Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (56 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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Stone was by no means the committee’s only victim. General George Gordon Meade, who was summoned to appear after the Fredericksburg defeat in May of 1863, two months before his great victory at Gettysburg, said in a letter that “I sometimes feel very nervous about my position, [the committee is] knocking over generals at such a rate.”
And here was Sherman, who had commanded Louisiana’s state military academy before the war, was known to have a low opinion of the black population’s abilities, and had extended such generous peace terms to his fellow West Point alumnus Joseph E. Johnston. He was indeed the witness, and one the committee saw as a questionable and possibly dangerous figure, but he was not the real target. Senator Benjamin Wade, the prominent Radical Republican and a former trial lawyer who was the committee chair, wanted to use Sherman to get at and discredit what he considered to be the misguided policies of Abraham Lincoln. Among other things, Wade had never forgotten what had happened to the Wade-Davis Bill, legislation that he had put forward in 1864 with Congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. Motivated by the Radicals’ belief that only Congress had the right, through legislation, to determine the terms of Reconstruction, this had been a challenge to Lincoln’s assumption of wartime emergency powers to be enacted by executive orders. When Lincoln killed the bill with a pocket veto, it infuriated the legislation’s sponsors and further widened the gap between Lincoln and the more ardent Radicals.
As the committee’s session opened, Wade went to work, questioning Sherman himself. He soon found that Sherman, who had aggressively torn apart the South, was employing a defensive strategy. Sherman loved his Army of the West, to which he would say good-bye the day after tomorrow after leading it down Pennsylvania Avenue on the second day of the Grand Review; he loved the United States Army and wanted to continue serving in it; he hated Stanton. He wanted Wade’s jaws to snap shut on thin air, and he wanted to clear his name.
In his testimony—the transcript ran to thirty-two printed pages—Sherman kept faith with the officers and men who trusted him and did not hide behind Lincoln, in whom he had seen more goodness and greatness than in any other man he had met. He rebutted any effort to smear him in such a way that there could be grounds for his dismissal from the army, and he caused no new trouble for Grant and the postwar United States Army. And Sherman had his day in court, where Stanton was concerned.
Senator Wade tried and tried. Thinking that Sherman would, for his own defense, agree with the suggestion that in his first dealings with Johnston he was carrying out explicit orders from Lincoln, he gave Sherman the chance to clear himself and portray Lincoln just as the Radicals wanted him to be seen: a man who wanted a soft peace for the South. “Did you have,” Wade asked him, “near Fortress Monroe, a conference with President Lincoln, and if so, about what time?”
Sherman said that he had, and gave the dates of his stay at Grant’s headquarters at City Point. Wade moved in. “In those conferences was any arrangement made with you and General Grant, or either of you, in regard to the manner of arranging business with the Confederacy in regard to the terms of peace?”
“Nothing definite. It was simply a matter of general conversation, nothing specific and definite.”
Here was the mystery. Either Sherman did not possess any proof of Lincoln’s instructions to him, or he had it and chose not to produce it, or, more likely in the light of his family’s worries about him, he had indulged in feverish wishful thinking the day before and was now facing the reality of this hearing. Thwarted, the best Wade could get out of Sherman was the statement, “Had President Lincoln lived, I know he would have sustained me.”
Turning to Sherman’s first agreement with Johnston, Wade asked why he had not dealt with the subject of slavery in that document and had left open an interpretation that slavery could continue in the former Confederate states. Sherman answered that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had settled that subject once and for all, long before his meeting with Johnston, and that “for me to have renewed the question when that decision was [already] made would have involved the absurdity of an inferior undertaking to qualify the work of his superior.” He went on to point out that the agreement he had reached with Johnston specifically stated that it had to be approved in Washington, and that he had immediately sent the document there by special messenger. In what was clearly a misrepresentation of what had happened—Sherman had never expected his terms to be rejected by his superiors—he now portrayed his initial terms as being “glittering generalities,” hastily penned to stop the fighting and to have something to send to Washington for improvement. On this last point, that of stopping the fighting, Sherman stressed to the committee that both his own generals and Johnston had wanted an immediate end to the war, and that he in particular had feared that if there were not a general surrender, Johnston’s experienced men would slip away and continue fighting throughout the South indefinitely as guerrilla bands.
