Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (46 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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That night, as the winds continued, Sherman saw that “the whole air was full of sparks and flying masses of cotton, shingles, etc. some of which were carried by the wind for four or five blocks, and started new fires.” He ordered an entire division of his troops to start fighting the spreading blaze, but while they did this, many blacks and drunken Union soldiers wantonly started other fires. (At least one Union officer said that even many of the sober and disciplined troops, ordered to fight the fire, ceased to do so whenever the officers’ backs were turned. When a particularly disciplined brigade was ordered to round up the drunk and disorderly soldiers on the streets, one of the unit’s officers said that they “very frequently had to use force, and many men would not be arrested, and were shot. Forty of our men were killed this way, many were wounded, and several dead drunk men were burned to death.”) Only at four in the morning, when the wind stopped, could the fire be brought under control. By then, a third of the city was in ashes.
The burning of Columbia became the subject of endless argument and investigation. It entered the Southern psyche as a deliberate, organized effort to burn an entire city to the ground, after its military defenders had left and it had surrendered and was clearly offering no resistance. Many of its residents had certainly seen Sherman’s soldiers setting fires. General William B. Hazen, whose division furnished the brigade that began shooting their drunken fellow Union soldiers who resisted arrest, took the position that “no one ordered it, and no one could have saved it.” Sherman’s attitude seems to have fallen somewhere between callous indifference and vengeance: he later said defiantly, “If I had made up my mind to burn Columbia, I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village, but I did not do it.” Two weeks after the conflagration, a colonel who had not been there heard Sherman say in an informal conversation, “Columbia!—pretty much all burned, and burned
good!”
By the time Sherman marched one of his principal columns toward the outskirts of Goldsboro, North Carolina, in the state’s interior, forty-five miles southeast of Raleigh, his men thought that their “Uncle Billy” was nearly superhuman. He felt the same way about them: as he had watched the 104th Illinois stride into Fayetteville after marching through fifteen miles of thick mud in five hours, he said, “It’s the damndest marching I ever saw,” and he noted that fewer men in his army were sick on the march than when they were in relatively permanent camps. As he moved up through North Carolina, Sherman’s confidence grew: in a report that he sent to Grant on March 22 concerning everything his army had done the previous day, he referred to three of his generals: “Our combinations were such that Schofield entered Goldsboro, from New Bern, Terry got Cox’s brigade with pontoons laid and a bridge across [Mill Creek] and Entrenched, and we whipped Joe Johnston on the same day.”
“Whipped” suggests a greater victory than what took place. At the Battle of Bentonville to which Sherman referred, his troops inflicted more casualties than they sustained, but he failed to press home an initially successful attack on Johnston’s left flank, and when Johnston, who had replaced Beauregard, counterattacked and then extricated his forces from the battlefield with his usual defensive skill, Sherman did not pursue him.
Here was a major difference from Grant’s behavior. After every battle, Grant did everything to “keep the ball moving.” Indeed, for Grant, that further effort to pursue, to exploit whatever had been gained, was seemingly a reflex action, a part of the battle itself. Perhaps, despite Sherman’s admiration for Grant, Sherman had been influenced more than he knew by the French military thinker Jomini, whose preference for winning by maneuver rather than frontal attack Halleck emulated. Sherman often said that he wanted to minimize his casualties, and he did, but at Bentonville he missed the opportunity to deal Johnston a blow that might have shortened the war and in the process spared both sides suffering yet to be endured.
Nonetheless, Sherman was proving himself a master of maneuver. Moving on after Bentonville, the men with Sherman felt themselves to be part of an irresistible northward march. As they came in sight of the houses of Goldsboro on the afternoon of March 22, they saw, in what seemed a remarkable piece of military choreography, a heartening sight: “A locomotive train came thundering along from the Sea 96 miles distant loaded with shoes, & pants, & clothing as well as food.”
The following day, when they all entered Goldsboro, they found Brigadier General John Schofield waiting for them with his Twenty-third Corps. (At Atlanta, when Sherman wanted to know what to expect from his new opponent John Bell Hood, it was Hood’s West Point classmate Schofield who told him that Hood would attack within forty-eight hours—an estimate that Hood undercut when he attacked the next day.) Here at Goldsboro, within twenty-four hours, eighty thousand men of Sherman’s army, an army that had been moving through North Carolina along several routes, some that included swamps, were reassembled in one gigantic encampment. All of them had marched 330 miles or more since leaving Savannah on their different missions, some of them covering the distance in as little as twenty-one days.
