Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (59 page)

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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

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The end for Ellen came on November 28, 1888, when she was sixty-four. She had been sick for some weeks, lying in bed upstairs in the house on Manhattan’s West Seventy-first Street into which they had recently moved. Sherman wishfully thought she was exaggerating the gravity of her illness but had installed a nurse to take care of her. He was reading in his office when the nurse suddenly called down to him that Ellen was failing. Sherman raced up the stairs, crying out, “Wait for me Ellen, no one ever loved you as I love you!” When he reached her bed, she was gone.
After a time of mourning so deep as to worry those who remembered the mental states of his wartime years, Sherman resumed his New York social life. Cared for by his unmarried daughter Lizzie and with frequent visits from his married daughters Ellie and Minnie, he resumed his combination of sophisticated New York life and reunions of his veterans—he attended several hundred of those gatherings during the first fifteen years after the war, always as the guest of honor—but his fabled energy was deserting him. On February 8, 1890, his seventieth birthday brought forth greetings and tributes from all over the nation, and he was surrounded by a family that now included seven grandchildren, but a year later, he was stricken by an illness that appeared to be related to the asthma from which he had suffered earlier in his life. This soon became pneumonia. Sherman lay in bed, steadily growing weaker, with his mind sometimes wandering. On February 11, 1891, he asked his daughter Minnie to make certain that the words “Faithful and Honorable” be carved on his headstone. Three days after that, he died.
Sherman’s body was to be taken west for burial in St. Louis, but first there would be a massive funeral service for him in New York, attended by President Benjamin Harrison, who had served in his ranks, former president Rutherford B. Hayes, another of his veterans, former president Grover Cleveland, and five of the surviving major generals of the Army of the West. The funeral procession from Sherman’s house to the church would have thirty thousand men marching, in organizations ranging from the entire West Point Corps of Cadets to regiments of the Regular Army and National Guard, as well as thousands of Civil War veterans from the association known as the Grand Army of the Republic.
As the funeral procession was being organized, an erect, frail, eighty-four-year-old man got off a train in New York, bringing with him a valise and the honor of the South. From the time he had met Sherman in North Carolina for the purpose of surrendering his army to him, General Joseph E. Johnston had remained his admiring friend. They had corresponded and had frequently dined together in Washington during the postwar years during which Johnston had, among other things, served the reunited nation as a congressman from Virginia from 1879 to 1881, and was appointed United States commissioner of railroads in 1885. Learning that Sherman had named him an honorary pallbearer, Johnston had headed north from his home in Washington, despite the concern of his family and friends that he was not used to the winter weather he would find in New York in mid-February. As he stood at attention bareheaded outside Sherman’s house while the casket containing his friend’s body was brought down the steps to be placed in a hearse, someone behind him leaned forward and said, “General, please put on your hat, you might get sick.” Johnston replied, “If I were in his place and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat.” By the end of the day, Johnston had a severe chill, which caused complications for his weakened heart. Back in the South, Johnston died a month later.
The trip of Sherman’s body west to be buried in St. Louis was symbolic in itself—a man from Ohio, a soldier of the West, the commander of the Army of the West, returning to be buried near the Mississippi River that he and Grant had used as the strategic avenue that led them to the victory at Vicksburg and all that followed from that—but there was something more. Along the route of his funeral train, his veterans waited for him in daylight and darkness, ready to salute him a final time. Many of them had gathered in squads, small groups of survivors wearing their broad-brimmed slouch hats, saved from the days when they fought and marched beside their “Uncle Billy.” Some even had their old muskets, loaded with a blank charge of powder, to raise and fire at the sky in the manner of military funerals. What they saw when the train came was a big picture of Sherman, fixed to the headlight, and his sword swinging beneath it as he went west.
The last survivor of the two couples, the Grants and the Shermans, was Julia Grant. She loved her eight years in the White House as first lady and greatly enjoyed the two and a half years that she and Grant spent traveling around the world after he left office. Nation after nation hailed him with twenty-one-gun salutes, and United States Navy vessels were placed at their disposal whenever they wanted to travel aboard them. When the Grants dined with Queen Victoria at Windsor Palace, before Grant took the queen into dinner on his arm, Julia and Victoria had a chance to talk and told each other about their children. “The Paris I remember,” Julia wrote in her own wise and charming memoirs, “is all sunshine, the people all happy,” and she also noted that “the President of France, that grand old soldier Marshal MacMahon and Madam MacMahon were unceasing in their attentions.” At Heidelberg, Richard Wagner “performed some of his own delightful pieces of music for us.” Arriving at Cairo by train from the port of Alexandria, the Grants were met by officials representing the khedive of Egypt, including former Confederate general William W. Loring, a West Pointer who had lost an arm in the Mexican War and had commanded troops fighting Grant in the Vicksburg campaign, and was employed by the khedive in modernizing and training his army. (Grant promptly asked Loring to ride with him in his carriage, and the two talked of Civil War campaigns.)
After Grant’s death, Julia moved from New York to Washington, where she lived in a large, comfortable house on Massachusetts Avenue, receiving prominent visitors of every sort and often dining at the White House. In good health, lively as always, interested in everything, she began to outlive many of her contemporaries; when the Spanish-American War started in 1898, she became the active head of the Women’s National War Relief Association, which sent its first shipload of supplies to Manila. (During that conflict, which began thirty-three years after the Civil War ended, former Confederate cavalry general Joseph Wheeler served as a major general of United States Volunteers at the age of sixty-one, and Robert E. Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh Lee, who had been another young Confederate cavalry general, also became a major general and was a corps commander in Cuba, being present at the Battle of San Juan Hill when he was sixty-two. The Grants’ son Frederick, who as a boy of thirteen was with his father at the surrender of Vicksburg, later graduated from West Point, and after time out of the service, including acting along with his brother Ulysses Jr. as confidential secretary to the president while Grant was in office, came back into the army when he was forty-seven to serve as a major general in the Philippines.)
In 1902, at the age of seventy-six, Julia Dent Grant had an attack of bronchitis, combined with heart and kidney failures. To the end, she remembered and cherished all of Ulysses S. Grant, not just the general and the president but also the young lieutenant who had ridden up to her house at White Haven so long ago. The squint-eyed girl from Missouri had gone with him every loving, supportive step of the way, from the morning rides across bright pastures along the shining Gravois Creek, through hard times when Grant was peddling firewood on the streets of St. Louis, to battlefield areas, to the White House, to Windsor Castle, to caring for him in his last illness as he wrote his account of the battles he fought and the campaigns he commanded. They had done it together, they had lived one of the great American love stories, and now in her last days she still yearned for her “Ulys,” who signed all his letters with, “Kisses to you and the children.” In the last lines of her memoirs she wrote, “I, his wife, rested in and was warmed in the sunlight of his loyal love and great fame, and now, even though his beautiful life has gone out, it is as when some far-off planet disappears from the heavens; the light of his glorious fame still reaches out to me, falls upon me, and warms me.”
 
