Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (7 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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As the national crisis grew, at the seminary in Louisiana, Sherman, the Board of Supervisors, the faculty, and the new cadets all acted as if the only business at hand was that of teaching, studying, and participating in military drills preparing them to engage an unspecified enemy. (At this point, the academy’s muskets were being supplied by the federal government.) Sherman, who was first addressed as Major and later as Colonel, worked hard and effectively. The board and faculty liked him and appreciated his efforts, and the cadets admired and came to be fond of him. His desire to have a success at last kept him from recognizing just how fragile his own position was, no matter how accurately he foresaw the growing crisis and how efficiently he ran the seminary, and reality descended upon him at the end of 1860. Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party had won the presidential election; at just the time Ulysses S. Grant was writing a friend about his job in the family leather goods store in Galena, the nation learned that South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Sherman’s cadets remained quiet, while Sherman, who burst into tears on hearing of South Carolina’s action, wrote a Southern friend, “You are driving me and hundreds of others out of the South, who have cast [our] fortunes here, love your people and want to stay.”
In January of 1861, Louisiana state militia units seized the United States Arsenal at Baton Rouge and sent the captured weapons to be stored at the seminary. Sherman resigned. Even in this hour of hot feeling and impending bloodshed, the board passed two resolutions praising him and thanking him for his services. Men from the governor of Louisiana on down wrote him that they wished he would continue as superintendent. Overtures were made to Sherman, suggesting that high rank awaited him if a separate Southern army came into being, but everyone soon understood and respected his need to go. When Sherman said good-bye to his assembled cadets, all of them clearly sad to see him leave, his emotions overcame him: trying to speak, all he could manage was to point to his heart, say, “You are all in here,” and stride away. (When he later encountered some of these young men as prisoners captured by Union troops he commanded, he did everything in his power to help them, including giving them some of his own clothes; he would write his daughter Minnie that she must remember that he was fighting those “whom I remember as good, kind friends.”) Heading north to Ellen and their four children, even now Sherman hoped for peace.
 
GRANT AWAKENS
 
 
 
On April 12, 1861, artillery belonging to the seceded state of South Carolina began firing on Fort Sumter, the United States Army post in Charleston Harbor, and the fort surrendered two days later. The forces of the United States of America were engaged in combat with those of the Confederate States of America.
Abraham Lincoln, who had taken the oath as president of the United States five weeks before, still hoped to avert a large-scale war, but he issued a call for seventy-five thousand volunteers from the North, to augment the small Regular Army, then numbering sixteen thousand men, in which Grant and Sherman had once served. The Confederacy, its central government coming into existence overnight, brought its army into being from a collection of militia organizations and companies of volunteers.
In Washington, the federal government kept its few Regular Army regiments intact and authorized the creation of additional Regular units, but many experienced officers of the peacetime army were quickly moved into posts commanding regiments filled with the new volunteers. In the Union Army as a whole, an important distinction existed between those holding Regular Army commissions—men who had graduated from West Point, or who had in a very few cases been given Regular commissions as they were brought in from civilian life—and those officers holding Volunteer commissions, which, while carrying real responsibilities, were appointments frequently made as a political favor to men with little or no military experience. With the wartime expansion, a West Pointer who had served for years in the Regular Army might find himself advanced several ranks, to make use of his ability and knowledge: a man would, for example, continue to hold his Regular commission as a captain, a rank in which he previously commanded no more than a hundred men, but soon be given the rank of colonel of Volunteers and become the commander of a regiment of a thousand. As for marching into battle, it was all the same Union Army.
It was a time of fateful, painful decisions: the South gained the services of Robert E. Lee, who declined an offer by an intermediary acting for President Lincoln that he should, in Lee’s words, “take command of the army that was to be brought into the field.” Three months before Fort Sumter was fired upon, Lee had written about the agonizing issue of conflicting loyalties to his son Lieutenant Custis Lee, who had graduated first in the West Point class of 1854: “I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union.” But when his beloved native Virginia seceded, he resigned from the army he had entered as a West Point cadet thirty-five years before, stating, “I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.” Lee urged his son to make his own decision in the matter, but Custis also resigned, to fight for the Confederacy. Of the 1,108 officers serving in the United States Army, a third chose to join the forces of the South; in the navy, a quarter of the officers resigned, to reappear in the new Confederate States Navy.
In the eyes of professional military men, another great loss to the Union was the decision to go with the South made by the exceptionally able Joseph E. Johnston, who had been Lee’s West Point classmate. The Confederacy elected as its president Jefferson Davis, a Southerner who had graduated from West Point, had led with distinction a regiment of Mississippi volunteers in the Mexican War, and had gone on as a civilian to serve as a United States senator and subsequently to become secretary of war in the cabinet of President Franklin Pierce, dealing with reams of paperwork that included accepting the resignations of Captains Sherman and Grant. In early 1861, he was again a United States senator from Mississippi. On the day before he made his farewell address in the Senate and headed south, Davis said, “Civil war has only horror for me, but whatever circumstances demand shall be met as a duty.”
 
