Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (10 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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Here was yet another case of a politically based military appointment. Frémont (whom Sherman also went to see in his fruitless quest for reinforcements and the formation of a cohesive strategy, concluding that “I could not discover that he was operating on any distinct plan”) was a man of considerable accomplishments and checkered background, but he had no experience commanding large bodies of soldiers. Not a West Pointer, at the age of tweny-five Frémont had been appointed as a second lieutenant in the Army’s Topographical Engineers. In that capacity, sometimes using Kit Carson as a scout, he made the first maps of the Oregon Trail, explored the Sierras, discovered Lake Tahoe, and later gave the name Golden Gate to the entrance to San Francisco’s harbor. His prewar army career had ended in a court-martial for disobedience of orders; the military tribunal handed down a sentence that was remitted by President James K. Polk, but it was an affair that ultimately forced him to resign.
Known to the American public as “the Pathfinder,” in civilian life Frémont had become one of California’s first two senators and was the Republican Party’s first candidate for president, being beaten in 1856 by the Democrats’ Buchanan. Twenty years before the war began, he had married the attractive and ambitious daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri; Frémont’s national reputation, and his alliance with a family of influential Republican politicians, motivated Lincoln to entrust him with the complexities of the Department of the West.
In this first effort that Grant and Sherman made to establish themselves in their new western commands, Grant fared better with Frémont than Sherman did. This was partly because Frémont, who sent his wife to Washington to ask Lincoln for more troops for his own command, was intent on making a name for himself by thrusting down the Mississippi River rather than in diverting much of his strength to help Sherman defend neighboring Kentucky. After an initial Union defeat at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri for which Grant had no responsibility, Frémont ordered Grant to organize an effective defense of Jefferson City.
When Grant did that and no Confederate attack materialized, Frémont then ordered him to go to the Union riverfront headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, and prepare to lead offensive actions from there. In picking Grant over a number of other brigadier generals, Frémont overruled those on his staff who reminded him of Grant’s old reputation for drunkenness, and had only one fault to find: Grant was wearing a civilian suit, possibly the one he had worn most of the past year. Frémont told his chosen general to get into uniform. Chaplain Crane described how Grant obeyed that order: “He usually wore a plain blue [enlisted man’s] blouse coat, and an ordinary black felt hat, and never had about him a single mark to distinguish his rank.” (In fact, Grant sometimes wore pinned-on shoulder straps that had emblems of rank.)
The port where Grant had his headquarters in a hotel that the correspondent of the London
Times
found “almost untenable by reason of heat and flies” was on a strategically located south-pointing peninsula. To its west, the Mississippi moved downstream from St. Louis. To its east, the Ohio River ran down from Cincinnati, passing Kentucky’s riverfront cities of Louisville and Paducah, and joined the Mississippi at Cairo. Back up the Ohio River near Paducah were the entrances to the Tennessee River and the Cumberland, both of which flowed north from hilly country to empty into the Ohio, resulting in a situation in which an advance into the South along those rivers had to be made by going upstream. (The war had turned Cairo into a rip-roaring Western town: in his General Orders No. 5, issued within a week of taking up his headquarters there, Grant deplored what he found: “It is with regret that the Genl Comdg sees and learns that the closest intimacy exists between many of the officers and soldiers of his command; that they visit together the lowest drinking and dancing saloons; quarrel, curse, drink and carouse generally on the lowest level of equality … Discipline cannot be maintained where the officers do not command respect and such conduct cannot insure it.”)
Taking the military initiative under the authority given him by Frémont, Grant first quickly and bloodlessly seized Paducah, located thirty-two miles to the east of him at the point where the Tennessee River flows into the Ohio. Occupying the city on the morning of September 6, he issued a proclamation to its citizens in which he said, “I have nothing to do with opinions. I shall deal only with armed rebellion and its aiders and abbetors [sic] … The strong arm of the Government is here to protect its friends, and to punish only its enemies.” (Grant’s entrance into Kentucky ended the state’s attempt at neutrality and brought war to the commonwealth.) Leaving a subordinate commander and two regiments to occupy Paducah, Grant was back in Cairo by late afternoon, ready to concentrate on the many matters involved in preparing to take the war into Confederate territory down the Mississippi.
