Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (8 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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This rebuff plunged Grant into gloom. “I’ve tried to reenter service in vain,” he told a friend in Ohio. Recalling his varied experiences as a regimental supply officer in both Mexico and California, he added, “Perhaps I could serve the army by providing good bread for them. You remember my success at bread-baking in Mexico?”
When Grant returned to Springfield after his humiliating experience at McClellan’s headquarters in Cincinnati, his fortunes changed. Among his various duties during the Illinois mobilization had been a temporary appointment as a “mustering officer and aide,” during which he had the task of swearing several of the new regiments into the service of the state. Doing this, he had spent two days in Mattoon, Illinois, eighty miles west of Springfield, with the Twenty-first Illinois, whose officers liked him. One of them, who had spent two years as a West Point cadet, observed, “[We] saw that he knew his business, for everything he did was done without hesitation. He was a little bit stooped at the time, and wore a cheap suit of clothes and a soft black hat. Anyone who looked beyond that recognized that he was a professional soldier.”
At the time Grant spent two days with the Twenty-first, it was commanded by a man whose first appearance among them, striding into camp at the head of the Volunteer company from Decatur who made him their captain, had so impressed everyone that he was in effect elected colonel by acclamation, rather than becoming a “candidate” through political influence at Springfield. Tall, erect, shooting piercing glances in every direction, newly elected Colonel Simon S. Goode wore high boots and a broad-brimmed hat, and for weapons carried a big bowie knife and no fewer than six small pepper-box revolvers. It soon became apparent that he was a drunk, given to moving around the camp at night in a long cloak while he quoted Napoleon and told bemused sentries, “I never sleep.” After Grant left at the end of his two-day visit, under Goode’s unsteady hand the regiment rapidly deteriorated: the new recruits rioted, protesting the lack of proper food, and when the guardhouse became infested by vermin, they burnt it. Men dug tunnels under the fence at night to carouse through the streets of Mattoon and roam the countryside, stealing food: an old sergeant commented that “there wasn’t a chicken within four miles of us.” At one point, Colonel Goode went to a tavern with the men who had been assigned to guard duty that night and were supposed to be at their sentry posts. Scores of men of the Twenty-first began to desert.
In response to vociferous complaints from the authorities and citizens of Mattoon, the governor’s office ordered the Twenty-first Illinois to be brought to Springfield by train; on the way, they created disturbances in the coaches carrying them. Once in camp at Springfield, Colonel Goode tried unsuccessfully to restore discipline by surrounding their regimental area at the state fairgrounds with a guard detachment of eighty men who wielded clubs in an effort to keep them from breaking out of what they regarded as a prison.
Desperate to improve the situation, two lieutenants of the Twenty-first went to call on the Illinois secretary of state. They were ushered in to see Governor Richard Yates, who was aware that all the Illinois volunteers, currently in the status of state militia, believed that they would soon have the option of going home or being sworn into federal service for a three-year term of duty as was intended. Yates took the complaints about the worst-behaving Illinois regiment at face value and convened a meeting of the regiment’s officers. They told him they wanted a new colonel, “preferably Captain Grant,” and Grant was offered the colonelcy. He accepted.
Ulysses S. Grant, who at this moment had neither a uniform nor a horse, went out to his new command by riding on the horse-drawn trolley to the state fairgrounds. A man who saw him walk into the encampment said that the new colonel “was dressed very clumsily, in citizen’s clothes—an old coat, worn out at the elbows, and a badly dinged plug hat.”
As Grant headed toward headquarters and the word spread that this was the new commanding officer, the recruits began to jeer, shouting, “What a colonel! Damn such a colonel!” One private asked another, “What do they mean by sending a little man like that down to command this regiment? He can’t pound sand in a dry hole.” According to an observer, “Rustic jokes were passed upon him, and one young fellow made insulting gestures behind his back. Another daredevil slipped up behind him, and flipped his hat from his head. Grant turned and said, ‘Young man, that’s not very polite,’ and walked on.”