In Galena, Illinois, President Lincoln’s call for volunteers produced a mass meeting; Ulysses S. Grant, the only man in town who had served as an officer in the Regular Army, was pressed into duty as chairman. The citizens voted to form a company of foot soldiers to be known as the Jo Daviess Guards, named for Jo Daviess County, of which Galena was the county seat. Asked if he would take command of what soon became a hundred volunteers, Grant declined, saying that he intended to offer his services at a higher level, but he threw himself into the business of organizing the town’s company and readying these recruits to proceed to a camp outside the state capital of Springfield for training. “I never went into our leather store after that meeting,” Grant said, “to put up a package or do other business.”
Suddenly this quiet man was everywhere, helping the patriotically minded ladies of Galena order the right kind of cloth for uniforms from a dry-goods merchant appropriately named Felt, and telling the tailors at Corwith Brothers what the dark blue uniforms should look like. He showed the company’s newly elected captain how to drill the men: the entire state of Illinois had only 905 muskets and rifles on hand, 300 of which needed repairs, so the Jo Daviess Guards had their first instruction in the manual of arms using wooden laths instead of real weapons.
By the end of the first week, Grant had a tentative plan for himself: Galena’s congressman Elihu Washburne, who had given a fiery patriotic speech at the meeting that voted the Jo Daviess Guards into being, told Grant that he should go with the new company when they went to Springfield. At the state capital, Washburne told Grant, he would use his influence with the governor to find him a suitable position in the state’s effort to mobilize. Writing to his father in Kentucky, Grant urged him to come north from that border state, which might explode in violence at any time, and added that his own duty was clear: “Having been educated for such an emergency, at the expense of the Government,” he must offer his services in the conflict that had begun. At the moment he thought he might be gone for as long as three months. Of his wife’s reaction to both the national crisis and his intention to serve, he told his father that “Julia takes a very sensible view of the present difficulties. She would be sorry to have me go, but thinks the circumstances may warrant it and will not through [throw] a single obsticle [sic] in the way.”
That was not the entire picture of Julia’s feelings. A woman from a slaveholding family, married to a man who might soon be fighting against the South, she hoped that her home state of Missouri could be kept in the Union, and she had followed closely the events leading to the attack on Fort Sumter. Julia later wrote:
Oh! how intensely interesting the papers were that winter! My dear husband Ulys read aloud to me every speech for and against secession. I was very much disturbed in my political sentiments, feeling that the states had a right to go out of the Union if they wished to, and yet thought it the duty of the national government to prevent a dismemberment of the Union, even if coercion should be necessary. Ulys was much amused by my enthusiasm and said I was a little inconsistent when I talked of states’ rights, but that I was all right on the duties of national government.
 
The news of Confederate shells landing on a United States Army post at Fort Sumter evidently resolved the question of Julia’s loyalties. “I remember now with astonishment the feeling that took possession of me in the spring of ’61. When reading patriotic speeches, my blood seemed to course more rapidly through my veins.” She added, “Galena was throbbing with patriotism.”
 
