The Man Who Saved the Union (21 page)

Congress gave Lincoln what he wanted. Secession had carried off from the legislature the Southern wing of the Democratic party; sudden
death, from typhoid fever in June, deprived the party’s Northern wing of its leader, Stephen Douglas. The large Republican majority that resulted assured Lincoln of support in his effort to crush the rebellion. The Republicans ratified Lincoln’s past actions and approved the president’s request for men and money, with a bonus of a hundred thousand men more than he asked for and an additional hundred million dollars.

F
red Grant loved soldiering as only a young boy can. The eleven-year-old’s father visited Galena to see Julia and the children and gather some personal effects; when he left he took Fred with him. The two traveled by train back to camp near Springfield. “
Fred was delighted with his trip,” Grant wrote Julia. The boy mingled with the troops, who adopted him as a mascot. “
The soldiers and officers call him Colonel and he seems to be quite a favorite.”

Grant got orders from Washington to move his regiment to Quincy, just across the Mississippi from the northern part of
Missouri. That state remained loyal but precariously so, and Lincoln and
Winfield Scott wanted to secure it militarily. A railroad ran from Springfield to the Mississippi, yet Grant chose to march his men. “
I thought it would be good preparation for the troops,” he explained. The march was much easier than traversing Mexico fifteen years earlier had been, but it posed its own challenges. An enterprising Illinoisan joined Grant’s column selling liquor to slake the men’s thirst; Grant, learning of the commerce, immediately interdicted it. He confiscated the seller’s inventory and ordered him to get away from the line of march—“
which he did in double-quick time, not even taking the trouble to pick up his coat,” a local reporter noted.

A change of plans caught Grant halfway to Quincy, at the Illinois
River. The War Department now wanted him to go to Ironton, Missouri, and had dispatched a steamboat up the Illinois to fetch him and his men. The regiment boarded and began their river journey, only for the vessel to run aground on a sandbar. Awaiting a rise in the river, Grant received another set of orders. A rebel force had trapped a Union regiment in Missouri on the
Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad; Grant was to relieve the regiment and capture or disperse the rebels. The train to Quincy was the shortest and quickest route.

With battle approaching, Grant thought Fred had seen enough of army life. He put the boy on a steamboat at Quincy, heading north toward Galena. “
Fred started home yesterday,” Grant wrote Julia. “I did not telegraph you because I thought you would be in a perfect stew until he arrived. He did not want to go at all, and I felt loath at sending him, but now that we are in the enemy’s country I thought you would be alarmed if he was with me.”

Grant underestimated his wife. “
Do not send him home,” Julia responded. She admonished her husband with a classical precedent: “Alexander was not older when he accompanied Philip. Do keep him with you.”

But the boy had been sent and couldn’t well be recalled. Julia nonetheless took pride from the way Fred’s journey played out. The steamboat dropped him at Dubuque, which was connected to Galena by rail. The train, however, had departed when he arrived, and rather than wait for the next one he set off on foot. “He walked the whole distance from Dubuque to Galena, seventeen miles, and carried his own knapsack,” Julia remembered of her little Alexander.

T
he prospect of meeting the enemy made Grant anxious. Anxiety often induced headaches in him, and it did so now. “
Last night we had an alarm which kept me out all night with one of those terrible headaches which you know I am so subject to,” he confided to Julia. “Today I have laid up all day.” Patent medicine eased the symptoms without addressing the cause. He recalled his first experiences in combat and how he had gotten past the fear he had felt then, but he realized something was quite different now. “
My sensations as we approached what I supposed might be a field of battle were anything but agreeable,” he wrote afterward. “I had been in all the engagements in Mexico that it was possible for one
person to be in, but not in command. If some one else had been colonel and I had been lieutenant-colonel I do not think I would have felt any trepidation.” Possessing the command made him responsible for the fate of the whole regiment, and the experience stressed him badly.

The feeling diminished before long, though not through his own doing. As his regiment was preparing to cross the Mississippi, the besieged Union regiment that was supposed to be the object of Grant’s rescue suddenly appeared, looking embarrassed and bedraggled. “My anxiety was relieved,” Grant recalled. “I am inclined to think both sides got frightened and ran away.”

Grant’s regiment received orders to cross into Missouri all the same. “
Tomorrow I start for Monroe, where I shall fall in with
Colonel Palmer and one company of horse and two pieces of artillery,” he explained to his father. “One regiment and a battalion of infantry will move on to Mexico, North Missouri road, and all of us together will try to nab the notorious
Tom Harris with his 1200 secessionists.” Harris had been tearing up the countryside and destroying railroads. Grant was willing enough to give chase with his infantry, but he wasn’t hopeful about catching Harris. “His men are mounted, and I have but little faith in getting many of them.”

Grant learned that the rebels had made camp near the town of Florida. He gathered teams and drivers to transport the regiment’s gear and provisions forward. He had done this in Mexico many times, and the logistics of the march came easily. The psychology of the march was another matter, and the anxiety returned. “
When we got on the road and found every house deserted, I was anything but easy. In the twenty-five miles we had to march we did not see a person, old or young, male or female, except two horsemen who were on a road that crossed ours. As soon as they saw us they decamped as fast as their horses could carry them.”

Grant’s distress intensified as he neared Harris’s camp in a creek bottom between two sets of hills. “The hills on either side of the creek extend to a considerable height, possibly more than a hundred feet,” Grant wrote. “As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and
consider what to do; I kept right on.” He reached the crest of the road and looked down into the valley. He saw signs of a recent large encampment but neither Harris nor his mounted men.

“My heart resumed its place,” Grant wrote. And a revelation came over him. “It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.”

18

W
ILLIAM
S
HERMAN SPENT MUCH OF HIS LIFE IN A BAD MOOD, AND
the outbreak of the war didn’t make it better. Louisiana’s secession compelled his resignation from the state’s military academy just when his efforts with the cadets were beginning to show real progress. He respectfully told his patron, Governor Moore, that dissolution of the Union was recklessly harebrained. “
I have never been a politician,” he wrote Moore, “and therefore undervalue the excited feelings of present rulers, but I do think, if this people cannot execute a form of government like the present, that a worse one will result.” His brother John summoned him to Washington to reclaim his commission in the federal army; to that end John, now a senator, arranged an interview with Lincoln. “Mr. President, this is my brother, Colonel Sherman, who is just up from Louisiana,” John said at the introduction. “He may give you some information you want.”

Lincoln, bothered by other business, inquired distractedly: “How are they getting along down there?”

“They think they are getting along swimmingly,” William Sherman responded. “They are preparing for war.”

“Oh, well,” Lincoln rejoined. “I guess we’ll manage to keep house.” He turned away, indicating an end to the interview.

Sherman couldn’t believe that Lincoln had such little interest in the eyewitness account of a professional soldier just arrived from behind enemy lines. “I broke out on John, damning the politicians generally,” he recalled. He told John and, by extension, the other politicians: “You have got things in a hell of a fix, and you may get out of them as you best can.” He said the country was sleeping on a volcano that was about to explode,
but he wanted nothing to do with it. His wife and children were in Ohio; he was going there to tend to them. John implored him to have patience, but he refused. He caught the first train west.

His wife greeted him with a letter from a St. Louis street railroad offering him the firm’s presidency. Still angry at the political classes, he took the job. He arrived in St. Louis on the verge of
Claiborne Jackson’s coup against the federal arsenal. Frank Blair, planning his countercoup and speaking with the apparent authority of the government at Washington, offered Sherman a brigadier generalship of volunteers to help suppress the rebels. Sherman refused. He explained that he had been to Washington and been rebuffed; he had since accepted a job he couldn’t relinquish without injury to his reputation and family.

Blair and other Unionists in the city interpreted Sherman’s refusal amiss; some began to question his loyalty. Sherman wrote to
Simon Cameron, the secretary of war, to explain his action. “
I hold myself now, as always, prepared to serve my country in the capacity for which I was trained,” he said. But the president until recently had asked for three-month volunteers only. “I did not and will not volunteer for
three months
, because I cannot throw my family on the cold charity of the world.” The latest call, which was for longer enlistments, changed things a bit. “For the three years call made by the President, an officer can prepare his command and do good service.” Sherman still wouldn’t volunteer, as he was new to St. Louis. “The men are not well enough acquainted with me to elect me to my appropriate place.” But the army knew where to find him. “Should my services be needed, the records of the War Department will enable you to designate the station in which I can render most service.”

A week later he received a dispatch appointing him colonel of the Thirteenth Infantry Regiment of the regular army. He accepted the appointment, and his opinion of the government slightly rose. But it fell again when he discovered that the Thirteenth Infantry didn’t exist. Pending its formation, he was ordered to Washington, where
Winfield Scott set him to inspection duty. An early scare for the safety of the capital eased upon the arrival of large numbers of volunteers; Sherman realized, however, that the recruits were far from being soldiers. “
Their uniforms were as various as the States and cities from which they came,” he wrote. “Their arms were also of every pattern and caliber; and they were so loaded down with overcoats, haversacks, knapsacks, tents, and
baggage that it took from twenty-five to fifty wagon to move the camp of a regiment from one place to another; and some of the camps and bakeries had cooking establishments that would have done credit to Delmonico.”

The swelling presence of the troops prompted demands that they march against the enemy. Winfield Scott was skeptical, believing his army unready. Besides, he hoped to suppress the rebellion by encirclement—by a
blockade at sea and a flanking action along the Mississippi—rather than a frontal offensive. Critics derided this
“anaconda plan,” and Lincoln concluded that though it might work in time, the Northern public lacked the requisite patience. The president sought a quicker strategy.

He turned to
Irvin McDowell, who headed the Union forces in Washington. McDowell proposed to attack the rebels at Manassas Junction, twenty-five miles into Virginia on the road to Richmond, which had become the Confederate capital. A single bold stroke, McDowell explained, would defeat the rebel army, scatter the insurrectionary regime and win the war.

William Sherman liked the plan, especially after it included him. Scott and McDowell realized that Sherman was underemployed as an inspector, and he was given command of a brigade in McDowell’s army. “
We start forth today, camp tonight at or near Vienna,” Sherman wrote his brother John on July 16. “Tomorrow early we attack.” He added: “Secret absolute.”

But the secret was far from absolute. Washington was filled with Southern sympathizers, who traveled freely across the Potomac to Virginia. Some of the sympathizers were remarkably well informed;
Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a Maryland-born matron devoted to
states’ rights and the preservation of slavery, hosted high officials of the Lincoln administration, senior officers in the Union army, foreign diplomats and influential journalists. She plied her guests with wine and liquor; their loosened tongues told of operations afoot and envisioned. By her assistance,
Pierre G. T. Beauregard, commanding Confederate forces near Manassas, learned of McDowell’s plan almost as soon as Sherman and McDowell’s other subordinates did.

Fashionable Washington got the news a short while later, and hundreds of well-wishers, ill-wishers and neutral gawkers tagged behind McDowell’s army to witness the first real battle of the war. The engagement commenced promisingly for the Federals, who forded
Bull Run, a
small stream near Manassas, and drove the Confederates back. Newspaper reporters eager to scoop their competition dashed off stories of a great Union victory and sent them by courier back to Washington.

But the Confederates dug in as reinforcements arrived. Thomas Jackson was the most visible of the defenders; this dour professor from the
Virginia Military Institute earned the nickname “Stonewall” for his stubbornness that day. The inexperience of the Federals began to show, and they fell into disorder as the Confederate fire increased.