Read A Stillness at Appomattox Online

Authors: Bruce Catton

Tags: #Non Fiction, #Military

A Stillness at Appomattox (8 page)

BOOK: A Stillness at Appomattox
7.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Yet if there were many who uncritically expected much, there were some who had corrosive doubts. Congress had passed an act creating the rank of lieutenant general, knowing that if the act became law no one but Grant would be named, knowing that in passing the act it was doing only what the situation and the country demanded. Yet Congress had had one worry all the while it was acting—a worry expressed in the simple, vulgar question: If we turn the country's armies over to this man, will he stay sober?

The question was never debated publicly and never forgotten in private. Never before had there been anything quite like this uneasy concern that the nation's survival might hang on one man's willingness to refrain from drinking too much. Along with the legend of victory, there had arisen about Grant this legend of drunkenness—bad days in California, forced resignation from the army, hardscrabble period in Missouri and Illinois, surprise at Shiloh. All of these were items in the legend, and men who knew nothing whatever about it had at least heard of President Lincoln's offhand crack that he would like to buy for his other generals some of Grant's own brand of whisky. Men looked at Grant and saw what they had been led to see. Some saw quiet determination, and others, like Richard Henry Dana, saw "the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink," and considered that there was an air of seediness and half pay about the fellow.

The question had finally been resolved in Grant's favor, of course, but not without much soul searching on the part of those who had to resolve it. And as a hedge against a chancy future, Congress had created for the lieutenant general the post of chief of staff, and into this post there had come the thin, impassioned, consumptive little lawyer from Illinois, John A. Rawlins.

Rawlins knew no more about military matters than any other lawyer, except for what had rubbed off on him through three years with Grant, but that did not matter. He ran Grant's staff capably enough, although high policy sometimes got away from him and he was hesitant about asserting himself where officers of the Regular Army were concerned, but what was really important about him was the fact that he had a mother hen complex. He was devoted to the Union with a passion that was burning the life out of him, but he was even more devoted to U. S. Grant, and his great, self-chosen mission in life was to guard the general's honor, well-being, and sobriety. In elevating Grant the government had in effect elevated Rawlins as well. Unformulated but taken for granted was the idea that he was the man who would save the man who would save the country.
8

There was a good deal of needless worry in all of this. Grant was no drunkard. He was simply a man infinitely more complex than most people could realize. Under the hard, ruthless man of war—the remorseless soldier who hammered and hammered until men foolishly believed him raw strength incarnate—there was quite another person: the West Point cadet who hated military life and used to hope against unavailing hope that Congress would presently abolish the military academy and so release him from an army career; the young officer who longed to get away from camp and parade ground and live quietly as a teacher of mathematics; a man apparently beset by infinite loneliness, with a profound need for the warm, healing, understanding intimacy that can overleap shyness. Greatly fortunate, he found this intimacy with his wife, whom he still loved as a young man loves his first sweetheart, and when he was long away from her he seems to have been a little less than whole. On the eve of every great battle, after he became a famous general, with the orders all written and everything taped for the next day's violence, and the unquiet troops drifting off into a last sleep, he would go to his tent and unburden himself in a long, brooding letter to this woman who still spoke of him, quaintly, as "Mister Grant."

So it could happen badly with him, when he was alone and cut off and the evils of life came down about him. Marooned in California, far from his family, tormented by money problems, bored by the pointless routine of a stagnant army post under a dull and unimaginative colonel, he could turn to drink for escape. He could do the same thing back in Missouri as a civilian, working hard for a meager living, all the luck breaking badly, drifting into failure at forty, Sam Grant the ne'er-do-well. Deep in Tennessee, likewise, sidetracked by a jealous and petty-minded superior, the awful stain of Shiloh lying ineradicable on his mind, his career apparently ready to end just as it was being reborn, the story could be the same. There was a flame in him, and there were times when he could not keep the winds from the outer dark from blowing in on him and making it flicker. But it never did go out.

In any case, the Army of the Potomac was hardly in a position to look down its nose on officers who drank. It had an abundance of them, and they had been seen in every level from army commander down to junior lieutenant. There had been times when the sleep of enlisted men had been broken by the raucous noises coming from the tents of drunken officers. There had been one notable occasion this past winter when a famous corps commander got drunk, walked full-tilt into a tree in front of his tent, and was with difficulty restrained from court-martialing the officer of the guard on charges of felonious assault. A little Quaker nurse in a II Corps hospital, commenting on the fact that both a corps and a division commander had been drunk during a recent battle, wrote bitterly: "I don't care what anyone says, war is humbug. It is just put out to see how much suffering the privates can bear, I guess." Perfectly in character was the tale told of a major who commanded an artillery brigade, a heavy drinker despite the fact that he came from prohibitionist Maine. This man had a birthday coming up and he wanted to celebrate, and he called in his commissary officer and asked how much whisky they had in stock. The officer said there might be as much as two gallons, and the major was indignant.

'Two gallons!" he repeated. "What is two gallons of whisky among one man?"
0

To do the army justice, it did not worry about Grant's drinking. A general who never got drunk was a rarity—so much so that his sobriety was always mentioned in his biography, as a sign that he stood above the common run. What troubled the officer corps—and, to an extent, the enlisted man as well—was the fact that Grant came from the West. The West seemed to be a side show where a general could win a reputation without really amounting to much. (After all, there had been John Pope.) Federal troops in the West were thought to be an undisciplined rabble. Also—which was what really mattered—they had never been up against the first team. They had never had to face Robert E. Lee.

Lee was the one soldier in whom most of the higher officers of the Army of the Potomac had complete, undiluted confidence. Among the many achievements of that remarkable man, nothing is much more striking than his ability to dominate the minds of the men who were fighting against him. These men could look back on several years of warfare, and what they saw always seemed about the same—the Army of the Potomac marching south to begin an offensive, well-equipped and full of confidence, and, within days or weeks, fighting doggedly and without too much confidence to escape annihilation. Twice the army had won a defensive battle, letting its enemies go away unmolested afterward, but when it took the offensive it invariably lost the initiative. Its own plans never seemed to matter, because sooner or later both armies moved by Lee's plans. Grant was untried. His record probably meant nothing. Just wait until he tried tangling with Lee!

As it happened, this attitude worked both ways; if soldiers in the East had a low opinion of soldiers in the West, the Westerners returned the feeling with interest. A Federal general in one of the Western armies, reading the sad news from Chancellorsville the preceding spring, had remarked that "we do not build largely on the Eastern army," and continued; "When we hear, therefore, that the Eastern army is going to fight, we make our minds up that it is going to be defeated, and when the result is announced we feel sad enough but not disappointed." Westerners believed that the Army of the Potomac had never been made to fight all out and that when all was said and done there was something mysteriously wrong with it. The Westerners had had no Antietam or Gettysburg, but they had had a Shiloh and a Stone's River, and they felt that they had seen the Confederates at their toughest. When the IX Corps was sent to Tennessee in the fall of 1863, Western troops greeted the boys with the jeering question: "All quiet along the Potomac?" and announced caustically: "Well show you how to fight."
11

So there were mutual d
oubts, and the effect was unfor
tunate. The officers of this army not only viewed Grant's advent with strong skepticism; in many cases this skepticism verged on outright hostility, so that it was ready to burst out with a bitter, triumphant "I told you so!" if the new general should run into trouble. Grant's presence here was an implied criticism of the army's prior leadership and strategy. Through him, the administration was striking its final blow at the whole complex of emotions and relationships which had come down from McClellan—and McClellan remained, next to Lee, the man in whom most of the veteran officers still had implicit confidence.

Among the private soldiers there was mostly a great curiosity. It was noticed that of a sudden the enlisted man had become a student of newspapers and magazines, reading everything he could find about the new general in chief. Men made themselves familiar with Grant's campaigns, and it was not uncommon to see campfire groups drawing maps in the dirt with sticks to demonstrate how Vicksburg and Chattanooga had gone. At the worst, there was resigned acquiescence. One man summed up his company's opinion by saying: "He cannot be weaker or more inefficient than the generals who have wasted the lives of our comrades during the past three years." He concluded that "if he is a fighter he can find all the fighting he wants."
12

Ohio and Pennsylvania soldiers, huddling together on a picket post, talked it over:

'Who's this Grant that's made a lieutenant general?"

"He's the hero of Vicksburg."

"Well, Vicksburg wasn't much of a fight. The Rebels were out of rations and they had to surrender or starve. They had nothing but dead mules and dogs to eat, as I understand."

The men nodded, and one said that Grant could never have penned up any of Lee's generals that way. Longstreet or Jeb Stuart "would have broken out some way and foraged around for supplies."
13

An impressionable newspaper correspondent might describe Grant as "all-absorbed, all-observant, silent, inscrutable," a man who "controls and moves armies as he does his horse," but the enlisted man wanted more evidence. He liked the fact that Grant went about without fuss and ceremony, and he was ready to admit that "a more hopeful spirit prevailed," but for the most part he went along with the company officer who said that only time would tell whether this new general's first name was really Ulysses or Useless.
14

Yet there was a change, and before long the men felt it. There was a perceptible tightening up, as if someone who meant business had his hands on the reins now. Orders went forth to corps and division commanders to make a radical cut in the number of men who were borne on the returns as "on special, extra, or daily duty," and attention was called to
the
discrepancies
between
the
numbers
reported
"present
for duty"
and
those
listed
as
"present
for
duty,
equipped."
In brigades
and
divisions
the
inspectors
general
became
busy, and
where
equipment
had
been
lacking
it
suddenly
materialized.
Long
trains
of
freight
cars
came
clanking
in
at
Brandy Station,
to
unload
food
and
forage,
uniforms
and
blankets, and
shelter
tents
and
munitions.
Men
found
that
they
were working
harder
now
than
in
the
past.
Subtly
but
unmistakably,
an
air
of
competence
and
preparation
was
manifest.

Cavalry
found
that
a
new
day
had
dawned.
The
Pleason
tons
and
Kilpatricks
were
gone,
and
at
the
top
there
was
another
Westerner—a
tough
little
man
named
Phil
Sheridan, bandy-legged
and
wiry,
with
a
black
bullet
head
and
a
hard eye,
wearing
by
custom
a
mud-spotted
uniform,
flourishing
in one
fist
a
flat
black
hat
which,
when
he
put
it
on,
seemed
to be
at
least
two
sizes
too
small
for
him.
Like
Grant,
he
rode
a great
black
horse
when
he
made
his
rounds
and
he
rode
it
at a
pounding
gallop,
and
it
was
remarked
that
he
"rolled
and bounced
upon
the
back
of
his
steed
much
as
an
old
salt
does when
walking
up
the
aisle
of
a
church
after
a
four
years* cruise
at
sea."

BOOK: A Stillness at Appomattox
7.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Pizza My Heart 1 by Glenna Sinclair
Winterwood by Dorothy Eden
TemptationinTartan by Suz deMello
A Sister's Promise by Anne Bennett
On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat
Silver May Tarnish by Andre Norton
The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn