Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (36 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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In the last two days of 1863, it was back to duty. On December 30, Sherman wrote a letter to his brother John in which he said of Grant, “With him I am as a second self. We are personal and official friends.” He added that he was leaving Ohio to return to Memphis to take up his duties as commander of the Army of the Tennessee, the post to which he had succeeded when Grant was given overall command of that army and two others before the Battle of Chattanooga. Grant wrote Halleck on December 31 that he had just arrived at Knoxville and “will go to the front [this] evening or in the morning … Longstreet is at Morristown [Tennessee].”
 
The year 1864, which Sherman had told Ellen would be “the hardest of the war,” began badly for the Grants. In the third week of January, their son Fred suddenly fell ill in St. Louis with what Julia said was “camp dysentery and typhoid fever,” the combination of diseases that carried off Willy Sherman. Julia rushed to St. Louis from Nashville, where she had been with Grant, and found that Fred was already beginning to recover.
Leaving his military duties, Grant hurried to see Fred soon after Julia arrived, and the relieved Grants were briefly reunited in St. Louis, near her family’s farm where they had met. (From St. Louis, Grant wrote Sherman that “I come here to see my oldest boy who has been dangerously ill of Typhoid Pneumonia. He is now regarded by his physician as Out of danger.”) The crisis involving Fred had passed, but Julia received news concerning a less serious medical matter. She was now thirty-seven. All her life she had been conscious of her strabismus, the condition that made one of her eyes go out of focus and squint. When she was younger, an eye specialist in St. Louis had told her several times that he could perform a simple operation that would correct the condition. Julia said of that, “I had never had the courage to consent, but now that my husband had become so famous I thought it behooved me to look as well as possible.” Now, with Fred recovering, she had time to consult with the specialist, and he told her that it was, as she wrote of it, “too late, too late.” Unhappy, she shared this with Grant.
I told the General and expressed my regret.
He replied: “What in the world put such a thought in your head, Julia?” I said: “Why, you are getting to be such a great man and I am such a plain little wife. I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain, Ulys; who knows?” He drew me to him and said: “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had not better make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”
 
Returning quickly to his headquarters at Nashville, Grant plunged back into the problems awaiting him. He referred to the immediate military situation in a typically direct letter to General Thomas: “Longstreet has also been reenforced by troops from the East. This makes it evident the enemy intend to secure East Tennessee if they can, and I intend to drive them out or get whipped this month.”
While making plans that resulted in his forces successfully keeping Longstreet away from his objectives, Grant also gave his attention to the many and varied other matters that inevitably came to his desk. He wrote Halleck of the results of an investigation he had ordered as a result of his suspicions “that there was much useless extravigance [
sic
] in the Quartermaster’s Dept.” His conclusion: “The result has been already to find that Govt. is being constantly defrauded by those whos [
sic
] duty it is to protect and guard the public interest. The guilty parties will be relieved and brought to trial.” In addition, his headquarters in Nashville was being besieged by the wives of Confederate soldiers who wanted to go farther south to see their husbands. Deciding that these requests should no longer be dealt with on an individual basis, Grant informed General Thomas of his solution to the problem. “As it is rather desirable that all such should be where their affections are set, I propose giving notice through the papers setting a day when all who wish will be permitted to go[,] and fix the point where they will be allowed to pass through our lines. Let me know where and when they should be allowed to go.”
Grant had not forgotten the most southerly area of his widespread command and wanted to continue putting pressure on the overall Confederate military effort. Four days after Longstreet broke off his unsuccessful attacks on Knoxville, Grant had written Halleck that he would like to try a previously considered movement to capture the port of Mobile, Alabama. As Grant saw it, whether Mobile fell or not, this would open the prospect of a campaign that would move his forces east from the Mississippi River into Alabama, with a further thrust that might take a Union offensive on into Georgia. This would not only “secure the entire states of Alabama & Mississippi,” but also, as Grant saw it, force Robert E. Lee to give up his positions in Virginia, in order to save the Deep South.
This was imaginative strategic thinking, but it received little support in Washington, where there was doubt that anything could pull Lee out of Virginia. Both Halleck and Lincoln felt that a higher priority should be given to following up against Longstreet in east Tennessee—an idea with which Grant did not disagree, but he felt it could not be implemented during winter weather in the mountains north of Knoxville.
Still wanting to keep the ball moving somewhere, Grant approved Sherman’s idea of making a massive raid on the Confederate railroad center at Meridian, Mississippi, a hundred miles east of Vicksburg. Here, again, Grant was demonstrating his complete confidence in Sherman, and Sherman responded with a successful performance that could have gone badly wrong. He left Vicksburg on February 3 with twenty thousand men, moving under orders that showed that he had learned from Grant’s move against the city of Jackson ten months before. Prefiguring larger moves that he would make, Sherman’s orders stressed the need to move swiftly and to carry only essential equipment. Within days, just the news of Sherman’s advance, which was blasting aside every enemy in its way, convinced Confederate general Leonidas Polk to give up Meridian without defending it. Reaching Meridian, Sherman’s men spent nearly a week destroying everything in the area: 115 miles of railroad track, sixty-one bridges, and twenty-one locomotives, in addition to arsenals, warehouses, and workshops. They returned to Vicksburg, herding along five thousand slaves they had freed, along with another, newer category of refugee—a thousand white Southerners who wanted to place themselves under Union control. The destruction of the Confederate warmaking capacity was the greatly successful side of the military ledger, but on his way to Jackson, Sherman was nearly captured. Another part of the effort, in which seven thousand horsemen under Grant’s cavalry chief General William Sooy Smith were to defeat the four thousand cavalrymen led by the mercurial Nathan Bedford Forrest, failed when Smith did not coordinate successfully with Sherman, and Forrest’s lesser numbers outmaneuvered and occasionally routed the federal troopers. (On the day he got back to Vicksburg, Sherman wrote Ellen, “Somehow our cavalry is not good. The Secech with poor mean horses make 40 & 50 miles a day, whereas our fat & costly horses won[’]t average 10. In every march I have ever made our Infantry beats the Cavalry & I am ashamed of them.”)
Grant and Sherman were to be remembered for their dramatic campaigns, but both men valued the clandestine side of warfare represented by military intelligence. As he was leaving Vicksburg aboard the naval gunboat
Silver Cloud
to return to his headquarters in Memphis, Sherman wrote Grant concerning Confederate troop strength remaining in Mississippi; as for the information he did not yet have, Sherman said, “I have one of my best Memphis female spies out, who will be back in time to let me know all we want.” The Meridian campaign had given Sherman added confidence: a few days after he sent Grant his letter about the female spy, he telegraphed Grant from Memphis, regarding another thrust he intended to make: “Enemy is scattered all over Mississippi and I think the movement indicated will clean them out.”
 
During the time that Sherman was conducting what became known as the Meridian Campaign, Grant wrote a brief letter to Julia. In it he said, “It now looks as if the Lieut. Generalcy bill was [
sic
] going to become a law. If it does and is given to me, it will help my finances so much that I will be able to be much more generous in my expenditures.”
This was Ulysses S. Grant’s way of telling his wife that Congress was going to name him as the first lieutenant general since George Washington received that rank. The promotion would automatically make him general in chief, placing him above Halleck, who under General Orders 98 ceased to hold that position and was “assigned to duty in Washington as Chief of Staff of the Army, under the direction of the Secretary of War [Stanton] and the lieutenant general commanding [Grant].” Ulysses S. Grant would command all the Union armies. He could therefore stay in the West or go east, but he decided to leave his vast Western theater of war, which he intended to turn over to Sherman, and base himself in or near Washington, ready to face Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
There were things that Grant already knew he wanted to do. The man who had grown up with horses was to say that, until now, the campaigns of the armies of the Union had reminded him of draft horses that were pulling the same wagon, but doing it in an awkward and inefficient way. To this point in the war, despite individual Union victories such as Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Gettysburg, the Union Army was divided into nineteen geographical military departments, with the Army of the Potomac an entity unto itself. Generals in all those sectors had been acting, when they did, on their own initiative, often without consultation or coordination with their peers in adjoining departments. This had resulted in sporadic, uncoordinated attacks and campaigns: the South, often given time to recover after a limited Union offensive ground to a halt in one area, was able to move its troops considerable distances and consolidate its forces to counter a new Union threat.
Grant intended to impose a cohesive Union strategy. He was going to be one of the two major figures in implementing that—the other was Sherman. As usual, any officer talking to Grant about a military matter was left in no doubt as to what he wanted and was left with great latitude in accomplishing the objective. Soon, Grant and Sherman would be conferring face-to-face, and Sherman would always remember the overriding concept: “He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston.”
There was no date on the letter in which Grant told Julia the news of his promotion—Sherman would be informed of it as soon as the promotion became official, and a warm exchange of letters between the two men would ensue—but Grant’s letter to Julia was written about February 10, 1864. On that date three years before, Ulysses S. Grant was sitting in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, bored and doing poorly at the job his father had created for him—a retired army captain who had resigned from the service rather than face a court-martial on charges of drinking while on duty. Now he commanded a continually growing army of seven hundred thousand men—seven hundred times the size of the Twenty-first Illinois, the regiment he began to lead thirty-one months before—in the struggle that would decide whether the United States would be two nations or one.
 
GRANT AND SHERMAN BEGIN TO DEVELOP THE WINNING STRATEGY
 
 
 
On March 2, 1864, Grant learned of Sherman’s success in the Meridian Campaign—the march through Mississippi that demonstrated Sherman’s ability to operate independently deep in enemy territory, far from Grant’s headquarters in Nashville, destroying more of the Confederate capacity to make war. Despite the failure of Sooy Smith and his cavalry to carry out their role in the campaign, Sherman’s execution of the large-scale raid, going to and from Meridian, fully justified Grant’s belief in him and foreshadowed the far greater movements that Sherman would soon be making. Grant said of that moment in March, “I was ordered to Washington on the 3
rd
to receive my commission.”
Grant’s promotion to lieutenant general and commander of all the Union armies was now official. On the same day, he wrote Sherman before he was to leave Nashville for Washington the following morning. In his letter, which he marked “Private” and began with, “Dear Sherman,” he included the name of the gifted and enterprising thirty-five-year-old Major General James B. McPherson, of whom they were both fond, and said:
I want to express my thanks to you and McPherson as
the men
to whom, above all others, I feel indebted for whatever I have had of success. How far your advice and suggestions have been of assistance you know. How far your execution of whatever has been given you to do entitles you to the reward I am receiving you cannot know as well as me …
Your friend
U.S. Grant
Maj. Gen.
 
This produced an effusive response from Sherman, writing from Memphis. Marked “(Private and Confidential),” it said in part:
You are now Washington’s legitimate successor, and occupy a position of almost dangerous elevation, but if you can continue as heretofore to be yourself, simple, honest, and unpretending, you will enjoy through life the respect and love of friends, and the homage of millions of human beings that will award to you a large share in securing to them and their descendants a Government of Law and Stability … You do General McPherson and myself too much honor … The chief characteristic in your nature is the simple faith in success, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in a Savior.
 