Finally, Wade gave Sherman his opportunity to talk about Halleck and Stanton. Sherman told the committee, with no letters or documents to prove it, about a conversation that he had with Stanton, when the secretary had come to Savannah in January of that year. Sherman said that Stanton had encouraged him to include civil matters in any opportunity to end the war. For Stanton to turn on him after that, Sherman said, as he had of Halleck, was “an act of perfidy.” This description of his conversation with Stanton in Savannah was the only new piece of information that Sherman had to offer, but for a moment the committee saw the man who had slashed apart the South. “I did feel indignant—I do feel indignant. As to my own honor, I can protect it.”
When Sherman left the hearing room, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had taken testimony from its last, and most controversial, witness. It would still receive final written reports from the generals of all the major commands, including Sherman, but the war and the work of the committee had ended. Sherman had held his own and, like everyone else in Washington, was looking ahead to the next day’s beginning of the Grand Review, but in this hour after he was excused by the committee he was in for an experience that balanced out the Radicals’ view of him. An Associated Press dispatch reported: “Gen. Sherman and his brother Senator Sherman passed down Pennsylvania-avenue this evening. His appearance caused the gathering of crowds, who repeatedly cheered him, while ladies waved their handkerchiefs. A large number of persons followed him, and the press soon became so general that he was compelled to call a carriage to escape the labor of a severe hand-shaking, which had already commenced.”
That evening presented an interesting contrast between life in the encampments of Meade’s Eastern army, both north and south of the Potomac, and Sherman’s Western army, bivouacked to the south of the river in and around Alexandria. Meade’s Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac was in a comfortable permanent camp on Arlington Heights above the southern bank of the river, near Arlington House, the Custis mansion occupied by Robert E. Lee up to the moment of secession. On this last night of that army’s existence, there were many parties, and the officers of the First Division of the Fifth Corps, a hard-fighting unit whose flag displayed a red Maltese cross against a white background, were gathering to honor the corps commander, Major General Charles Griffin. Four enormous hospital tents had been put together to accommodate the officers and their guests.
A special gift for General Griffin had been arranged for the occasion, paid for by a collection taken up among the officers. Made by Tiffany’s in New York, it was a gold pin whose enameled white surface bore the division’s red Maltese cross, with the cross outlined in diamonds, and with a center diamond that cost a thousand dollars. The man who designed it, and pinned it on Griffin’s uniform during the party to great applause, was the commander of the First Division, Major General Joshua Chamberlain, one of the war’s most interesting figures. When the war started, he had been a professor of religion and Romance languages at Bowdoin College in Maine. Given a leave of absence to study in Europe during 1862 and 1863, he had instead entered the army and first risen to be colonel of the legendary Twentieth Maine, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for his defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. Wounded several times—he had been hit twice at Hatcher’s Run during the final Appomattox campaign, seven weeks before, and during the war the horse that he would ride in the next day’s parade had been shot from under him three times and had healed well enough to go into action again—Chamberlain had been assigned to a special duty at Appomattox Court House. After Grant, Lee, and other commanders had left the area, Chamberlain was designated to be the senior officer present when the surrendered remnants of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched up to lay down their arms. On his own initiative, he had ordered the Union regiments lined up guarding the area to come to “present arms” in salute to their gallant foes—a gesture that, climaxed by a spontaneous three cheers given by Chamberlain’s men as the last Confederates marched up to surrender, caused one of Lee’s soldiers to write, “Many grizzled veterans wept like women, and my own eyes were as blind as my voice was dumb.”
No one in the Fifth Corps went to bed that night. At two in the morning they began lining up to come marching down from Arlington Heights. The Long Bridge could handle normal traffic, but it took two hours for all these men and horses and cannon to cross the river and get to their assembly place near the Capitol, where they would have to wait until the Eastern army’s cavalry and many other units preceded them in the parade.
In Sherman’s camps around Alexandria that evening, columns of quartermaster wagons had arrived, filled with new uniforms and boots for Sherman’s men to wear when their turn came to parade, two days hence. To the surprise of the well-meaning Eastern supply officers who brought them, most of the men refused to take a single item of clothing. Let them see us the way they are, they said. Clean weapons and bare feet. Let them look at us in our rags. They’ll know who we are. We’re Uncle Billy’s men. They don’t have to cheer. It’s our last march, and we’re going to do it our way.
