Grant Moves South (14 page)

Halleck was a strange character. A West Pointer who had left the Army in California in the 1850's to practice law and to accumulate a fortune, he had translated military texts and had written largely on strategy, and he was considered a highly intellectual soldier. In the prewar Army his nickname had been “Old Brains,” and except that he had a habit of rubbing both elbows, abstractedly, when lost in
thought—Secretary of the Navy Welles, who never liked him, wrote acidly that he did this as if the elbows were the seat of his mental processes—Halleck at least looked like a very wise general. His book knowledge of strategy was unexcelled, he had a good understanding of the political pressures that must bear on all general officers in this war, and he was a solid, conscientious and very capable administrator.

This last was a point in his favor, for in St. Louis he had much to administer. Frémont had appointed many officers without regard to legal requirements; he had surrounded himself with an almost totally incompetent administrative staff; and, in his effort to buy the weapons and supplies his unequipped troops needed, he had been responsible for an intricate network of contracts that were nothing less than appalling to the War Department officials who had to pass on them. (They arrived finally at the conclusion that there probably had been much corruption but that none of it touched Frémont personally; the man was quite unable to run a military department but he did have integrity, and if many people made money they were not entitled to make under his administration he himself got none of it.) Halleck's immediate job was to clean up a mess, and he went to work with whole-souled industry.

But what Halleck knew about war came out of books, and when the time came for action he would make war in a bookish manner. He was, in addition, waspish, petulant, gossipy, often rather pompous, afflicted with the habit of passing the buck: an ambitious man who could lose sight of larger issues in his anxiety to keep any undischarged responsibility, embodied in copperplate script from the War Department, from coming to rest at last on his own record. Now and then he might fail to accomplish things, but he would never leave the files with anything that would prove that the lack of accomplishment was due to himself. Between Halleck and Grant there would always be a faint cloud. Grant at last would come to dislike him, and in his memoirs, written in age, Grant would give Halleck none the best of it. On balance, however, Halleck in the long run would do Grant more good than harm.

One qualification the man did have, and it worked to the country's advantage. He could see, much more clearly than most soldiers then could see, the ins and outs of politics. This war was not like
previous wars. It was military only in part; the rest of it was an exercise in ward and county courthouse politics, plus an attempt to make something out of the unvoiced but dominant aspirations of millions of plain citizens, aspirations which did not always express themselves in terms a soldier could understand. Halleck sensed this, and now and again he was able to protect an officer who did not sense it, so that the man's services could be saved for the Union cause.

He was sensing it this fall in connection with Brigadier General C. F. Smith, the white-mustachioed old Regular who commanded at Paducah. Smith was in trouble, as November moved on to December, and the trouble almost drove him out of the war; and this would have been too bad, because Smith had talents which the Union badly needed, and he was prepared to exercise them.

Smith was Old Army. He ran his post the way the regulations said a post ought to be run—an Army inspector, visiting Paducah that fall, reported that this was the most soldierly and the best disciplined place he had seen in all the West—and as a result he trod on the toes of innumerable ardent Northerners. His own men had not caught on to him, yet, and his insistence on drill, on the use of spade and ax to build fortifications, and on the precise observance of what the book said enlisted men ought to do, seemed unfeeling and harsh. Once some of Smith's men descended on a house whose occupants had hoisted a Rebel flag, when some Confederate officers visited Paducah under flag of truce, and prepared to take the place apart; Smith went around in person, dispersed the rioters, and next day issued orders denouncing the whole business as a grave breach of duty, mutinous in spirit. He was believed to be too lenient with Kentucky slaveowners, and out of all this came charges that he was actually disloyal to the Union cause. Not long after the Belmont fight Halleck got an indignant if somewhat incoherent letter from a citizen of Paducah drawing up a bill of particulars:

Complain of Gen Smiths inactivity. That he permitted the rebels to murder a man—that he does not confiscate provisions bot for the rebel army—or only in part—That he protects rebels whilst union men suffer—and the soldiers almost ready to rise against his policy—with affidavit before J. P.
²

Similar complaints seem to have gone to Washington, and late in November the War Department apparently was prepared to remove Smith from his command. But Halleck kept his balance. When the frantic Paducah letter reached him Halleck simply endorsed it
Respectfully referred to Brig. Gen. Smith for his remarks
and sent it to Paducah, in the belief that Smith ought to be allowed to get into the record any reply he cared to make. Halleck also telegraphed McClellan (who now commanded all of the Federal Armies) insisting that Smith was loyal and that he was needed where he was. The effort to get Smith out failed, but the mere fact that it had been made, and that responsible people in Washington had paid attention to it, wounded the old soldier deeply. When he wrote to Halleck's assistant adjutant general thanking Halleck for his support, Smith burst out:

What am I to think of those in authority who, at the say-so of political tricksters, condemn one of my age,
character
, genl repu, and services without the slightest opportunity of self-defense. I ask myself who is safe.… Until this Civil War is over I shall to my best ability, serve in any capacity, under any commander, where chance may place me, but on its conclusion I shall certainly, from a sense of self-respect, retire from the service of a government where to be suspected merely is to be damned. I write under a strong sense or injury rec'd, both in Washington last April and here.