 
 
And so the living echoes of the friendship between Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman came to an end. Both of them failures before the war, the two men, alike in some ways and so different in others, discovered their talents and strengths in the crucible of the great national crisis. They formed a partnership in which, often after significant differences of opinion, each resolutely and successfully supported the decisions and movements of the other. Both were formidable leaders, but it was their combined abilities and coordinated campaigns that proved literally irresistible and played such a major part in winning the Civil War.
Sherman’s role appears at first to be the more dramatic and visionary half of the Grant-and-Sherman story. Coming into his own at Shiloh after earlier failure and headlines saying “General William T. Sherman Insane,” his strategic vision not only led to his epic marches through the South but also ushered in a new era of modern warfare in which the destruction of the enemy population’s will to resist can be as important as the defeat of its armies in the field. What is less obvious but exciting to watch is Grant’s movement up the chain of command, proving himself equal to one extraordinary challenge after another. Grant was intuitively aggressive and instinctively tenacious. At Vicksburg, in saving the situation at Chattanooga, and in his risky clandestine change of front against Lee after Cold Harbor, Grant demonstrated that he too could be imaginative and bold. Beyond this, while Sherman had only his own armies to think of, as commander of the entire Union Army Grant proved to be a superb administrator who saw the overall picture of the war with a vision at least as clear as Sherman’s.
What drew the two men together as friends? Each needed a military colleague whom he could admire and trust, and each wanted the other’s warm approval. Grant had the love of Julia but yearned for affection from a flinty father who tried to turn a financial profit from his son’s military position. Sherman had what a later generation would call a “support system”—his wife, Ellen, his brother Senator John Sherman, his prominent father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, who became increasingly appreciative of his achievements as the war progressed—but underneath there was the once-insecure boy whose father had died when he was nine, at which time he and his ten brothers and sisters had been split up among a number of households.
Sherman was right when he said of himself and Grant, “We were as brothers.” They did the things that devoted brothers do: back each other up, help each other out, sacrifice for the other. It was Sherman, standing to gain if Grant resigned from the army, who talked him out of going home when Halleck sidelined him after Shiloh; it was Sherman who told Grant to go ahead and send him into action at Hayne’s Bluff above Vicksburg, a move likely to hurt Sherman’s reputation but one that might help the Vickbsurg campaign as a whole; it was Grant’s steadfast support that led Sherman to say after Vicksburg, “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and that if I got in a tight place you would come if alive.”
Grant worked to ensure that Sherman received his richly deserved promotions. When Sherman’s brilliant victories in the South caused a bill to be introduced in Congress to give him a promotion making him eligible to rise to the supreme command above the beleaguered Grant, he wrote a letter to his senator brother urging that the effort be stopped. As the war came to a close, after Sherman had concluded the surrender agreement with Joseph E. Johnston that some in Washington found so generous as to be the act of a traitor, Grant arrived in North Carolina and swiftly and tactfully rectified a situation that could have ended Sherman’s career at the height of his fame.
Grant thought that Sherman was entertaining, and thoroughly enjoyed his company; when they were together, Grant, usually reserved in manner, relaxed as he did with no other officer. Sherman was often baffled by the depths from which Grant pulled forth his successful military movements, but he came to see that Grant was a master of what he did. Each saw in the other a friendly, trusted partner who quickly grasped the other’s ideas and made it possible to implement them for their mutual benefit and for the success of the cause to which they were dedicated. Each saw a man who wanted victory far more than he wanted promotion or fame; each saw a soldier’s soldier. Whether they were campaigning together, or communicating by letter and telegraph at times when their headquarters were several hundred miles apart, each knew that the other made him more than what he was before they met.
 