This daily work of gathering forces and planning for an offensive brought Grant into several activities new to him. In his headquarters beside the Mississippi, he had daily contact with the officers of the United States Navy who commanded the “mud turtle” gunboats, and he also conferred with the captains of the paddle-wheeler riverboats that would be needed as transports and cargo vessels to support landings, crossings, and other movements along the shores of the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers. Vessels carrying supplies for the Confederacy also plied these rivers, at some distance from Cairo, and on September 9 he reported the capture of three Confederate “Steamers … prizes just brought into this port by Gun Boat … The [civilian] officers and crew will be detained as prisoners until instructions are received from St. Louis what disposition to make of them.”
In another aspect of his varied responsibilities, Grant became involved with intelligence activities: he acted on information received from a former Russian army officer who was a spy in the Confederate stronghold of Memphis, and read telegrams from Frémont that were sent from St. Louis in Hungarian and translated back into English at Grant’s headquarters, on the assumption that even if the messages were intercepted the Confederates had no one who could read them. Twice in one week in September, Grant had to ask Frémont for money “required here to pay for secret services.”
Despite his growing importance and the constant demands on his time, Grant thought frequently of home. The closing passage in one of his letters to Julia echoed Sherman’s concern for what the world might think of his performance in the campaign to come.
Remember me to all in Galena. Kiss the children for me and a hundred for yourself. You should be cheerful and try to encourage me. I have a task before me of no trifling moment and want all the encouragement possible. Remember that my success will depend a greatdeel [sic] upon myself and that the safety of the country, to some extent, and my reputation and that of our children greatly depends upon my acts.
 
Interestingly enough, the sequence of events that would soon draw Grant and Sherman together was caused in good part by ethical questions concerning General Frémont. When Sherman went to St. Louis in his vain effort to strengthen his shaky new Department of the Cumberland and bring it into concerted action with Frémont’s Department of the West, he found the famous Californian surrounded by several San Francisco businessmen Sherman remembered from his days there as a banker. The man who ushered him in to see Frémont was a recently commissioned major Frémont had brought onto his staff: Isaiah C. Woods, who had been head of the San Francisco branch of the St. Louis bank whose failure had started the run on the other eighteen banks in the city, hurting all of them and causing six to collapse. Of Frémont’s making Woods his commissary of subsistence, Sherman wrote Ellen that “Woods should not be appointed to an office of Trust, when money is to be handled.” The next man he saw was another San Francisco banker, Joseph Palmer, a major contributor to Frémont’s political campaigns whose fraudulent handling of state and federal funds entrusted to him caused his bank to close its doors for good. Another of Frémont’s advisers was Abia A. Selover, an investor in mines and real estate owned by Frémont. At the hotel where Sherman stayed, he saw “old Baron Steinberger, a prince among our early California adventurers … His presence in St. Louis recalled the maxim, ‘Where the vultures are, there is a carcass close by.’” Rounding out the picture was a Mormon from California named Beard, who had been awarded the contract for building a line of fortifications around the city. Sherman did not say that Frémont was involved in conflicts of interest but only that he “had drawn to St. Louis some of the most enterprising men in California.”
News of what Sherman and others had seen and suspected reached Washington. Frémont had failed to achieve the military success Lincoln expected, and he had also issued an unauthorized political proclamation harmful to Lincoln’s efforts to win over the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. In it Frémont announced the confiscation of all “real and personal” property owned by Confederate sympathizers in Missouri, language that included the concept that slaves could be taken from their owners—something Lincoln intended to accomplish in time but not an idea he wished at the moment to force upon slaveholders who might remain neutral. Now came these reports of possible corrupt dealings involving public funds. Secretary of War Simon Cameron set out for St. Louis to investigate, accompanied by Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army.
