Rise to Greatness (23 page)

Halleck was a wealthy and cultured man, fluent in several languages, and married to the granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. He was so bookish that he once lashed himself to a bunk during a stormy passage around Cape Horn so that he could safely continue reading by candlelight. He was the sort of general who complained about the way subordinates folded their reports. In other words, Old Brains was completely out of his element on a miserable, corpse-strewn battlefield—a place where Grant was increasingly at home. The short time these mismatched men would spend together very nearly cost the Union its greatest warrior.

For the moment, Grant was the toast of Washington, but Halleck found little to admire. He was appalled by the condition of Grant’s bruised army and immediately ordered him to clean up the camps and crack down on discipline. “I never saw a man more deficient in the business of organization,” Halleck sniffed. Summoned to Halleck’s headquarters aboard a steamer tied to the dock, Grant was forced to stand respectfully as Halleck paced back and forth “scolding him in a loud and haughty manner.” Halleck had never commanded a great mass of volunteers, so he didn’t understand how they differed from professional soldiers. He was shocked to see that some men sat down on guard duty; worse yet, some of their volunteer officers let them do it. Halleck issued a flurry of orders: to properly train sentinels, to get to work improving the muddy roads around the camps, to close the saloons on board the steamships at the river landings.

Buell did what he could to stoke Halleck’s fire. When a complaint crossed Buell’s desk about rowdy troops firing their muskets in camp, he added a note blaming Grant’s men before he sent it on to Halleck. A week in the same camp with Grant had done nothing to change Buell’s belief that Grant’s incompetence would have caused the annihilation of his army at Shiloh if Buell had not come to the rescue. By Buell’s account, Grant “had no line or order of battle, no defensive works of any sort, no outposts, properly speaking, to give warning” of the attack. When the Rebels struck, Grant was as surprised as his troops: he was caught breakfasting at his headquarters downstream. Worse yet, Buell asserted, Grant had been late to the field and had spent most of the day in retreat until his dwindling and “defeated” force was “driven to refuge in the midst of its magazines, with the triumphant enemy at half-gunshot distance.” Only Buell’s timely arrival had checked the Rebels, and the next day he had driven them away.

This version of the epic Shiloh battle reached the public on April 14, when a Cincinnati newspaper published a long and scathing description of Grant’s failures by Whitelaw Reid, a young journalist from Buell’s home state of Ohio. The account was promptly picked up by the
Herald
in New York. Reid’s earlier reports from Pittsburg Landing, before the battle, had already caused a stir with their mix of inflammatory charges and hit-or-miss accuracy; this new dispatch landed just as the first lists of Shiloh casualties sowed grief through the towns and farmsteads of the North. Overnight, Grant plunged from his pedestal. No longer was he “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Now he was an absentee commander who let his men be slaughtered like hogs. After the lieutenant governor of Ohio visited wounded volunteers from his state, he published another version of the same indictment. These shocking reports hit Washington with the power of massed artillery. “All that we hear of our officers at Pittsburg Landing is most painful,” wrote Charles Sumner to the governor of Massachusetts, John Andrew. “Some of them ought to be shot.”

Grant’s first impulse was to ignore the charges. Sherman responded differently: as commander of the division hit first by the Rebels, he was implicated as well, and silence was not his operating style. Despite his bandaged hand, he immediately began scrawling his testimony in letters to his politically powerful relatives: his brother John was a U.S. senator and his foster father was Thomas Ewing, Sr., a confidant of both Stanton’s and Lincoln’s. “This story of surprise is an afterthought of the Rascals who ran away & had to Excuse their Cowardice,” Sherman explained to his brother in the Senate. “Newspapers now rule,” he complained to Ewing. “Their representatives the Reporters are to me the most contemptible race of men that exist, cowardly, cringing hanging round and gathering their material out of the most polluted sources.” Thus supplied with material to rebut Reid’s charges, the Sherman lobby fought back in the press and in Congress.