 
 
In citing works in the notes, short titles have generally been used. Works frequently cited have been identified by the following abbreviations. The full citation appears in the bibliography, under the name of the author or editor.
 
GMS
Ulysses S. Grant,
Memoirs and Selected Letters
JDG
John Y. Simon, ed.,
The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant
LL
Lloyd Lewis,
Sherman: Fighting Prophet
M
John F. Marszalek,
Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order
PUSG
John Y. Simon, ed.,
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant
SCW
Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds.,
Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865
SG
Jean Edward Smith,
Grant
.
SM
William Tecumseh Sherman,
Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
 
 
PROLOGUE
 
“put the river” SG, 200.
“Well, Grant” Ibid., 201.
“The South never smiled” Brooks,
Grant,
144.
“plain as an old stove” Garland,
Grant,
229.
“He is never quiet” Kennett,
Sherman,
99.
“as if he had determined” SG, 300.
“When Grant once” Porter,
Campaigning,
223.
“In a moment” Ibid., 417.
1. TWO FAILED MEN WITH GREAT POTENTIAL
 
“In my new employment” PUSG, I: 359. Grant’s letter of resignation, April 11, 1854, PUSG, I: 329-32. Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant
, 329, sets forth circumstances of the resignation. Also see SG, 87.
“Every day I like” PUSG, I: 334.
Grant’s financial situation SG, 91.
“Why, Grant” Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant
, 346.
“Great God, Grant” SG, 91.
The pawn ticket PUSG, I: 339. The ticket also appears among this book’s illustrations.
Crop freeze SG, 92.
“Julia and I” PUSG, I: 343.
“shabbily dressed” SG, 95.
“Grant was” Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant
, 377.
“I rarely read over” GMS, 39.
Jack Lindsay incident Fleming,
West Point
, 102.
“His hair was” SG, 26.
“the class, still mounted” Garland,
Grant,
52.
“The farm of White Haven” Casey, “When Grant Went …” All quotations from Emma Dent Casey are from this recollection.
“That young man” Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant
, 110.
“a darling little lieutenant” Ulysses S. Grant Homepage, citing
www.mscomm.com/~ulysses/page181.html
.
“he was kind enough” JDG, 48.
“Saturday came” Ibid., 49.
“serious the matter with me” GMS, 37.
“On this occasion” Ibid., 38.
“We all enjoyed” Casey.
“I noticed, too” Ross,
The General’s Wife
, 25, citing
Laddies’ Home Journal
, October 1890.
“Before I returned” GMS, 39.
“In the thickest” PUSG, I: 86.
“I crossed at such” GMS, 81.
“I never went” Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant,
249.
“You could not keep him” Garland,
Grant
, 100.
“the first two persons” Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant
, 251.
“found a church” GMS, 106.
“The shots from” Ibid., 109.
“every shot was” Ibid.
“I could not tell” Ibid.
“astonishing victories … frightful” PUSG, I: 146.
“one of the most” GMS, 41.
“the very best soldier” Freeman,
Lee
, I: 284.
“There’s no danger!” Lewis,
Captain, Sam Grant
, 245.
“was more bronzed” Casey.
“one of those beautiful … hand to glove” Ulysses S. Grant Homepage, interview, Julia Dent Grant,
www.mscomm.com/~ulysses/page181.html
.
“I enjoyed sitting” JDG, 56.
“a man of iron” Garland,
Grant,
122.
“He seemed always to be sad” Ibid.
“a mail came in” PUSG, I: 320.
“He was in the habit” Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant
, 324.
“sprees” Ibid., 319.
Grant’s resignation PUSG, I: 329-32; also see Lewis,
Captain, Sam Grant
, 329, and SG, 87.
“I peeped at him” Bleser,
Intimate Strategies
, 138.
“I remember seeing” SG, 25.
“These brilliant scenes” Howe,
Home Letters
, 107.
“I have felt tempted” Ibid., 116.
“What is that?” M, 68.
“peculiarly bad luck” Ibid., 79.
“firmly in the main” Howe,
Home Letters
, 20.
“a terrible Civil War” M, 78.
“protector” Bleser,
Intimate Strategies
, 141.
“This is too bad” Kennett,
Sherman
, 57.
“covered with sand” SM, 120.
“a cry about Minnie” Kennett,
Sherman
, 72.
“I would rather live” and “I would rather be” Bleser,
Intimate Strategies,
144.
“For the past seven months” Kennett,
Sherman
, 74.
“Cump rubbed me” Ibid.
“Cump & I” Ibid.
“I have bet” SCW, 563.
“sent jellycake,” “Archbishop called,” and “Prayed for the conversion” Kennett,
Sherman,
72.
“no symptoms of dishonesty” Clarke,
Sherman,
69.
“In giving his instructions” Merrill,
Sherman,
103.
“depression” Clarke,
Sherman,
66.
“Knowing insanity” Ellen Sherman to John Sherman, November 10, 1861,
William T. Shennan Papers
, Library of Congress. Various printed sources give different versions of the words between “Cump” and “once in California.” I believe that a photostat of the original reads as, “in the verge of it.” See also SCW, 155-56, which renders this as, “in the seize of it.”
“No doubt you are glad” Bleser,
Intimate Strategies
, 145.
“that West Point” M, 114.
“I look upon myself” Ibid., 119.
Sherman’s experience in this post in Louisiana is treated in Walter Fleming,
Sherman as College President
.
“I have heard men of good sense” Howe,
Home Letters,
163.
“You mistake, too” LL, 138.
“It is hard to realize” PUSG, I: 359.
“You are driving me” M, 137.
“You are all in here” Ibid., 139.
“whom I remember” Fellman,
Citizen Sherman
, 88.
2. GRANT AWAKENS
 
“take command of the army to be brought into the field” Freeman,
Lee
, I: 633-36. I interpret this to mean that, with the aged and infirm Winfield Scott, who was soon to retire, being in no condition to lead the Union Army, Lee would take field command and become general in chief upon Scott’s retirement.
“I can anticipate” Ibid., 420.
“I could take no part” Ibid., 437.
“Civil War has only horror” Heidler,
Encyclopedia,
II: 568.
“I never went into” SG, 89.
“having been educated” PUSG, II: 6.
“Julia takes” Ibid., 22.
“Oh! how intensely” JDG, 87.
“I remember now” Ibid.
“fell in behind” Garland,
Grant,
160.
“I might have got” PUSG, II: 21.
“at a little square table” and “one suit” McFeely,
Grant,
74.
“I thought he was the man” and “McClellan never” SG, 107.
“got on one of his little sprees” Ibid., 83.
“I’ve tried” Garland,
Grant,
168.
“[We] saw that” SG, 105.
Simon S. Goode Garland,
Grant,
165-66.
“there wasn’t a chicken” Ibid., 108.
“preferably Captain Grant” SG, 107.
“was dressed very clumsily” Ibid., 108.
“What a colonel!” Lewis,
Captain Sam Grant
, 427.
“What do they mean by” and “Rustic jokes” Garland,
Grant,
173.
“Mexico” incident Woodward,
Grant,
54.
“Howdy, Colonel?” Fuller,
Grant and Lee
, 71.
Orders No. 8 PUSG, II: 46.
“unostentatious” through “manner” SG, 110.
Orders No. 14 PUSG, II: 48.
“Alexander was not older” JDG, 92.
“Your Dodo” letter PUSG, II: 50. .
“They entered” GMS, 246.
“My own opinion” PUSG, II: 21.
“This is an infantry” SG, 111.
“Fred enjoys it” PUSG, II: 59.
3. SHERMAN GOES IN
 
