Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (57 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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At three-thirty in the afternoon, the last of Meade’s eighty thousand men passed the reviewing stand where Grant and Sherman had been since morning. The spectators poured from the sidewalks into the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, a sea of little American flags and white handkerchiefs waving good-bye to the backs of the last ranks of the Army of the Potomac as they marched into history.
Grant and Sherman parted, and Grant went into the White House grounds and mounted the horse that had been brought there for him. On an impulse, he told an enlisted orderly to mount another horse and come with him, and rode out into the crowd that was slowly dispersing along Pennsylvania Avenue, all talking about what they had seen. Grant on a horse always was an imposing figure, one of the great horsemen of his day. Startled to see him right there, a few feet away, the people cheered as he rode quietly among them, occasionally lifting his hat. Perhaps he too did not want the day to end.
 
During the first day of the Grand Review, Sherman’s army had moved to new bivouac areas just south of the Long Bridge across the Potomac, and that night Sherman held a meeting with his generals and their adjutants. Sharing his observations of what he had seen from the reviewing stand, he said, “Be careful about your intervals and your tactics. I will give [the troops] plenty of time to go to the Capitol and see everything afterward, but let them keep their eyes fifteen feet to the front and march by in the old customary way.”
These were the kinds of instructions Sherman was giving, with his generals noting what they were to do, but
The New York Times
had a different idea of what might happen in the morning. Citing the
Washington Tribune
as its source, the
Times
said that “it is mentioned in political circles that an influence is organizing among the superior officers of Sherman’s army
to demand
of President Johnson the removal of Secretary Stanton, for his warfare upon their Commander … There is a public expectation throughout the city of a demonstration of the feeling of the rank and file of Sherman’s army toward the Secretary of War when it shall march past the official stand in front of the White House.” In an example of praise being so faint as to be inaudible, the
Times
added that, while the actions of Stanton and Halleck might have been “somewhat hasty and ill-advised,” it was to be hoped that Sherman would not “forfeit the respect in which he is held by the great body of the people, and add another to the many proofs already existing, that one may be a great commander without being a wise man.”
Whether Sherman even saw this article is unknown; he and his generals were concentrating on the last march they would make together, and nothing else, and his army finally got to sleep. At first light, a correspondent from
The New York World
heard bugles blowing, and he described Sherman’s men forming up and following their regimental colors across the river on the Long Bridge: “Directly all sorts of colors, over a wild monotony of columns, began to sway to and fro, up and down, and like the uncoiling of a tremendous python, the Army of Sherman winds into Washington.” The column was fifteen miles long.
Around the Capitol, young women were everywhere, chatting flirtatiously with Sherman’s weather-bronzed soldiers as they pushed roses into the lapels of the men’s uniforms and stuck flowers into the muzzles of their muskets. Numbers of girls had set up tubs of water with blocks of ice in them on street corners and brought cups of cold water for the men to drink as they waited for the parade to start. Everything was fair game for decoration: garlands were attached to the tops of the staffs of regimental battle flags, and horses were draped in flowers, as were cannon. The weather was even better than it had been the day before.
Sherman rode through all this, wearing a clean uniform and with his wiry red hair freshly cut. His men smiled as they saw their Uncle Billy “dressed up after dingy carelessness for years.” His splendid horse, a “shining bay,” was not only perfectly groomed for the occasion but was already covered in flowers put there by young women. For the rest of his life, female admirers would fuss over Sherman—and he loved the attention—but this morning he had just one thing on his mind: he wanted his army to make a good showing. He knew how well his men could fight, but he did not know if they could march well in a massive parade like this, and he was not sure that they cared what Washington thought of them. His officers cared: they were passing along their ranks, saying, “Boys, remember it’s ‘Sherman’ against the ‘Potomac’—the west against the east today.”
