Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (6 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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Sherman occasionally had reason to wonder about the wisdom of his resignation from the army. One unforeseen event followed another: the failure of the home office of another bank back in St. Louis started a massive run on all the banks in San Francisco. By noon of the day the news swept Montgomery Street, Sherman’s bank had honored withdrawals totaling $337,000, but his adroit management of the crisis enabled him to close his next day’s business with a balance of $117,000, at a moment when seven of the nineteen banks in San Francisco failed. Then a prominent lumberman, financier, and leading citizen known as “Honest Harry” Meiggs suddenly left for Chile, leaving behind debts secured with forged paper totaling close to a million dollars—a huge fraud in an era when Sherman’s bank had been able to open in San Francisco with assets of a quarter of a million. Sherman wrote that he had seen “no symptoms of dishonesty” in Meiggs, but he had kept his relatively modest loans to Meiggs under close review, and his bank was the one least hurt in the scandal.
The problems continued. Now deep in the unpredictable commercial life of the growing city, Sherman maneuvered his bank through situations ranging from a local panic caused by the loss of an inbound ship carrying half a million dollars, to credible reports that California might default on its state bonds. While dealing with these crises, any one of which might ruin all that he tried to accomplish, Sherman was aware of the difference between his tenuous situation and the growing influence of his brother John, who in the fall of 1854 had been elected to Congress as a member of the newly formed Republican Party and was steadily rising in the ranks of the House leadership.
In 1856, at a time of relative calm in the family—Ellen and their three children were with him in San Francisco, and she was pregnant with their fourth child—a situation occurred that tested Sherman’s judgment and character, leaving him feeling defensive and troubled by the result. As an increasingly important citizen and a former army officer, he had reluctantly accepted the nominal role of commander of a division of the state militia, an organization that existed almost entirely on paper. When the editor of one San Francisco newspaper shot and killed another, a Vigilance Committee, sometimes known as the Vigilantes, sprang up and, among other acts, hanged the killer. The committee, soon numbering more than five thousand men, including both riffraff and prominent citizens, became the de facto force of law and order.
Sherman’s duty, as well as his craving for order, required him to restore the authority of the state and city’s elected officials, but Sherman had an equally powerful need to continue the success he was finally having as a banker. He did not want to antagonize the many prominent businessmen who believed that the only way to have a peaceful San Francisco was to enforce the law themselves. Although he worked to enlist militiamen and tried to maneuver behind the scenes for conciliation between the governor and the Vigilance Committee, he avoided an armed confrontation and soon resigned his militia commission. Sherman himself knew all too well that even his limited anti-Vigilance position made him unpopular with many in the business community whose goodwill his bank needed; his resignation stemmed from a combination of expediency and angry frustration that society would not conform to his vision of a wisely self-regulated world.
To this point in his time as a banker, the San Francisco newspapers had favorably mentioned Sherman, and Ellen had started a scrapbook of these clippings. Now the pro-Vigilance press attacked him for not supporting their position, while the governor of California publicly deplored Sherman’s resigning his commission at a time of crisis. If more were needed to upset him, when Sherman was named foreman of a grand jury that indicted San Francisco’s
Daily Evening Bulletin
for libeling the Sisters of Charity in stories criticizing the way they ran the County Hospital, the Bulletin struck at him by saying that he was motivated by the fact that he was a Catholic. All of this might have rolled off the back of a seasoned politician, but it wounded Sherman, giving him a suspicious dislike of journalists that would work against him at a future day.
Sherman’s San Francisco experiences were taking their toll. His nervous behavior was noted by a man who saw him walking various employees out of the bank on their way to meetings and transactions at other offices.
In giving his instructions, he will take a person by the shoulder and push him off as he talks, following him to the door all the time talking … His quick, restless manner almost invariably results in the confusion of the person whom he is thus instructing, but Sherman himself never gets confused. At the same time he never gets composed.
 
At times his state of mind was considerably worse than “he never gets composed.” Writing to Turner in St. Louis in early 1856, before the Vigilante crisis and the grand jury matter, Sherman said that he had slept for only three hours during the past twenty-four. In words indicating a fear of unspecified but well-publicized failure, he urged Turner to replace him in San Francisco with someone else. In a subsequent letter he apologized for having been so dramatic about his “depression,” saying that it was due to “the effects of a disease which I cannot control,” presumably asthma, and bad business conditions. Ellen, later writing of some moment during their time together in California, made this reference: “Knowing insanity to be in the family and having seen Cump in [sic] the verge of it once in California …” She never expanded on that, but, whatever Sherman and Ellen were experiencing, they were experiencing it together.
In early 1857, his bank’s home office in St. Louis studied California’s fluctuating economy and recent explosive history, and decided to close its San Francisco branch. It did, however, plan to open a branch in New York City, and offered Sherman the opportunity to be its manager. No sooner did he travel to New York and launch this branch than the Panic of 1857 hit Wall Street in August, immediately staggering the nation’s economy. In October, word came from St. Louis to close the office in New York. Bitter at this end of his ambitions to become a prosperous banker who could be independent of his in-laws, Sherman wrote this to Ellen, who deserved kinder words: “No doubt you are glad to have attained your wish to see me out of the army and out of employment.”
 