This was not all of it. An Indianapolis man signing himself simply “A friend of justice” wrote to Smith on December 2 saying that men in the 11th Indiana were sending home word that Smith was disloyal, and adding that these reports undoubtedly originated with one of Smith's subordinates, the brand-new Brigadier General from Indiana, Lew Wallace, who years later would write a novel called
Ben Hur
. Smith knew better—he had taken Wallace under his wing when Wallace first came to camp, and Wallace was one of his greatest admirers—and now he simply passed the letter on to Wallace, who returned it with an informal note remarking that “the peculiar manner in which the writer gives me ‘fits' satisfied me that he is what the Yankees call ‘a darnation smart chap.'” Smith knew well enough where the trouble lay, and a bit later he wrote to a friend that “a
poor devil as a man or as a soldier by the name of
Paine
(Brig. Genl) hatched a base conspiracy to oust me from command on the ground of—everything, I don't know what—disloyalty, etc., etc.… Thanks to the manliness and just appreciation of me by Genl. Halleck, who denounced the whole thing as a base conspiracy among my subordinates, the order” (the projected War Department order deposing Smith as commander at Paducah) “was revoked and Paine banished to Bird's Point on the Mississippi.”
³

Halleck stood by Smith, then, and saved him for further service; and the whole tangle is worth going into here because it represents one of the problems that could confront any Civil War general at any moment. Volunteer troops had Volunteer officers, many of them men of political influence, all of them men who would be listened to if they wrote to home-town newspapers or to Congressmen. Rigorous application of Army discipline, failure to appreciate a subordinate's gifts as a soldier, apparent softness toward Rebel civilians or inability to respond to the pressing demands of the antislavery people—any of these could, and often did, enmesh a soldier in anonymous accusations of the sort which a Regular of Smith's type might find it all but impossible to answer.

In the East, trouble of this sort had already beset Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, who was ruined despite the fact that both the President and the Commanding General had full confidence in him. One year later the same problem would end the career of Fitz-John Porter, one of the ablest officers in the Army of the Potomac; it would greatly handicap and finally help to close the military career of McClellan himself, and in the West it would contribute much to the ultimate downfall of Don Carlos Buell. No general officer could consider himself safe. The war was being fought in an era of unlimited suspicion, and as Smith had so bitterly pointed out, simply to be suspected was just about as bad as to be convicted.

All of which was deplorable but perfectly natural. War and politics were inextricably blended and the conflicting strains and pressures which resulted had to be taken into account. No lover of the Union could fail to note that professional soldiers of long experience and high reputation were now trying to destroy the government that had nurtured them. (That these men had been moved by the loftiest motives of inner loyalty was a point Northerners could
not at the moment recognize, nor would it have mattered to them greatly if they had recognized it.) What some men had done, it seemed, other men might do. In a civil war unquestioned loyalty to the government's cause was the one virtue that counted more than all others put together, and it was precisely the professional soldier, temperamentally unable to imagine that his loyalty could possibly come under suspicion, who was the most likely to get into trouble because of this fact.

Halleck could understand this where many abler generals could not understand it, and he could come to the rescue of a man like Smith in a way McClellan was unable to do for a man like Stone. Halleck was also, this fall, saving for the Union cause the undeniable talents of the thorny and outspoken General Sherman, whose troubles were even worse than Smith's.

Sherman had had what would now be called a nervous breakdown and had had to give up his command in Kentucky. Halleck fixed him up with a minor post in Missouri and gave him the breathing spell and the encouragement that Sherman desperately needed, but as the autumn wore away Sherman was deeply despondent. From Sedalia, Missouri, he wrote to his wife saying that Sedalia was “A bleak, desolate place without water or timber or any shelter,” and predicting that “if Price does not wipe us out, winter will.” The papers had asserted that Sherman was insane, and Sherman himself seems almost to have believed it. To his brother, Senator John Sherman, he wrote: “I am so sensible now of my disgrace from having exaggerated the forces of our enemy in Kentucky that I do think I should have committed suicide were it not for my children. I do not think that I can again be entrusted with a command.” And, to Mrs. Sherman, he confessed frankly; “Could I live over the past year I think I could do better, but my former associations with the South have rendered me almost crazy as one by one all links of hope were parted.… The idea of having brought disgrace on all associated with me is so horrible to contemplate that I cannot rally under it.”
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Once this fall Mrs. Sherman herself wrote to Halleck, reciting the dreadful things the newspapers were saying about her husband and asking his help. Halleck wrote her a soothing letter, but he himself was disturbed, and to Mrs. Halleck he wrote:

I enclose a letter just received from Mrs. Sherman. How do you suppose I answered it? I could not say her husband was
not
crazy, for certainly he has acted insane. Not wishing to hurt her feelings by telling her what I thought, and being unwilling to say what I did not believe, I treated the whole matter as a joke and wrote her that I would willingly take all the newspapers said against General Sherman if he would take all they said against me, for I was certain to gain by the exchange.
⁵

Very slowly but surely, Sherman was rallying, and there would presently be work for him to do. Oddly enough, both he and Smith, who were to prove magnificent leaders of volunteer troops in action, were saying now that they simply were not qualified for such command. Sherman confessed to his brother: “I do not feel confident at all in volunteers. Their want of organization, the necessity to flatter them, is such that I cannot prosper with them.” And Smith, in precisely the same vein, was writing: “Whilst my experience of human nature teaches me to know the manner in which Voln troops ought to be treated to make them soldiers with the least jar on their previous habits of life, neither my education, habits, associates nor temper fit me to command them to the best advantage. This is a frank confession for those who seek my position.”
⁶

Grant, meanwhile, was busy with the endless routine involved in getting his military district in order. Accusations of disloyalty were not brought against him, and in an odd way the old legend about excessive drinking seems to have been almost protective; when Grant was accused of anything—and accusers were not lacking, this fall—he was simply accused of drinking too much, and in the strange temper of that era this somehow carried less weight than the accusation of softness toward the Rebels and toward slavery. Like all other Federal commanders in or near slave territory, he was pestered by slaveowners demanding the return of fugitive slaves, and in such cases he had one answer: if the slaveowner was not a man of unquestioned loyalty to the Union, the Army would not help him regain any slave that had run away. He made his position clear in a letter one of his aides sent to a subordinate just at the end of this year: