Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (51 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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The telegram was from Stanton: it gave the facts of Lincoln’s assassination and said there was reason to think that Grant, newly sworn-in President Andrew Johnson, and other political and military leaders might be targets themselves. (Sherman would also receive a warning from Stanton of a report that he was a specific target, but nothing came of that.)
Reading this telegram as the train waited for his order to pull out, Sherman immediately found himself “dreading the effects of such a message at that critical time.” He knew that “Mr. Lincoln was particularly endeared to the soldiers, and I feared that some foolish woman or man in Raleigh might say something or do something that would madden our men, and that a fate worse than that of Columbia would befall the place.” Telling the telegraph operator to let no one learn of Lincoln’s death, Sherman said nothing of this to his staff officers and simply let it be known that he would return to Raleigh that afternoon.
About two and a half hours later, Sherman was greeted politely by Johnston, whom he had never met, at a place in the countryside a few miles from Durham, and the two of them went into a small frame house that belonged to a local farmer and his wife, James and Nancy Bennett. “As soon as we were alone together I showed him the dispatch announcing Mr. Lincoln’s assassination, and watched him closely. The perspiration came out in large drops on his forehead, and he did not attempt to conceal his distress. He denounced the act as a disgrace to the age, and hoped I did not charge it to the Confederate Government. I told him I could not believe that he or General Lee, or the officers of the Confederate army, could possibly be privy to acts of assassination; but I would not say as much for Jeff. Davis.”
Turning to the immediate military situation, Johnston readily agreed that “any further fighting would be
‘murder;
’ but he thought that, instead of surrendering piecemeal, we might arrange terms that would embrace
all
the Confederate armies.” When Sherman asked Johnston if he had the authority to surrender all the Confederate forces still spread out in places like Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and parts of Georgia, Johnston said that he did not but indicated that he thought that, “during the night,” he could get Davis’s agreement for what Sherman termed “a universal surrender.” They agreed to meet at the same place the next day and ended what Sherman called an “extremely cordial” conversation, “satisfying me that it could have but one result … to end the war as quickly as possible.”
Back in Raleigh, Sherman issued a Special Field Order to his army, informing the troops of Lincoln’s assassination, denouncing the crime and at the same time saying he knew that “the great mass of the Confederate army would scorn to sanction such acts.” He cautioned his officers “to watch the soldiers closely, to prevent any violent retaliation by them,” and it was well that he did. A major wrote in his diary, “The army is crazy for vengeance.” Most of the troops contented themselves with storming around their bivouacs, shouting angrily and bellowing out the song, “We’ll Hang Jeff Davis to a Sour Apple Tree,” but about two thousand men from one encampment headed toward Raleigh, and only the threat of being blasted by their own artillery—a battery was placed right in the road, the cannon aimed at them—stopped the potential violence. Sherman spent the night riding from one of his divisions to another, keeping the peace, and later said, “Had it not been for me Raleigh would have been destroyed.” The next day, a large meeting of citizens of Raleigh convened at the Wake County Court House. In an action that helped calm the situation to some degree, the meeting quickly drafted, approved, and circulated a resolution “to express our utmost abhorrence of the atrocious deed.” (When a Southern lady expressed to Sherman her pleasure that Lincoln had been killed, he replied, “Madam, the South has lost the best friend it had.”)
Conferring with his generals about the overall situation, Sherman found that their greatest concern was that he sign something that would guarantee an end to the fighting. They had chased Johnston and his hardened troops all over the South. Johnston still had forty-five thousand men in the area, and Sherman said that his generals now told him that if these negotiations failed “they all dreaded the long and harassing march in pursuit of a dissolving and fleeing enemy—a march that might carry us back again over the thousand miles that we had just accomplished. We all knew that if we could bring Johnston’s army to bay, we could destroy it in an hour, but that was simply impossible in the country in which we found ourselves.” Sherman, remembering his conversation with Lincoln at City Point, asked his generals if he should let Jefferson Davis and his fleeing cabinet “escape from the country” if they fell into his army’s hands. One of them, mentioning the capital of the British island chain of the Bahamas off the Florida coast, replied that, “If asked for, we should even provide a vessel to carry them to Nassau from Charleston.”
