Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (55 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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This brought an almost instant reply, not from Rawlins but from Grant, who tried to soothe Sherman’s feelings about having to learn of his army’s part in the forthcoming “Grand Review” by reading the newspapers. “I am just in receipt of yours of this date,” Grant began. “The orders for review was only published yesterday, or rather was only ready for circulation at that time, and was sent to you this morning.”
Then Grant got down to more serious business.
I will be glad to see you as soon as you can come to the City, can you not come in this evening or in the morning? I want to talk to you upon matters about which you feel sore, I think justly so, but which bear some explanation in behalf of those who you feel have inflicted the injury.
Yours truly,
U.S. Grant Lt. Gen.
 
By the next morning, Sherman had not yet gone to see Grant, and members of Sherman’s family, across the river from the huge encampment of Sherman’s army at and around Alexandria, started worrying about him. Washington was abuzz with talk that Sherman and his men wanted to cross the Potomac and physically punish and perhaps remove Stanton and other officials. In his diary entry for that day, Ellen’s brother Major General Hugh Ewing—three of her four brothers had become generals—said that “the threats of Gen. Sherman against the authorities, that we heard on the streets this morning, made it necessary that he be counseled, and I found John Sherman in Willard’s barbershop in the chair, took him to Charles Sherman’s room, where the Shermans and Gen. Tom [Ewing] and myself held a consultation over his condition, and had John go to his camp and quiet him.”
Clearly, the Sherman-Ewing family feared that they might be hearing more than just rumors based on vindictive talk coming out of Sherman’s encampment. The reference to Sherman’s “condition” may have indicated a concern that they might be seeing another form of the breakdown he had suffered in Kentucky in 1861, this episode brought on by a different form of pressure and anxiety. His brother John made no mention of what happened when he visited the general at his headquarters near Alexandria, but later in the day Sherman came in to see Grant at the War Department. Apparently Grant enabled Sherman to understand to some degree just how terrified and bewildered so many people, in and out of government, had been after Lincoln was killed in the middle of their city and how easy it had been to read a traitorous intent into a flawed, lenient truce agreement.
Talking to Sherman in a government building that had until recently been hung with long black streamers in mourning for the slain president, Grant assured him that, whatever might have happened in North Carolina a month before, Sherman now had the grateful support of virtually all the government leaders. To prove his point, Grant led Sherman from the War Department, which was at Seventeenth and F Street, to a house at the corner of Fifteenth and H occupied by Johnson, who had not yet moved into the White House. Sherman found the president and his cabinet, with the exception of Stanton, waiting to greet him. In a marvelous example of political hypocrisy, President Johnson, who had joined Stanton and others of his cabinet in calling Sherman a traitor when Grant had read them Sherman’s first agreement with Joseph E. Johnston, stretched out his arms and said, “General Sherman, I am very glad to
see you-very
glad to see you—
and I mean what I say.
” He then told Sherman that he had known nothing about Stanton’s letters to the newspapers until they were published, and that Stanton had shown them to no one before sending them out on his own initiative. Almost all the other cabinet members told Sherman the same thing, which was evidently true.
As Grant and Sherman parted at the end of the afternoon, they were coming to the end of a remarkable time in their lives and in the life of their nation. On this evening in May, Sherman was forty-five and Grant was forty-three. Much lay ahead for both of them—the presidency for Grant, succession in peacetime to Grant’s position as general in chief for Sherman—but it was as wartime soldiers that they had made their mark in history. Forty-seven months before, the men of the Twenty-first Illinois had hooted at Grant, this shabby figure of a colonel who had come to command them, and on this date in 1861, Sherman, who had held four jobs in the four years before that, was just reentering the army.
As they went their separate ways that evening, there was one thing they had to do, something that was equally important to these two West Pointers. They had to say good-bye to the Union Army, and do it in a way that made the troops take justified pride in themselves and gave the public the chance to show its feelings for those who had served and sacrificed. The Grand Review, a two-day parade through Washington, would begin in three days. Between now and then, Sherman had to appear before the Committee on the Conduct of the War, Grant had to deal with the continuous flow of paperwork involved in the shift from war to peace, and each of them had to prepare for his part in a tremendous spectacle. When they saw each other again, it would be as two immensely famous figures appearing in front of enormous crowds, but as they parted now in the hour before sunset, it was two men shaking hands on a quiet street.
 
A PARADE FOR EVERYONE, AND A HEARING FOR SHERMAN
 
 
 
During the morning of the next day, May 21, the streets of Washington filled with preparations for the great two-day victory parade, now only forty-eight hours away. Although many black wreaths mourning Lincoln remained in place throughout the city, both government buildings and private dwellings began to be decorated with red-white-and-blue streamers, banners, and bunting of every design and size. Along Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, scores of workmen erected grandstands. In front of the White House itself, a special covered pavilion with a capacity for two hundred of the most prominent spectators went up, a few yards from where the troops would pass. Hung with blue-and-white drapes that had big white stars on them, with baskets of flowers hanging from the pavilion’s supports, the decorations facing the avenue included signs that proclaimed, “Donelson,” “Shiloh,” “Vicksburg,” “Gettysburg,” and the names of other Union victories. In the pavilion would sit the president and cabinet, Grant and his staff, some of the leading officers not in the parade, the ambassadors of other nations, and the families of all these dignitaries. On the other side of the avenue, festooned with the state flags of the Union, was the grandstand in which would be the justices of the Supreme Court, senators and congressmen, and governors of several states. On either side of the presidential reviewing stand were stands, paid for by private contributions, that would each hold five hundred wounded or sick Union soldiers, including withered men recently released from Southern prison camps.
Tens of thousands of visitors poured into the city, many on special trains. Under the headline “THE GRAND REVIEW,” two subheadlines in
The New York Times
said, “Great Rush of Visitors to See the Boys in Blue” and “Washington Crowded Beyond All Precedent.” The hotels filled to the point that cots had to be placed in the hallways. Some enterprising people, finding no accommodations available anywhere, rented streetcars in which to spend the night. The newspapers joined in the enthusiasm, offering interesting examples of the size of the forces that would march down Pennsylvania Avenue: they told their readers that they would see more men marching than had been in the combined armies of Napoleon, Cromwell, and Augustus Caesar, and that the legions with which Caesar conquered his empire had fewer men than were in just one wing of the Army of the Potomac.
At the War Department, Grant kept sending out orders, balancing out the smaller number of troops that were still needed against those that were to be sent to their home states and mustered out as soon as possible. Also awaiting his attention were matters as varied as many men going out of service wanting to buy their muskets to keep—Grant ruled that they could—and the fact that, as Grant would soon write Halleck in Richmond, “I am informed that a great many bodies have been left unburyed [sic] at Appomattox C. H.”—a situation Grant solved by instructing Halleck to send cavalry units there and to Sayler’s Creek to bury the dead.
At his tent headquarters across the river, Sherman was pondering what to say the next day at the hearing of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. He had by now come to understand that the Radicals wanted to portray Lincoln, posthumously, as a man who would have extended to the South peace terms so soft that they would have undercut the war aims for which 360,000 Northern men died. Therein lay a defense for Sherman, if he wanted to use it. He could portray his first agreement with Joseph E. Johnston as having been an implementation of what Lincoln had told him to do during his meeting with Lincoln and Grant and Admiral Porter at City Point seven weeks before, and justify his actions: he had been a soldier, carrying out his commander in chief’s unwise instructions.
At least one man ready to strengthen that claim came to see Sherman at his headquarters. Colonel Absolom H. Markland had served under both Grant and Sherman, in an unusual capacity. As a military postmaster general, in the Western theater he had implemented Grant’s idea of sorting mail for the troops as it was being carried on special railroad cars. Grant thought so highly of his services to the army throughout the war that, two days before this, he had sent him the saddle that he had used in all the battles and campaigns from Fort Henry in February of 1862 through to the final day at Appomattox. “I present this saddle to you not for any intrinsic value it possesses,” Grant had written him, “but as a mark of friendship and esteem.”
Coming now to Sherman, Markland reminded him that, soon after Sherman’s conference with Lincoln and Grant at City Point, Sherman had told him about it in some detail. Markland now told Sherman that the moment he read of Sherman’s first truce terms with Johnston, he had recognized them as being what Sherman had said that Lincoln wanted. Markland urged Sherman to use that information and promised to make written statements or testify on Sherman’s behalf in any way that he could. To Markland’s surprise, “General Sherman was in no mood to take up the subject and very clearly intimated to me that I should be silent concerning it.”
No one could ever know all that was in Sherman’s mind, but as the hours passed on the day before the hearing, he wrote to Major General Stewart van Vliet, who had been one of his two closest friends at West Point. On April 27, when the news of Sherman’s dealings with Johnston were first in the newspapers, van Vliet had written him that he thought Sherman’s original set of terms were better suited to produce a just and lasting peace, and that he believed time would prove that true. “Dear Van,” Sherman wrote him now, “Stanton and Halleck … thought they had me down, and when I was far away on public business under their own orders, they sought the opportunity to ruin me by means of the excitement naturally arising from the assassination of the President, who stood in the way of fulfillment of their projects, and whose views and policy I was strictly, literally following.” He went right on to demonstrate just how far his thinking differed from that of the Radicals. “I prefer to give votes to rebel whites, now humbled, subdued and obedient, rather than to the ignorant blacks that are not yet capable of self-government.” This was a distillation of something he had recently written to Ellen, saying that “Stanton wants to kill me because I do not favor the scheme of declaring the negro of the South
Now Free
, to be loyal voters whereby Politicians may manufacture just so much more pliable Electionary material. The Negros dont want to vote. They want to work & enjoy property, and they are no friends of the negro who want to complicate him with new prejudices.”
Sherman’s place in history at that moment was ironic. If he had not captured Atlanta just when he did in the autumn of 1864, the Republicans, including the Radicals whom he would be facing at the hearing the following day, might well have lost the election and the political power they now wielded, including the power they were bringing to bear in pressing for immediate voting rights for blacks. It was Sherman’s bold and brilliant marches through the South that had freed hundreds of thousands of blacks, but he continued to view them as inferior beings. In an exchange of letters with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase after seeing him during Chase’s inspection trip of newly freed Southern areas the past January, he had written, “Of course I have nothing to do with the Status of the Negro after [the] war. That is for the law making power, but if my opinion were consulted I would say that the negro should be a free race, but not put on an equality with the whites.”
As night fell on Washington, no one, and seemingly not Sherman himself, could say just how he intended to handle himself at the hearing the next day. His letter to van Vliet, with its statement that in his first agreement with Joseph E. Johnston he was “strictly, literally following” Lincoln’s “views and policy,” implied that he had documents or knowledge in his possession that “not only justify but made imperative” his action in offering those terms. To van Vliet he said, “I am to go before the war investigating committee, when for the first time, I will be at liberty to tell my story in public,” adding that “thus far I have violated no rule of official secrecy, though severely tempted, but so much the worse for [Stanton and Halleck] when all is revealed.”
 
As the morning of May 22 dawned, Washington was far more focused on the next day’s parade than on what would happen in one governmental hearing room. Visitors continued to arrive by the thousands, and the soldiers of the encamped armies began appearing in the streets during their off-duty hours. Walt Whitman was out and about and taking it all in. An ardent Union patriot, he had seen terrible suffering among the men being brought from the battlefields and dying in the hospitals where he helped care for them, and was deeply relieved by the end of the fighting. His notes for that day included: “Have been taking a walk along Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventh street north. The city is full of soldiers, running around loose. Officers everywhere, of all grades. All have the weather-beaten look of practical [active] service. It is a sight I never tire of. All the armies are now here (or portions of them,) for tomorrow’s review. You see them swarming like bees everywhere.”
