Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (9 page)

Read Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Online

Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction

BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
6.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Sherman’s official report gave more glimpses of what became a chaotic nightlong flight back to Washington, with the carriages of civilian spectators who had come out to see the battle mixed in with horse-drawn ambulances and carts filled with groaning wounded men. The mercurial Sherman, always craving a sense of organization, conveyed his own bewilderment and inability to change the course of events.
There was no positive order to retreat, although for an hour it had been going on by the operation of the men themselves. The ranks were thin and irregular, and we found a stream of people strung … across Bull Run, and far toward Centreville … About nine o’clock that night [at Centreville] I received … the order to continue the retreat to the Potomac. This retreat was by night, and disorderly in the extreme. The men of the different regiments mingled together … reached [the Potomac River, at a point opposite Washington] at noon the next day, and found a miscellaneous crowd crossing over the aqueduct and ferries.
 
Despite energetic efforts by Sherman and other commanders to keep the men on the battlefield, and then to reorganize them at various places during the nightlong retreat, the first major battle of the Civil War had ended in a rout. At times during the retreat, Sherman himself was separated from his command, and there was a question about his own behavior : the men of the Seventy-ninth later successfully petitioned to be removed from his command because of an alleged incident in which, on the rainy day after the defeat, he had some of the Highlanders ejected from a barn so some horses could be sheltered there. In the wake of this defeat and his own baptism by fire, Sherman, the lover of orderly procedure, poured out his descriptions and feelings in three letters to Ellen, telling her of the “Shameless flight of the armed mob,” and said that he had in the past “seen the confusion of crowds of men at fires and Shipwrecks, but nothing like this. It was as disgraceful as words can portray.”
There was confusion indeed. Leaderless soldiers wandered the streets of Washington, some begging for food, while many saloons were packed with officers getting drunk instead of trying to find and care for their demoralized men. Other soldiers boarded trains north and were never seen again. Sherman later summed up Bull Run in these terms: “Though the North was overwhelmed with mortification and shame, the South had not much really to boast of, for in the three or four hours of fighting their organization was so broken up that they did not and could not follow our army, when it was known to be in a state of disgraceful and causeless flight.”
Back in camp after they finished pouring into the Washington area, some of Sherman’s troops “were so mutinous, at one time, that I had ordered the [Regular Army artillery] battery to unlimber, threatening, if they dared to leave camp without orders, I would fire upon them.” His brigade was soon visited by President Lincoln, accompanied by Secretary of War Simon Cameron, whose brother James, the colonel commanding the Seventy-ninth New York, had been killed at Bull Run. During the visit, Lincoln stood in his carriage, surrounded by hundreds of soldiers, and spoke to them in a way that Sherman described as “one of the … best, most feeling addresses I ever listened to, referring to our late disaster at Bull Run, the high duties that still devolved on us, and the brighter days yet to come.” The talk steadied and encouraged the shaken young soldiers; as for his own feelings and those of his fellow commanders during these days, Sherman said, “We were all trembling lest we should be held personally accountable for the defeat.”
Still in this troubled mood, Sherman was speaking one evening with several other worried colonels in a large, high-ceilinged room at Arlington House, the Custis family mansion that until a few weeks before had been the home of Robert E. Lee and his family. (Arlington House and its farmland, sitting directly across the Potomac from Washington in Virginia and clearly visible from the Capitol, was one of the first places in Virginia to be occupied by federal troops. Some of the dead from Bull Run were being buried on the extensive Arlington lands, which later became the Arlington National Cemetery.) As the group of colonels talked in this room that was now serving as an adjutant general’s office, important news arrived in a way that Sherman later described.
Some young officer came in with a list of the new brigadiers just announced at the War Department, which embraced the names of Heintzelman, Keyes, Franklin, Andrew Porter, W. T. Sherman, and others, who had been colonels in the battle, and all of whom had shared the common stampede. Of course, we discredited the truth of the list, and Heintzelman broke out with, “By————, it’s all a lie! Every mother’s son of you will be cashiered.” We all felt he was right, but, nevertheless, it was true, and we were all announced in orders as brigadier generals of Volunteers.
 
