The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (156 page)

Their problem now was escape from the greatly superior Federal columns rapidly converging on them from the south and east and north. Shelby led them west along the south bank of the Missouri, in the direction of his prewar home at Waverly. Before they got there, however, they had their one full-scale engagement of the raid, October 13 near Arrow Rock, where the enemy columns finally brought them to bay, outnumbered five to one. Splitting his command in two, Shelby dismounted the larger half and fought a savage defensive action in which he lost about one hundred men while the smaller half made a mounted getaway by punching a hole in the line of the attackers; whereupon he remounted the remainder and did the same at another point, taking a different escape route to confuse and split his pursuers. On through Waverly he rode that night, still accompanied by his train, which he had brought out with him. At nearby Hawkins Mill, however, he was later to report, “finding my wagons troublesome, and having no ammunition left except what the men could carry, I sunk them in the Missouri River, where they were safe from all capture.” This done he turned south. Bypassing Lexington, Harrisonville, and Butler to skirt the Burnt District, he reached Carthage on October 17 and turned east next day through Sarcoxie, which he had visited two weeks before, on his way north. Laying ambushes all the while to delay pursuers, he re-entered Arkansas on October 19 and was joined next day on the Little Osage River by the smaller force that had split off at Arrow Rock a week ago. From the Little Osage he moved by what he called “easy stages” to Clarksville, where he recrossed the Arkansas River on October 26 and made his way south through the Ouachita Mountains to Washington. There at last he called a halt, November 3, forty miles southwest of his starting point at Arkadelphia. In the forty-one days he had been gone he had covered a distance of 1500 miles, an average of better than thirty-six miles a day, and though he had suffered a total loss of about 150 killed and wounded, he had also picked up 800 recruits along the way, so that he returned with twice the number of men he had had when he set out. He listed his gains—600 Federals killed or wounded, 500 captured and paroled; 6000 horses and mules taken, together with 300 wagons, 1200 small arms, and 40 stands of colors; $1,000,000 in U. S. Army supplies destroyed, plus $800,000 in public property—then laconically closed his report, which was addressed to Price’s adjutant: “Hoping this may prove satisfactory, I remain, major, very respectfully, your obedient servant, Jo. O. Shelby, Colonel.” Highly pleased—as well it might be; for there was also substance to his claim that the raid had kept 10,000 Missouri bluecoats from being sent to assist in raising the siege at Chattanooga—the government promoted him to brigadier the following month.

Quantrill by now was calling himself a colonel, too, and had even
acquired a uniform in which he had his picture taken wearing three stars on the collar, a long-necked young man with hooded eyes, a smooth round jaw, and a smile as faint as Mona Lisa’s. But the government—much to its credit, most historians were to say—declined to sanction his self-promotion, even after he scored a second victory in Kansas, one far more impressive, militarily, than the first, which he had scored six weeks before at Lawrence. While Shelby was preparing to set out from Arkadelphia, Quantrill was reassembling his guerillas on familiar Blackwater Creek, intending to take them to Texas for the winter. In early October the two columns passed each other, east and west of Carthage, Shelby and his 600 going north, Quantrill with about 400 going south, neither aware of the other’s presence, some twenty miles away. On October 6, when the former passed through Warsaw, the latter drew near Fort Baxter, down in the southeast corner of Kansas at Baxter Springs, which was held by two companies of Wisconsin cavalry and one of Kansas infantry. Quantrill decided to take it. While the attack was in progress, however, he learned that a train of ten wagons was approaching from the north, attended by two more companies of Wisconsin and Kansas troops; so he pulled back half his men, and went to take that too. His luck was in. The train and troops were the baggage and escort of James Blunt, lately appointed commander of the District of the Frontier, on his way to establish headquarters at Fort Baxter. When Blunt saw the horsemen in line across the road ahead, he assumed they were an honor guard sent out from the fort to meet him. He halted to have his escort dress its ranks, then proceeded at a dignified pace to receive the salute of the waiting line of horsemen.

He received instead a blast of fire at sixty yards, followed promptly by a screaming charge that threw his hundred-man escort first into milling confusion and then, when they recognized what they were up against—the guerillas, having been warned to expect no quarter, certainly would extend none—into headlong flight. This last availed all but a handful of them nothing; 79 of the hundred were quickly run down and killed, including Major Henry Curtis, Blunt’s adjutant and the son of the former department commander. Blunt himself made his escape, though he was nearly unhorsed in taking a jump across a ravine. Thrown from his saddle and onto his horse’s neck by the rebound, he clung there and rode in that unorthodox position for a mile or more, outdistancing his pursuers, who turned back to attend to the business of dispatching the prisoners and the wounded. Quantrill called off the attack on the fort—its garrison had suffered 19 casualties to bring the Federal total to 98, as compared to 6 for the guerillas—and proceeded to rifle the abandoned wagons. Included in the loot was all of Blunt’s official correspondence, his dress sword, two stands of colors, and several demijohns of whiskey. Quantrill was so pleased with his exploit that he even took a drink or two, something none of his companions had seen him do
before. Presently he became talkative, which was also quite unusual. “By God,” he boasted as he staggered about, “Shelby couldn’t whip Blunt; neither could Marmaduke; but
I
whipped him.” He went on south to Texas, as he had intended when he left Johnson County the week before, and Blunt was removed not long thereafter from the command he had so recently acquired.

But Holmes and Price, reduced by sickness and desertion to a force of 7000, had not been greatly helped by either Shelby or Quantrill; Steele still threatened from Little Rock, and though he had not been reinforced, he outnumbered them two to one. On October 25, the day before Shelby recrossed the Arkansas River on his way back from Missouri, Holmes ordered a withdrawal of the troops left at Pine Bluff, thus loosening his last tenuous grasp on the south bank of that stream in order to prepare for what Kirby Smith believed was threatening, deep in his rear: Banks had begun another ascent of the Teche and the Atchafalaya, which could take him at last to the Red and into Texas. Once this happened, Smith’s command, already cut off from the powder mills and ironworks of the East, would be cut off from the flow of goods coming in through Mexico. “The Fabian policy is now our true policy,” he declared, and he advised that if further retreat became necessary, Holmes could move “by Monticello, along Bayou Bartholomew to Monroe, through a country abundant in supplies.”

Grant by then had left for other fields. In mid-September, after ten days of confinement to the New Orleans hotel room, unable even to sit up in bed, he had himself carried aboard a steamboat bound for Vicksburg, and there, although as he said later he “remained unable to move for some time afterwards,” he was reunited with his wife and their four children, who came down to join him in a pleasant, well-shaded house which his staff had commandeered for him on the bluff overlooking the river. Under these circumstances, satisfying as they were to his uxorious nature, his convalescence was so comparatively rapid that within a month he was hobbling about on crutches.

McPherson kept bachelor quarters in town, boarding with a family in which, according to Sherman, there were “several interesting young ladies.” Not that his fellow Ohioan had neglected his own comfort. Like Grant, Sherman had his family with him—it too included four children—camped in a fine old grove of oaks beside the Big Black River, near the house from whose gallery, several weeks ago, the dozen weeping women had reviled him for the death of one of their husbands at Bull Run. He had been discomfited then, but that was all behind him now, together with his doubts about the war and his share in it. Grant had given his restless spirit a sense of direction and dedication; he could
even abide the present idleness, feeling that he and his troops had earned a decent period of rest. “The time passed very agreeably,” he would recall years later, “diversified only by little events of not much significance.” That he was in favor of vigorous efforts at an early date, however, was shown in a letter he wrote Halleck on September 17—the day after Grant’s return from New Orleans—in response to one from the general-in-chief requesting his opinions as to “the question of reconstruction in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.… Write me your views fully,” Halleck urged him, “as I may wish to use them with the President.”

Never one to require much encouragement for an exposition of his views, the red-haired general replied with a letter that was to fill eight close-spaced pages in his memoirs. He had done considerable thinking along these lines, based on his experiences in the region before and during the war, and if by “reconstruction” Halleck meant a revival of “any civil government in which the local people have much say,” then Sherman was against it. “I know them well, and the very impulses of their nature,” he declared, “and to deal with the inhabitants of that part of the South which borders on the great river, we must recognize the classes into which they have divided themselves.” First, there were the planters. “They are educated, wealthy, and easily approached.… I know we can manage this class, but only by
action,”
by “pure military rule.” Second were “the smaller farmers, mechanics, merchants, and laborers.… The southern politicians, who understand this class, use them as the French do their masses—seemingly consult their prejudices, while they make their orders and enforce them. We should do the same.” Third, there were “the Union men of the South. I must confess that I have little respect for this class.… I account them as nothing in this great game of war.” Fourth and last, he narrowed his sights on “the young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers-about-town, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense. They care not a sou for niggers, land, or any thing.” His solution to the problem they posed as “the most dangerous set of men that this war has turned loose upon the world” was easily stated: “These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.” Just how they were to be employed by the government they were fighting Sherman did not say, but having sketched the various classes to be dealt with, he proceeded to give his prescription for victory over them all. “I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it—that we will do it in our own time and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be in one year, or two, or ten,
or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are enemies, and that we will not account to them for our acts.” Lest there be any misunderstanding, he summed up what he meant. “I would not coax them, or even meet them half way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.… The only government needed or deserved by the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi now exists in Grant’s army.” He closed by asking Halleck to “excuse so long a letter,” but in sending it to Grant for forwarding to Washington, he appended a note in which he added: “I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.… The South has done her worst, and now is the time for us to pile on our blows thick and fast.”

Halleck presently wired that Lincoln had read the letter and wanted to see it published, but Sherman declined, preferring “not to be drawn into any newspaper controversy” such as the one two years ago, in which he had been pronounced insane. “If I covet any public reputation,” he replied, “it is as a silent actor. I dislike to see my name in print.” Anyhow, by then he was on the move again; his troops had “slung the knapsack for new fields,” and he himself had experienced a personal tragedy as deep as any he was ever to know in a long life.

Rosecrans had been whipped at Chickamauga while Sherman’s letter was on its way north, and before it got to Washington the wires were humming with calls for reinforcements to relieve Old Rosy’s cooped-up army. On September 23 Grant passed the word for Sherman to leave at once for Memphis with two divisions, picking up en route the division McPherson had recently sent to Helena, and move toward Chattanooga via Corinth on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which he was to repair as he went, thus providing a new supply line. Drums rolled in the camps on the Big Black; for the next four days the roads to Vicksburg were crowded with columns filing onto transports at the wharf. The steamer
Atlantic
was the last to leave, and on it rode Sherman and his family. He was showing the two girls and the two boys his old camp as the boat passed Young’s Point, when he noticed that nine-year-old Willy, his first-born son and namesake—“that child on whose future I based all the ambition I ever had”—was pale and feverish. Regimental surgeons, summoned from below deck, diagnosed the trouble as typhoid and warned that it might be fatal. It was. Taken ashore at Memphis, the boy died in the Gayoso House, where Grant’s banquet had been staged five weeks ago. Sherman was disconsolate, though he kept busy attending to details involved in the eastward movement while his wife and the three remaining children went on north to St Louis with
the dead boy in a sealed metallic casket. “Sleeping, waking, everywhere I see poor Willy,” he wrote her, and he added: “I will try to make poor Willy’s memory the cure for the defects which have sullied my character—all that is captious, eccentric and wrong.”