Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (54 page)

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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

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BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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Having expressed his own feelings, he told Grant that Stanton “seeks your life and reputation as well as mine … Whoever stands in his way must die.” About Halleck, a copy of whose recent sycophantic letter he enclosed, Sherman said, “Read Halleck’s letter and see how pitiful he has become. Keep
above
such influences, or you also will be a victim—See in my case how soon all past services are ignored & forgotten. Excuse this letter. Burn it, but heed my friendly counsel. The lust for Power in political minds is the strongest passion of Life, and impels Ambitious Men (Richard III) to deeds of Infamy.”
With that, Sherman subsided for the moment. In fact, not only had Grant written Sherman the recent telegram saying “I know of no order which changed your command,” with its implicit signal that Grant considered him to still have all the authority he held prior to the political explosion, but Grant had sent him a longer letter on May 6 that in effect dealt with much of what Sherman now expressed. In his earlier letter, Grant had explained that Sherman’s long letters to Rawlins and himself about Halleck and Stanton had been delayed and had only just arrived, but what he went on to say about the controversy was much less than what Sherman wanted to hear. Grant wrote that he did “not know how to answer” Sherman’s concerns about what he agreed was an “insult”—Halleck’s countermanding of Sherman’s orders and publishing the fact he had done that. Evidently trying to deflect some of Sherman’s anger against Halleck, Grant had written, “I question whether it was not an answer, in Halleck[’]s style, to directions from the Sec. of War giving him instructions to do as he did.” Then, as if keeping the targets difficult to hit, he added, “I do not know this to be the case although I have spoken to Mr. Stanton on the subject.” Without comment on Sherman’s wisdom in doing so, Grant stated that, having received Sherman’s denunciation of Stanton and his request to have it published, “I requested its publication. It is promised for tomorrow.”
Tentative as his language on political matters seemed to be in this response to Sherman, on another subject—Sherman as a soldier—Grant spoke with his usual directness. Telling him that there was room for disagreement between Sherman and himself concerning Sherman’s original negotiations with Johnston, he said that what had happened then “made no change in my estimate of the services you have rendered or of the services you can still render, and will, on all proper occasions.”
Sherman made no immediate answer to this. The next day, as he marched his main army through Richmond on its way north, Halleck stood for a time on the portico of the house he was using as his headquarters, apparently believing that Sherman’s divisions would feel compelled to salute him as they passed by a few yards away. Every officer and man of the leading column of Sherman’s army—fifty-three thousand of his sixty-five thousand soldiers—marched past that headquarters with eyes straight ahead as if Halleck were not in Richmond. Not a single officer’s sword lifted in salute, and one of Sherman’s ragged riflemen stepped out of the passing column and spat a stream of tobacco juice all over the polished boots of the “very spick and span” sentry standing guard there. (As soon as Ellen learned of this monumental snub, she wrote Sherman that the Ewing clan was “truly charmed” that he had “so good an opportunity of returning the insult of that base man Halleck … I would rather have seen that defiant parade through Richmond than anything else since the war began.”)
As Sherman’s men, many of them barefoot, left Richmond behind and began the last marches and bivouacs on their way to Washington, throughout the North other voices began to be heard. The
Cincinnati Commercial,
which four years before had carried the headline, “General William T. Sherman Insane,” now said, “As to the charge of insanity being made … We wish there were a few more such insane men in the Army.”
The Louisville Journal,
published in the Kentucky city where Sherman had made panicky claims of an impending advance by overwhelming Confederate forces, deplored “the most cruel attacks … upon the integrity and patriotism of the illustrious soldier.”
Among the Shermans and Ewings, there had been some dismay about Sherman’s first agreement with Johnston. On reading the earliest newspaper accounts, Ellen immediately wrote him that “I think you have made a great mistake” in giving such lenient terms to what she called “perjured traitors [and] deserters,” but added, “I know your motives are pure … I honor and respect you for the heart that could prompt such terms.” Then the family closed ranks and began one more of their campaigns to help him in Washington. Sherman’s brother John told him candidly that “for a time you lost all popularity gained by your achievements” but added that public opinion was turning against Stanton and Halleck for their “gross and damnable perversions” of what Sherman had done, and his brother Charles advised him that if Sherman would “act prudently,” it might all turn out well for him.
By no means placated, Sherman sent ahead a letter to a friend in Washington that said, “It is amusing how brave and firm some men become when all danger is past,” and made an unmistakable comparison between Halleck and Shakespeare’s Falstaff. At Sherman’s request, that letter too would soon be published in the Washington papers and, in a demonstration that Sherman was not the only member of the family who knew how to strike fear into the enemy’s heart, his brother the senator wrote anonymously in the
Washington Chronicle
of May 15 that Stanton “must expect open defiance and insult, and neither his person nor his rank can shield him.” What the public did not hear, fortunately, was the sentiment expressed in a letter from Sherman to Ellen in which he told her that the men against him in Washington were “a set of sneaks who were hid away as long as danger was rampant” and that he would “take a regiment of my old Division & clear them out.”
As it was, there were those in Washington who really believed that Sherman was going to march his army straight into the capital. (Their opinion of Sherman was not improved by the fact that Ellen’s brother Tom, a lawyer who had risen to brigadier general before resigning from the army in 1864, had since May 12 been the attorney defending three men accused as lesser conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination.) Sherman had not the remotest idea of participating in or permitting some sort of coup—he had already written Grant that he would enter Washington only upon his express wish, or that of the president, and in addition he would soon go out of his way to reject any suggestions that he would make a good future presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, his army was still angry about what they considered to be the slurs upon him: Theodore Upson, the combat-hardened sergeant of the 100th Indiana who had described the celebrations among Sherman’s men when they heard of Appomattox, complete with a general marching through camp banging on a bass drum in the midst of drunken revelry, wrote in his diary that newspapermen had better “look out … or they would have General Sherman’s army to reckon with the first thing they know.”
So there matters stood. Since Grant and Sherman had mapped out their grand strategy in a hotel room in Cincinnati fourteen months before when Grant was taking command of the entire Union Army, they had met twice, both times within the last seven weeks. On the first occasion, they had conferred with President Lincoln at City Point. Since then, Lee had surrendered, Lincoln had been assassinated, and Grant had rushed to North Carolina to correct Sherman’s dealings with Johnston, his worst mistake of the war. Grant was deeply involved with the myriad issues and details of moving the army from a wartime footing to a peacetime status in a politically tense postwar situation. Sherman was coming to Washington, angry and determined to clear his name. How all this would affect their friendship remained to be seen.
 