Another name on this list was that of an officer serving far to the west who had nothing to do with the Bull Run disaster: Ulysses S. Grant. Ten days after receiving his own promotion, Sherman opened a note from a more senior brigadier general, Robert Anderson, commander of the Union force that had, after surrendering Fort Sumter, been allowed to come north. Early in his army career, Sherman had served under then-Captain Anderson, who found him impressive: when they met now in Washington, Anderson told Sherman that, as Sherman recounted it, he had been “offered the command of the Department of the Cumberland, to embrace Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., and that he wanted … me as his right hand.” This led quickly to a meeting between the two officers and President Lincoln, during which Sherman made a prophetic request. “In this interview with Mr. Lincoln, I explained to him my extreme desire to serve in a subordinate capacity, and in no event to be left in a superior command. He promised this with promptness, making the jocular remark that his chief trouble was to find places for the too many generals who wanted to be at the head of affairs, to command armies, etc.”
Sherman was indeed on his way to Kentucky, but his request to remain as a second in command betrayed a lack of self-confidence. Perhaps under there was still the boy whose father had died when he was nine, the boy sent to a prominent family by whom he had always felt overshadowed, or it could be that the disaster at Bull Run made him wish that there would always be someone higher in command to take the blame if things went wrong.
Arriving in Louisville, Kentucky, Sherman threw himself into the work of assisting Anderson in trying to assemble a new army in a new theater of war. Here he now found more confusion, in a border state of great strategic importance with a population whose loyalties were mixed. There was little fighting, but Sherman struggled with shortages of trained personnel, weapons, and supplies, an ill-organized command structure, no clear picture of when and where additional troops would arrive, and a volatile political situation.
Sherman began to exaggerate things; there were indeed Confederate spies and sympathizers about, but he saw the Kentuckians as “nearly all unfriendly.” Military intelligence was poor on both sides: on the same day that Sherman reported that he had four thousand men to oppose a force led by Simon Bolivar Buckner that he estimated to number fifteen thousand, Buckner was telling his superiors that the six thousand men he actually had could easily be defeated by the thirteen thousand he felt certain were with Sherman. On October 5, Sherman wrote his brother John, “I’m afraid you are too late to save Kentucky. The young active element is all secession, the older stay at homes are for Union & Peace. But they will not take part.” To Ellen he wrote the following day, “I don’t think I ever felt so much desire to hide myself in some obscure place, to pass the time allotted to us on earth, but I know full well that we cannot if we would avoid the storm that threatens us, and perforce must drift on to the end. What that will be God only knows.”
He soon found his deepest fear realized: Anderson, in poor health since his ordeal at Fort Sumter and overwhelmed by the night-and-day task of trying to organize this new Department of the Cumberland, resigned from his command on October 8 and went home. Sherman wrote that Anderson “said he could not stand the mental torture of his command any longer, and that he must go away or it would kill him … I had no alternative but to assume command, though much against the grain, and in direct violation of Mr. Lincoln’s promise to me.”
Already under the strain of constant work, Sherman became increasingly apprehensive about the balance between the unreliable forces at his disposal and the unknown numbers of Confederates opposing him. As he assessed the placement of federal forces along the Union’s east-to-west front from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, a distance of 825 miles, he found that of the 175,000 men defending this line, he had a total of 14,000 to cover approximately a third of that area. He believed himself to be facing 55,000 Confederates.
Going completely out of the chain of command, Sherman, who had earlier written Ellen that he intended “to meddle as little as possible with my superiors, and to give my opinion only when asked for,” sent a telegram to President Lincoln. It said in part, “My own belief is that Confederates will make a more desperate effort [to] join Kentucky [to them] than they have for Missouri. Force now here or expected is entirely inadequate[.] The Kentuckians instead of assisting, call from every quarter for protection against local secessionists.” It closed with the one-word imperative, extraordinary to be coming from a brigadier general to the commander in chief: “Answer.” This produced a response, also out of any normal chain of command, from Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, one of Senator John Sherman’s political allies. Chase told him that keeping Kentucky in the Union was indeed crucial, but that Lincoln thought Sherman already had enough troops. Sherman replied, “I am sorry if I offended the President, but it would be better if all saw things as they are, rather than as we would they were.”
As his anxiety mounted, Sherman sent Ellen letters so pessimistic that she wrote back, “Do write me a cheerful letter that I may have it to refer to when the gloomy ones come.” To this, Sherman answered, “How any body can be cheerful now I cant tell … Give my love to all at home and tell Willy that I am very anxious to leave him a name of which he will not be ashamed if the tools are furnished me for the task to which I am assigned.”
 