Sherman’s entire army had become men whose marches rivaled those of the Roman legions. From the time they had left Meridian, Mississippi, after the Vicksburg campaign, his forces had traveled more than two thousand miles. Coming into Goldsboro, more than half the men had worn out their shoes and were walking on calloused bare feet, and the uniforms of most of the soldiers who proudly swung past Sherman had rotted into rags. When a Union general who was beside him said of the passing troops, “Look at those poor fellows with bare legs,” Sherman, whose own uniform was in little better condition, shot back with, “Splendid legs! Splendid legs! I’d give both of mine for any one of ’em.”
As the army paused briefly at Goldsboro to rest, even some Southerners were ready to give Sherman credit for the unconventional strategy that had brought his army so far. At this point, after nearly four years of war,
The Richmond Whig
said, “Sherman is simply a great raider. His course is that of a bird in the air. He is conducting a novel military experiment and is testing the problem whether or not a great country can be conquered by raids.”
Despite Sherman’s failure to pursue after Bentonville, in a recent letter to Grant he had appropriated Grant’s own phrase, “keep the ball moving,” and was thinking hard about his role in what he had no doubt was the impending end of the war. He wanted to be in at the kill, not only defeating Johnston but also sharing in the defeat of Lee. (His soldiers shared the same feeling: a sergeant from Iowa wrote home that “it is the talk of the Boys now that our next moove [sic] will be in the direction of Richmond, but the boys say it is hard to tell which way Crazy Bill will go for he goes wherever he wants and the rebs can[’]t help themselves.”)
Sherman had no way of knowing that Grant, also certain that the end was near, had come to think that it would be better for the postwar political situation if his Eastern forces defeated their old adversary Lee by themselves. Even though he was a man of the West himself, Grant felt that if Sherman’s men completed their remarkable series of campaigns by coming up from North Carolina into Virginia to take a large part in defeating Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, “It might lead to disagreeable bickering between members of Congress of the East and those of the West” as to which area of the nation deserved credit for winning the war. (Grant was to say that when he spoke of his concern about this to Lincoln, the president considered it valid but told Grant that he “had never thought of it before, because his anxiety was so great that he did not care where the aid came from so [long as] the work was done.”)
With the subject of the war’s final strategic moves on his mind, Sherman wrote Grant on March 23 that “if I get the troops all well placed, and the supplies working well, I might run up to see you for a day or two, before diving into the bowels of the Country again.” The following day he added in another letter that “I think I see pretty clearly how in one more move we can checkmate Lee, forcing him to unite Johnston with him in the defense of Richmond, or by leaving Richmond to abandon the cause. I feel certain that if he leaves Richmond[,] Virginia leaves the Confederacy.”
There is no record of Grant’s response to Sherman’s “I might run up to see you for a day or too,” but on March 25, when his engineering troops finished repairing the torn-up rail line from Goldsboro to New Bern, Sherman left his army under the command of General Schofield and started for Morehead City, a port on the North Carolina coast nearly a hundred miles away. According to a reporter from
The New York Herald,
when Sherman stopped overnight at New Bern, sixty miles southeast of Goldsboro, some of his off-duty soldiers saw him walking down the street and enthusiastically “rushed around him as if they were going to tear him to pieces and all the while calling for a speech.” Sherman said only this to them: “I’m going up to see Grant and have it all chalked out for me and then come back and pitch in. I only want to see him for five minutes and won’t be gone but two or three days.” At Morehead City the following day, Sherman embarked on the swift steamer
Russia,
a captured Confederate blockade-runner. Writing Ellen from the ship as it moved north, he told her, “There is no doubt we have got the Rebels in a tight place and must not let them have time enough to make new plans … I will now concoct with Grant another plan.” In closing he said, “The ship is pitching a good bit, we are just off Hatteras, and I cannot write more.”