Looking back on their campaigns together, Sherman now expressed his feeling for Grant: “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come if alive.” He continued, with equal candor, “My only points of doubt were in your knowledge of Grand Strategy and of Books of Science and History. But I confess your common sense seems to have supplied all these.”
Closing this warm statement of appreciation and praise, he said, “We have done much, but still much remains to be done.” Then Sherman, a man of the West speaking to another man of the West, urged Grant to leave Halleck in Washington, where Halleck knew how “to stand the buffets of Intrigue and Policy.” Sherman wanted Grant to run the whole war from the Western theater, and in expressing this he showed his willingness to give up his chance to be the man clearly in command in the West. “Come out West, take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley. Let us make it dead sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and Pacific shores will follow its destiny as surely as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk … From the West when our task is done, we will make short work of Charleston, and Richmond, and the … coast of the Atlantic.”
That was not to be. Grant, accompanied by his son Fred, now thirteen, arrived in Washington on March 8. A welcoming committee met the wrong train, so Grant, dressed in a nondescript linen duster that concealed the general’s stars on his uniform, made his own way to the Willard Hotel with Fred and asked the desk clerk for a room. Unimpressed by the appearance of this rumpled traveler, the clerk handed him a key to a small room on the top floor and asked him to register. When he saw the signature, “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois,” he took back the key, and Grant and Fred were escorted to the best suite in the hotel. After dinner at the hotel, during which everyone in the dining room rose and gave “three cheers for Lieutenant General Grant,” he found a note from the White House: President Lincoln was holding his weekly evening reception and would like General Grant to join him. Grant put Fred to bed and was soon shaking hands with the six-foot-four Lincoln, who looked down at his five-eight choice to lead the armies of the Union and said, “Why, here is General Grant! Well, this is a great pleasure, I assure you.” Lincoln then introduced Grant to Secretary of State William H. Seward. It was Seward who presented Grant to Lincoln’s wife, the mentally erratic and unpredictable Mary Todd Lincoln. On this occasion Mrs. Lincoln was calm and friendly, and began making social conversation with Grant.
The hundreds of guests at first tried to restrain themselves from walking over to get a close look at the man in whom the Union now reposed its hopes, but soon Grant found himself surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers; one guest said that Grant “blushed like a schoolgirl” as he tried to shake the scores of outstretched hands. When the room began to rock with cheers of “Grant! Grant! Grant!” he was persuaded to stand on a sofa so more people could see him, which produced louder cheers. A journalist who was present wrote: “It was the only real mob I ever saw in the White House … For once the President of the United States was not the chief figure … The little, scared-looking figure who stood on the crimson-covered sofa was the idol of the hour.”
The next morning, Grant was back in the White House, where Lincoln presented him with his commission as lieutenant general. After the short ceremony, the two men went upstairs to talk. They had a rapid and complete meeting of minds. As Grant remembered it, Lincoln told him that, in military matters, “all he wanted or ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all of the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance.” Grant’s response: “Assuring him that I would do the best I could with the means at hand, and avoid annoying him or the War Department, our first interview ended.”
A British war correspondent who saw Grant during his initial visit to Washington underscored the same qualities that Lincoln liked so much in this general. “I never met a man with so much simplicity, shyness, and decision … He is a soldier to the core, a genuine commoner, commander of a democratic army from a democratic people. From what I learn of him, he is no more afraid to take responsibility of a million men than of a single company.”
After further conferences with Lincoln and Stanton, and an inspection trip to see General George Meade at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac sixty miles southwest of Washington, Grant got on a train to return for a short time to Nashville and close up his headquarters there. He knew what he wanted to do, and now he had the authority to do it. In line with a suggestion from Sherman that he stay out of Washington with all its intrigues and bureaucracy, Grant would leave Halleck to run the detailed administration of the army from the War Department in Washington, while he set up his headquarters as general in chief near those of Meade on the fighting front in Virginia. From that headquarters in the field, he would plan and oversee the overall campaigns of the Union military effort in the Eastern and Western theaters of war. In addition, he would become the de facto commander of the Army of the Potomac, fighting Robert E. Lee and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the broad battlefront area between Washington and Richmond, but he would issue those orders through Meade. (Grant’s worries about Meade’s potential resentment of being superseded vanished at their first meeting. Meade, the greatly famous victor of Gettysburg, immediately told Grant that he would understand if Grant wished to replace him with Sherman or any of the other generals who had served him well in the West. The important thing was to get on with the job, and he pledged, as Grant admiringly remembered it, to “serve to the best of his ability wherever placed.” Grant “assured him that I had no thought of substituting anyone for him.”)
Grant also had a number of ideas about promotions, demotions, and transfers. Although the Navy Department controlled the assignments of Admiral Porter, with whom Grant and Sherman had worked so well during the Vicksburg campaign, Porter would eventually move from the Mississippi theater to take command of what was known as the Northern Blockade Squadron, on the Atlantic coast. Addressing another aspect of the Union’s military posture and practices, Grant decided to end the virtual autonomy of the army departments such as those controlling supplies and commissary matters, and the legal department run by the adjutant general. Nearly half the soldiers in the Union Army were serving in various assignments well behind the fighting fronts, and Grant determined to reduce those positions “to the lowest number of men necessary for the duty to be performed.”
On March 17, thirteen days after receiving the official notification of his promotion, Grant arrived back in Nashville. At Grant’s request, Sherman had come from Memphis to meet him, bringing four other generals, including Grenville Dodge, who had done such remarkable work in building and repairing railway lines and bridges when construction rather than destruction was needed, and in running the Union spy network in the Western theater—the largest one operated by either side during the war. For two days these men conferred, as Grant handed over to Sherman the daily conduct of the war in the West and the Deep South. Adam Badeau, a journalist who had joined Grant’s staff as military secretary, now for the first time saw Grant and Sherman in the same room.
Sherman was tall, angular, and spare, as if his superabundant energy had consumed his flesh. His words were distinct, his ideas clear and rapid, coming, indeed, almost too fast for utterance, in brilliant, dramatic form …
Grant was calmer in manner a hundred-fold. The habitual expression on his face was so quiet as to be almost incomprehensible … In utterance he was slow and sometimes embarrassed, but his words were well-chosen, never leaving the remotest doubt of what he intended to convey … Not a sign about him suggested rank or reputation or power … [but] in battle, the sphinx awoke.
 
