Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (5 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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When Sherman returned from the freshly discovered goldfields where thousands of men lived in tent cities as they took more gold from the ground every day, he found that soldiers were deserting in the “gold fever” frenzy. (Sherman’s own clerk at headquarters soon vanished.) All this produced yet another of the frustrations that plagued his life: some men were making fortunes in hills just a few days’ ride away, while as an officer he felt duty bound to keep order with a shrinking number of troops, resisting the impulse to ride out and grab his share of the gold being drawn from the earth. As tens of thousands of men poured into California, bringing with them a demand that outstripped the supply of everything from shovels to food, whiskey, and women, prices soared. Sherman, living on an officer’s fixed pay, feared that the inflated prices for everything would make him, ironically, poor amid this explosion of riches.
A few chances to make money did come his way. He and two other officers invested in a store in the gold-mining area of Coloma, and he took a two-month leave during which he was paid as a surveyor in San Francisco and also profitably bought and sold some land in Sacramento. Nonetheless, he always remained aware of the difference between his undistinguished life and that of the Ewings, to whom he felt so indebted. Senator Ewing was now secretary of the interior in the cabinet of President Zachary Taylor, while Sherman was an obscure lieutenant, having had “peculiarly bad luck during the past four years serving in a distant land,” as he put it, missing out on the victorious war that propelled General Zachary Taylor straight from the battlefield to the White House. He was well aware that while he was marking time, his younger brother John Sherman, back in Ohio, had become a successful lawyer and was making significant amounts of money in real estate and the lumber business while planning to enter politics.
Letters from Ellen, often taking six months to reach him, left him worried about her various ailments, which included frequent headaches, boils, and gynecological problems. She made it clear that she looked forward to marrying him but did not look forward to being an army wife. At twenty-six, Ellen knew her mind: she wanted to stay near her parents, with whom she now lived in Washington, and she wanted her husband to become a financially successful civilian. A Catholic as ardent as her mother, she could not understand why her fiance, who had after all been baptized in her faith, virtually never went to Mass. In answer to her troubled inquiries about his religious feelings, he had earlier written her that he believed “firmly in the main doctrines of the Christian Religion, the purity of its morals, the almost absolute necessity for its existence and practice among all well regulated communities to assure peace and good will amongst all.” But, he had added, “I cannot, with due reflection, attribute to minor points of doctrine or form the importance usually attached to them.” It was a cerebral, unsatisfying response to a young woman who believed in the Real Presence of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist at Mass.
As if confronting these thoughts and problems were not enough for Sherman, who now began to suffer from asthma, his older sister Elizabeth, living in Philadelphia, was married to an alcoholic. When Sherman sent her fifteen hundred dollars of the money he had made in California, her husband promptly lost it in the latest of his schemes for becoming rich, and Sherman had reason to wonder if their children had enough to eat.
In 1850, Sherman’s time in California was up. Happy to be reunited with Ellen in the East, he nonetheless had no illusions as to why certain marks of favor were shown him. Asked to dine with the army’s commander, the legendary General Winfield Scott, Sherman realized that the great leader was less interested in him as a young officer than as the man soon to marry the daughter of Thomas Ewing, whose support Scott needed for the presidential bid he intended to make in two years. (During dinner, Scott, who had been a general since the War of 1812, told Sherman, eleven years before it occurred, that the nation was heading toward “a terrible Civil War.”) Scott was only the first of a galaxy of prominent Americans he soon saw face-to-face. At his wedding to Ellen in Washington on May 1, with Sherman wearing a full dress uniform that included a saber and boots with spurs, the guests at the brilliant social event included President Taylor and his cabinet; Senator Henry Clay, who gave Ellen the silver basket in which she carried her wedding bouquet; Representative Daniel Webster; and the justices of the Supreme Court. (There is no record of Sherman’s mother being at the wedding; he and Ellen did, however, go to Lancaster as part of their long honeymoon and spent a month there. During that period, Sherman signed an agreement with his brother John to support their mother. She also later went to live with a married daughter.)