Back in St. Louis in late 1857 for discussions preparatory to making a final trip to San Francisco to untangle and salvage the bank’s assets there, Sherman was walking down the street when he encountered Ulysses S. Grant, who had just moved to the city after his failure as a farmer. The two men had never served together in the army but recognized each other from their days at West Point.
If ever there was a commonplace meeting that nonetheless foreshadowed great events, this was it. Anyone watching the brief conversation between the shorter, brown-haired Grant in his rumpled clothes, who was then thirty-five, and the tall, red-headed, constantly gesturing thirty-seven-year-old Sherman could never have dreamt what lay ahead for them. Within five years the two would be winning immense military victories that preserved the American nation as one country; eleven years after their brief chat, the shabby shorter man would be elected president of the United States. As for what they discussed that day on the street, all Sherman could recall of their talk was that he walked on feeling “that West Point and the regular army were not good schools for farmers [and] bankers.”
 
On what proved to be Sherman’s final return from San Francisco, Ellen and her parents once again urged him to take on the job of running the family saltworks near Lancaster. He still refused and in effect fled to Leavenworth, Kansas, where Thomas Ewing had set up his sons Thomas Jr. and Hugh Boyle Ewing in a combination of law firm and real estate management business. It was hardly a meaningful act of defiance: Sherman dabbled in a few legal matters, but his primary job there was to manage large tracts of farmland owned by his father-in-law. That entire venture failed; during the winter in Kansas, laboring in the wind and snow as he and some hired hands built storage barns to house corn, he wrote to Ellen, who was pregnant with their fifth child, in despairing terms, using the language of cockfighting, where the birds fought to the death: “I look upon myself as a dead cock in the pit, not worthy of further notice.”
When Sherman came back from his galling struggles in Kansas, through Thomas Ewing’s influence he received an offer to be the manager of an American bank in London. Burnt by his experience with banking, and still wanting to accomplish something on his own in a position that did not come to him because of his father-in-law, Sherman now tried to get back into the United States Army. This proved fruitless: the small peacetime army could not even retain all the junior officers who had stayed in the service since graduating from West Point, and had no way of bringing back in those who had resigned. Out of these efforts to reenter the Regular Army, however, he learned that Louisiana had created a new school to be known as the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, a name that Sherman considered to be awkward and pretentious. Its Board of Supervisors was accepting applications for the job of leading this institution with the title of superintendent.
Sherman applied for the position, was accepted, and on November 12, 1859, two months after the birth of his and Ellen’s fifth child, a daughter, arrived by himself at the school in Alexandria, Louisiana. At that moment the newspapers were filled with stories about the recent seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry led by the fanatical abolitionist John Brown—an abortive raid put down by a company of United States Marines under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army, assisted by an army lieutenant nicknamed “Jeb” Stuart. The bloodshed at Harpers Ferry was small—ten of John Brown’s nineteen followers were killed, including two of his sons, along with five townspeople shot by his men—but its portents were immense. Brown’s purpose had been to seize the weapons at the federal arsenal and distribute them to slaves to use against their owners in an uprising. This threat of a slave revolt was an old nightmare in the South, and Southerners were shocked not only by the raid itself but also by the way many Northern abolitionists hailed Brown, who was tried and hanged for his act, as a martyr in the cause of freedom. Increasing numbers of white Southerners began to feel that the only way to preserve slavery would be to form a separate nation. This would involve seceding from the Union. Millions of Americans outside the South were not particularly incensed about slavery but were prepared to fight, if necessary, to preserve that Union.
Considering that Louisiana’s military academy had hired a Northerner at a time when many in the North and South were taking irreconcilable political positions, things at the school went surprisingly well for nearly a year. As a result of Sherman’s past postings in the South, he liked and admired its people and felt comfortable among them. As for the great issues agitating so many Americans, Sherman regretted that slavery existed but did not want to see war waged to abolish it, and he was content to live among white slaveholders; as for their black slaves, he considered them to be inferior beings and sympathized with Southern fears of a slave uprising. Secession from the Union, on the other hand, offended Sherman’s need for the world to be a logical place. He wrote to Ellen, “I have heard men of good sense say that the union of the states any longer was impossible, and that the South was preparing for a change. If such a change be contemplated and overt acts be attempted of course I will not go with the South.” In a later letter he continued to express his anxiety: “All here talk as if a dissolution of the Union were not only a possibility but a probability of easy execution. If attempted we will have Civil War of the most horrible kind.” As the crisis heightened, with statements of some bellicose Southerners proclaiming that the North had no stomach for a war, and that if it came, one Southern soldier would prove to be equal to two or more Northern men, Sherman argued this to David French Boyd, the seminary’s professor of ancient languages and a Virginian who liked and admired Sherman:
You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people and will fight too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You will fail.
 
Seven hundred and fifty miles to the north, Ulysses S. Grant had already written a friend, “It is hard to realize that a State or States should commit so suicidal an act as to secede from the Union, though from all the reports, I have no doubt that at least five of them will do it.” What both Sherman and Grant failed to comprehend was the degree of military skill that many of their fellow West Pointers would bring to the Southern cause, as well as the historical heritage that led so many Southerners to see themselves as both right and invincible. By 1860, Southern presidents had led the nation during sixty of its eighty-four years. Of the twenty-nine men who had served on the Supreme Court, eighteen were from the South. More than twice as many presidents pro tem of the Senate, speakers of the House, and attorneys general had been from the South as from the North. In the army and navy, the great majority of the higher ranks had invariably been filled by Southern men and still were. The South believed that its men would prevail, because they always had.

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