GRANT, SHERMAN, AND THE RADICALS
 
 
 
As Sherman’s army marched north through Virginia, now only days away from Washington, at his office in the War Department Grant was trying to juggle a number of matters in the middle of a volatile atmosphere. The congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, a powerful body formed to give the Senate and the House authority to investigate, and thus influence, war policies and the conduct of military affairs, was holding hearings concerning the end of the war and what might lie ahead in dealing with the South. With the sudden vacuum in power caused by Lincoln’s death, and the succession to office of the untried, little-known Andrew Johnson, both political parties were maneuvering vigorously to further their interests. As the Radicals saw it, the white South must be punished for seceding, and the freed blacks be given the vote, or else the war had been fought for nothing. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the former “Peace Democrats” (sometimes called “Copperheads”) believed in gentler treatment for the defeated Confederacy and no vote for the blacks for the time being. Millions of Northern voters found themselves between the two positions.
Grant had been summoned to appear at a session of the committee on May 18, and when Sherman arrived in the Washington area on May 19 he would discover that he had been similarly requested to testify within the next few days. The senior committee chairman, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, was a Radical Republican who was Stanton’s political colleague and friend. (In an interesting example of how political positions could harden, and perceptions change, earlier in the war, after Shiloh, Wade had teamed with his fellow senator from Ohio, John Sherman, to endorse Halleck’s recommendation that William Tecumseh Sherman be promoted to major general of Volunteers.) Lincoln’s death had further hardened some positions: more than before, some Radicals in Congress viewed more moderate Republicans, and the great majority of Democrats, as their enemies.
On one issue, Grant soon confronted the position of those who wanted revenge against the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis, captured in Georgia on May 10, was on his way to confinement at Fortress Monroe on the Virginia coast as a political prisoner, but the Radicals also wanted to arrest Robert E. Lee, now at his house in Richmond, and try him for treason, a crime punishable by death. This would lead to an angry exchange between Grant and President Andrew Johnson. When Grant pointed out that Lee, along with all his army, had left Appomattox with a valid parole that guaranteed he could not be arrested as long as he lived a law-abiding life, the new president demanded to know on what grounds “a military commander interferes to protect an arch-traitor from the laws.”
Grant had an answer to that. Referring to the document he and Lee signed at Appomattox, he said, “My terms of surrender were according to military law, and as long as General Lee observes his parole, I will never consent to his arrest. I will resign the command of the army rather than execute any order to arrest Lee or any of his commanders so long as they obey the law.” Johnson knew better than to precipitate the resignation of the victorious commanding general of the United States Army, and for the time being the matter was put aside.
The paperwork piling up on Grant’s desk also dealt with matters having important implications for the future: the continuing settlement of the Great Plains and the Indian wars. On May 17, Grant wrote to General John Pope, commander of army frontier outposts well to the northwest of any remaining Confederate holdouts. Responding to Pope’s request that he be allowed to keep the people of the Sioux tribe “placed in that relation to the military forces which ensures their protection both against white and red rascals and enemies,” Grant expressed an opinion seldom heard on this subject. After approving Pope’s request, Grant added, “It may be the Indians require as much protection from the whites as the whites do from the Indians. My own experience has been that but little trouble would ever have been had from them but for the encroachments & influence of bad whites.”