Most of the men of the Western army had no idea of the intense curiosity about them felt by the crowds gathering in Washington. Among the visitors who had come to see the Grand Review was a small group of young ladies, friends who were members of prominent Boston families. The only place they had found to stay was in an attic room of a house near the Willard Hotel. On the day before the parade, they hired a carriage and drove out to Georgetown, finding themselves on a street where companies of Sherman’s men were passing. Letting their friendly curiosity get the better of their New England reserve, they called out, “What regiment are you?” Back came the shouted answer, a regiment’s number, and “Michigan!” As if on an expedition into unknown territory, the delighted girls asked the next unit where they were from and heard, “Wisconsin!,” and another exchange produced what was to them the undoubtedly exotic, “Iowa!”
What the girls from Boston could not be expected to see, what few Americans of the day really understood, was the significance of those fine soldiers, farm boys from Michigan and Wisconsin and Iowa, being on the streets of Washington. It was the old Northwest, the West as it was then called, the Midwest as it later came to be known, that had given the nation such men as Lincoln and Grant from Illinois, and Sherman from Ohio. The soldiers of the Eastern states had done their full share in winning the war, but it was this new dimension, the political and military power of the West, that had welded itself to the older Eastern states in the great national crisis, and together these regions and their forces had won the war. The next two days would be a dramatic demonstration of that reality.
 
THE PAST AND FUTURE MARCH UP PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
 
 
 
The Grand Review turned out to be something so vast, so moving, that its effect overwhelmed even the generals who organized it. The parade was scheduled to step off from the Capitol Building at nine, but the crowds packed the sidewalks soon after sunrise, listening to the whisper in the air of drums beating miles away, as regiments kept marching into the city from their encampments. Everywhere, people positioned themselves at windows and on rooftops to watch, and boys climbed into trees along the route.
It was a beautiful May morning. For the first time since Lincoln’s death five weeks earlier, the flag at the White House was raised from half-mast to the top of the pole. In the crowd stood many thousands who had lost members of their families in the war—mothers and fathers grieving for their sons, sisters remembering their brothers, young widows bringing their children to see the army that their father had joined and from which he had not returned. Along the route stood choirs of schoolgirls dressed in white, who would sing patriotic songs as the soldiers passed. Other young women dressed in white carried woven garlands to present to generals and colonels as they rode at the head of their divisions and brigades and regiments, while thousands of others in the crowd held bouquets that they intended to throw at the soldiers’ feet in tribute as they passed. Many of the spectators carried little American flags, and women had white handkerchiefs in their hands, ready to wave.
Sherman came to the presidential reviewing stand early, along with Ellen, their eight-year-old son Tommy, and Ellen’s father. Thomas Ewing was old and frail now, but he was happy to be back in the city where he had been a major figure and immensely proud of the son-in-law who had never seemed able to make a career for himself. After a time, Julia Grant joined them, bringing her son Jesse, who was seven. Julia and the Shermans sat together, talking as more dignitaries were escorted into this pavilion and the congressional reviewing stand across the avenue. Sherman was his usual animated self but seemed relatively at ease. It was his day to be a spectator as the nation gave thanks and said good-bye to the Army of the Potomac; his moment to ride up to this stand at the head of sixty-five thousand men would come tomorrow. Various members of the cabinet arrived. Presumably Secretary of War Stanton was somewhere among these powerful figures, but there is no account of his encountering Sherman on this first day.
At nine o’clock, the time for the parade to begin, neither President Johnson nor Grant had appeared, but, just as ordered, the signal gun fired from the Capitol. General George Gordon Meade, his horse decorated with chains of flowers placed there by admirers, came riding around the side of the Capitol, which had on its western portico a huge banner that read, “THE ONLY NATIONAL DEBT WE CAN NEVER REPAY IS THE DEBT WE OWE TO THE VICTORIOUS UNION SOLDIERS.” He turned up Pennsylvania Avenue, followed by the officers of his staff, also on horseback and with their sabers drawn. A band marched behind them, playing. Soon after that came the first mounted troopers of a column of cavalry
seven miles long.
