Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (58 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 the end of each of several brigades came some of Sherman’s “bummers,” the independent operating foragers, “first in an advance and last in a retreat”—with examples of their foraging and of the newly freed slave families that had attached themselves to the army as it moved through the South. The crowd reacted to this as if watching a circus parade, and a
Times
reporter described it this way.
It was a most nonchalant, grotesque spectacle—two very diminutive white donkeys bestrode by two diminutive black contrabands. If that is not paradox, a dozen patient pack mules, mounted with Mexican pack saddles, camp equipage on one side and boxes of hardtack the other; half a dozen contraband females on foot; a dozen contraband males leading the mules; a white soldier or two on horseback, to see that everything was all right; the servants of the mess, and the mess kit, and scattered about on the panniers [cargo baskets] of the mules, reclining very domestically, half a dozen game cocks, a brace of young coons, and a sure-footed goat, all presenting such a scene that brought laughter and cheers from end to end of the avenue.
 
Here was complex irony again: these black Americans, being treated as figures of fun by the crowd, were no longer slaves because of the sacrifices made by the white men in blue uniforms marching ahead of them, as well as by those made by black regiments. (As many as 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army at one time or another; no uniformed contingent of these United States Colored Troops, as they were designated, was included in the parade.)
Julia Grant was greatly enjoying the Grand Review. She was to remember thinking, “How magnificent the marching! What shouts rent the air!” when suddenly she saw Mrs. Herman Canfield. She was the “tall handsome” woman “clad in deepest mourning” who had come to call after Shiloh, to tell of Grant’s kindness to her when she came to see her wounded husband, the colonel of an Ohio regiment, who died before she could reach his hospital bed. The last thing she had said to Julia that day three years before was, “I have determined to devote my time to the wounded soldiers during the war.” Julia saw that she had. “I saw Mrs. Canfield, the soldier’s widow, the soldiers’ nurse, when all this was passing. She, yes, she had grown older in these three long, weary years, for her dark hair showed threads of silver, her fair face and brow were furrowed and browned by exposure, her mourning robes looked worn and faded, as did the flag of her husband’s old regiment as it passed on that glorious day up Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Grant and Sherman continued to return salutes and to greet division commanders who would dismount and sit with them as their regiments passed. This parade was truly a good-bye: most of these tens of thousands of men were marching together for the last time. Their units would be disbanded, some within a few days, and they would return home, honored as veterans but taking up their future lives as individual civilians.
In the midst of this day’s fame and excitement, the future was indeed waiting for Grant, and for Julia, and for Sherman and Ellen. Forty-one months after this parade, Grant would be elected president and serve two terms marred by political scandals caused by men who betrayed the governmental trust he reposed in them. Historians would differ as to what degree it was a failed presidency, but it had its moments. Soon after he entered the White House, Grant invited Robert E. Lee to call on him there. At eleven in the morning of May 10, 1869, six years to the hour after the first shots were fired in his great victory at Chancellorsville and forty-nine months after Appomattox, Lee stepped out of a carriage and walked into the Executive Mansion to be greeted by Grant. The visit was brief and formal, and not without its political repercussions. Many Republicans who had voted Grant into office were aghast at what he had done, but both Grant and Lee understood the meaning of the occasion: Grant was inviting the South back to the White House, and Lee was accepting the invitation.
Grant and Sherman’s friendship would to some extent survive, but it had some exceedingly difficult times. Sherman’s life after the war had in it a mixture of national and even international fame, along with professional frustration and disappointment in his friend Grant. Less than two months after the Grand Review, with Grant remaining the army’s commander, Sherman was assigned to command what was then designated the Military Division of the Mississippi, a territory which, with the exception of Texas, included all the land from the great river to the Rocky Mountains. Named a lieutenant general the following year, he found himself holding a key command in an army whose size the Congress was steadily reducing, at a time when the Indian Wars were under way and federal forces were required for the military occupation of the South during the early Reconstruction years. Fourteen months after the surrender at Appomattox, at which time the Union Army had numbered a million men, Congress reduced the size of the peacetime Regular Army to forty-four thousand, with further reductions coming despite a continuing responsibility to garrison 225 posts ranging from coast artillery installations to wooden forts deep in Indian territory.
When the cuts in military appropriations also reduced the pay for generals, Sherman pointed out that he felt all the Union generals had been underpaid during the war and certainly should not be treated this way. He wrote to a friend, “What money will pay Meade for Gettysburg? What Sheridan for Winchester and the Five Forks & what Thomas for Chickamauga, Chattanooga or Nashville?” Referring to what the taxpayers would save by these reductions in military pay, Sherman added, “Few Americans would tear these pages from our national history for the few dollars saved from their pay during their short lives.”
Never politically adept and always disliking the press, Sherman’s views caused more controversy than he wanted. Convinced by the concept of Manifest Destiny, which held it self-evidently right that the American white population should spread across the plains and settle all of the Western lands, he regarded the Indians as being an inferior people, who, he told a graduating class at West Point, had an “inherited prejudice … against labor.” (Grant, who had written in a letter to Julia of the future international power of the United States that was an extension of the idea of Manifest Destiny, was for a gentler treatment of the Indians, but his efforts were hampered by both the inefficiency and occasional corruption of the Indian Agency, and the enormous thrust of post-Civil War Western expansion.)