On his way to meet Johnston again that afternoon, Sherman felt mounting pressure to get the entire situation settled. Today he found Johnston, while making statements that proved to be entirely honest, also to be as adroit in negotiations as he had been in his long series of retreats. Johnston had prepared himself for this second meeting as fully as a lawyer prepares for a negotiation or a trial. Sherman said that he “assured me that he had the authority to surrender all the Confederate armies, so that they would obey his orders to surrender on the same terms with his own, but he argued that, to obtain so cheaply this desirable result, I ought to give his men and officers some assurance of their political rights after the surrender.”
This was taking Sherman right into the area of “civil policy” that Stanton and Grant insisted he avoid. Sherman pointed out that an 1863 proclamation of amnesty by Lincoln, still in force, enabled every Confederate soldier below the rank of colonel to regain citizenship “by simply laying down his arms, and taking the common oath of allegiance”; he added that Grant’s terms to Lee had embodied the same principle, extending it, as Sherman told Johnston, “to
all
the officers, General Lee included.” The procedure for regaining full citizenship, Sherman reassured Johnston, was established; this meeting, however, was not to determine everyone’s postwar civil status, but to stop the fighting.
Johnston conceded that “the officers and men of the Confederate army were unnecessarily alarmed about this matter, as a sort of bugbear,” but he insisted that there needed to be some guarantees about their postwar status committed to paper. He then told Sherman that John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was nearby and available to join their discussion.
This gave Sherman pause. Breckinridge, the prewar vice president of the United States under Democratic president James Buchanan, had run for president against Lincoln under the Southern Democrat banner in the four-way 1860 presidential race, losing to Lincoln but winning more electoral votes than the other two contestants. Named by Kentucky to serve in the United States Senate, late in 1861 he had resigned to go with the South, serving for three years in the Confederate Army and rising to the rank of major general. Ten weeks before this meeting between Sherman and Johnston, Breckinridge had been appointed by Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s secretary of war. “I objected,” Sherman said of this proposal that Breckinridge sit in with them, “on the score that he was then in Davis’s cabinet, and our negotiations should be confined strictly to [military] belligerents.” Johnston countered with the thought that “Breckinridge was a major-general in the Confederate army, and might sink his character of [not act as] Secretary of War.”
Sherman thought about all this. He had an army that had already shown it could explode with wrath about Lincoln’s assassination, and he could understand that now, more than ever, the soldiers of the South might want to know what lay ahead for them if they surrendered. He had his generals urging him to get it all settled; they did not want another long march to hunt down an elusive foe. The night before, Sherman had written to one of his generals who was stationed at New Bern, “There is great danger that the Confederate armies will dissolve and fill the whole land with robbers and assassins,” and added that he needed to restore order: “I don’t want Johnston[’]s army to break up in fragments.”
Sherman also remembered his meeting with Lincoln and Grant aboard the
River Queen,
during which, as Admiral Porter remembered it, Lincoln expressed the thought that “he wanted peace on almost any terms.” Perhaps Sherman thought that to have Breckinridge—a man who was both a Confederate general and the Confederate secretary of war—enter the discussions now might add further weight to this parlay’s authority to create a widespread cease-fire. He agreed to have Breckinridge join them; as soon as he arrived, Breckinridge “confirmed what he [Johnston] had said as to the uneasiness of the Southern officers and soldiers about their political rights in case of surrender.” At this point, a Confederate courier brought in a sheaf of papers for Johnston, who explained that they were from John Reagan, the South’s postmaster general, who was traveling with Davis as the Confederate president moved through the South to avoid federal capture. After Johnston and Breckinridge looked over these papers and had “some side conversation,” as Sherman put it, Johnston handed one of the documents to Sherman. It was the Confederate government’s proposal for peace, apparently ready to sign if Sherman would just do that. Sherman looked at the document: “It was in Reagan’s handwriting, and began with a long preamble and terms, so general and verbose, that I said they were inadmissible.”