On the same day, Grant wrote lengthy instructions to his cavalry leader Philip Sheridan, “assigning you to command West of the Miss. [Mississippi River] … Your duty is to restore Texas, and that part of Louisiana held by the enemy, to the Union in the shortest practicable time, in a way most effectual for securing peace.” Having future trouble with Mexico also in mind, he added, “To be clear … I think the Rio Grande should be strongly held whether the forces in Texas surrender or not and that no time should be lost in getting them there.” This set in motion movements to deploy what would become a total of fifty thousand Union soldiers, including twenty thousand black troops, who would end Confederate resistance and begin the pressure that in time caused Maximilian’s downfall and the restoration of the Juarez government in Mexico. (Sheridan would quietly supply Juarez with sixty thousand rifles for his followers.)
Meanwhile, Grant still felt that Sherman had been badly treated, but to perform his varied duties as general in chief during this transition from war to an uneasy peace, Grant felt he needed to keep a clear and effective line of communication open to Secretary of War Stanton, whose office was near his in the War Department. This soon moved beyond simple courtesies. When Grant fell ill at just this time, with Julia finding it difficult to care for him while they both stayed at a hotel, Stanton suggested to Halleck by telegram that Halleck might offer Grant and Julia the house in the Georgetown section of Washington that he had occupied before Appomattox. Halleck invited them to do so, and the Grants promptly moved in, with Grant thanking Halleck for his “very kind” act.
There was no record made of private talks between Grant and Stanton at the War Department, but certain memoranda he wrote to Stanton suggest that previous discussions occurred. Considering the Radical animus against Confederate soldiers, it is unlikely that, without Stanton’s approval, Grant would have suggested a policy of making recently surrendered rebel soldiers eligible to be recruits for the United States Army. Grant’s wording was that he “would respectfully recommend” that, in addition to opening recruiting stations in the North to enlist men to replace some of the masses of soldiers about to be mustered out, “Citizens of the Southern States, as well as persons who have served in the rebel Armies, be accepted as recruits, but all persons who have been engaged in the rebellion against the U.S. before being received will be required to qualify as loyal Citizens, in addition to taking the prescribed enlistment oath.” Stanton agreed.
Obviously, some backroom compromises were being reached, and Grant felt the need to keep the United States Army, which he commanded, above the partisan political fray. This became clear when he made his appearance before the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Grant might well have been a lawyer who had the army for his client. When the committee’s chairman, Stanton’s friend Benjamin Wade, questioned Grant about Stanton, whose treatment of Sherman Grant had described as “infamous,” the queries and responses went this way.
Question. I wish to place upon our record your answer to the following question. In what manner has Mr. Stanton, Secretary of War, performed his duties in the supply of the armies and the support of the military operations under your charge?
Answer
. Admirably, I think. There has been no complaint in that respect—that is, no general complaint. So far as he is concerned I do not think there has been any ground of complaint in that respect.
Question.
Has there ever been any misunderstanding with respect to the conduct of the war, in any particular, between you and the Secretary of War since you have been in command?
Answer. Never any expressed to me. I never had any reason to suppose that any fault was found with anything I had done. So far as the Secretary of War and myself are concerned, he has never interfered with my duties, never thrown any obstacle in the way of any supplies I have called for. He has never dictated a course of campaign to me, and never inquired what I was going to do. He has always seemed satisfied with what I did, and has heartily cooperated with me.
 
