Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (40 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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Regimental bands, going along through the night carrying their instruments with them, brought them out and began to play spirited marches. Thousands of men sang. When Sherman later spoke of that night, he called Grant’s decision to move on south the most important act of his life. Grant was going after Lee, whatever the cost, whatever lay ahead. Sherman was not there, but everything he learned confirmed what he knew about his friend’s mind, heart, and methods: “Undismayed, with a full comprehension of the work in which he was engaged, feeling as keen a sympathy for his dead and wounded as anyone, and without stopping to count his numbers, he gave his orders calmly, specifically, and absolutely.”
Grant was taking the Army of the Potomac to Spotsylvania Court House, nine miles southeast of his position in the Wilderness and forty-five miles northeast of Richmond, and into eleven more days of brutal fighting. Lee maneuvered his troops there just ahead of Grant, and on the morning of May 8 the two armies began blasting away at each other. Referring to the Wilderness and the continuing action at Spotsylvania collectively in a letter that he wrote Halleck at eight-thirty in the morning on May 11, Grant said, “We have now ended the sixth day of very hard fighting.” With an optimism he may not have felt, he added, “The result up to this time is much in our favor.” It was favorable in some ways—Grant was moving into Lee’s territory, meeting the great Southern leader move by move, causing Confederate casualties Lee could ill afford—but he also had to report this to Halleck: “We have lost to this time eleven general officers killed, wounded, and missing, and probably twenty thousand men.” (Lee had lost for the time being the severely wounded Longstreet, and his cavalry leader Jeb Stuart had been killed at Yellow Tavern.) In his way of combining the prosaic with the memorable, Grant finished that paragraph of his report with a statement of his commitment: “I am now sending back to Belle Plain all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Two days after Grant wrote to Halleck, the regimental surgeon of the 121st New York Infantry underscored the intensity of the continuing clash in a letter to his wife: “After eight days of the hardest fighting the world has witnessed, I … am still alive … The rebels fight like very devils! We have to fairly club them out of their rifle pits. We have taken thousands of prisoners and killed an army; still they fight as hard as ever.”
 
SHERMAN SAVES LINCOLN’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
 
 
 
