days that he endured “a horse-back ride of fifty miles through the rain over the worst roads I ever saw.” At times, Grant had to be lifted off his horse and carried across washed-out places where horses might slip and fall. On the second day, his horse slipped coming down a mountain while he was in the saddle, further damaging his leg. In pain, on the evening of October 23, having gotten through the remaining open land route, Grant arrived at George Thomas’s headquarters, a one-story frame house in the middle of Chattanooga, and had to be lifted off his horse and helped in out of the rain.
Captain Horace Porter, a twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate, was serving as the ordnance officer on Thomas’s staff. He described his first glimpse of Grant: “In an arm-chair facing the fireplace was a general officer, slight in figure and of medium stature, whose face bore an expression of weariness. He was carelessly dressed, and his uniform coat was unbuttoned and thrown back from his chest. He held a lighted cigar in his mouth, and sat in a stooping posture, with his head bent slightly forward. His clothes were wet, and his trousers and top-boots were spattered with mud.”
Grant declined Thomas’s suggestion, made only after an aide to Thomas quietly mentioned the new commander’s bedraggled condition, that he retire to a warm bedroom, change his clothes, and have something to eat. He lit a second cigar and asked for a report on the situation at Chattanooga. Thomas and his chief engineer officer began pointing out the Union and Confederate positions on a large map.
General Grant sat for a time immovable as a rock and as silent as the sphinx, but listened attentively to all that was said. After a while he straightened himself up in his chair, his features assumed an air of animation, and in a tone of voice which manifested a deep interest in the discussion, he began to fire whole volleys of questions at the officers present. So intelligent were his inquiries, and so pertinent his suggestions, that he made a profound impression upon everyone by the quickness of his perception and the knowledge which he had already acquired concerning the army’s condition. His questions showed from the outset that his mind was dwelling not only upon the prompt opening of a line of supplies, but upon taking the offensive against the enemy.
The meeting broke up, but Grant detained Porter, asking him questions about the dangerously depleted ammunition supply. Then, at about nine-thirty, when Porter felt certain that Grant would finally eat and go to bed, the new commander began writing telegrams. The first was to Halleck in Washington, telling him that he had arrived. Uncertain of how the orders handed to him by Stanton concerning the reorganization of the Western armies had been distributed, his second sentence read, “Please approve order placing Genl Sherman in command of Dept. & army of the Tennessee with Hd. Qrs. in the field.” Porter later wrote of Grant, “He had scarcely begun to exercise the authority conferred upon him by his new command when his mind turned to securing advancement for Sherman.” Once again, Grant was using and relying on Sherman as his leading subordinate.
The next day, Grant was taken on an inspection of Union positions. It was a chilling tour. The Union defenders down in the city, which was in a bowl of high hills, numbered forty-five thousand. On the ridges hemming them in on three sides were seventy thousand Confederates. The enemy had cut the principal waterborne supply line that came up the Tennessee River from Bridgeport, Alabama, reducing the defenders’ food supply so much that the hungry troops had been subsisting on half rations. Facing south, with the river at his back, Grant had Raccoon Mountain on his right, Lookout Mountain to the front, and Missionary Ridge on his left. Using his field glasses, Grant studied Lookout Mountain, which loomed twelve hundred feet above him. He could see Confederate cannon and artillerymen up there. Those gunners were in perfect position to drop shells anywhere in Chattanooga in support of Southern infantrymen who might be able to swarm down the slopes and engulf the city. Grant saw all this and decided to go on the offensive.
That night, Captain Horace Porter had his second look at Grant. Told to report at headquarters, he found Grant pointing to a chair and saying “bluntly but politely, ‘Sit down.’” After Grant asked him several questions concerning the type and placement “of certain heavy guns which I had recently assisted in putting in position,” Grant began writing dispatches. When Porter rose to go, Grant said, “Sit still.”
My attention was soon attracted to the manner in which he went to work at his correspondence … His work was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly … He sat with his head bent low over the table, and when he had occasion to step to another table or desk to get a paper he wanted, he would glide rapidly across the room without straightening himself, and return to his seat with his body still bent over at about the same angle at which he had been sitting when he left his chair.Upon this occasion he tossed the sheets of paper across the table as he finished them, leaving them in the wildest disorder. When he had completed the dispatch[es], he gathered up the scattered sheets, read them over rapidly, and arranged them in their proper order. Turning to me, he said, “Perhaps you would like to read what I am sending.”
The captain thanked the general and began to read. He found that Sherman’s entire expeditionary force of twenty thousand, en route from the areas of Vicksburg and Memphis by train and road, was being urged to proceed to within “supporting distance” of Chattanooga as quickly as possible. A message to Halleck explained how attacks were going to reopen supply lines. Measures would be taken “for the relief of Burnside in east Tennessee.” Most of the hungry and exhausted horses now with the army in Chattanooga were to be sent to quiet areas “to be foraged.” Paging through the sheaf of papers, Porter noted that “directions were also given for the taking of vigorous and comprehensive steps in every direction throughout his new and extensive command.”
As Grant bade him good night and went off to bed, Porter concluded from what he had seen of Grant while he was writing, and from what he had just read: “His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as the ink from his pen; he was never at a loss for an expression, and seldom interlined a word or made a material correction.” What Porter did not know was that Grant had decided to add him as a future member of his staff.