There the three men sat, Sherman perhaps a bit nettled that the Confederate government, its armies defeated on the battlefield, would try to set the terms for peace. He was not going to sign what had been put before him, but he felt he must do something.
Then recalling the conversation of Mr. Lincoln, at City Point, I sat down at the table, and wrote off the terms, and explained that I was willing to submit these terms to the new President, Mr. Johnson, provided that both armies should remain
in statu quo
until the truce declared therein should expire. I had full faith that General Johnston would religiously respect the truce, which he did; and that I would be the gainer, for in the few days it would take to send the papers to Washington, and receive an answer, I could finish [repairing] the railroad up to Raleigh, and be the better prepared for a long chase.
 
With that, there was some conversation while the papers were copied and then signed by Sherman and Johnston. During this, Sherman, perhaps acting on his memory that Lincoln had observed at City Point that Jefferson Davis should for everyone’s sake “escape the country” if he could, advised Breckinridge to do that himself. Breckinridge replied that he would “speedily leave,” and Sherman soon took his special train back to Raleigh. At that moment, despite the acclaim Grant had received in Washington during the days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Sherman’s reputation throughout the North was nearly as great as Grant’s: a grateful Union saw him as the remarkable leader who had served prominently in one successful battle or campaign after another, all the way from Shiloh and Vicksburg to planning and riding at the head of his epic marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. No one, including Sherman, would have imagined that he would soon be in a predicament from which he could be saved only by Grant.
 
SHERMAN IN TROUBLE
 
 
 
The morning after his second meeting with Joseph E. Johnston, Sherman sent Major Henry Hitchcock of his staff to Washington, carrying two copies of the surrender terms he had devised. One copy was to go to Grant, who since Appomattox was commanding the United States Army from an office in the War Department. The other was addressed to General Halleck, who, unknown to Sherman, Grant had shifted from his chief of staff position in the War Department to take command of forces in Virginia. Probably thinking that Halleck still had quicker access to President Andrew Johnson that Grant did, in his covering letter to Halleck, Sherman asked him to urge Johnson “not to vary the terms at all, for I have considered every thing, and believe that, the Confederate armies once dispersed, we can adjust all else fairly and well.” In a second letter to both Grant and Halleck, he said that what he had worked out would, “if approved by the President of the United States, produce peace from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.” To Ellen he wrote, “I can see no slip. The terms are all on our side … If I accomplish this I surely think I will be entitled to a month[’]s leave to come and See you … I now expect a week of Comparative leisure till my messenger returns from Washington, and I will try to write more at length.”
The terms that Major Hitchcock was carrying north, to a capital aflame with new vengeful feelings toward the Confederacy, included several conditions. Rather than surrendering their muskets and cannon directly to the federal forces in the field, as had been done at Appomattox, the enemy regiments, apparently still carrying their muskets, were “to be conducted to their several State capitals.” There they would put all their weapons and equipment in each state arsenal, where they would remain available “to maintain peace and order”—in whose hands was not specified. Sherman also set forth procedures by which enemy soldiers would “file an agreement to cease from acts of war, and to abide the action of both State and Federal authority,” and guaranteed to the citizens of the Confederate states “their political rights and franchises … as defined by the Constitution of the United States and of the States respectively.”
All that language about the ongoing authority at this time of states, when they were the states that had seceded from the Union and started a war that cost 360,000 Northern lives, was bad enough, but Sherman reinforced this by the article in his agreement that pledged the president of the United States to leave the present Southern state governments in place, as soon as their “officers and Legislature” took an oath of allegiance. There was in addition a provision about restoring to Southerners “their rights of person and property” that could be construed as continuing the right to own slaves.
Whatever he thought he had written and signed, Sherman had in fact abandoned his statement to Grant and Stanton that he would “be careful not to complicate points of civil policy.” His terms greatly exceeded the purely military surrender agreement that Grant and Lee had signed. In the last paragraph of his own agreement, Sherman stated that neither he nor Johnston was “fully empowered by our respective principals [the governments of the United States and the Confederacy] to fulfill these terms,” but went right on to say that “we individually and officially pledge ourselves to promptly obtain the necessary authority and to carry out the above programme.” Sherman and Johnston also agreed to give each other forty-eight hours’ notice before resuming the fight, if either of their governments rejected the document they had signed, but they clearly thought they had brought the war in the South to an end.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of April 21, two days after Sherman sent Hitchcock north to Washington carrying the copies of the signed surrender document, the major delivered one copy to Grant in his office at the War Department. As soon as Grant read its terms, he saw that they were unacceptable and immediately wrote this note to Stanton.
