Read Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Online
Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood
Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (37 page)
BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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Using this strategy, Grant hoped to close out the war in 1864. To strengthen this military policy and objective, he intended to issue orders that would bring back to the main Eastern and Western Union armies the smaller forces then operating in such places as Florida and Arkansas. If he and Sherman could accomplish what he hoped—smash and wear down the main Confederate armies in a two-pronged, coordinated effort—the enemy’s out-of-the-way outposts would wither on the vine.
As Sherman prepared to go on the offensive, Grant returned to Washington, took up his headquarters near Meade’s Army of the Potomac, and reiterated the pertinent part of this philosophy to General Meade. On April 9, he told Meade, “Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” Although the capture of Richmond, the Confederate capital, remained an inevitable goal, the emphasis was going to be less on control of territory and more on destroying the Confederate armies and the South’s means of waging war. (In this latter area, that of drying up the South’s source of men and of supplies ranging from weapons to food, both Grant and Sherman had increasingly come to realize that the South was indeed a nation in arms and that the common European practice of having standing armies engage each other in set-piece battles to determine the outcome of a war was not enough to win this struggle. When Grant had told Sherman right after Vicksburg to set out after Joseph E. Johnston “and inflict on the enemy all the punishment you can,” he had already demonstrated at Jackson that he regarded all kinds of supplies as legitimate military targets, and Sherman’s burning of Randolph, Tennessee, and his Meridian Campaign had shown that he too was ready to lay waste anything and anyplace that could sustain the enemy’s ability and will to resist. Both men were ready to engage in what became known as total war.)
Bold as Grant was, he did not at that moment realize that Sherman was thinking even more boldly than he, in terms of getting “into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can.” By the end of April, Sherman had assembled ninety-eight thousand men in Chattanooga, ready to march southeast in an attempt to take Atlanta, a hundred miles away. This was not going to be a massive raid like the Meridian Campaign, in which he left Memphis, marched a hundred miles, struck, and then returned to Memphis. This was going to be straight-ahead fighting, with no intention of turning back.
Ulysses S. Grant. One of the finest horsemen ever to graduate from West Point, Grant was the most aggressive and resolute general in the Union Army. (Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library)
Grant’s wife, Julia. Highly intelligent and charming, always believing in her husband’s destiny despite his prewar failures, she and Grant lived one of the great American love stories. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
This receipt shows that on December 23, 1857, at a time when he was down and out, Grant pawned his gold watch for twenty-two dollars so that he could buy Christmas presents for his family. Eleven years later, he was elected President of the United States. (courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library)
During the war, numerous photographs were made of Grant by himself and with his higher-ranking officers, but this is the only one showing him against a background of his troops in the field. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
William Tecumseh Sherman. He said of his immensely successful military partnership with Grant during which they constantly supported each other’s effort. “We were as brothers, I the older man in years, he the higher in rank.” (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Sherman’s wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman. Their marriage was a difficult one, but it was impossible to imagine either of them being married to anyone else. (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. /Art Resource. N.Y.)
Sherman’s devoted younger brother John. Already a United States senator when the Civil War began, John Sherman served in the Senate for thirty-two years, and is best known as the author of the legislation known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. (University of Notre Dame Archives)
General Henry Halleck, sometimes wise and sometimes duplicitous. At various times he commanded both Grant and Sherman. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Admiral David Dixon Porter of the United States Navy, who worked effectively with Grant during amphibious operations such as those on the Mississippi that led to the great Union victory at Vicksburg. (National Archives at College Park)
One of the Navy’s “mud turtles.” flat-bottomed gunboats that furnished vital support for Grant and Sherman’s campaigns along the rivers of the South. (Collection of Hit New-York Historical Society)
BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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