 
On the same October day that Sherman wrote Ellen he feared he might leave his son Willy a shameful legacy, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant, now commanding the military district headquartered at Cairo, Illinois, a grimy, bustling port located where the Ohio River entered the Mississippi, issued orders referring to “our Gun Boat Fleet.” These were flat-bottomed paddle-wheeler riverboats, each with two tall side-by-side funnels, that had cannon poking out of their slanted dark armor superstructure; the men called them “mud turtles.” Officers and sailors of the United States Navy manned these ships. The other vessels now at Grant’s disposal, to carry troops and supplies, were the colorful riverboat steamers of the type immortalized by Mark Twain, each also with two funnels, some propelled by one large paddle wheel at the stern, and others with a paddle wheel on each side.
In contrast with Sherman’s recent war experience, which began with the stunning rout at Bull Run and was continuing with what he saw as an impending disaster in Kentucky, Grant was having a varied and productive apprenticeship in command. He had sent his son Fred home to Julia after a week of his comradeship as he led his Twenty-first Illinois west. Rather than being ordered into battle, Grant found himself peacefully encamped with his regiment at different points in northern Missouri, ensuring that the population did not take up arms against the Union. This gave Colonel Grant time to train his regiment. To improve his men’s already good morale, he organized a group of mail wagons to serve his command alone, which increased the speed of communications between his soldiers and their families. At this point, Grant still believed that the war would end within nine months, and that his time as a colonel of Volunteers would be only an episode in his life. In answer to a letter from his father, who asked Grant if he would not be wise to consider staying in the army as a career, he answered, “You ask if I should not like to go into the regular army. I should not.”
During this quiet period, James Crane, chaplain of the Twenty-first, was sitting in a tent reading a newspaper when he came across Grant’s name in a list of newly promoted brigadier generals of Volunteers. Grant said that he had no idea this was coming and commented that it must be “some of Washburne’s work.” So many military matters were intertwined with politics: Lincoln, who never forgot his original power base of Illinois, had granted the Illinois congressional delegation the right to appoint six brigadier generals of Volunteers—two more than he apportioned to any other state. That gave Republican Representative Elihu Washburne, Grant’s congressman, the opportunity to urge his fellow Illinois representatives to include the man he had spotted as an obscure former Regular Army captain. This same list of promotions to brigadier general of Volunteers, all backdated to May 17, contained the name of William T. Sherman, with Sherman being senior to Grant because he graduated from West Point three years before Grant did.
With this promotion, Grant was suddenly given important responsibilities. First he was sent to St. Louis to confer with Major General John Frémont, a most interesting figure who had just been assigned to command the Department of the West—the critical and complicated theater of war that had the Mississippi River at its heart.

Other books

In Her Eyes by Wesley Banks
Prairie Hardball by Alison Gordon
The Pea Soup Poisonings by Nancy Means Wright
Masked Innocence by Alessandra Torre
101 EROTICA STORIES by Green, Vallen
Perfect Bride by Samantha James