As Grant pressed on into almost constant bloody action against Lee in northern Virginia during the summer of 1864, Sherman would determine the fate of more than the success or failure of his march into Georgia to reach Atlanta. Without at first realizing it, Sherman and his army had become a force that could not only fulfill Grant’s strategy to destroy the Confederate military but also save Lincoln’s political future and ensure the prospects for the kind of peace for which the war was being fought.
On June 8, the Republican Convention in Baltimore nominated Abraham Lincoln for a second term as president, with Andrew Johnson to run for vice president, but the North was sick of the war. Later in the summer the Democrats chose as their presidential candidate General George B. McClellan. Relieved of command by Lincoln in September of 1862 because of his delay in pursuing Lee after Antietam, McClellan had gone to his home in New Jersey, still a general but waiting for orders that never came. The Democrats, many of whom were eager to explore ways to end the fighting, saw the well-known and personable McClellan as a candidate who could not be faulted for lack of patriotism and could add legitimacy to the desire for peace. Even among Republicans, a split developed; as a concession to the defeatists among them, the party’s executive committee went so far as to ask Lincoln to open communication with Jefferson Davis, to see if some kind of mutually acceptable terms for peace could be reached.
All this moved forward against a background of rising Union casualty figures. From the time Grant moved into the Wilderness on May 5 until he finished three unsuccessful days of throwing his army against Lee’s defenses at Petersburg on June 18, he had lost sixty-five thousand men killed, wounded, and missing—nearly 10 percent of the entire Union Army at that time.
Among the terrible days were those of the battle at Cold Harbor, only twelve miles northeast of Richmond, an engagement Grant later admitted he should never have fought. Although Grant, Lincoln, and Halleck realized that the destruction of Lee’s army was more important than the capture of Richmond, from June 1 to June 3, Grant made a series of attacks in an effort to break through Lee’s defenses that were so near Richmond, capture the Confederate capital, and possibly end the war right there. On June 3, the last day of these attacks, seven thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded in thirty minutes at Cold Harbor, and the three-day total of Northern casualties came to twelve thousand.
None of this bloodshed had produced a decisive victory—no Shiloh, no Gettysburg, no Vicksburg, no Chattanooga—and, despite Grant’s expressed determination to finish the war in 1864, the people of the North could see no end in sight. President Lincoln’s highly nervous wife, who had chatted pleasantly with Grant at the White House the night he arrived from the West to be hailed as the man who would save the Union cause, now frequently said of him, “He is a butcher.” The Northern public started to distrust newspaper reports of what was happening to their soldiers in Virginia. The first bulletins from Petersburg were of a brilliant capture of the city. The next accounts said that Union troops were not in the city but were taking some of its outer defenses, suffering heavy losses as they did. Next came what proved to be the truth: after being thrown back repeatedly, Grant’s army was digging in opposite those outer defenses and starting to besiege Petersburg. In an effort to breach the formidable Confederate earthworks, a regiment of coal miners from Pennsylvania was set to work digging a tunnel under a sector of the enemy trenches, and this was filled with four tons of gunpowder. Grant was skeptical about the scheme, but on the morning of July 30, the explosion was set off, killing 278 of the Confederate defenders and creating a crater 170 feet long, 70 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. Rather than opening an avenue through which Grant’s forces could rush through Petersburg’s defensive line, this gigantic hole proved to act as a trap—in the crater and the area surrounding it, fifteen thousand Union soldiers milled about ineffectually under enemy artillery and musket fire, and in eight hours four thousand of them were killed or wounded in the disaster that became known as the Battle of the Crater. After this fiasco, which Grant himself termed “a stupendous failure,” there began to be calls for him to be relieved of command. One estimate was that he had lost ninety thousand men in a two-month period.
In fact, despite the severe losses, Grant was winning the war. (A month before Grant started into the Wilderness, Sherman wrote his brother that “Grant is as good a Leader as we can find … Let him alone.”) Lee had fought so hard and well in an effort to throw back Grant toward Washington, precisely to stop him from getting to a strategic position such as the one where he now stood. It was ironic that Grant, who had maneuvered so boldly in all his Western campaigns, was to be thought of only as the bulldog that fought it out toe-to-toe with Lee. Nine days after his costly failure at Cold Harbor, he had taken an enormous gamble: slipping his army away from their entrenchments facing Lee at Cold Harbor in darkness during the night of June 12-13, he had 115,000 of his men moving rapidly to the southeast by the time Lee’s picket line saw in the morning that the Union trenches were empty. The next night, going swiftly to the James River, risking destruction of some of his long columns that were vulnerably strung out on the march, he had an entire corps ferried across the river. By eleven o’clock the following night, his engineers had completed throwing across the James the longest pontoon bridge ever assembled, twenty-one hundred feet in length, and division after division poured across.
Only Lee could have recovered so quickly from this complete surprise. He countered rapidly enough to stop Grant, who was moving south along the east bank of the Appomattox River, from taking Petersburg, twenty-five miles south of Richmond. Nonetheless, Grant had gained a tremendous strategic advantage: he was facing and besieging Petersburg, with his headquarters at City Point on the James River, where his army could be supplied both by land and sea, the latter avenue secured by naval forces under Admiral Porter, his colleague from the Vicksburg campaign. Relentless military logic dictated what Grant could eventually accomplish: with superior forces, he could keep extending his lines to the west into Virginia south of Petersburg, forcing Lee to spread his lesser numbers thinner and thinner to avoid being outflanked, until Grant could break through somewhere. The public in the North, and many Northern politicians, saw only the casualty figures and not the strategy, but at seven a.m. on June 15, commenting on Grant’s enormously resourceful move away from Cold Harbor less than seventy-two hours after he got it under way, Lincoln had sent him a message that said, “I begin to see it. You will succeed—God bless you all.” At just the period when a storm of criticism began to surround Grant, Lee admitted privately that if Grant could get his army in position to besiege Petersburg—something he had now done-Confederate defeat would be “a mere question of time.”
Lee’s prediction, however, assumed that the North would maintain its will to win. From the war’s outset, the stakes had been different for the South and the North. The Confederacy had never dreamed of marching into the more distant Northern cities, nor did it need to do so. From the beginning, the South had hoped to inflict such dramatic defeats upon the North, such bloody losses, that the Northern public would lose heart and cease to support its invasion of an area which, even cut into as it now was in 1864, was larger than any European nation. To win, all that the Confederacy needed was not to lose, and to be left to go its own way, a separate American nation with its institution of slavery intact. For the North to have a fully meaningful victory, federal troops had to destroy the Confederate armies, bring the South to its knees, and impose a peace founded on the concept of one nation, a nation in every part of which slavery was abolished. (Even now, after three years of war, there was no guarantee that a Union military victory would bring an end to slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, after his preliminary proclamation in 1862, declared that all slaves in the states “in rebellion” were free, but this left many questions unanswered. Of itself, the document did not free slaves in Northern or border states, and Lincoln’s authority to take action was based on his wartime powers rather than on an act of Congress. There was a widespread perception that a Union victory, bringing to an end the authority under which Lincoln acted, could render the freeing of the slaves invalid—a concern that would not be remedied until the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, clearly abolishing slavery throughout the United States, was enacted on December 18, 1865, more than six months after the fighting ended.)
The Union’s will to see its overall war aims through appeared to diminish or be undercut every day during the summer of 1864. In a news leak, the Northern public learned that Lincoln had authorized Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the
New York Tribune
and a Republican who was an advocate of negotiations for peace, to meet with Confederate emissaries on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The meeting on July 18 had come to naught—the Southerners proved not to have the authority they claimed to have, and there was no indication that they would have accepted anything but the recognition of the Confederate States of America as a permanent sovereign nation, practicing slavery—but the fact that Lincoln had agreed to such a secret conference caused widespread worry and confusion.
Things got worse. Thurlow Weed, the editor of the
Albany Evening, Journal
and the boss of New York State’s powerful Republican political machine, came out in print with “Lincoln’s re-election is an impossibility.” Even Henry J. Raymond, founder of
The New York Times
, who was chairman of the Republican National Executive Committee, wrote Lincoln privately that “the tide is setting strongly against us.” Raymond laid it right out for Lincoln: Grant’s stalled drive in Virginia was a major and growing election issue. Fewer voters were ready to continue making such bloody sacrifices to ensure the emancipation of slaves, and more of them were ready to accept Southern secession as the price for peace. It was also true that in the coming election, the soldiers of the Union Army would be voting; nineteen Northern states had arranged for their troops to vote by absentee ballot, and the others expected their citizen-soldiers to receive furloughs to come home and vote. Would those hundreds of thousands of military voters endorse Lincoln and a national policy to fight on in a war in which increasing numbers of their comrades were being killed?
Even though Lincoln was the official Republican nominee and the election was scheduled for November 7, during August a number of prominent Republicans began planning to hold a political convention of their own in Cincinnati, to put forward what would in effect be a third-party candidate. On August 23, with the Democratic Convention in Chicago six days away, Lincoln wrote a remarkable memorandum that he intended to use if the Democrats won at the polls in November. He somehow got every member of his cabinet to sign the back side of the paper, without seeing his words, and commit themselves to act on what it said. Then he put it in a desk drawer. It read: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration …”
Lincoln wrote this memorandum to guarantee continuity and cooperation in the transition of administrations that would occur if he were defeated. As he did this, word was just reaching Washington that two days earlier the Confederate cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest boldly attacked Memphis, which was supposed to be solidly in Union possession, and held it for the day; two Union generals fled just in time to escape capture. At the same time came news that, in an action south of Petersburg, federal troops had repelled a Confederate counterattack but in doing so lost 4,445 of the 20,000 Union soldiers engaged. Lincoln, Grant, and the Northern cause desperately needed some good news.
The New York World
asked, “Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the opening of Grant’s campaign?”
 