Grant took command on June 17, 1861. He had eleven days in which to turn this insubordinate mob into a unit that would, man by man, choose either to go home or to sign up for three years of dangerous service. After Grant’s first night in camp, there were twenty men under arrest for leaving the post without permission, some facing additional charges of being drunk and disorderly. In addition to those arrested was a notorious troublemaker known as “Mexico,” who appeared drunk in front of Grant’s tent, defying anyone to touch him. When Grant had him tied to a post, Mexico shouted at him, “For every minute I stand here I’ll have an ounce of your blood!” Grant turned to a sergeant, said, “Put a gag in that man’s mouth,” and went about his duties. When Grant decided that Mexico had stood there long enough in the June weather, tied to a post with a gag in his mouth in the middle of camp where everyone could see him, he took off the gag and the ropes himself, and stood back waiting to see what Mexico would do next. The man saluted and silently walked away. A sentry greeted Grant by saying, “Howdy, Colonel?” while standing with his musket at his side. Grant asked the man to hand him his musket, which Grant then snapped up to the saluting position of present arms. Handing it back, he said, “That is the way to say ‘how do you do’ to your Colonel.” When the different companies all held morning roll call an hour late, with the men getting up whenever they pleased, they found no breakfast waiting for them.
Within forty-eight hours Grant had set up a simple daily schedule, understood by all: the men would drill in small groups as squads from six to seven in the morning and as companies from ten to eleven, and again as companies from five to six in the afternoon. Other than these times, the men could go into Springfield during the daylight hours, as they wished. Grant’s words regarding their conduct were set forth in his Orders No. 8: “All men when out of Camp should reflect that they are gentlemen—in camp soldiers; and the Commanding Officer hopes that all of his command, will sustain these two characters with fidelity.”
The men began to feel that Grant considered them responsible individuals. The regiment’s chaplain spoke of Grant’s “unostentatious vigor and vigilance,” saying that he “would correct every infraction on the spot,” and do it in a “cool and unruffled manner.” Each day, there were fewer disciplinary cases. Some soldiers who thought that they were still back in Mattoon, with a colonel who would go out drinking with them when they slipped away from guard duty, left their sentry posts and found themselves under arrest, with Grant’s Orders No. 14 stating that they could be fined ten dollars apiece and face “corporal punishment such as confinement for thirty days with ball and chain at hard labor.” Bearing in mind the recent history of this regiment and its deficient commander, Grant let the offenders off lightly but reminded them that if they left a sentry post in the face of the enemy, “the punishment of this is death.”
As Grant took his regiment out on a short route march, someone told him that many of the men’s canteens were “loaded,” filled not with water but whiskey. He halted the column, ordered everyone to pour out the contents of his canteen, and resumed the march. A lieutenant wrote his wife that the guardhouse was packed with miscreants for the first few “nights and days but yesterday there was but two or three in and to day none.” The colonels of the other new regiments began coming around to see what Colonel Grant was doing with the Twenty-first.
Grant made a swift trip home to Galena and returned wearing a new uniform, riding a newly bought horse named Rondy, and accompanied by his oldest son, eleven-year-old Fred, who Julia felt should see what his father was doing. Julia had always believed that her Ulys would eventually do splendid things, and she wanted their son to see him commanding his regiment. Likening her husband to Philip of Macedon and their son to Alexander the Great, going off to conquer in ancient campaigns, she wrote Grant, “Alexander was not older when he accompanied Philip. Do keep him with you.” For his part, Grant was thinking not of Julia’s romanticized view of history but of his daily work with one steadily improving regiment of recruits in Illinois. In a letter to Julia that he signed, “Your Dodo,” Grant said, “The men I believe are pleased with the change that has taken place in their commander,” and added that the greatest change was “the order in camp.”
On June 28, 1861, after patriotic speeches by two Democratic congressmen, the soldiers of the Twenty-first Illinois had their opportunity to go home or to sign up to be in the Union Army for three years. As Grant put it, “They entered the United States service almost to a man.”
Five days after this, Grant started moving his regiment west toward Quincy, Illinois, on the Mississippi River, to aid the Union forces in Missouri who were attempting to prevent that state from joining the Confederacy. The movement was taking him into the region where his and Sherman’s military destiny lay. Other than Lincoln, Grant and Sherman would have more to do with winning the war that preserved the Union than anyone else, yet at this moment Grant commanded fewer than a thousand men in an army that he would command when it would number more than a million, and he had an unrealistic view of what lay ahead. Two months before, writing to his undemonstrative father, a man he yearned to impress, Grant offered these views, in words that were frequently misspelled:
My own opinion is that this War will be but of short duration. The Administration has acted moste [sic] prudently and sagaciously so far in not bringing on a conflict before it had its forces fully martialed [sic]. When they do strike[,] our thoroughly loyal states will be fully protected and a few decisive victories in some of the southern ports will send the secession army howling and the leaders in the rebellion will flee the country. All the states will then be loyal for a generation to come, negroes will depreciate so rapidly in value that no body will want to own them and their masters will be the loudest in their declamations against the institution [slavery] in a political and economic view. The nigger will never disturb this country again. The worst that is to be apprehended from him is now; he may revolt and cause more destruction than any Northern man, except it be the ultra abolitionist, wants to see. A Northern army may be required in the next ninety days to go south to suppress a negro insurrection.