Sherman’s orders to his men instructed that the first units of his army were to form “opposite the northern entrance to the Capitol grounds, prepared to wheel into Pennsylvania Avenue at precisely 9 A.M.,” and at the sound of the signal gun Sherman turned up Pennsylvania Avenue on his flower-decked horse. At his side rode Major General O. O. Howard, who had lost his right arm in combat three years before. In a sense, Howard symbolized both the sacrifices of war and the hopes of the peace for which it had been fought: still holding his military rank, just eleven days earlier he had been named to head the Freedmen’s Bureau, the new federal agency formed to protect the interests of the former slaves.
From the outset, Sherman’s march up the avenue conveyed the reality of his army when it was campaigning: a contemporary account said that behind the mounted officers of his staff “was a group of orderlies, mounted servants, pack mules, &c., and behind these a body of cavalry, known as the headquarters guard and escort.” Only after that came a band, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” One observer’s first impression of Sherman’s troops, muskets with fixed bayonets on their shoulders, was that these leathery young men, their faces made old by war, were marching along sullenly, but their expressions changed as the successive columns “wheeled” into Pennsylvania Avenue and saw what awaited them. The crowd was larger than the day before; a
New York Times
reporter wrote, “The enthusiasm to-day far exceeded that of yesterday.” Many thousands of men from the Army of the Potomac who had marched the day before had come back today on their own, ready to cheer the Army of the West. Two new banners had gone up overnight, stretching across the avenue: the first read in part, “HAIL TO THE HEROES OF THE WEST!” and the second said, “HAIL CHAMPIONS OF BELMONT, DONELSON, SHILOH, VICKSBURG, CHATTANOOGA, ATLANTA, SAVANNAH, BENTONVILLE—PRIDE OF THE NATION.” People in the crowd were holding up babies, so that the infants could one day be told they had seen Sherman’s men. Some of Sherman’s regiments were marching behind bare flagstaffs, because their battle flags had been literally shot away, while other banners were darkened and stained from powder burns and weather. Yesterday the crowds had shouted, “Gettysburg!”; today, the cry of “Vicksburg!” rang along the avenue.
Sherman and his men, so many of them barefoot and in rags, were showing the North the “sea of bayonets” that had recently convinced the residents of Raleigh, North Carolina, that for them the war was over. At the end of large units, ambulances came along, the horses drawing them well groomed and the ambulances clean; the crowds hushed as they saw the rolled-up canvas stretchers on the sides of the ambulances, which had been washed but still had deep brown bloodstains from the wounded men they had carried. Sometimes wild cries came from the crowd, giving voice to feelings that perhaps none understood. Other people “raised their hands to heaven in prayer.” So many flowers were thrown from the sidewalks that barefoot men marched through petals that lay ankle-deep.
Sherman’s progress up Pennsylvania Avenue was literally triumphal: the
Times
said, “He was vociferously cheered all along the line,” and added, “The greeting of this hero was in the highest degree enthusiastic.” When he rode by, raising his hat in answer to the shouts of admiration and welcome, people jumped up and down to get a better look at him, waving flags and handkerchiefs as they did. One spectator caught up in the crowd felt that “there was something almost fierce in the fever of enthusiasm.” A woman journalist observed “in his eye … the proud, conscious glare of the conqueror, while his features, relieved of the nervous anxious expression of war times, assumed an air of repose which well became him.” Sherman’s soldiers began responding to what Sergeant Upson of the 100th Indiana called “one constant roar,” and Upson noted that his troops marched better and better: “on the faces of the men was what one might call a
glory look
.”
A young private from Wisconsin was thinking about Abraham Lincoln: if he had been there, this veteran of many battles decided, the units would simply have broken ranks to crowd around him, and the parade would have stopped right then. Even in the midst of the bands playing and the crowds cheering, some houses still bore wreaths of mourning; it was as if Lincoln, the man with the solemn face and the sudden sweet smile, still hovered over the soldiers of whom he asked so much and loved so well.