Sherman understood who was behind many of the stories, and why the attacks were coming out of his home state: the regiments that broke and ran in Sherman’s division comprised Ohio volunteers and were led by prominent Ohio citizens. One such officer, Colonel Jesse Appler of the 53rd Ohio, was a young judge whose political ambitions died the moment he called out to his men (who were in fact fighting quite well): “Retreat! Save yourselves!” and began running toward the river. Another, Colonel Rodney Mason of the 71st Ohio, was the son of a well-known lawyer. Like many elected officers of the all-volunteer army, Mason, it was said, “went into the service not from motives of patriotism, but to win a name and fame that would carry him into the Halls of Congress.” According to Sherman, Mason not only ran from the battlefield on the first day of fighting but also refused to return on the second day, even after reinforcements arrived. “Instead of joining with the fragment of his Regiment then steadily advancing under fire, he made direct to the Steamboat Landing,” Sherman declared, adding: “I will not permit Col. Mason … to accuse me [and] shield himself at my expense.”

Sherman fought political battles the same way he fought with rifles and cannon, giving no mercy. His testimony won over Halleck while routing his enemies in Washington and Ohio. Thomas Ewing, Jr., in Washington on business, reported on the mood at the highest levels of the army: “Halleck says in a dispatch to [Stanton] that ‘Sherman saved the fortunes of the day.’” His father instructed the younger Ewing to report this to the president, “and remind him that I said to him last winter Sherman was the best fighting general he had.”

Sherman’s earlier trial by newspaper—when he was accused of madness for predicting that the Rebels would be very hard to defeat—had left him with a fairly thick skin. This time he was able to take the criticism in stride; he even paused in his letter-writing to hunt up battlefield souvenirs for his sons, including a box of shells, some of them still live. For Grant, who had grown to enjoy his lionizing coverage, the criticism after Shiloh left him feeling “shockingly abused.” Along with the other charges, his enemies exhumed his California drinking problem and used it to bolster the accusation that Grant was drunk during the battle. These charges could not be ignored, much as Lincoln might have wanted to wish them away. The president ordered Stanton to get to the bottom of the matter. On April 23, Stanton wired Halleck, who replied with a lukewarm defense of Grant and the promise of an investigation.

While he waited for the results of this inquiry, the president fended off demands that he cashier the former hero. The story soon spread that he had asked what brand of whiskey Grant preferred because “I’d like to send a barrel to my other generals.” (Lincoln later told a questioner that he had not actually said this, but “it would have been very good if [I] had.”)

The president badly wanted to believe the version of Shiloh that he was hearing from Sherman’s allies, because he needed Grant to be a man possessing, as Lincoln would later put it, “the grit of a bulldog.” He had enough failing generals on his hands already; he was willing to overlook many shortcomings in a military leader, including lack of polish on the parade ground and uncertain fealty to the field manual. All that mattered was that his soldiers act according to the simple truth expressed by the Rebel cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest: “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” When the Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure called on Lincoln to say that the outraged citizens of his state were demanding Grant’s head, Lincoln answered almost plaintively: “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”

*   *   *

George McClellan showed little eagerness to fight, but he did take great pleasure in the complex logistics and furious industry required to prepare for battle. He marveled at the projects he himself directed—the digging of elaborate trenches and the placement of enormous siege guns on the road to Richmond—exulting in a letter to his wife that they “may almost be called gigantic.”

But the Confederates had been busy, too. By mid-April Joseph E. Johnston had successfully relocated most of his army to positions between McClellan and Richmond—“the best troops of the Confederacy,” John Dahlgren fretted, “strongly intrenched and barring the way.” McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, designed to swing around Johnston and dash into Richmond, had lost all its swing and dash. On April 22, Senator Ben Wade hosted a dinner party attended by Attorney General Bates where once again conversation turned—as it did everywhere in Washington—to the question of McClellan’s true loyalties. A visitor from Ohio claimed to have heard Little Mac say that “the South was right and he would never fight against it.” Bates disagreed. “I cannot concur in believing [McClellan] a traitor. With more charity I conclude that he is only a foolish egotist.”