 
Sixty days had elapsed since Grant wrote that letter to his father, who cared far more about the injustices of slavery than he did. No “negro insurrection” had occurred, but in his indifference to the condition of blacks, an attitude similar to Sherman’s, Grant echoed a widespread Northern point of view: what was bringing volunteers forward, what had compelled Sherman to leave Louisiana, was not a desire to eradicate slavery but the conviction that secession was treason and that the Union must be preserved as one nation by force of arms if necessary. Grant’s and Sherman’s views on several issues would change—indeed, Lincoln himself was not yet the Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation—but Grant’s mind was now devoted entirely to daily military matters and decisions. When state officials started making arrangements to move his Twenty-first Illinois by rail to Quincy, 116 miles from Springfield, Grant startled Governor Yates by saying that his men would go there on foot. “This is an infantry regiment,” he said. “The men are going to do a lot of marching before the war is over and I prefer to train them in friendly country, not the enemy’s.”
And so Grant marched his men to war, riding one horse while his eleven-year-old son Fred rode beside him on Rondy, the horse he had bought for himself. In a letter to Julia written several days into the regiment’s movement west through peaceful farmland, Grant said, “Fred enjoys it hugely … The Soldiers and officers call him Colonel and he seems to be quite a favorite.” He closed his letter: “Kisses to you. Ulys.”
 
SHERMAN GOES IN
 
 
 
In the weeks before the attack on Fort Sumter, while Grant sat bored in the family leather goods store at Galena, Sherman returned to his family in Ohio after resigning from his leadership of Louisiana’s military academy. He found two letters waiting for him. The first offered him the presidency of the Fifth Street Railroad in St. Louis, a company that ran the city’s horse-drawn trolleys. The second came from his ever-devoted brother, United States Senator John Sherman, urging him to come to Washington as soon as he could. John’s newly elected Republicans had many choice appointive posts to fill, and in Washington Sherman could also investigate the possibility of reentering the army on what might be the eve of war.
Sherman arrived in Washington in a frustrated state. On his recent trip north from Louisiana, passing through Southern areas that were seceding from the Union, he had seen excited preparations for war; in the North, he saw calm street scenes and a population that seemed unaware of the crisis. Sherman did not want war, nor did he wish to rush into a position of military leadership, but he felt that those who believed in the Union should make an accurate assessment of the situation.
On March 8, 1861, two days after Abraham Lincoln was sworn into office and thirty-five days before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Sherman’s brother John steered him into the White House, and he found himself shaking hands with the new president. Introducing him to the lanky, sallow-skinned Lincoln, John Sherman used the rank given him at the southern military school: “Mister President, this is my brother, Colonel Sherman, who is just up from Louisiana. He may give you some information you want.”
To this the affable Lincoln replied, “Ah! How are they getting along down there?”
“They think they are getting along swimmingly,” Sherman answered, eager to convey his sense of urgency to the nation’s new commander in chief. “They are preparing for war.”
“Oh, well!” Lincoln spoke cheerfully. “I guess we’ll manage to keep house.”
A few moments later, possibly in response to some remark that Sherman be considered for reinstatement in the army, Lincoln remarked dismissively that he would not be needing “military men” and indicated that the secession crisis could be solved peacefully.
Emerging from the White House, Sherman turned angrily to his brother. “I was sadly disappointed and I broke out on John damning the politicians generally … adding that the country was sleeping on a volcano that might burst any minute, but that I was going to St. Louis to take care of my family and would have no more of it. John begged me to be patient, but I said I would not, that I had no time to wait; that I was off for St. Louis; and off I went.”
And so it was that, when Fort Sumter was attacked, with Lincoln’s views changing from “I guess we’ll manage to keep house” to what he said the day of Fort Sumter’s surrender—“I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force”—Sherman was in an office in St. Louis running the Fifth Street Railroad’s trolley service, being paid well and swiftly improving its efficiency and profits. While Ulysses S. Grant trained Galena’s company of Jo Daviess Guards, accompanied them to Springfield, Illinois, and began looking for ways of entering military service, Sherman remained in his civilian job, his fourth job in four years. In a letter to his brother John, who with his Ewing in-laws was using every kind of influence on his behalf in Washington, he expressed his desire to make enough money “so as to be independent of any body so I can not be kicked around as heretofore.” He added, with the air of being above the fray, “If the country needs my services, it can ask for them.”