Two days before his thirty-ninth birthday, Grant said good-bye to Julia and their four children and headed downtown, wearing a tired old civilian suit, a slouch hat, and the faded army overcoat he had worn peddling firewood in St. Louis, and carrying an old bag that had little in it. The Jo Daviess Guards were being sent off in a large and enthusiastic parade through town and across the bridge to the railroad depot, where the recruits would board the train for Springfield to join the many volunteer companies converging there. Grant watched from a sidewalk as different organizations—the Masonic Assembly, the city’s fire companies with their horse-drawn engines, the Odd Fellows, the mayor and various civic groups, all interspersed with brass bands—paraded down the street, followed by the hundred newly uniformed recruits he had equipped, many of them waving high-heartedly to the cheering crowds. As the last of the Jo Daviess Guards passed, the brother of the company’s captain watched Grant standing there on the sidewalk. A man to whom he later spoke of the moment remembered him describing how Grant “fell in behind the column and quietly, with head pensively drooping, marched in their wake across the bridge, and entered the train for Springfield.”
When Grant arrived with the Jo Daviess Guards at Springfield sixteen days after Fort Sumter was fired on, he found a military nightmare. He knew that the Volunteer companies, units of a hundred recruits apiece, had elected their officers, who might or might not lead them well, but now Grant found many men at the state capital, some with no military experience, seeking political appointments to be commanders of the ten regiments whose formation the Illinois legislature had authorized. This meant that, although even colonels were nominally elected by ballot, “candidates” named by the governor of Illinois would lead regiments composed of ten Volunteer companies, each regiment having a thousand men. With the Regular Army still trying to keep many of its officers with their prewar Regular regiments, the new Volunteer regiments desperately needed qualified commanders, wherever they might come from, but Grant was appalled by the inadequacy of the applicants he saw. To his father he wrote, “I might have got the Colonelcy of a Regiment possibly, but I was perfectly sickened at the political wire-pulling for all these commissions, and would not engage in it.”
Grant took a civilian job that Congressman Washburne found for him in the office of the state adjutant general, where he efficiently processed paperwork for the mobilization of the Illinois regiments, using forms that were in some cases the same ones he had often filled out during his army service. He would soon write a letter to Washington, trying to get back into the Regular Army, and it was known that, although he would not enter the political dogfight, he wanted command of one of the Illinois regiments. The elected captain of the Jo Daviess Guards, who saw him working “at a little square table, of which one leg was gone and which had been shoved into a corner to keep it upright,” said that Grant, wearing his “one suit that he had worn all winter, his short pipe, his grizzled beard and his old slouch hat did not … look a very promising candidate for the colonelcy.”
When, frustrated and discouraged, Grant finished his various duties involving mobilization and was once again unemployed, he took a train for Cincinnati and appeared at the office of Major General George B. McClellan, who had been three years behind him at West Point and whom he had known during the Mexican War. In 1855, McClellan had been one of three United States Army officers sent to Europe to observe the war being fought on the Crimean Peninsula between Russia on the one hand, and the armies of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Turks on the other. Then a captain, McClellan had been present during the siege of Sebastopol, and during his year abroad had the opportunity to study other European armies as well; his modification of the Hungarian saddle used by the Prussian army became known as the McClellan Saddle that the army adopted in 1859 and would use for generations. In 1857, he had resigned his captain’s commission to enter a business career that brought him to prominence: on the eve of war, he had the largest salary of any railroad executive in the United States.
Here was an example of a combination of solid military experience and superb political connections: “Little Mac,” who had left the army with the same rank of captain as had Grant and Sherman, was appointed by the governor of Ohio to organize and lead that state’s regiments, holding the rank of major general. Able, painstaking, and vain, his efficiency, coupled with a flair for dramatic appearances and confident statements, was swiftly gaining him wide recognition not only in Ohio but also in Washington, where President Lincoln was one of his acquaintances. Although Grant had wanted a regiment of his own, he too held McClellan in high regard and was now ready to serve under him. “I thought he was the man to pilot us through,” Grant recalled, “and I wanted to be on his staff.”
At McClellan’s headquarters, Grant was greeted by Major Seth Williams, a West Pointer from the class ahead of his who had been Robert E. Lee’s adjutant when Lee served as superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855. Word was sent in to McClellan’s office that Grant would like to see him. After waiting for two hours, Grant left, telling someone that he would come by the next day. The following day, Grant reappeared, was asked to wait, and once again left after two hours, later writing that “McClellan never acknowledged my call.”
In his determination to enter the war in some capacity, there was something that Grant may have forgotten, or blocked from his mind. Eight years before, while serving on the West Coast as quartermaster of the Fourth Infantry Regiment, one of Grant’s responsibilities had been to equip a survey party led by McClellan, then a captain in the army’s elite Corps of Engineers, who was setting out to map the Cascade Range in the Oregon Territory. According to another officer, during the time Grant supervised the issuing of supplies and assignment of horses required by McClellan’s detachment, he “got on one of his little sprees, which annoyed and offended McClellan exceedingly, and in my opinion he never quite forgave Grant for it, notwithstanding the necessary transportation was soon in readiness.”

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