On their return east, talking freely of the military disappointments, political ineptitude, and unresolved questions of disbursement that soon caused Frémont to be relieved of command, they met with Sherman in his rooms at the Galt House hotel in Louisville. Had it not been for Frémont’s deficient performance and rumors of a version of the spoils system, the secretary of war would not have been within five hundred miles of Louisville, and Sherman would not have had the opportunity to see him face-to-face. (Cameron had lost his brother James, colonel of the Seventy-ninth New York, the Highlanders, when that officer was killed while under Sherman’s command at Bull Run, and Cameron also had approved the Highlanders’ request to be removed from Sherman’s command after the alleged incident in which Sherman had some men of that regiment ejected from the shelter of a barn during the Bull Run retreat so some horses could be stabled there.)
By the time of this meeting, Sherman, not outnumbered but thinking he was, had become so worried about the situation in his large area of operations that he could be found pacing the corridors of the hotel at all hours, smoking eight to ten cigars a night, and waiting for dispatches at the telegraph office at three a.m. He drank too much; his hands sometimes shook. Sherman’s experiences with the press in San Francisco had given him a permanent hostile mistrust of reporters, and he banned them from his headquarters. When journalists found the opportunity to ask him questions, he replied with a snarl, and on one occasion had a reporter jailed for disobeying his order that the man stay out of military camps. (When Sherman heard that the Confederates had shot two Northern reporters they considered to be spies, he expressed his pleasure, and said, “Now we’ll have news from Hell by noon.”)
As Cameron and General Thomas entered Sherman’s rooms on October 17, they were accompanied by six or seven reporters, some from local papers and some from the East who were traveling with the secretary of war. After the hotel manager sent in what Sherman described “as a good lunch and something to drink,” Cameron, who had arrived feeling sick, lay on Sherman’s bed and said, “Now, General Sherman, tell us of your troubles.” When Sherman remarked that he felt uneasy discussing military matters “with so many strangers present,” Cameron answered expansively, “They are all friends, all members of my family, and you may speak your mind freely and without restraint.”
Sherman stepped to the door, locked it, and started talking. He described the Union defenses in that part of Kentucky as being so weak that if Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston chose to do so, “He could march to Louisville any day.”
As Sherman described that moment, “Cameron exclaimed, ‘You astonish me! Our informants, the Kentucky Senators and members of Congress, claim that they have in Kentucky plenty of men, and all they want are arms and money.’”
Sherman pressed on, describing the situation in the darkest terms. Holding up a large map of the United States,
I argued that, for the purpose of defense, we should have sixty thousand men at once, and for offense, should need two hundred thousand, before we were done. Mr. Cameron, who still lay on the bed, threw up his hands and exclaimed, “Great God! Where are they to come from?” I asserted that there were plenty of men at the North, ready and willing to come, if he would only accept their services … We discussed these matters fully, in the most friendly spirit, and I thought I had aroused Mr. Cameron to a realization of the great war that was before us, and was in fact upon us. I heard him tell General Thomas to make a note of our conversation, that he might attend to my requests on reaching Washington. We all spent the evening together agreeably in conversation.
 
That is the way it seemed to Sherman. Although Cameron sent telegrams from Louisville ordering that additional forces be sent to reinforce Sherman, on his way back to Washington Cameron told reporters at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that Sherman was “absolutely crazy.” Thomas soon wrote a report of the meeting at the Galt House, something that was supposed to be a confidential War Department memorandum. On October 30, the
New York Tribune
, one of whose reporters had been at the Galt House meeting and had since been given an unauthorized look at Thomas’s report, published an article that made no distinction between Sherman’s estimate that he needed sixty thousand men for defense but that it would take two hundred thousand to mount and sustain a successful long-range offensive. The piece said only that when Cameron asked him how many men he had to have, Sherman “promptly replied 200,000.”

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