Ellen Sherman, pregnant with their sixth child, began to realize that, no matter what her husband said, he wanted to be back in uniform. Writing to John Sherman, who was becoming impatient with his brother’s sensitivity and entire stance in what was now a time of war, she said, “I am convinced that he will never be satisfied out of the army & I know that you can obtain for him a high position in it.”
As a result of the family’s lobbying on his behalf in Washington, Sherman was offered an important War Department civilian position, which he turned down, but on May 14, 1861, his brother telegraphed him that he had been appointed colonel of one of the newly authorized Regular Army regiments, which was yet to be organized. “Of course I could no longer defer action,” Sherman said of this moment. Arriving in Washington in early June, he was not sent to the still-forming regiment to which he had been assigned but was immediately utilized in the inspection of the capital’s defenses. This task involved reporting daily to the army’s infirm seventy-five-year-old commander, General Winfield Scott, who was well aware of Sherman’s political connections and formed a good opinion of him as one of the badly needed officers who had Regular Army experience.
Sherman was soon given a brigade to command, of units all encamped in the Washington area: the Thirteenth, Sixty-ninth, and Seventy-ninth New York Volunteer Infantry, and the Second Wisconsin, along with a battery of the Regular Army’s Third Artillery. His units totaled thirty-four hundred men, a force roughly four times the size of the Twenty-first Illinois that Grant was leading toward Missouri.
Sherman was later to speak as if these regiments had been good units at the time he took command of them, but when he walked in to take over his brigade on June 30, he encountered the same kind of disdainful reactions that Grant experienced a few weeks earlier when the enlisted men of the Twenty-first Illinois had their first look at him. One soldier remembered a “tall gaunt form in a thread bare blue coat, the sleeves so short as to reveal a bony wrist, the trousers at least four inches shorter than the usual length.” Others recalled that the troubled, prematurely wrinkled face looking out from under a most unmilitary “broad brimmed straw hat”—quite sensible to wear in a Washington summer—had “hollow cheeks,” a bushy untrimmed beard,” and “a pair of piercing eyes.”
The new commander was no more impressed by his men than they were with him, referring to them in his letters as “rabble”; at one point Sherman wrote Ellen that he commanded “volunteers called by courtesy Soldiers, but they are all we have got.” Two weeks after taking command, he received orders from Brigadier General Daniel Tyler to begin moving his green troops from their base on the south bank of the Potomac, marching slowly west into Virginia. The Union Army was about to take the offensive, and Sherman faced the possibility that he might soon be killed. On July 16, about to put his columns in motion, he wrote to Ellen, who had given birth to a baby daughter a few days before, and told her, “Whatever fate befals [sic] me, I know you appreciate what good qualities I possess—and will make charitable allowances for defects, and that under you the children will grow up on the safe side.” Speaking of his two sons, his favorite child Willy, age seven, and four-year-old Tommy, he said, “Tell Willy I have another war sword, which he can add to his present armory … when I come home again … though truly I do not choose for him or Tommy the military profession. It is too full of blind chances to be worthy of a first rank among callings.” Sherman closed this letter to Ellen with, “Goodbye—and believe me always most affectionately yours.” He signed it, as he did all his letters including those to his ten-year-old daughter Minnie, “W. T. Sherman.” Then he led his brigade to a succession of night encampments in the field. “The march,” Sherman recalled, “demonstrated little but the general laxity of discipline.”
The first big movements of the war were now under way. After Fort Sumter fell, the United States Navy had dispatched its ships in an effort to blockade Southern ports, but in the land war, both sides had initially devoted most of their efforts to organizing their armies rather than to attacking each other. (It was during this period that Sherman wrote, “As soon as real war begins, new men, heretofore unheard of, will emerge from obscurity, equal to any occasion.”) Then, after some movements in Missouri that brought most of that state under Union control, McClellan won some minor engagements in western Virginia, feeding the Northern hope for a quick series of bigger victories. The Washington newspapers were clamoring for a large and decisive battle. The slogan “On to Richmond!” expressed a widespread belief that Union forces could thrust aside any opposition and sweep on to capture the Confederate capital, 105 miles to the south. (Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
was both explicit and demanding, with a headline that read “FORWARD TO RICHMOND!” and a subheadline that said of the Confederate Congress scheduled to meet there on July 20,
“By That Date the Place Must Be Held by the National Army.