Meeting with Lincoln SM, 185-86.
“I shall, to the extent” Lincoln,
Speeches and Writings
, 231.
“so as to be independent” SCW, 88.
“I am convinced” Kennett,
Sherman,
114.
“Of course I could no longer defer” SM, 192.
“tall gaunt form” and descriptions of Sherman’s face and hat M, 147.
“volunteers called by courtesy” SCW, 127.
Letter of July 16 Ibid., 117-18.
“The march” SM, 198.
“As soon as real war” SCW, 98.
“On to Richmond!” Trefousse,
Radical Republicans
, 174.
Bettie Duvall and intelligence sources Leech,
Reveille,
95-96.
“for the first time” SCW, 124.
“Up to that time” SM, 202.
“there stands Jackson” Roland,
Iliad,
52.
“After I had” SM, 205.
“We could see” Johnston,
Him on the One Side
, 34.
“There was no positive” SM, 203.
“Shameless flight” and “seen the confusion” Ibid., 124-25.
“Though the North” SM, 199.
“were so mutinous” Ibid., 207.
“one of the … best” Ibid.
“We were all trembling” Ibid., 209.
“Some young officer” Ibid.
“offered the command” Ibid., 210.
“In this interview” Ibid.
“nearly all unfriendly” Kennett,
Sherman,
132.
Figures of opposing forces LL, 122.
“I’m afraid” SCW, 143.
“I don’t think” Ibid., 145.
“said he could not” SM, 216.
“to meddle as little” SCW, 127.
“My own belief” Ibid., 146.
“I am sorry” Ibid., 150.
“Do write me” and “How any body” SCW, 148
n
l, 147.
“our Gun Boat Fleet” PUSG, III: 36.
“You ask if” Ibid., II: 67.
“some of Washburne’s work” SG, 113.
“I could not discover” SCW, 138.
“He usually wore” SG, 119.
“almost untenable” Woodward,
Grant,
190.
General Orders No. 5 PUSG, II: 207.
“I have nothing to do with” Ibid., 194.
“Steamers … prizes” Ibid., 262.
“required here” Ibid., 218.
“Remember me” Ibid., 148-49.
“Woods should not” SCW, 145.
“old Baron Steinberger” and “had drawn to St. Louis” SM, 214.
“Now we’ll have news” Davis,
Sherman’s March
, 140.
description of the meeting in Louisville SM, 218-20.
“absolutely crazy” Merrill,
Sherman,
176.
“promptly replied” Kennett,
Sherman,
140.
“riding a whirlwind” and “the idea” SCW, 154.
“Sherman’s gone in the head” M, 163.
“Send Mrs. Sherman” SCW, 156
n
.
“in a great, barnlike” Kennett,
Sherman,
141.
“of such nervousness” M, 164.
“General Halleck is satisfied” Fellman,
Sherman,
100.
“completely ‘stampeded’” M, 164.
“acted insane” Ibid., 167.
“I would like” PUSG, II: 300.
“Veterans could not” GMS, 179.
“The alarm ‘surrounded’ was given” Ibid., 180.
“I saw a body” Ibid., 183.
“There is a Yankee” Ibid., 185.
“I was the only man” Ibid., 184.
Confederate musket ball Woodward,
Grant
, 211.
“the enemies [
sic
] loss” PUSG, III: 129. This report was written by Captain William S. Hillyer of Grant’s staff.
“The General Comdg.” Ibid., 130.
Quotations from
New York Herald
and
New York Times
SG, 131.
“whose disorders” Hirshson,
White Tecumseh
, 103.
“it seemed to affect him Kennett,
Sherman,
144.
“then came telegraphic” Hirshson,
White Tecumseh
, 103.
“well convinced” and “the President evinced” Ibid.
GENERAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN INSANE LL, 201.
“Nature will paint” Hirshson,
White Tecumseh
, 201.
“Sir” SCW, 161.
“distressed almost to death” Kennett,
Sherman,
141.
“I feel desolate” and “So now my dearest” Hirshson,
White Tecumseh
, 105.
“true lawyer-like ambiguity” LL, 205.
“Mr. Lincoln, Dear Sir” Ibid.
“seemed very anxious” Hirshson,
White Tecumseh
, 109.
“Dearest Ellen” SCW, 173.
“I am so sensible” Ibid., 174.
“Do you know who I am?” M, 168.
President’s General War Order No. 1 SG, 139.
“was cut short” GMS, 190.
“Make your preparations” Ibid., 140.

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