Terrible Swift Sword (5 page)

“The duty was not distasteful,” Sheridan wrote, “and I felt that I was qualified to undertake it.” Indeed, Sheridan's familiarity with quartermaster and commissary
paperwork, together with his Finck & Dittoe's bookkeeping experience, undoubtedly had recommended him to Halleck for the job.

When Sheridan and the other investigators finished their work, McKinstry was court-martialed, convicted of fraud, and dismissed from the army.
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HALLECK GAVE SHERIDAN A new assignment: chief commissary and chief quartermaster of the Army of the Southwest. Its commander, Brigadier General Samuel Curtis, was assembling troops and supplies for a campaign to drive Confederate major general Earl Van Dorn's army from southwestern Missouri.

Sheridan was an extremely efficient, if ruthless, commissary quartermaster. A staff officer described him as “a modest quiet little man” with a forceful personality and “vitalizing energy.” As the army marched toward a major clash with Van Dorn's Rebels at Pea Ridge, along the way Sheridan built mills where his men threshed corn and wheat. And all over southern Missouri, Sheridan's commissary agents purchased grain, produce, and livestock from the region's often hostile, pro-Confederate farmers.

Sheridan paid fair prices, but he also dealt harshly with uncooperative growers who claimed they had nothing to give the Yankees—by coercing them to reveal hiding places. Decades later, Colonel Grenville Dodge of the 4th Iowa Infantry would write that the brutal methods employed to obtain this information from these holdouts “would astonish those of our people who have been so horrified at the mild persuasions used for similar purposes in the Philippines.”
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When Sheridan discovered that some troopers were stealing horses from civilians and selling them to the commissary department, he seized the horses as captured property, branded them with “US” markings, and refused to pay for them. An assistant quartermaster in on the scam circulated a false report that Sheridan was withholding money that the foragers had earned honestly. Without first looking into the matter, Curtis, preoccupied with the Battle of Pea Ridge—an important victory that gave the Union control of Missouri—ordered Sheridan to pay the men.

Sheridan refused. “No authority can compel me to jayhawk or steal. If those under my supervision are allowed to do so, I respectfully ask the general to relieve me from duty in this District.” Curtis's staff drew up charges against Sheridan, alleging disobedience of orders and neglect of duty. Sheridan promptly turned to Halleck, and the general sent orders for Sheridan to report to St. Louis. The charges were never preferred—they were pronounced “nil-void” in August 1862.
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“Forlorn and disheartened at the turn affairs had been taken,” Sheridan wrote, he returned to St. Louis. Halleck gave him no time to brood, sending him north to buy horses for the army. In Wisconsin and Illinois, he bought four hundred mounts and shipped them downriver.

 

SHERIDAN WAS IN CHICAGO when he learned that a bloody battle had been fought at Shiloh (Hebrew for “place of peace”) in southwestern Tennessee on April 6 and 7. He left immediately for St. Louis, hoping to get into the fighting that was continuing in Mississippi.
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Caught by surprise and apparently beaten on the battle's first day, Major General Ulysses Grant's Army of the Tennessee, reinforced during the night by 30,000 troops from Major General Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio, had won a narrow victory on the second day. Calls for Grant's removal were met by President Lincoln's declaration, “I can't spare this man; he fights.”
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When Sheridan reached St. Louis, Halleck was not there. He was on his way to Shiloh to take personal command of the Armies of the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Ohio that were massing for an offensive in Mississippi.

Sheridan persuaded the commander's assistant adjutant general, Colonel John Kelton, to give him an assignment in Mississippi. Kelton drafted orders for Sheridan to report to Halleck, and Sheridan hitched a ride down the Mississippi on a hospital boat bound for Pittsburg Landing.

“This I consider the turning-point in my military career, and shall always feel grateful to Colonel Kelton for his kindly act which so greatly influenced my future,” Sheridan later wrote in his
Personal Memoirs
.
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A YEAR AFTER GENERAL P. T. G. Beauregard's batteries fired on Fort Sumter, Captain Phil Sheridan at last reached the war zone. But he was again disappointed in his hope of joining a combat unit. Halleck sent him to Colonel George Thom, his chief topographical engineer, who gave Sheridan the unglamorous job of building corduroy roads across the swampy bottomlands between the supply depot at Pittsburg Landing and the front near Corinth, Mississippi. By Sheridan's own admission, “it was rough, hard work, without much chance of reward, but it was near the field of active operations, and I determined to do the best I could at it till opportunity for something better might arise.”