As the crowd caught a glimpse of the first of eighty thousand soldiers from the Army of the Potomac coming toward them, a roar of “Gettysburg! Gettysburg!” swept along the avenue, accompanying Meade and his men as they neared the presidential reviewing stand. When Meade came directly in front of that pavilion, with the president and Grant still not there, everyone in the stands on both sides of the avenue rose and cheered: the justices of the Supreme Court, senators, congressmen, governors, and their families. Meade raised his sword in salute and rode his horse into the White House grounds. As he dismounted to come and sit in a place of honor in the presidential pavilion, President Johnson arrived in a carriage, and Grant and some of his staff appeared, briskly walking through the White House grounds as they came from the War Department. (Neither man ever offered an explanation of this astonishing failure to be on time.) Johnson took his place in the stands, with Grant and Sherman sitting within a few feet of him.
As the cavalrymen clattered past, thousands upon thousands of them, Grant and Sherman began watching the parade intently—two professional officers, less concerned with the history of the occasion than with the identity of the regiments and the performance of the troops. As the generals at the head of each division came up, Grant rose and saluted. The horsemen rode by briskly; there was much that the public probably did not grasp about what passed before them. Here came the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, but men from California had also fought in its ranks. Early in the war, starting with a hundred volunteers known as “the California Hundred,” young men had come east to fight in a cavalry unit that was incorporated into this Massachusetts regiment. In all, 504 men from California had served this regiment, and their survivors were passing Grant and Sherman now, perhaps triggering memories for Grant of the loneliness of his early tour of duty on the West Coast that led to his drinking and forced resignation from the army, and also reminding Sherman and Ellen of Sherman’s time there as an officer and, later, as a banker.
Someone that many in the crowd did indeed recognize was the dashing cavalryman General George Armstrong Caster, who eleven years later would die with the Seventh Cavalry at the hands of the Sioux during the Battle of the Little Big Horn, at a time when Grant was president and Sherman had Grant’s old job as commander of the United States Army. As Custer rode up to the reviewing stand to salute, his foot-long golden locks streaming from under his wide-brimmed officer’s hat, a wreath thrown from the stands landed in front of his horse. The mount wheeled, bolted so swiftly that Custer’s hat blew off, and galloped away with him, causing Sherman to say later, “he was not reviewed at all.” The unintended drama of that moment was followed, during the
two hours
that it took for the Cavalry Corps to ride past, with thrilling periodic displays by different units of the Horse Artillery. A long interval was allowed to develop in the line of march, and then artillery batteries came speeding down the avenue, the six-horse teams cantering past in a rumble of caissons and cannon that conjured up the scene when the guns had been brought swiftly onto battlefields, to be unlimbered and fired in situations where their timely arrival often saved the day.
As the last of the horsemen passed the reviewing stand and rode into history, some soldiers and civilians alike saw not only them but also the ghosts of those who had once ridden with them. In the 1864 Shenandoah campaign led by Philip Sheridan, who had desperately wanted to lead the Cavalry Corps today but who on Grant’s orders was taking command in Texas, they had suffered losses of 3,917 men.
No sooner had the sound of hooves died away than the infantry came into view. Grant’s aide Horace Porter said that when the long column marched toward the reviewing stand, “Their muskets shone like a wall of steel.” The men of Sherman’s army might be right in thinking that they had no equal as a combined striking force, but coming up Pennsylvania Avenue now were regiments second to none. The Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania, which also had a component of California volunteers, had asked to have that regimental number in tribute to the distinguished fighting record of New York’s “Fighting Sixty-ninth.” There were forty-five battle streamers weighing down its regimental flagstaff as it came up the avenue, signifying that they had fought in that many separate engagements during the past four years, including the Seven Days’, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, right through to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. As was the case with so many regiments, they had lost nearly as many men from disease as from enemy action; in one unlucky unit, the Fifteenth Maine, assignments to militarily quiet malarial areas in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida resulted in a loss of only five men in combat, but 343 died from illness. The Fighting Sixty-ninth itself, marching up Pennsylvania Avenue behind its green banner that had a gold harp and shamrocks embroidered on it, every man with a sprig of green in his cap, was filled with Irishmen from New York City; it had fought in many of the same battles and campaigns as its Pennsylvania namesake, also ending the war at Appomattox. The Scots of the Seventy-ninth New York, “the Highlanders,” who had fought under Sherman’s command at Bull Run and had remained in the Eastern theater, marched past behind the only bagpipe band in the Grand Review.