Heading north at sea, moving toward his friend and military superior, Sherman was coming to an almost symmetrically placed point in the plans that he and Grant had made in that hotel room in Cincinnati a year before. They had not seen each other since, but in the meantime they had indeed lived Grant’s dictum, which Sherman expressed as, “He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston.” They had done that. The remaining question was still the one Lincoln had asked after the capture of Savannah: “But what next?”
 
GRANT, SHERMAN, AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN HOLD A COUNCIL OF WAR—AND PEACE
 
 
 
Sherman’s destination, Grant’s busy headquarters at City Point, was on the same side of the Appomattox River as besieged Petersburg, nine miles away. It was at just that time a particularly interesting and dramatic place to be. President Lincoln enjoyed getting out of Washington and being with the troops, and his son Robert, who had graduated from Harvard the year before, was now serving as a captain on Grant’s staff. Lincoln and his wife had recently arrived for an extended stay. On the same day that Sherman left his men at their inland encampment at Goldsboro in North Carolina, Lincoln at City Point had been taken to a hill near the Petersburg front to watch the battle for Fort Stedman, an effort by Lee to break and weaken Grant’s line that cost the Confederacy more than four thousand casualties in one day.
During this presidential visit, it was Julia Grant’s misfortune to have to deal with Lincoln’s mentally unstable wife, who frequently had the idea that every woman was trying to steal her husband. In addition, Mary Todd Lincoln insisted on having every kind of privilege accorded her and often saw slights where none were intended. The Lincolns stayed aboard a handsome ship, the
River Queen,
which brought them down from Washington and was anchored in the river. Grant had at his disposal a smaller vessel, the
Mary Martin,
a fast little steamship that was frequently tied up at a dock near headquarters. The first time the Lincolns came ashore, the
River Queen
was brought alongside Grant’s
Mary Martin,
and the Lincolns walked across the
Mary Martin’s
decks to the dock, where they were greeted by Grant and Julia. That happened only once: Mrs. Lincoln let it be known that she did not want to have to cross another ship’s deck to come ashore, and while soldiers were dying some miles away, Grant’s vessel was moved out into the river every time she wanted to come ashore, so that she could step straight ashore from the presidential ship. A most unfortunate outburst occurred when, sitting beside Julia in an ambulance being used as a carriage at a large military review, she saw the beautiful wife of General Edward Ord, a stylish woman who was a superb equestrienne, riding her horse in a party of generals and other notables that included Lincoln. When Mrs. Ord was brought alongside the makeshift carriage to be presented to Mrs. Lincoln, her horse wheeled and carried her off in pursuit of the group that included Lincoln. An officer tried to explain to the jealous Mrs. Lincoln that Mrs. Ord’s horse was trained to stay near General Ord. The man added, trying to be helpful and pleasant, that the horse “will not let the lady leave her husband’s side. I would recommend that you get one just like it. If you would like … I will try to get him for you; he is just what you want.” Mary Todd Lincoln took this as a warning that Mrs. Ord might steal Abraham Lincoln from her if she did not get a horse and ride right beside him and angrily cried out, “What do you mean, Sir?” It took all of Julia’s tact and good sense to soothe her, and even then Mrs. Lincoln struck out at Julia with, “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?”
Lincoln, on the other hand, seemed to be calmer, even within the sound of the cannon firing back and forth at besieged Petersburg, than in Washington. He enjoyed riding Grant’s big horse Cincinnati—Grant let no one else ride his favorite mount—but Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter of Grant’s staff remarked that he seemed sad and tired, and described something that happened in one of the headquarters tents.
Three tiny kittens were crawling about the tent at the time. The mother had died, and the little wanderers were expressing their grief by mewing piteously. Lincoln picked them up, took them on his lap, stroked their soft fur and murmured: “Poor little creatures, don’t cry; you’ll be taken good care of,” and turning to Bowers [a colonel of Grant’s staff], said: “Colonel, I hope that you will see that these motherless little waifs are given plenty of milk and treated kindly.” Bowers replied: “I will see, Mr. President, that they are taken in charge by the cook of our mess, and are well cared for.”
Several times during his stay Mr. Lincoln was found fondling these kittens. He would wipe their eyes tenderly with his handkerchief, stroke their smooth coats, and listen to them purring their gratitude to him. It was a curious sight … upon the eve of a great military crisis in the nation’s history, to see the hand which had affixed the signature to the Emancipation Proclamation … tenderly caressing three stray kittens.