Such an opportunity soon presented itself. While Halleck labored mightily to supply his army of 100,000, his headquarters camp was in bad straits—poorly sited and provisioned. At the suggestion of one of Halleck's staff officers, Sheridan was assigned to fix the camp's problems. Conditions rapidly improved, thanks to Sheridan's knack for creating order. Everyone, including Sheridan, was happy with the changes. “My stay at General Halleck's headquarters was exceedingly agreeable,” he wrote.

The great benefit of Sheridan's assignment to the army's headquarters was the regular access he now had to all of the Mississippi army's important figures. It moved
Sheridan out of the army's shadows, where he had toiled for eight long years, into the bright light where decisions and careers were made.
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In his unoccupied hours, Sheridan went to the front to watch Brigadier General Sherman's men skirmish with the Rebels. Sheridan and Sherman discovered that, besides their common Ohio backgrounds and Sheridan's acquaintance with Sherman's in-laws, the Ewings, they had other qualities in common: their eloquent profanity, their loquaciousness when among friends, and their passion for order.

Sherman understood what Sheridan had been through in Missouri. In Kentucky, Sherman was relieved of command by Buell due to newspaper reports alleging that he was unstable and possibly deranged. Sent to Halleck, Sherman was given a division—one of those driven back during Shiloh's first day. Nonetheless, Halleck retained confidence in Sherman.
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Sherman was eleven years older than Sheridan, and he took a big-brotherly liking to the younger man. Would Sheridan be interested in a field command with an Ohio regiment if Sherman could arrange it? Of course, this was the very thing that Sheridan wanted. But Ohio governor David Tod appointed someone else.

Sheridan's name remained in circulation, however. Brigadier General Gordon Granger, the Army of the Mississippi's cavalry corps commander, recommended Sheridan to Michigan governor Austin Blair while visiting his state's volunteer regiments. Blair was seeking a regular army officer to lead the 2nd Michigan Cavalry.

On May 27, 1862, Captain Russell Alger, a former Michigan governor, delivered a telegram to Sheridan informing him that he had been appointed commander of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry. Thrilled with his first field command, Sheridan persuaded Halleck to waive the usual War Department clearance so that he could join his new regiment immediately.

Sheridan set out with Alger and the regiment's quartermaster for the 2nd Michigan, which was poised to mount a raid near Rebel-held Corinth. As he rode away from Halleck's headquarters camp, Sheridan wore the coat and trousers of an infantry captain, but on his shoulders rested a pair of well-used colonel's epaulets given to him by General Granger.

That very night, Sheridan embarked on his first raid of the war with his new command.
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CORINTH WAS HALLECK'S OBJECTIVE as he inched his massive army southward for seven weeks—digging, digging at every stopping point. “Old Brains,” as Halleck's men nicknamed him because he was a lawyer, author, and military theorist and had helped write California's constitution, was a brilliant administrator but an obsessively cautious field commander. At last, his grumbling, sweating men scooped
out trenches on the northern edge of the railroad hub in anticipation of a siege—and a climactic, possibly war-ending battle.

But when the Union army finally entered Corinth on May 30, the Yankees found only deserted works, dummy guns, and even wooden cannoneers with mocking grins painted on their faces; the Rebels had slipped away to Tupelo, fifty miles to the south. Halleck pronounced it a great victory and sent Major General John Pope and his Army of the Mississippi after the Rebels.
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SHERIDAN'S 2ND MICHIGAN RODE east, almost into Alabama. With the 2nd Iowa Cavalry, the other regiment in Colonel Washington Elliott's cavalry brigade, it captured Iuka. The brigade then seized Booneville, twenty-two miles south of Corinth, and destroyed the tracks of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, preventing the retreating Confederates from using it.

As the Rebels approached Booneville on their way to Tupelo, the Union cavalrymen repelled an attack by enemy mounted troops, capturing five hundred prisoners. They burned twenty-six railroad cars and their contents, about 10,000 small arms, and three cannons. Sheridan's regiment and the Iowans then joined in Pope's pursuit, clashing often with the withdrawing Confederates.
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On June 11, when Colonel Elliott was promoted to brigadier general and became Pope's chief of staff, Sheridan became the brigade's commander—just two weeks after joining the 2nd Michigan. “Whenever my authority would permit I saved my command from needless sacrifices and unnecessary toil,” he wrote. “Therefore, when hard or daring work was to be done, I expected the heartiest response, and always got it.”
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ON JULY I, COLONEL Phil Sheridan and his cavalry brigade awaited the Confederates in the wilting heat outside Booneville. Scouts had reported that 5,000 Rebel cavalrymen led by Brigadier General James Chalmers were swarming up two roads that converged southwest of Booneville.

Just north of the junction, Sheridan and his 820 men guarded the southern approaches to Corinth. He recognized that his men, outnumbered five to one, must make a supreme effort if they hoped to withstand the Rebel attacks, much less prevail.

In a matter of minutes, his pickets were falling back and firing at two Rebel regiments advancing on either side of the road. After dismounting, the Confederates occupied strong positions north of the junction. Sheridan sent Captain Archibald Campbell and the rest of the 2nd Michigan to reinforce his pickets and positioned the 2nd Iowa behind Campbell.

He informed the cavalry reserve commander, Brigadier General Alexander Asboth, who was in Rienzi, ten miles from Sheridan, that Chalmers had eight regiments, and Sheridan's two regiments needed support, particularly artillery. “Let me have them at once, if it is possible,” he wrote.
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The Rebels attacked Campbell across an open field, their eerie, keening cry sending shivers down the spines of the Union cavalrymen. The Yankees waited until the attackers were thirty yards away before driving them off with heavy fire from their Colt revolving rifles, which could fire six shots without reloading but were prone to powder fires.

Chalmers's cavalrymen attacked Campbell's flanks, forcing him to withdraw to a stronger position. Then, they mounted another frontal assault. There were too many of them, and this time the Rebels overran Campbell's position. During the brutish hand-to-hand combat, the Yankees fended off the Rebels with rifle butts. The 2nd Iowa rushed to the 2nd Michigan's assistance, and together they repelled the attack.

The roar of small arms fire subsided, and there was a lull in the fighting as Chalmers prepared to launch a strong attack on the brigade's left flank. Sheridan knew that he must act quickly; his brigade faced annihilation. He asked the cavalry division headquarters for two battalions, along with artillery and infantry. “I have been holding a large force of the enemy—prisoners say ten regiments—all day, and am considerably cut up.”

At the same time, Sheridan was also making an offensive plan to defeat the Rebels with just his small force. In his
Personal Memoirs
, Sheridan wrote, “My standing in drawing at the Military Academy had never been so high as to warrant the belief that I could ever prove myself an expert.” But at West Point he had learned how to make rough maps; he had notebooks full of them.

He had in fact drawn a map of Booneville and the surrounding countryside. It was about to come in handy as he prepared to put into practice the overriding principle taught in Dennis Mahan's “Science of War” class: “Successful warfare is almost always offensive warfare.” Attack the flanks, Mahan had said, and pursue the enemy until he was beaten.
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On his map, Sheridan noted that a meandering woodmen's road looped around the Rebels' left flank. A small mounted force might slip down that road, get around Chalmers, and strike his rear—while Sheridan simultaneously launched a frontal attack. Only by making such “a bold and radical change in our tactics,” thought Sheridan, could his brigade beat the heavy odds against it.

He selected four saber companies—cavalrymen who fought principally on horseback. Two were from the 2nd Michigan, and two were from the 2nd Iowa, for a
total of ninety-two men. Captain Russell Alger, the former Michigan governor, was ill and resting in his tent when Sheridan asked him to lead the flank attack. Alger eagerly consented. Sheridan directed him to follow the woodmen's road until it joined a road about three miles from Booneville, turn up it immediately, and charge in column formation, employing it as a battering ram to pierce the Rebels' rear.