The sight of these regiments, some shrunken to small numbers and marching behind flags shot through so often that some were only shreds dancing in the breeze, moved many in the crowd to tears. Every few yards, someone, perhaps from the family of a man who died serving in those ranks, would suddenly run out from the sidewalk and kiss what was left of a flag. The bands marched past, playing the great songs—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching”—and the crowds sang the words, some smiling as they did and some sobbing. Many a soldier found a woman coming out of the crowd to hand him a bouquet, and carried it swinging along in one hand while he kept his musket on his shoulder with the other.
On the reviewing stand, Sherman was making mental notes of what he saw. As he later recalled, when many of Meade’s troops marched past the presidential pavilion, they “turned their eyes around like country gawks to look at the big people on the stand.” The regiments marched well when their own bands were playing, but when they came up to the reviewing stand those bands fell silent, and the music as they passed was provided by two orchestras that had no sense of military cadence—Sherman called them “pampered and well-fed bands that are taught to play the very latest operas.” He decided to dispense with the services of those two orchestras when his army marched the next day. Turning to Meade at one point, Sherman said, “I’m afraid my poor tatterdemalion corps will make a poor appearance tomorrow when contrasted with yours.” When Meade replied that the spectators would make allowances for the appearance of Sherman’s men, Sherman swore to himself that his men would show Washington some marching the public would never forget.
As the hours went by, with three hundred men moving past the reviewing stand every sixty seconds—a spectator called it “a Niagara of men”—here came General Joshua Chamberlain and his division, including the Twentieth Maine. As he rode up the avenue at the head of his troops, he had an ecstatic moment.
Now a girlish form, robed white as her spirit, presses close; modest, yet resolute, fixed on her purpose. She reaches up to me a wreath of rare flowers, close-braided, fit for viking’s arm-ring, or victor’s crown. How could I take it? Sword at the “carry” and left hand tasked, trying to curb my excited horse … He had been thrice shot down under me; he had seen the great surrender. But this unaccustomed vision—he had never seen a woman coming so near before—moved him strangely. Was this the soft death-angel—did he think?—calling us again, as in other days? For as often as she lifted the garland to the level of my hand, he sprang clear … I managed to bring his forefeet close beside her, and dropped my sword-point almost to her feet, with a bow so low I could have touched her cheek. Was it the garland’s breath or hers that floated to my lips? My horse trembled.
 
Later in the presidential reviewing stand, watching his regiments receive Grant’s salute as they marched by, Chamberlain, like many another soldier that day, saw the living men but felt the ghosts as well. “These were my men … They belonged to me by bonds birth cannot create nor death sever. More were passing here than the personages on the stand could see. But to me so seeing, what a review—how great, how far, how near! It was as the morning of the resurrection … the ten ironhearted regiments that made that terrible charge down the north spur of Little Round Top into the seething furies at its base, and brought back not one-half of its deathless offering … I see in this passing pageant—worn, thin hostages of the mortal.”
The future was there at the review, as well as the past. In the congressional stands sat James A. Garfield, who had fought under Grant at Shiloh and gone on to fight at Chickamauga, before retiring from the army as a brigadier general to run for Congress. Near him was another future president, four-times-wounded Major General Rutherford B. Hayes, who was still in uniform. Waiting to march with their men in Sherman’s army the next day were two more men who would occupy the White House, Brigadier General Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, who had campaigned with Sherman to Atlanta, and William B. McKinley, who had enlisted as an eighteen-year-old private in 1861 and four years later was a major.
The spectators sometimes moved almost as one being. War correspondent Charles A. Page of the
New York Tribune
, who at Bull Run noted that the same stretchers used to carry wounded men back from the front were quickly loaded with boxes of cartridges and sent forward again, wrote that “when the crowd would surge up to the stand, at any brief interval in the procession, and demand a sight of their favorites, the President would rise, and bow repeatedly, but say never a word. Grant when called for would but rise for an instant, with lifted hat, and if his face told any story at all it was one of shyness and surprise.” As for those the crowd rushed forward to see, “There never was so perfectly happy a set of men as those in the main pavilion—the President and Cabinet, General Grant, and the score or two of distinguished officers. It wasn’t self-complacency, but a sort of calm quiet; a settled peace and gratitude seemed to pervade them all.”

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