I have rec’d, and just completed reading the dispatches brought by Special Messenger from Gen. Sherman. They are of such importance that I think immediate action should be taken on them, and that it should be done by the President, in council with his whole Cabinet.
I would respectfully suggest whether the President should not be notified, and all his Cabinet, and the meeting take place tonight?
 
At eight that evening, with Grant present, President Andrew Johnson sat down with his cabinet. The preceding days had been ones of immense drama and tension. Two days before, Lincoln’s funeral services had been held in the overflowing East Room of the White House, with Grant standing alone at the head of the coffin as its chief military guard, tears rolling down his cheeks during the ceremony. The following day, thousands of grieving ordinary citizens had filed past Lincoln’s body as it lay in state in the Capitol’s rotunda. Twelve hours before this cabinet meeting, crowds had silently lined Washington’s streets to watch the procession as the slain president’s body was taken to the Baltimore and Ohio railroad station and placed aboard the black-wreathed train that would carry him to Philadelphia, New York, and other cities that would honor him during a twelve-day trip through the grieving North, before he was buried in his home state of Illinois.
It was in this highly charged atmosphere that President Johnson and his cabinet heard Stanton announce that Grant would read them the terms written and signed by Sherman. As soon as Grant finished, everyone immediately agreed that the document must be disavowed and rejected, but that was only the beginning. Grant characterized the meeting as being in a state of “the greatest consternation.” Johnson, Stanton, and Attorney General James Speed denounced Sherman as a traitor. According to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Stanton, who was still fearful that he might be assassinated himself, “seemed frantic,” and the attorney general voiced the fear that Sherman might march his “victorious legions” up to Washington and take over the government.
Certainly Stanton, who just a week before had walked through blood in Secretary of State Seward’s house and been at Lincoln’s side when he died, might in his present state have associated what he knew of Sherman’s racial views, and these lenient terms Sherman had now committed himself to in dealing with Joseph E. Johnston, with an effort to undermine the victory. Stanton, like the other cabinet members present, was determined that the fighting should come to an end on terms acceptable to them and lead to a peace in which the victor’s word was law. Some Radicals felt that even the terms Grant gave Lee at Appomattox had been too generous and that Lee should now be in prison, awaiting trial and a possible death sentence for treason.
There were no notes taken at this tempestuous meeting; one secondhand account said that in the midst of this uproar, Grant, who had been the first to see that the terms could not stand, defended Sherman’s motives, but others made no mention of that. For the moment, in the still-shocked atmosphere of these days after Lincoln’s death, Sherman’s enormous contribution to victory was forgotten amid this sudden suspicion that he might somehow be selling out the Union at the last hour, or undercutting the results of all that had been sacrificed and won.
The thrust of the meeting became to undo what Sherman had done, and to do it swiftly. Again, there is some question as to whether Grant volunteered to take the next step and was then given authorization to implement it, or whether the meeting simply turned to him to solve the problem, or whether he was ordered to act. In any event, before the evening was out, he received from Stanton instructions that read, referring to Sherman’s agreement with Johnston, “You will give notice of disapproval to Gen Sherman and direct him to resume hostilities at the earliest moment.” Stanton enclosed a copy of the message he had sent Grant after Lee’s earlier peace overture in March, stating on Lincoln’s instructions that, concerning a political settlement, “such questions the president holds in his own hands,” and added that this also expressed “the views of President Andrew Johnson, and will be observed by Genl Sherman.” Stanton’s instructions closed with, “The President desires that you proceed immediately to the Hd Qtrs of Gen Sherman and direct operations against the enemy.”