”)
At the time Sherman’s brigade, part of a force of thirty-five thousand, made the first of two overnight bivouacs at Centreville, Virginia, seventeen miles west of Washington, they knew that large Confederate units were in that area. But there was something the Union commanders did not know: several days before, a beautiful dark-haired Southern intelligence courier named Bettie Duvall, wearing a smart riding habit and with her long black hair swept up under her hat, had come out of Washington and ridden into Confederate headquarters at Fairfax Court House, a few miles from Centreville. Taking off her hat and loosening her tresses, she pulled out something hidden in her hair: a tiny package wrapped in black silk, containing the Union Army’s plan for its advance into Virginia and the approximate time of the movement. This, and a later more specific message brought by another courier, swiftly reached the headquarters of Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard southwest of Centreville at Manassas Junction, an important railroad hub located west of a wide, slow-moving stream called Bull Run. Alerted, Beauregard, who had twenty-two thousand men, telegraphed Jefferson Davis in Richmond, and the Confederate president immediately sent him by railroad a reinforcement of twelve thousand troops led by Joseph E. Johnston, the general whose decision to go with the South so many knowledgeable Union officers regretted. Not only were the Confederates in the area now equal in numbers, but thirteen of the fifteen senior Southern commanders were West Pointers of exceptional ability, including Ulysses S. Grant’s best man and cousin by marriage, James Longstreet, and the gifted cavalry officer Jeb Stuart. Taking the role of principal commander and knowing what to expect, Beauregard deployed his forces on favorable higher ground and awaited the clash.
At dawn on Sunday, July 21, Union forces under General Irvin McDowell, who had no idea the Confederates were there in such strength, began to attack, and the federal troops poured across Bull Run at Sudley Ford. During the morning, both sides committed more regiments to the battle, and by noon the Confederates had set up what proved to be their final line of defense, on a wooded ridge.
It was at this point that Sherman’s brigade crossed Bull Run, some of his men fording the stream while others marched over a stone bridge, and entered the thickly wooded area in which the battle was already raging. At the age of forty-one, twenty-one years after graduating from West Point, Sherman said that “for the first time I saw the Carnage of battle— men lying in every conceivable shape, and mangled in a horrible way,” as well as horses “with blood streaming from their nostrils, lying on the ground hitched to [artillery] guns, gnawing their sides in death.” Bullets grazed his shoulder and knee, and his horse was shot through the foreleg, but Sherman kept moving his men forward.
Three hours into his brigade’s part in the battle, with Sherman about to make the mistake of sending his four regiments up Henry Hill one after another, rather than making one massive attack with his entire force, he encountered a Confederate brigade that had come into position opposite them on higher ground and was mowing down his men. Speaking of his troops, Sherman said, “Up to that time all had kept their places, and seemed perfectly cool … but the short exposure to an intense fire of small arms, at close range, had killed many, wounded more, and had produced disorder in all of the battalions that had attempted to encounter it.” His men were now facing the regiments commanded by Thomas Jonathan Jackson, whose performance that day in defense of Henry Hill prompted a general from South Carolina to cry admiringly, “There stands Jackson like a stone wall!”—a tribute that gave the commander and his brigade the name by which they were thereafter known.
Sherman described how he became aware of an even bigger problem than the effect being produced by Jackson’s brigade. Referring to the past hours, he said, “After I had put in each of my regiments, and had them driven back … I had no idea that we were beaten, but reformed the regiments in line in their proper order, and only wanted a little rest, when I found that my brigade was almost alone … I then realized that the whole army was ‘in retreat,’ and that my men were individually making back for the stone bridge.”
What Sherman was seeing as a commanding officer was mirrored by the experience of one of his soldiers. Private Alexander Campbell belonged to the Seventy-ninth New York, a regiment known as the Highlanders because its ranks were filled with men born in Scotland, or of Scottish ancestry; this unit had a bagpipe band, and early in the war some of its soldiers wore kilts. Campbell, whose brother James served in the Confederate Army’s First South Carolina Battalion, wrote his wife, Jane, of this same moment of the Union collapse: “We could see our army retreating and the men cutting their horses Loose from the wagons and mo[u]nting there [sic] backs and galloping off as fast as they could … Then we came across a field running across as fast as we could … [Later] we came into centervall [Centreville] and the regiments that was at the fight tried to get themselves together but it was impossable [
sic
].” After trying vainly to find some of his comrades, “I gave them up for Lost then started with a small party for arlington heights”—all the way back to the Potomac River and Washington.

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