In a hurry to return to Washington, Grant had Sherman and General Dodge accompany him on the train to Cincinnati, with Sherman and Grant smoking cigars as they discussed the campaigns to come. In Cincinnati, Sherman had a brief, bittersweet reunion with Ellen. Her mother, who had raised Sherman from the time he came to live in the Ewings’ house at the age of nine, had died, which brought sorrow to him as well as her. Ellen was pregnant again; they had by letter discussed the idea of naming the baby Willy if it were a boy but decided that it would be too painful a reminder of their son who died the previous summer. Writing Ellen, Sherman had spoken of their feelings in these words: “On reflection I agree with you that his name must remain sacred to us forever [.] He must remain to our memories as though living, and his name must not be taken by any one. Though dead he is still our Willy and we can love him as God only knows we loved him.”
Grant rented a room in a Cincinnati hotel, and for two days he and Sherman pored over maps, as Dodge kept track of all the paperwork involved in their deliberations. The grand strategy was, as Sherman would famously say, “He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston.” In the Confederate military hierarchy, Lee and Johnston were at this time de facto equals under the civilian direction of Jefferson Davis, with Lee leading his Army of Northern Virginia against the Army of the Potomac on the South’s northern front, while Johnston was reorganizing the South’s Army of Tennessee at Atlanta and intending to begin offensive operations. If both men and their armies could be defeated in their separate theaters of war, the South’s ability to fight on would be virtually at an end.
While Grant gave Sherman much latitude in how he was to “go for Joe Johnston,” he stressed certain points. Lee and Johnston had the advantage of operating at relatively short distances from their bases in the interior of the South, while Grant would be attacking from the north and Sherman would have to start his movements from a point 530 miles southwest of Grant and the Army of the Potomac. The danger was that Lee, who had shown immense skill in moving his forces from one critical point to another by railroad, might be able to send reinforcements to Johnston when Johnston needed them, and that Johnston could similarly send large and swift support to Lee. To forestall that, Grant’s and Sherman’s armies had to act in close cooperation, keeping constant pressure on their respective fronts so that there were no quiet moments when either Lee or Johnston could spare troops to send to the other.
Even after their lengthy session in Cincinnati, when Grant got to Washington he reinforced his priorities in a letter to Sherman in which he said, “You I propose to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” Sherman responded by saying, “Like yourself you take the biggest load and from me you shall have thorough and hearty cooperation.” To reassure Grant that he really understood what was wanted of him, he added, “I will not let side issues draw me off from your main plan in which I am to Knock Joe Johnston, and do as much damage to the resources of the Enemy as possible.” (Sherman was to characterize all this as being a policy of “Enlightened War.”)

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