 
On the morning of March 27, Grant’s headquarters received the news that Sherman had arrived at Fortress Monroe, on the Virginia coast, and that the
Russia
was proceeding up the James River to City Point. The reunion about to take place came not only at a critical point in the war but also at a critical moment in each of their careers. Sherman’s far-ranging campaigns had made him so famous that there were now those who thought that when victory came he might be made some sort of American dictator, or at least become president. (Of the latter idea, Sherman wrote to a friend, “You may tell
all
I would rather serve 4 years in the Singsing Penitentiary.”)
In contrast with the image Sherman had gained of being the all-conquering general, Grant was embedded in the public mind as the bulldog who knew only how to throw regiments straight ahead in his constant bloody battles with the equally tenacious Lee. In fact, like Sherman and Lee, Grant was a great practitioner of the war of movement: he had demonstrated that skill in his Western campaigns and in his slipping 115,000 men away from Lee’s front after Cold Harbor to reappear swiftly before Petersburg. In the last year, however, both Grant and Lee had become prisoners of the Confederate determination to hold the two neighboring cities of Richmond and Petersburg at all costs, a political decision that required Lee to defend that area. Grant’s goal was to destroy Lee’s army rather than to capture Richmond, but to do the one thing, it appeared that he would have to do the other as well.
Whatever the public perception of him, Grant was doing much more than presiding over the war of attrition against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia: as general in chief, in the days just before Sherman arrived he sent specific operational orders to the commander at Knoxville, made recommendations for a reorganization of the command structure for Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas, suggested a campaign be made in northeast Texas to subdue the remaining Confederates there, and dealt with matters concerning the United States Army as a whole that involved promotions, prompt pay for black soldiers, and the exchange of prisoners.
Grant’s aide-de-camp Porter stood nearby as Sherman arrived aboard the
Russia
at three in the afternoon.
General Grant and two or three of us who were with him started down the wharf to greet the Western commander. Before we reached the foot of the steps, Sherman had jumped ashore and was hurrying forward with long strides to meet his chief. As they approached Grant cried out, “How d’you do, Sherman?” “How are you, Grant!” exclaimed Sherman; and in a moment they stood upon the steps, with their hands locked in a cordial grasp, uttering earnest words of familiar greeting. Their encounter was more like that of two school-boys coming together after a vacation than the meeting of two actors in a great war tragedy.
 
Grant walked Sherman up to his headquarters, where Julia greeted Sherman warmly, and members of Grant’s staff crowded around. Porter said, “Sherman then seated himself with the others … and gave a most graphic description of the events of his march through Georgia. The story was the more charming from the fact that it was related without the manifestation of the slightest egotism. Never were listeners more enthusiastic; never was a speaker more eloquent. The story, told as he alone could tell it, was a grand epic related with Homeric power.” Another officer noted Sherman’s appearance: “his sandy whiskers closely cropped … sharp twinkling eyes, long arms and legs, shabby coat, slouch hat, his pants tucked into his boots.” A man from Massachusetts who first saw him during this visit observed that “his features express determination, particularly the mouth, which is wide and straight with lips shut tightly together … a very remarkable-looking man such as could not be grown out[side] of America—the concentrated essence of Yankeedom.”
After an hour of Sherman’s accounts, Grant said, “I’m sorry to break up this entertaining conversation, but the President is aboard the River
Queen,
and I know he will be anxious to see you. Suppose we go and pay him a visit before dinner.” About an hour after that, the two generals returned to Grant’s log cabin. This first visit had been largely a courtesy call; Lincoln had initially expressed concern that Sherman was not with his army but then relaxed and listened intently to Sherman’s stories of his recent campaigns. It was understood that Grant and Sherman were to meet with Lincoln the following morning for a conference on the military and political strategy to be followed in ending the war.
Porter had been talking with Julia as he waited for his chief to reappear and witnessed what came next. Julia had prepared the two generals some tea, and as they entered, she asked her husband, “Did you see Mrs. Lincoln?” Grant, taken aback, said “Oh,” and sheepishly added, “We went rather on a business errand, and I did not ask for Mrs. Lincoln.” Sherman chimed in with, “And I didn’t even know she was on board.”