Sherman, starting toward Atlanta from Chattanooga at the same time in May that Grant began fighting Lee in the Wilderness, found himself in a war of maneuver against his and Grant’s old opponent, Joseph E. Johnston. Robert E. Lee’s friend and West Point classmate, Johnston had been successfully aggressive at Bull Run in July of 1861; after he was wounded in 1862 at Seven Pines, Virginia, his command of Confederate forces in northern Virginia had been taken over by Lee. When he recovered, Johnston was sent west, where his actions during the Vicksburg campaign could be seen either as having been indecisive, contributing to Vicksburg’s fall, or as realistic decisions and clever elusive movements that saved tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers for further service to the Southern cause.
During the time that Grant and Lee locked their armies in close-quarters fighting for eleven days at Spotsylvania, Sherman’s forces outflanked Johnston at Resaca, Georgia. Although Grant and Sherman’s favorite young general James B. McPherson had failed to push through Snake Creek Gap to Resaca in a move that might have destroyed most of Johnston’s army, Sherman kept on outmaneuvering Johnston until the Union forces reached Allatoona Pass, only thirty miles from Atlanta. There Johnston’s divisions consolidated, and the Southern defenses stiffened; by the end of May, the running war between Sherman and Johnston had cost each side about nine thousand casualties, with Confederate general John Bell Hood playing an increasingly important part in the unfolding campaign. Hood, a blond, sad-eyed, aggressive six-foot-two Kentuckian and West Pointer who had been wounded in prewar frontier fighting against the Indians, had first gained fame commanding the Texas Brigade. He was then badly wounded in the arm at Gettysburg and subsequently lost his right leg at Chickamauga. Strapped into the saddle to keep him from falling off his horse when he went into action, Hood was a fearless leader who disliked Johnston and thought he was far too cautious a general. (Lee’s evaluation of Hood, expressed in a letter to Jefferson Davis, was, “Hood is a bold fighter … I am doubtful as to other qualities necessary.”) Later in the campaign, when a worried Jefferson Davis sent General Braxton Bragg south from Richmond to talk with Johnston about his continued withdrawals toward Atlanta and to make his own observation of Sherman’s march into Georgia, Hood wrote an out-of-channels letter to Bragg, subversively criticizing Johnston for being “so directly opposite” to his own view “that we should force the enemy to give us battle.”

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