At the head of his sixty-five thousand men, Sherman had a great deal happening in only a few minutes. As he rode up the incline to the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue where he and the leading division of his army would come to the first two turns before passing the reviewing stand in front of the White House, Sherman gave in to an impulse to look back and see if his soldiers were marching as well as he fervently hoped they were. Underneath the roar of the crowd he had been hearing behind him what a soldier from Minnesota called “one footfall”—a good indication that the men were marching in step—but now, at the top of this little slope, he turned on his horse to see the column of thousands of men that stretched more than a mile behind him down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. “When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.”
Sherman was to say in later years that “I believe it was the happiest and most satisfactory moment of my life,” and it may well have been: he would serve as both commander of the United States Army and as secretary of war, honors would descend upon him, he would remain nationally and internationally famous, and be lionized during the final years of his life in his adopted New York City, but he would always be happiest when he was among his groups of veterans at their frequent reunions in many states, occasions he unfailingly attended.
Coming into Lafayette Square, Sherman rode over to the side of the street toward the front of the house that served as the army’s headquarters for the defense of Washington. Secretary of State Seward, who was still recovering from the knife wounds he received during the attempt to assassinate him, had been brought there to watch the parade. Sherman brought his horse to a halt and “took off my hat to Mr. Seward, who sat at an upper window. He recognized the salute, and returned it.” Finally, as Sherman came to the presidential pavilion and the other grandstands, with the bands striking up “Marching Through Georgia,” the
New York World
said, “The acclamation given Sherman was without precedent … The whole assemblage raised and waved and shouted as if he had been the personal friend of each of them … Sherman was the idol of the day.” When he entered the pavilion after dismounting from his horse in the White House grounds, everyone was still on his feet to welcome him. Witnesses would differ on whether Secretary of War Stanton extended his hand to Sherman or simply nodded in greeting but, in a historically memorable instance of one person “cutting dead” another, Sherman walked past Stanton as if he were not there. He shook hands with President Johnson and every other member of the cabinet. Then, to loud applause, he and Grant greeted each other warmly.
There it was: the apotheosis of the friendship and military partnership that had brought the Union and its armies to this day. They were the men, the two generals, who more than any other soldiers had made this moment happen, and everyone there knew it. Sitting on either side of Johnson as the Army of the West continued to pass, Grant and Sherman rose and returned salutes whenever it was appropriate, but they seemed to become lost in thought, occasionally saying a few words to each other, and it was others who studied and recorded what the celebrities and the crowd now saw. Journalists remarked on how the Western soldiers were bigger men and marched with longer strides. One reporter reacted this way: “‘Veteran’ was written all over their dark faces, browned by the ardent Southern sun, and health almost spoke from their elastic step and erect figures … They seemed almost like figures from another planet.” Walt Whitman saw them as “largely animal, and handsomely so.” Two
New York Times
stories vied with each other in praise, one describing the Westerners as “tall, erect, broad-shouldered, stalwart men,” and the other calling them “the most superb material ever molded into soldiers.”
Sherman’s army kept passing, like a torrent controlled only by itself. Someone in the crowd noted that so many garlands were draped on the musicians that the bands as they marched past appeared to be “moving floral gardens.” There were not only the muskets and bayonets and some highly polished brass cannon gleaming in the sun, but also heavy supply wagons and the components for pontoon bridges like those in Meade’s column the day before. Signalmen carried slender staffs sixteen feet high, at the top of which were little emblazoned flags that a
New York World
reporter likened to “talismanic banners” that might be found in some medieval pageant.
And there was this: marching at the head of each brigade of the Fifteenth Corps, and at some other places in the parade, was “a battalion of black pioneers [engineering troops] … in the garments he wore on the plantation, with shovel and axe on the shoulder, marching with even front, sturdy step and lofty air.” Sherman had not brought these freed slaves into his army as combat soldiers, but he had come to appreciate their strength and skill as they laid the plank roads through the Carolina swamps that Joseph E. Johnston thought Sherman’s army could never pass. In other similar units, a reporter saw “the implements being carried on the shoulders of both white and black soldiers.”

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