“Well, you are a pretty pair!” Julia said, chiding them. “I do not see how you could have been so neglectful. Now, you have got your foot in it.”
Grant replied contritely, “Well, Julia, we are going to pay another visit in the morning, and we’ll take good care then to make amends for our conduct today.”
“And now,” Sherman suggested to Grant as they settled down with their tea, “let us talk further about the immediate movements of my army.”
At this point Julia said, “Perhaps you don’t want me here listening to all your secrets.”
Sherman smiled at Julia and asked, “Do you think we can trust her, Grant?”
“I’m not so sure about that, Sherman,” Grant answered lightheartedly. This led to some banter about Julia’s trustworthiness, and Sherman said, “Now, Mrs. Grant, let me examine you, and I can soon tell whether you understand our plans well enough to betray them to the enemy.”
“Very well,” Julia replied. “I’m ready for all your questions.”
Porter described what happened next. “Then Sherman turned his chair squarely toward her, folded his arms, assumed the tone and look of a first-class pedagogue, and, in a manner which became more and more amusing as the conversation went on, proceeded to ask all sorts of geographical questions about the Carolinas and Virginia.”
In fact, Julia had studied the big headquarters maps with great interest during her sometimes weeks-long visits to City Point and knew a great deal about the territory in which the Union forces were operating. She decided to answer “wide of the mark,” as she later put it. Porter said, “When asked where a particular river in the South was, she would locate it a thousand miles away, and describe it as running up stream instead of down; and when questioned about a Southern mountain she would place it somewhere in the region of the north pole. Railroads and canals were also mixed up in interminable confusion.”
After some minutes of what Julia described as “throwing dust in Sherman’s eyes,” with Grant enjoying it all greatly, Sherman turned and said, “Well, Grant, I think we can trust her.” Then he said to Julia, “Never mind, Mrs. Grant; perhaps some day the women will vote and control affairs, and then they will take us men in hand and subject us to worse cross-examinations than that.”
Grant suddenly spoke up. “Not if my plan of female suffrage is adopted.”
“Why, Ulys,” Julia said, “you never told me you had any plans regarding that subject.”
“Oh, yes,” Grant continued. “I would give each married woman two votes; then the wives would all be represented at the polls, without there being any divided families on the subject of politics.”
Then Grant and Sherman got down to business, in what Julia called “a long talk of troops and movements.” They both knew the various possibilities—the war could end with Sherman defeating Johnston in North Carolina and Grant defeating Lee in Virginia, or Lee might make a sudden march south with the remains of his Army of Northern Virginia to link up with Johnston for a final combined stand, or Johnston might be able to come north to aid Lee. Sherman now said that whatever movements Johnston might make, he felt he could march north immediately to join in a final defeat of Lee. “Grant, if you want me to help you, I can come up. Yes, I can manage it, I’m sure.” Grant answered, “No, I can manage everything myself. You hold Joe Johnston just where he is. I do not want him around here.”
When dinner was announced, Sherman took Julia into the headquarters mess on his arm. After all the other dinner guests had gone and Grant and Sherman continued to talk, with Grant’s staff officer Horace Porter still present, thirty-four-year-old Major General Philip Sheridan arrived near midnight, explaining that he was late because the train bringing him had been derailed. In the sixteen months since Grant commended him for his “prompt pursuit”—indeed, the only effective pursuit—of the enemy after the taking of Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga at the end of November 1863, Sheridan had risen to hold a unique place within the Union Army. From being an able, aggressive commander of foot soldiers who had experience with mounted troops, he had become the leading cavalry general whose seven-month-long Shenandoah Valley Campaign against Jubal Early laid waste the fertile valley to the point that Sheridan said, “A crow could not fly across it without carrying his rations with him.” His campaign produced the important victories at Winchester, Fisher’s Hill, and Waynesboro, but his most dramatic day came at Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864. When Sheridan, returning from a conference in Washington, learned at Winchester in the morning that his army had been routed in a surprise attack eight miles to the south at Cedar Creek, he raced there on his horse Rienzi. Arriving amid his demoralized retreating troops at about ten-thirty a.m., he leapt Rienzi across an improvised barricade made of fence rails. Facing his startled soldiers, he bellowed, “Men, by God, we’ll whip them yet! We’ll sleep in our old tents tonight!”

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