At times Sherman tried to ensure that white settlers treated the Indians fairly, but as he became increasingly convinced that the Indians would not change and become the kind of domesticated, productive citizens he wanted them to be, he came to something like his wartime policy toward the South. It would be more realistic, and better in the long run for everyone concerned, to crush the Indians’ resistance to white settlement sooner than later, by applying harsh force. The Indians simply had to be gotten out of the way of the inevitable settlement of the Western lands that they persisted in thinking were theirs. His underlying attitude toward the Indians was not a desire to wipe them out, but at least once, voicing his belief in the need to take strong military measures against the Indians, he admitted that he “believed in the doctrine” expressed in the saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
During the immediate postwar years, before Grant became president, Sherman’s resentment of what he considered to be the dictatorial attitude toward him taken by President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of War Stanton increased the tension between him and his two civilian superiors. Nonetheless, his wartime fame ensured that he would be sounded out by one group or another as a possible presidential candidate during every election from 1868 to the one to be held in 1892, overtures that he most memorably finally dismissed with, “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”
When Grant was elected president in the autumn of 1868, he named Sherman to replace him as the army’s commander. Taking that position of general of the army in March of 1869, Sherman felt that he and his old friend Grant would work well together, as they had during the war. At that moment, the secretary of war was General John M. Schofield, who had served under Sherman during the war. Schofield had been a compromise appointment made by Andrew Johnson after Johnson failed in his efforts to remove Stanton during their dispute about Reconstruction policies, with Stanton resigning on his own initiative after Johnson’s impeachment. Sherman, who on Grant’s recommendation had just been promoted to the new rank of full general, had reason to assume that, among himself, Grant, and Schofield, three greatly experienced West Pointers, army matters would be dealt with in a harmonious and effective fashion.
No sooner had Sherman taken command of the army than Grant replaced Schofield as secretary of war with his old wartime chief of staff and confidant John A. Rawlins, who was now gravely ill. In an action that substantially reduced Sherman’s authority, Rawlins immediately issued orders that in effect rescinded Grant’s own recent order setting forth the wide scope of the general of the army’s powers. Hurrying to the White House, Sherman tried to get this reversed, only to encounter Grant’s statement, about Rawlins and his illness, “I don’t like to give him pain now; so, Sherman, you’ll have to publish the rescinding order.” When Sherman still protested, with the two men still addressing each other as “Grant” and “Sherman” in the manner of their wartime meetings, Grant said, “Well, if it’s my own order, I can rescind it, can’t I?”
Sherman, who had written his brother during the war that Grant “has an almost childlike love for me,” stood up and said, “Yes, Mister President, you have the power to revoke your own order; you shall be obeyed. Good morning, sir.”
Things were never quite the same between them after that. When Rawlins died five months later, Grant named Sherman as his interim secretary of war, but when the post was filled by W. W. Belknap, a civilian who was another of Sherman’s former subordinate generals, Belknap soon exceeded Rawlin’s actions in restricting the powers of the general of the army. Sherman began to see that Grant was in the hands of politicians. Nonetheless, Sherman remained in command of the army for a total of fourteen years, serving not only under Grant through his two terms as president but also under President Rutherford B. Hayes, another Civil War general, as well as James A. Garfield, who had fought as a brigadier general at Shiloh, and Chester A. Arthur. On his sixty-fourth birthday, February 8, 1884, nearly forty-eight years after he was sworn in as a cadet at West Point, William Tecumseh Sherman resigned from the army.
During the last year of Grant’s life, it would be the newly retired Sherman’s turn to lift his friend’s spirits. In 1884, seven years after he left the White House, Grant, then living in New York, lost all his money because of the fraudulent machinations of a Wall Street figure to whom he had entrusted everything he had. To try to regain the loss and provide for his family, he began to write his accurate, powerful, historically valuable memoirs, a work that brings the reader to the close of the war. Lavishly praised across the next century by figures as diverse as Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, and Edmund Wilson, the book was destined to succeed with the public immediately and guarantee Julia a comfortable income, but soon after he began to write, Grant started to suffer from the throat cancer finally brought on by thousands of cigars. Racing against his illness as he wrote, Grant welcomed Sherman’s repeated visits to him: on December 24, 1884, Sherman wrote Ellen, “Grant says my visits have done him more good than all the doctors.”
In a gallant final effort, Grant finished his classic work on July 19, 1885, and died four days later. A crowd of one and a half million—the largest to assemble in the United States to that time—lined the streets of Manhattan to watch his funeral cortege pass. In the solemn parade were not only Union Army veterans but also a contingent of Confederates who had served in the Stonewall Brigade. Sherman was a pallbearer at the funeral ceremony and bowed his head and wept as a bugler played Taps. Two months later, Sherman said of his friend, “It will be a thousand years before his character is fully appreciated.” He became the defender of Grant’s military reputation: when an argument was made that Lee was the greater general, Sherman countered that it was Grant who had seen the Civil War as a strategic seamless web, and added, of Lee, “His Virginia was to him the world … [He] stood at the front porch battling with the flames whilst the kitchen and whole house were burning, sure in the end to consume the whole.”
In that future, still far distant on the day of the Grand Review, Ellen would be the next to go. To the end, she and Sherman were very different and disagreed on many things as they always had—twelve years after the war, they lived apart for close to two years—yet deep in Ellen was the little five-year-old girl who “peeped with great interest” as her father brought the red-headed nine-year-old boy from next door home to live with them. Two years after Sherman retired from the army in 1884, they went to live in New York City, where she remained at home in the evenings while he consorted with the millionaires of the age—the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—as well as with actresses, artists, and assorted celebrities. His flirtatious friendships with women, including those with a sculptress and a Philadelphia socialite, were well-known, but in the middle of all that, while she was away on a trip, Ellen wrote him a letter that rang the truth for both of them. “You are the only man in the world I ever could have loved,” she said, and then told him that, whether he knew it or not, “You are true to me in heart and soul.” They would never reconcile their views on Catholicism—when their son Tom, eight years old at the time of the Grand Review, decided at the age of twenty-three to become a Jesuit priest, his decision broke Sherman’s heart and pleased Ellen—but their unending love for their dead son Willy was one of the bonds that held them together like steel.

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