So there it was. Ulysses S. Grant intended to get along with the men who represented the traditional American civilian control of the military. As occurrences within the next few days would prove, he was thinking about his friend Sherman, and would help him, but he had extraordinarily complicated tasks on his hands. In this moment of moving the army around, of garrisoning areas of the South, of preparing to demobilize more than eight hundred thousand men, and with problems ranging from the situations in Texas and Mexico to the question of how to handle the Sioux in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, Grant was ready to protect Robert E. Lee from arrest as a matter of principle, but he wanted all his generals, including Sherman, to say and do nothing that would cause unnecessary political repercussions.
 
There were at this moment two military realities. In Washington, Grant was actively winding down the army’s wartime commitments, and the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac who had faced and defeated Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were in comfortable encampments near the capital, still disciplined and equipped for battle but fully realizing that the war was over and that most of them would soon be going home. In Sherman’s army, the situation was different. Marching northward for hours every day, sleeping in makeshift conditions every night, his men still had the mentality of soldiers whose campaign has not ended. There were of course thoughts of home—an Irishman in the Twenty-first Wisconsin said that on his return he would hire a fifer and a drummer to come to his door in the morning to play reveille, and every day he would roll over and say, “To hell with your reveille”—but the troops continued to think as the highly professional soldiers they had become. As they passed the recently defended Confederate entrenchments between Richmond and Washington, they studied them and decided that they had faced far more difficult defensive positions at Vicksburg, at Missionary Ridge and Seminary Ridge, and at Kennesaw Mountain. When they encountered defeated Confederates, they treated them kindly, but when they saw Union troops of the Eastern army, their esprit de corps led them to make taunting remarks about the “white glove” soldiers, and this led to frequent fistfights.
Among the units of Sherman’s Western army were some from the East that, before being sent west, had begun the war on battlefields south of Washington such as Bull Run. Of Sherman’s 218 regiments, many of them literally decimated, thirty-three were from the East—sixteen from New York, ten from Pennsylvania, three from New Jersey, and two each from Connecticut and Massachusetts. A war correspondent had noted how these Easterners had changed, not only in switching from the forward-sloping visored caps of the Eastern army to the broad-brimmed slouch hats of the Western divisions, but also in the way they marched: they moved with the long, relaxed strides of men who had campaigned across not hundreds, but thousands, of miles.
At the head of all these men, Sherman also studied the battlefields they passed. At Chancellorsville, the scene of Lee’s greatest victory, Sherman’s soldiers saw him walking with his hands clasped behind him, deep in thought as he passed along the ridge near the key position of Chancellorsville House. When he came to Bull Run, Sherman was at the place where he had fought in his first battle of the war. For him, and some of the regiments now following him, that had begun an enormous, bloody, roughly circular route, 2,500 miles in all—out to the Mississippi River and down to Vicksburg, over to Chattanooga, down to Atlanta and east to Savannah and the sea, followed by the final marches north through the swamps of the Carolinas, with this last movement up through Virginia done only to the sound of feet and hooves and wagon wheels on the road, in the unfamiliar silence after the guns stopped firing.
Sherman had some definite ideas of what might lie ahead of his army, if not for himself, when they got to Washington. As far back as his time in Raleigh, he had written Ellen that his final destination, as told to him by Grant during Grant’s visit there to revise Johnston’s surrender terms, would be Alexandria, across the Potomac from Washington, “where I will move my Head Qrs. in anticipation of mustering out the Army.” He told her then that “if I could take all the family to Alexandria to witness the final success attending ‘Shermans’ army it would be a prize in the memory to our children,” and on May 16 he had wired Ellen to come on to Washington. Now, reaching Alexandria on Saturday, May 19, he wrote John Rawlins a letter that announced his arrival and said, “All my army should be in camp near by to-day.” In a slightly offended tone, he indicated that he knew that a great two-day final parade of the Union Army was now planned for May 23 and May 24, but said that “I have seen the orders for the review in the papers, but … it is not here in official form. I am old-fashioned, and prefer to see orders through some other channels, but if that be the new fashion, so be it. I will be all ready … though in the rough. Troops have not been paid for eight or ten months, and clothing may be bad, but a better set of arms and legs cannot be displayed on this continent.” In a mixture of defiance and a desire for acceptance, Sherman closed with, “Send me all orders and letters you may have for me, and let some one newspaper know that the vandal Sherman is encamped near the canal bridge, halfway between Long Bridge and Alexandria, to the west of the road, where his friends, if any, can find him. Though in disgrace, he is untamed and unconquered.” He signed it, “As ever, your friend.”

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