In his office at the War Department, Grant may well have been thinking of what the day ahead might hold for Sherman, but nothing he put on paper that day referred to it. In a telegram to Meade, the commander of the Eastern troops who were to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue the next day, he said, “Please direct your Eng. [engineering] officer to place in the review a pontoon train say of four boats and two Chess wagons,” the wagons used to transport the planks that formed the bridge supported by the boats. Other than suggesting this touch, sure to interest the crowds along the parade route, his only other communications that day involved assignments of commanders in the West.
And so Major General William Tecumseh Sherman made his way to the hearing of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. This was to be its last day in existence. Every Union general knew of its activities. Formed in December of 1861 to investigate the Union military disaster at Bull Run and a lesser fiasco at Ball’s Bluff and given “the power to send for persons and papers,” its evolving Radical faction had pressed for more aggressive Union Army campaigns and had pushed Lincoln for an earlier emancipation of slaves than he had felt it politically wise to grant. The committee looked at everything, not only defeats and such matters as the Confederate treatment of Union prisoners, but also whether victories might have been better exploited, and the status of government contracts, naval shipbuilding, and matters such as the cotton trade in the occupied South. Some of its inquiries were legitimate and possibly helpful, but generals who appeared before the committee felt like defendants rather than witnesses.
Among the committee’s clear prejudices was that against West Pointers. Its members felt that even academy graduates from the North were likely to be Southern sympathizers at heart, men who had no interest in the issue of slavery and retained friendly feelings for their brother officers of the prewar army who had chosen to fight for the Confederacy. They also saw the career army men as having little interest in democratic institutions and as possessing little faith in the American tradition of civilian control over the military. Some of the committee’s targets were reasonable ones: their sometimes-devious investigation into George McClellan’s inertia had been part of what pushed Lincoln to relieve him of command of the Army of the Potomac.
On the other hand, the committee sometimes acted in the role of thought police. An example of the unprincipled ferocity of this committee that Sherman would now appear before was its shameful and groundless arrest and six-month imprisonment of General Charles Stone, who was both a West Pointer and a Democrat. Stone, although not actually present, was technically in command at the defeat of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, on October 21, 1861, a battle in which the federal losses of all categories totaled 921, compared with 149 Confederate casualties. This in itself justified an investigation, but the committee’s motives were political to the core. The inept general who was directly in charge at Ball’s Bluff and was killed there was Edward Baker, a major general of Volunteers who had been a Republican senator and a strong Radical. On the other hand, Stone’s wife had relatives in the South, and, prior to army orders not to do so, Stone had returned fugitive slaves to their owners in accordance with then-existing laws. There were also rumors that rebel couriers were able to cross the Potomac River in his area, and it was true that he was one of the favorite generals of McClellan, whose Democratic Party loyalties were well-known.
The committee, in good part because it saw a chance to discredit McClellan, decided that Stone was a traitor who had deliberately planned an action in which Baker and his men would be killed. A month after a committee hearing began in which Stone was in effect treated as a defendant in a criminal case who was never told the charges against him and given no chance to prepare an informed defense, he was, with Secretary of War Stanton’s tacit compliance, arrested at midnight and placed in solitary confinement at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. Released by an act of Congress after six months, he failed in his repeated attempts to have a formal military court of inquiry convened to hear his case. Finally, on February 27, 1863, seven months after his unjustified and illegal imprisonment ended, Stone had the chance to confront his original accusers in a committee hearing, during which he categorically disproved every charge that had been brought against him. Going on to serve bravely later in 1863 at the battle of Port Hudson and in the Red River campaign, he was nonetheless a marked man, never able to escape the personal tragedy of the unfair indictment against him. Returning east to the Army of the Potomac in which he had been serving at the time of Ball’s Bluff, he found that gossip pursued him and that his opportunities for advancement were closed. In April of 1864, Stanton arbitrarily mustered him out of his Volunteer commission as brigadier general, and as a Regular Army colonel this late in the war, Stone waited for orders that never came and resigned in September of 1864. (Ironically, nineteen years later, Stone, in his capacity as a civil engineer, was in charge of constructing the massive base for the Statue of Liberty.)

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