The first year of his marriage to Ellen set a pattern of almost constant stress for Sherman. Even during their long honeymoon, Ellen’s possessive parents wrote her letters from Washington saying how much they missed her and urged the couple to live near them in Washington when they returned. Even though Ellen referred to him as her “protector,” she and her parents repeatedly asked Sherman to resign from the army, adding what they felt was an inducement: he could manage the saltworks they owned near Lancaster, Ohio, where the Ewings kept the large house they lived in when not in Washington. That proposal would have made him his father-in-law’s employee, and the saltworks became for Sherman a symbol of the Ewings’ desire to keep him in a state of friendly, comfortable captivity.
Sherman resisted. In the autumn, the army ordered him to St. Louis and promoted him to captain with extensive responsibilities as a supply officer, but Ellen, now pregnant with their first child, refused to go. When their baby, a girl, was born in January of 1851, Sherman was on duty in St. Louis while his wife and child were in Washington. Within two months he succeeded in getting them to St. Louis, where Sherman found time apart from his military duties to manage lands near the city that had been acquired by his powerful father-in-law, but the family tensions never ceased. To maintain a household in any style, Sherman had to borrow money from both his father-in-law and his brother John. In September of 1852, the army ordered him to his next post as a supply officer in New Orleans, where he found the city and its people as charming as they had been during his brief visit earlier in his military service, but Ellen, pregnant again, did not accompany him, remaining back in Lancaster for the birth of their second child, another daughter. It was during this pregnancy, with Sherman first in St. Louis and then in New Orleans, and Ellen clearly reluctant to leave her family in Lancaster, that Sherman vented his frustration with his in-laws in a harsh, nearly insulting letter to his brother-in-law Thomas Ewing Jr., who was a lawyer. Referring to the entire situation, he said, “This is too bad and is only due to the immense love you all bear Lancaster. I have good reason to be jealous of a place that virtually robs me of my family and I cannot help feeling sometimes a degree of dislike for the very name of Lancaster … As to her [Ellen] being home next summer when you get there I doubt it exceedingly—I think she has been at Lancaster too much since our marriage, and it is time for her to be weaned.”
Soon after Sherman succeeded in prevailing upon Ellen to bring the two girls and join him in New Orleans, his old friend Henry Turner, a banker in St. Louis who knew of Sherman’s military service in California and his recent commissary experience and management of Thomas Ewing’s lands, offered him the opportunity to manage the branch that his St. Louis bank, Lucas and Turner, would soon open in San Francisco.
Always fretful, Sherman was torn by the possible risks and benefits of this unexpected opportunity. He understood that, initially, Ellen would refuse to come and bring their two daughters to California: sailing around Cape Horn could be hazardous, and, as Ulysses S. Grant’s experience had demonstrated, the other route, which involved crossing the Isthmus of Panama by land, exposed travelers to deadly diseases. Even though Sherman could arrange a six-month leave from the army to try this venture, there was no guarantee of business success in that far-off city that had seen both a gold boom and widespread bankruptcies.
Sherman decided to gamble. As things stood, he and Ellen were constantly at odds about where they should live and whether he should continue his low-paying army career. Her family dominated both their lives. Perhaps he could make a significant success as a banker in California, become his own man, financially independent of the Ewings, and bring Ellen and the children to live there in harmony, far from her parents. If he made a lot of money and Ellen refused to join him, he could at least return east able to support her in style. If he could look ahead, while in California, and see any of that happening, he would willingly resign from the army, but if things did not go well there, he could continue as an officer.
Receiving a six-month leave from the army, Sherman took the job and headed for San Francisco, while Ellen and their two daughters returned to Ohio to live with her parents, who were as thrilled to have them under their roof as she was to be there. The night before Sherman’s ship was to land in San Francisco in April of 1853, the vessel ran aground on a rock. Sherman transferred to a small lumber schooner, which capsized in San Francisco Bay. Coming ashore “covered with sand, and dripping with water,” as he described it, he found a city that had in five years grown from its pre—Gold Rush population of nine hundred to a city of fifty thousand, with some millionaires building mansions while its harbor filled with ships whose sailors drank and whored in the waterfront area known as the Barbary Coast. Within days, Sherman discovered that California had no banking laws: anyone could open an office and start lending money on any terms.
Having sized up the situation in San Francisco as best he could, in July of 1853 Sherman returned east and committed himself to serve as the head of the San Francisco branch of Lucas, Turner & Co. He resigned from the army at the end of his leave in September and, accompanied by Ellen and their year-old younger daughter Lizzie, set out on a five-week trip from New York to California, which involved taking a ship to Nicaragua, crossing to the Pacific by land, and boarding another ship for San Francisco. (Unlike Grant’s regiment, the Sherman party made the land passage without complications.)
For four years, Sherman served as president of Lucas and Turner’s San Francisco branch, battling both the wild swings of California’s economy and the attitudes of Ellen and her possessive parents. Ellen had left their two-year-old daughter Minnie at home with her parents: her diary entries for New Year’s Day 1854 and the following day speak of her having “a cry about Minnie” not being with her. In the spring of 1855, Ellen went home for seven months, leaving with Sherman their daughter Lizzie and an eighteen-month-old son born in San Francisco, Willy, in whom Sherman immediately took a greater interest than he did in his daughters. When Ellen returned from Ohio, she again left their older daughter Minnie with her parents. Despite living in a handsome house and having three and sometimes four servants, Ellen detested the bustling city on the Pacific coast; writing home to her mother, she said of a cabin that belonged to her family in Ohio, “I would rather live [there] than live here in any kind of style.” Sherman stated the other side of the matter. In a letter to his father-in-law, he tried to explain his craving to become a success on his own: “I would rather be at the head of the bank in San Francisco, a position I obtained by my own efforts, than occupy any place open to me in Ohio.”
As for their domestic life, Ellen was constantly unwell, suffering from the headaches and boils that had plagued her for many years, in addition to having colds and some affliction for which she took tincture of opium. Sherman had relentless attacks of asthma, which he at different times thought might be caused by San Francisco’s sea air, or moisture in the walls of their house, or “carbonic acid” being released by nearby trees at night. In the summer of 1854, he wrote his friend and employer Henry Turner, “For the past seven months I have been compelled to sit up, more or less each night, breathing the smoke of nitre paper”—a practice that bothered Ellen—and went on to say that he knew that “the climate will sooner or later kill me dead as a herring.” Through all this, they shared the same bed: a diary entry of Ellen’s in early May of 1854 recorded that “Cump rubbed me with whiskey.” Along with entertaining their friends, mostly old army comrades and their wives now stationed in California, there were quiet evenings at home: “Cump & I sat upstairs in the evening, Cump reading and nodding and I sewing.” At times it may have been livelier than that. Years later, when Sherman wrote Ellen about some good news, he said that on hearing of it, “I have bet you will get tight on the occasion, à la fashion of Green Street California.”
As had been true in Ohio, Washington, and St. Louis, there was always Ellen’s involvement with her Catholic faith. Soon after coming to San Francisco, she began making calls on members of the clergy. Her diary entry for February 11, 1854, said, “sent jellycake to Bishop,” and on March 28, “Archbishop called.” Ellen never gave up on her efforts to bring her husband into the church in which he had been baptized. A diary entry in March says, “Prayed for the conversion,” and leaves it at that. Sherman’s children became used to attending Sunday morning Mass while their father went horseback riding.
Ironically, Sherman was finding that as a businessman in civilian life he was saving no money at all. Keeping up the kind of domestic establishment that was expected of the head of a San Francisco bank, and wanting to provide Ellen with everything that might make her enjoy living in California, he found himself writing his friend and employer Turner that Ellen was extravagant, but she must not learn that he was no more able to save money now than when he had been in the army. Although Ellen never liked San Francisco, she was with her husband the great majority of his time there, gave birth to two sons while there, ran the kind of household expected of a family in their position, and was respected by all who knew her. There were no outward signs of affection between Ellen and her husband, and no lessening of their differences about where to live and how to worship, but whenever he came under any kind of criticism, she was solidly by his side and on his side. Cump and Ellen Sherman might seem an unlikely pair to be married to each other, but it was difficult to imagine either of them being married to anyone else.
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