Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (4 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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Grant’s parents were not there: simple, spartan folk, they would have felt uncomfortable at this small but elegant wedding; besides that, Grant’s father, Jesse, was opposed to the concept and practice of slavery, and his son was marrying into a family that owned slaves. (Grant seems to have been indifferent to the issue at this stage in his life, and there is no record of letters or discussions on the subject between father and son at just that time.)
Ulysses and Julia spent the beginning of their honeymoon aboard what Julia called “one of those beautiful great steamboats,” going to Ohio so that Julia and his parents could meet. “Our honeymoon was a delight,” Julia recalled. “We had waited four long years for this event and we adjusted to one another like hand to glove.” Julia had never traveled outside the vicinity of St. Louis and had never been on a passenger vessel. “I enjoyed sitting alone with Ulys … He asked me to sing to him, something low and sweet, and I did as he requested. I do not remember any of the passengers on that trip. It was like a dream to me.” Their visit with Grant’s parents was a success: insofar as Jesse and Hannah Grant could be charmed by anyone, Julia succeeded.
After nearly four years of happy married life, during which the young Grants lived at army posts in upstate New York and in Michigan, in the spring of 1852 his Fourth Infantry Regiment was ordered to California. At that time Ulysses and Julia had a two-year-old son, Frederick Dent Grant, and she was due to have another baby in July. The route the Fourth Infantry was to take involved boarding a ship in New York to make the voyage to Panama, and at that time, long before the Panama Canal was built, this had to be followed by an overland trip across the often disease-ridden isthmus to the Pacific, with the final long leg on another ship to San Francisco. Despite their deep desire to stay together, the Grants decided that the risks to Julia and their son and unborn child were too great, and that he must start serving this lengthy tour of duty alone.
On his regiment’s harsh journey to California, Grant’s hard-won knowledge of logistics, developed as a supply officer during the Mexican War, briefly made him an unsung hero. His position as regimental quartermaster gave him the responsibility of drawing up and executing the plans for moving seven hundred soldiers, plus a hundred of their wives and children, across the Isthmus of Panama at a time when there was a cholera epidemic; it killed nearly a third of them. The toll would have been higher had it not been for Grant’s energy and willingness to take the initiative. The army had authorized Grant an allowance of sixteen dollars, per mule, to rent the beasts of burden to carry women, children, equipment, and what had been assumed would be a few sick persons. Finding no mules for rent at that price during a mounting crisis, Grant cast aside the bureaucracy’s rules, hired mules at double the price, and, burying along the way the men, women, and twenty young children who died, got the survivors to Panama City. There the sick were separated and sent to a vessel, anchored well out in the harbor, that Grant leased for a hospital ship. For two weeks, as more died all around him, Grant remained aboard, arranging for food, medicine, and care. A witness to his efforts said that Grant emerged as “a man of iron, so far as endurance went, seldom sleeping … His work was always done, his supplies ample and on hand … He was like a ministering angel to us all.”
During his first few months in California, Grant received none of the letters Julia sent him and felt their separation deeply. When a letter came, in which Julia had traced the outspread hand of their new son, Ulysses, whom he had never seen, Grant proudly showed the drawing to a sergeant at his post and then, as he turned away, began silently shaking, tears in his eyes. The sergeant said of him, “He seemed always to be sad.” After eighteen lonely months, he applied for orders that would take him back east. On February 6, 1854, writing Julia from Fort Humboldt, a remote post 250 miles north of San Francisco, he said, “A mail came in this evening but brought me no news from you nor nothing in reply to my application for orders to go home … The state of suspense I am in is scarcely bearable.” Grant had already begun to drink. One of his fellow officers observed:
He was in the habit of drinking in a peculiar way. He held his little finger just even with the … heavy glass bottom of the tumbler, then lying his three fingers above the little one, filled in whiskey to the top of his first finger and drank it off without mixing water with it. This he would do more or less frequently each day.
 
Others described him as a man who seldom took alcohol, but went on “sprees” when he did. In any event, his drinking led to the payday when he was drunk while handing out money to the troops. Grant’s colonel offered him the choice of resigning from the army without further explanation, or facing court-martial charges of being drunk while on duty. His West Point classmate Rufus Ingalls described what happened then: “Grant’s friends at the time urged him to stand trial, and were confident of his acquittal; but, actuated by a noble spirit, he said that he would not for the world have his wife know that he had been tried on such a charge. He therefore resigned his commission and returned to civil life.”
As soon as Grant was back with his beloved Julia and their sons, his drinking ceased, despite the struggles to make a living that he experienced in the years before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.
 
 
While Ulysses S. Grant sat bored in his father’s harness and leather goods shop in Galena at the age of thirty-eight, as the collision between North and South grew imminent, 750 miles to the south of him another West Pointer who had left the army as a captain, William Tecumseh Sherman, was reaching a dead end in one more of the careers he had tried since resigning from the service a year before Grant did.
The forty-year-old Sherman was failing dramatically, and this brilliant, nervous, ambitious man felt the frustration and insecurity that marked many phases of his life. When he was nine and living in Lancaster, Ohio, his father, a respected judge of the state’s Supreme Court who was honorably paying off a large debt instead of declaring bankruptcy, suddenly died, leaving his wife and eleven children nearly penniless. Relatives and family friends offered to have the older children live with them, and off they went. He was taken into the handsome big house, a hundred yards away, of Thomas and Maria Ewing, a prominent lawyer and his wife who were raising four children and two nieces and a nephew, all of whom had always played with the young Shermans. When Ewing, a self-made man who stood over six feet tall and weighed 260 pounds, walked in with his new foster son, his pretty brown-haired daughter Eleanor, aged five and always called Ellen, somehow understood that she and this red-haired boy from next door were now going to be raised as brother and sister. “I peeped at him with great interest,” she said. Twenty-one years later they would become husband and wife.
Living in his new home, the boy found that Thomas and Maria Ewing treated him as if he were one of their own children, and yet he always had the feeling of being different. His own mother and youngest brothers and sisters remained in his old house just down the hill, and he frequently ate there. Thomas Ewing had no thought of having the youngster change his name from Sherman to Ewing, but his wife, Maria, was a staunch Catholic and insisted that this new member of her family be baptized. Near the beginning of the christening ceremony the priest asked the nervous boy’s first name, and learned that it was Tecumseh, Tecumseh Sherman—a name given him by his late father, who admired the great Indian chief—and nothing else. The priest pointed out the need to add a Christian saint’s name, stated that the day was the Feast of Saint William, and baptized him as William Tecumseh Sherman.
When young Sherman was taken to Mass, the service meant little to him, but he felt other influences strongly. Two years after he entered the family, the Ohio legislature named his foster father to the United States Senate. Thomas and Maria Ewing believed that their children should work hard at school, they expected success in life for themselves and their entire family, and they tried always to be well-informed (when Senator Ewing was in Washington, his letters home, read to all the children, described dinners at the White House with President Andrew Jackson and conversations with Vice President John C. Calhoun).
Besides these influences, life had instilled some fears in young William Tecumseh Sherman. He had a horror of debt—as he saw it, if his father had not died owing so much money, he and his brothers and sisters would all still be living together with their mother. This feeling about debt extended to a dislike of being dependent on others. He also knew that the family from which he sprang had a history of mental disorders: his maternal grandmother and uncle both spent time in what were then called asylums. This produced a conflict: he needed friendship and love but felt that his world might betray him—fathers died, debts were presented, people became sick in all sorts of ways—and that he could rely only on himself. He yearned for the serenity of his early childhood, but those years would not return. Occasionally rebellious, he was untidy, and his mind leapt from one subject to another, but, in a near guarantee of future frustration, he wanted the world to be a predictable, well-behaved place.
As Cump—a nickname derived from Tecumseh—grew into a gangly, beak-nosed, animated youth, a teenager with a high bulging forehead, a pitted complexion, and a shock of coarse red hair, Thomas Ewing began to think about his foster son’s future. A United States senator has the power to make appointments to West Point: at the age of seventeen, Sherman entered the Military Academy, one of 119 plebes. He excelled in his studies, graduating sixth among the forty-two who completed the four years. (He would have been fourth but for a heavy total of demerits for minor offenses that ranged from holding parties in his room after lights-out to chatting in ranks while on parade.)
In Sherman’s last year at the academy, one of the entering plebes was a Cadet Grant, also from Ohio, who was to have his own problems about his name: his real name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but the congressman who appointed him mistakenly sent his name in as Ulysses S. Grant, and Grant was told that could not be changed. Whenever anyone thereafter asked what the “S” in his name stood for, Grant answered, “nothing,” but Sherman recalled how Grant came by the nickname Sam.
I remember seeing his name on the bulletin board, where the names of all the newcomers were posted. I ran my eyes down the columns, and saw there “U.S. Grant.” A lot of us began to make up names to fit the initials. One said “United States Grant.” Another “Uncle Sam Grant.” A third said “Sam Grant.” That name stuck to him.
 
Graduating from West Point in 1840, Sherman was sent to Florida and joined the campaign against the Seminole Indians; despite serving ably and conscientiously, he experienced none of the hit-and-run fighting that defined this guerrilla war. Subsequent postings took him to a fort near Mobile, Alabama, and to Fort Moultrie, at Charleston, South Carolina. His time with the hospitable and charming citizens of Mobile and Charleston, combined with a brief visit to New Orleans, left him with a great affection for the South. Short assignments to places such as Marietta, Georgia, gave his retentive mind the opportunity to study territory that he would one day revisit under circumstances he would then have considered unthinkable.
In 1846, the Mexican War came; 523 graduates of West Point fought in those battles, many distinguishing themselves in ways that influenced future assignments and promotions, but despite his efforts to get into this second war in six years, Sherman was ordered to duty in California. He served there first as a supply officer and later in various assignments as aide to commanding officers, combining this with responsibilities as an adjutant in charge of paperwork. Writing to Ellen Ewing, to whom he was now engaged, he expressed his reaction to the impressive American victories in Mexico: “These brilliant scenes nearly kill us who are far off, and deprived of such precious pieces of military glory.” In a letter he wrote her in 1848 after the war’s end, Sherman added, “I have felt tempted to send my resignation to Washington and I really feel ashamed to wear epaulettes after having passed through a war without smelling gunpowder, but God knows I couldn’t help it so I’ll let things pass.”
In the meantime, a major event occurred in this California that Sherman considered such a backwater, and he was among the first to learn of it. His commanding officer at the army post in Monterey called him into his office, pointed at some glistening stones brought in by two messengers from a Swiss-born California landowner named Sutter, and asked, “What is that?”
Three years after graduating from West Point, Sherman had seen gold in north Georgia; remembering what he could from his mineralogy course at the academy, he tested one stone and found it so malleable that he could hammer it flat. They were looking at large gold nuggets. The California Gold Rush began. Men of every description left their jobs, heading for the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada to hack through rocks and pan streams in hope of making their fortunes: sailors abandoned their ships; farmers threw aside their plows.
Sherman and his commander, accompanied by four soldiers and the commander’s black servant, set off for the American River near Sacramento to find out for the United States government just what was happening. On Weber’s Creek, a branch of the American River, they were shown a small area where two men had mined gold worth seventeen thousand dollars in a week, at a time when even with rising prices a servant could be hired for ten dollars a day. A little nearby ravine had yielded twelve thousand dollars.

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