In an effort to speed things along, Lincoln took a field trip on April 19 down the Potomac to Aquia Creek, where he hoped to meet Irwin McDowell, commander of his withheld army corps. It was a wet trip, but the president was glad to get out of the White House and free of the capital. Several of Lincoln’s advisers were also aboard, including two members of his cabinet, as well as the revered New York attorney David Dudley Fields and Captain Dahlgren with his grown son Ulric. Lincoln chatted with Stanton and Chase as the cutter
Miami
steamed past the stately town houses that climbed the hill behind the Alexandria waterfront, then rounded a bend to find Washington’s house at Mount Vernon standing sentinel over its wide green lawn.

When the group arrived at Aquia Landing, McDowell was nowhere to be found. The men bunked for the night aboard ship, “in the little cabin … stowed away in a place like a box,” Dahlgren recalled. Lincoln spent the evening telling stories and favorite jokes, like the one about a naughty schoolboy who was ordered to hold out his hand to have his knuckles rapped. Shocked at the filthy hand that slowly appeared from behind the boy’s back, the schoolmaster declared that he would suspend the punishment if the boy could find anything else so dirty in the entire classroom. “There it is!” cried the boy, presenting his other hand.

Early the next morning, McDowell reported to the president. As rain drummed on the cabin roof, the general said that his troops had chased a detachment of Rebels across the Rappahannock and that now, with his corps scattered between Warrenton and Falmouth, the region south of Washington was well in hand. Lincoln seemed pleased. The Confederate retreat had him feeling more confident about the safety of the capital, and he was thinking about combining McDowell’s corps with troops in the Shenandoah Valley under Nathaniel Banks for a march on Richmond from the north.

Stanton took over the discussion, clearly excited by the size and power of the Union forces available to capture the Rebel capital. Generals were beginning to complain about the secretary’s tendency to inflate their troop strength; Sherman, for one, warned his brother that “there may be enough on paper, but not enough in fact.” True to form, Stanton now spoke of 150,000 men available to McClellan and began imagining how large a force they could gather under McDowell. Why stop with Banks? Stanton asked. Why not add Frémont’s army to the thrust?

“There’s the political trouble,” Lincoln answered: John Frémont was never going to march quietly under the command of Irwin McDowell. But they were both major generals, Stanton countered. “The law authorizes you to give command to any of like commission.”

Here it was again, the same old incomprehension. Like Bates telling him at the beginning of the year that he had the authority to fire McClellan, or like the abolitionists who preached to him about his duty to free the slaves, Stanton had an abstract understanding of Lincoln’s power but was blind to the political realities constraining that power. It didn’t matter what the law authorized Lincoln to do, or what the higher laws of morality called on him to do. It mattered only what he could actually accomplish while keeping his tenuous grip on the fractious Northern coalition. Stanton’s grandiose idea was not something he could put into practice, Lincoln said. If he tried to put the radical Republican hero Frémont into a subordinate role under McDowell, in a movement designed to aid the Democrat McClellan, “there would be an outcry.”

Still, as he left Aquia that Sunday morning, Lincoln remained intrigued by the idea of combining McDowell and Banks in an overland thrust designed to join McClellan in front of Richmond. He mulled the idea as the week went by—a week marked by anxious waiting for word from Farragut’s fleet below New Orleans, and by a troublesome visit to Richmond by the French ambassador Henri Mercier.

The cascade of Confederate losses, along with the emperor’s hunger for cotton, inspired Mercier to visit the Rebel capital for a firsthand look at Southern morale. As he rounded the peninsula where McClellan was making his slow way forward, the envoy saw the forest of masts and smokestacks signaling the immense quantities of supplies being ferried daily to the mighty Union army. Mercier’s transport, the French warship
Gassendi,
passed the sturdy little
Monitor,
poised at anchor beneath the guns of Fort Monroe. Sailing up the James River and arriving at Richmond, Mercier “expect[ed] to hear talk of surrender,” according to the historian Amanda Foreman. Instead, he met unyielding men like the Confederate secretary of state, Judah Benjamin, who deeply impressed the Frenchman with his hatred of the North and his determination to fight to the end. Benjamin and his fellow Rebels were prepared to lose Richmond and New Orleans—indeed, all their ports, if necessary—but they would never submit to Federal authority. Mercier’s ears were also filled with warnings of how a Northern victory would spell the end of cotton for years to come: liberated slaves would abandon the fields, and proud Southerners burn their stores.