This was in its way an order as difficult to execute wisely as any Grant had ever received, and it had the possibility of cutting the oft-tested bond between Sherman and Grant. Stanton’s language was clearly bellicose, indicating a perfect willingness to start shooting at the Confederates again and keep it up until they agreed to anything put before them. The order that Grant should “direct operations against the enemy”—words used in referring to battlefield movements, not to negotiations for a surrender—reinforced the authority that Grant possessed as general in chief to supersede Sherman and take active field command of his army.
Grant made plans to leave for North Carolina at midnight. At that moment, a telegram might have reached Sherman a few hours before Grant could get to Raleigh himself, but evidently not wishing any telegraph operator to see his words, and perhaps worried that he himself might be struck down by an assassin en route, Grant chose to write a letter stating what he wanted Sherman to know. He told Sherman of the “disapproval” of his agreement and instructed him to inform Johnston that, as matters stood, the truce would come to an end. With characteristic clarity, Grant set forth what was expected of the Confederates: “The rebels know well the terms upon which they can have peace and just where negociations [sic] can commence, namely: when they lay down their Arms and submit to the laws of the United States.”
For whatever reasons, Grant did not use any means of communication to tell Sherman that he was on his way to join him in North Carolina. As events would show, he intended this to be a mission of peace, not of war; determined that the fighting should not resume, he also hoped to save his friend Sherman from the crisis he had created. He enclosed to Sherman the copy of Lincoln’s distinction between military surrender and political settlement—Sherman was to say that he had never heard of that letter or its contents, and that may well have been true—and then wearily wrote Julia. Tired as he was, near the end of his letter he wrote words that indicated his sense of the international destiny that awaited the nation whose future unity he had done so much to ensure. “It is now nearly 11 O’Clock at night and I have received instructions from the Sec. of War, and the President, to start at once for Raleigh North Carolina. I start in an hour … I find my duties, anxieties, and the necessity for having all my wits about me, increasing instead of diminishing. I have a Herculean task to perform and shall endeavor to do it, not to please any one, but for the interest of our great country which is now begining [sic] to loom far above all other countries, modern or ancient.”
Despite the hour and the pressures on him, Grant developed this thought concerning the country’s future international role: “That Nation, united, will have a strength which will enable it to dictate to all others,
conform to justice
and right
.” Speaking of the limits of power, the good it could achieve if used wisely, and the dangers of using it in an immoral way, he added, “Power I think can go no further. The moment conscience leaves, physical strength will avail nothing, in the long run.” Then Grant reverted to the purpose of his letter.
I only sat down to write you that I was suddenly required to leave on important duty, and not feeling willing to say what that duty is, you must await my return to know more.
Love and kisses for you and the children.
U. S. GRANT
 
In speaking of the “Herculean task” that lay before him, Grant almost certainly was thinking of more than what awaited him in North Carolina, pressing and crucial though the need to solve that problem was. In the days since Lincoln’s death he had seen political polarization in Washington. Vice President Andrew Johnson, sworn in as president three and a half hours after Lincoln’s death, was an unknown quantity; minutes after learning of the attack on Lincoln, Grant had told Julia, “I dread the change.” The Radical faction of the Republicans had already wanted to enforce an iron peace in the Confederate states as soon as they surrendered, and Lincoln’s murder greatly strengthened their hand. Before his death, Lincoln had agreed to the arrangement that the conquered South would for a time at least be divided into military districts, administered by the army and other federal officials. With every hour in his office at the War Department, Grant could see that, whatever else lay ahead, he had three major tasks before him. He had to stop the fighting throughout the South and Texas, prepare the postwar United States Army for some type of military occupation of the former Confederate states, and plan and execute across the next seven months of 1865 the demobilization of more than eight hundred thousand of his soldiers, almost all of whom were wildly eager to go home.
In addition to that, there was a problem involving Mexico, the land in which Grant first experienced combat. In December of 1861, while Washington was preoccupied with the war, European troops had landed in Mexico in a punitive response to President Benito Juarez’s decision to suspend payments of foreign debt. There were forty thousand excellent French troops still there, including regiments of the Foreign Legion, serving the puppet regime of the Austrian Duke Maximilian, who had been installed by Emperor Napoleon III.

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