While Grant came east to take control at Chattanooga and begin planning immediate counterstrokes, Sherman had experienced some perilous moments as he made his own way east toward his commander in their new theater of war. On the morning of Sunday, October 11, Sherman had left Memphis for Corinth on what he described as “a special train, loaded with our orderlies and clerks, the horses of our staff, the battalion of the Thirteenth United States Regulars, and a few officers going forward to join their commands, among them Brigadier-General Hugh Ewing [Ellen’s brother].” Some men of Sherman’s beloved Thirteenth Infantry were assigned to guard the train by sitting on the roofs of the cars with their muskets beside them. As the train rattled along east of Memphis on this peaceful Sunday morning, these soldiers waved as they passed and left behind them the men of Sherman’s Fourth Division who were marching along a road, beginning their long eastward march to the relief of Chattanooga.
At noon, just as the train passed the depot at Collierville, Tennessee, twenty-six miles east of Memphis, a force of enemy raiders that Sherman described as “about three thousand cavalry, with eight pieces of artillery” tried to surround it. Sherman took command of the situation, quickly having the train back up into the station and linking up with the 250 Union soldiers of the Sixty-sixth Indiana who comprised the Collierville garrison. For defensive positions, he had his greatly outnumbered combined force use the train station, a nearby blockhouse, and what he described as “some shallow rifle-trenches near the depot.” As the enemy horsemen were about to cut the telegraph line out of Collierville, Sherman sent out a call for help; before the line went dead, he received the words, “I am coming,” from Brigadier General John M. Corse, commander of the first brigade of the Fourth Division the train had passed that morning and whose men were still hours away from Collierville.
A blazing battle between five hundred Union soldiers and the three thousand Confederates ensued, in which the South just missed capturing what would have been its most important prisoner of the war. At one point, when a sergeant begged Sherman to stop standing up amid a fusillade of bullets “as though he was standing on parade,” Sherman told him to mind his own business. The train’s conductor remembered this: “I was somewhat frightened at first, but when I saw such a great man as he so unconcerned amid all the balls flying around him, I did not think it worthwhile for me to be scared.” Sherman’s matter-of-fact account mentioned none of that.
The enemy closed down on us several times, and got possession of the rear of our train, from which they succeeded in getting five of our horses, among them my favorite mare Dolly; but our men were cool and practiced shots (with great experience acquired at Vicksburg), and drove them back. With their artillery they knocked to pieces our train; but we managed to get possession again, and extinguished the fire … The fighting continued all round us for three or four hours, when we observed signs of drawing off, which I attributed to the rightful cause, the rapid approach of Corse’s division, having marched the whole distance from Memphis, twenty-six miles, on the double-quick. The next day we repaired damages to the railroad and locomotive, and went on to Corinth.
With Sherman still on the way, at Chattanooga Grant started his surprise counteroffensive about seventy-seven hours after he arrived. The object was to reopen the principal supply line, closed by the enemy. At midnight on October 26, his subordinate commander W. F. Smith started a march down the looping north bank of the Tennessee River with twenty-eight hundred men. Three hours later, in a move that in its way was as bold as Grant’s running the Confederate batteries at Vicksburg, Brigadier General William B. Hazen put eighteen hundred men aboard pontoons made for river crossings, and that force glided silently down the Tennessee, passing Smith’s troops who were quietly marching along beside the river. At five in the morning, Hazen’s soldiers captured the startled Confederate guards at Brown’s Ferry on the opposite bank and started using their pontoons to ferry Smith’s men across the river as they arrived. Smith’s troops, all across by seven a.m., started digging in, and Hazen’s soldiers stopped using their pontoons as ferryboats and started lashing them together so that a bridge could be built on top of them. By ten in the morning, a powerful Union position was in place, well behind the Confederate lines, where nothing had existed the day before. The following afternoon, completing the execution of Grant’s quickly improvised plan, General Joseph Hooker brought his force up the river from Bridgeport.
Reinforcements began to pour into Chattanooga; the question now was whether this reopened supply line could be kept open. Captain Porter commented on the situation: “As soon as the enemy recovered from his surprise, he woke up to the importance of the achievement; Longstreet was despatched to retrieve, if possible, the lost ground.”
For the first time in the war, Grant was facing his old West Point classmate, Julia’s cousin who had fought beside him in the Mexican War and was the best man at his wedding. Longstreet waded right in, coming to Wauhatchie (in Lookout Valley, just west of Lookout Mountain) south of Chattanooga at night on October 28 and making a midnight attack on an outnumbered division commanded by Union general John W. Geary. After four hours, Longstreet’s men were routed in the darkness by the most unusual charge made during the war. Captain Porter explained what happened.
During the fight Geary’s teamsters became scared, and had deserted their teams, and the mules, stampeded by the sound of battle raging around them, had broken loose from their wagons and run away. Fortunately for their reputation and the safety of the command, they started toward the enemy, and with heads down and tails up, with trace-chains rattling and whiffletrees snapping over the stumps of trees, they rushed pell-mell upon Longstreet’s bewildered men. Believing it to be an impetuous charge of cavalry, his line broke and fled.The quartermaster in charge of the animals, not willing to see such distinguished services go unrewarded, sent in the following communication: “I request that the mules, for their gallantry in action, may have conferred upon them the brevet rank [an honorary promotion] of horses.” Brevets in the army were being pretty freely bestowed at the time, and when this recommendation was reported to General Grant he laughed heartily at the suggestion.
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