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

  To my wife, Katherine Burnam Flood,

  and to our children, Caperton, Lucy, and Curtis

  Grant and Sherman’s Western Theater of War 1861-1863

  As soon as real war begins, new men, heretofore unheard of, will emerge from obscurity, equal to any occasion.

  —William Tecumseh Sherman, six weeks before Bull Run

  I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come if alive.

  —Sherman to Grant, March 10, 1864, summing up their successful Western campaigns

  But what next? I suppose it will be safe if I leave General Grant and yourself to decide.

  —Abraham Lincoln to Sherman, after congratulating him on his capture of Savannah, Christmas 1864

  He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.

  —Sherman, speaking of Grant

  I know him well as one of the greatest purest and best of men. He is poor and always will be, but he is great and magnanimous.

  —Grant, praising Sherman in a letter to Jesse Grant, his father

  We were as brothers, I the older man in years, he the higher in rank.

  —Sherman, summing up their friendship

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  1 - TWO FAILED MEN WITH GREAT POTENTIAL

  2 - GRANT AWAKENS

  3 - SHERMAN GOES IN

  4 - GRANT MOVES FORWARD, WITH SHERMAN IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

  5 - THE BOND FORGED AT SHILOH

  6 - POLITICAL PROBLEMS, MILITARY CHALLENGES: THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN DEVELOPS

  7 - THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG

  8 - PAIN AND PLEASURE ON THE LONG ROAD TO CHATTANOOGA AND MISSIONARY RIDGE

  9 - CONFUSION AT CHATTANOOGA

  10 - GRANT AND SHERMAN BEGIN TO DEVELOP THE WINNING STRATEGY

  11 - SHERMAN SAVES LINCOLN’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

  12 - PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT AND PERSONAL FRIENDSHIP: SAVANNAH FOR CHRISTMAS

  13 - THE MARCH THROUGH THE CAROLINAS, AND AN ADDITIONAL TEST OF FRIENDSHIP

  14 - GRANT, SHERMAN, AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN HOLD A COUNCIL OF WAR—AND PEACE

  15 - “I NOW FEEL LIKE ENDING THE MATTER”: GRANT’S FINAL OFFENSIVE

  16 - THE DAYS AFTER APPOMATTOX: JOY AND GRIEF

  17 - SHERMAN IN TROUBLE

  18 - GRANT, SHERMAN, AND THE RADICALS

  19 - A PARADE FOR EVERYONE, AND A HEARING FOR SHERMAN

  20 - THE PAST AND FUTURE MARCH UP PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

  L’ENVOI

  About the Author

  Praise for Grant and Sherman

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  Shiloh, April 6, 1862

  Shiloh, April 7, 1862

  Siege of Vicksburg, May 18–July 4, 1863

  Battles at Chattanooga, November 23-25, 1863

  Grant Battles Lee in Virginia, 1864-1865

  Sherman’s Marches, 1864-1865

  PROLOGUE

  In the early hours of April 7, 1862, after the terrible first day of the Battle of Shiloh, Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman came through the darkness to where his superior, Major General Ulysses S. Grant, stood in the rain. Sherman had reached the conclusion that the Union forces under Grant’s command could not endure another day like the one just ended. When the massive Confederate surprise attack on the vast federal encampment beside the Tennessee River began at dawn on April 6, Grant’s command had numbered thirty-seven thousand men. Now seven thousand of those were killed or wounded, another three thousand were captured, and more than five thousand were huddled along the bank of the river, demoralized and useless as soldiers. Sherman, who had been wounded in the hand earlier in the battle, was coming to tell Grant that he thought they should use the transport vessels near them at Pittsburg Landing to evacuate their forces so that they could “put the river between us and the enemy, and recuperate.”

  Sherman found Grant alone, under a tree. Hurt in a fall from a horse on a muddy road a few days before, Grant was leaning on a crutch and held a lantern. He had a lit cigar clenched in his teeth, and rain dripped from the brim of his hat. Looking at the determined expression on Grant’s bearded face, Sherman found himself “moved by some wise and sudden instinct” not to mention retreat and used a more tentative approach. “Well, Grant,” he said, “we’ve had the devil’s own day of it, haven’t we?”

  “Yes,” Grant said quietly in the rainy darkness, and drew on his cigar. “Lick ’em tomorrow though.”

  That was the end of any thought of retreat. At first light, Grant threw his entire force at the Confederates under General P.G.T. Beauregard, and after a second bloody day, Grant, with Sherman right beside him, had won the biggest Northern victory of the Civil War’s first year. The author and Confederate soldier George Washington Cable wrote, “The South never smiled after Shiloh.”

  Shiloh was a great victory in itself, but that meeting in the rain symbolizes something more. Enormous military and political results flowed from the friendship between Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, two men who had been obscure failures before the Civil War. Their relationship as superior and subordinate began when they moved toward the Battle of Shiloh, which took place ten months into the conflict. At Shiloh they came together on the field, and here Grant and Sherman took each other’s measure under fire and began two years of successful cooperation and friendship. They separated in the final year of the war to lead armies in different areas, but though their headquarters were hundreds of miles apart, they remained in virtually constant contact by what was then known as the “magnetic telegraph.” Throughout the war, each supported the other’s efforts in every way; each furthered and on occasion saved the other’s career.

  In some ways the two men were different. Grant, whom a fellow officer described as “plain as an old stove,” was reserved in manner and worked with decisive inner power. A man who knew Sherman described his torrential energy: “He is never quiet. His fingers nervously twitch his whiskers … One moment his legs are crossed, and the next both are on the floor. He sits a moment, then paces the floor.”

  Sherman was an intellectual, widely read in military history and theory. Early in the war, Sherman, greatly talented but insecure, asked President Abraham Lincoln to agree that he would remain as second in command in a specific assignment and not have to lead it. By contrast, Grant operated on military intuition, thinking boldly and acting with quiet confidence: another officer said that Grant looked “as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.” (As Grant advanced into Confederate territory, Abraham Lincoln said of him, “When Grant once gets possession of a place, he holds on to it as if he had inherited it.”)

  Grant needed a gifted and effective subordinate, and at first Sherman needed a man to give him orders and then stand by him, no matter what. And each needed a friend. They worked together for twenty-three months, planning, consuming countless cigars, learning the lessons taught them by their battles and campaigns.

  At that point, in March of 1864, Lincoln summoned Grant east to assume command of all the Union armies and to oppose Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia during the final year of the war. Before they parted, Grant and Sherman agreed on what each had to do next. Grant would attack Lee in northern Virginia, working to outflank Lee until he could break through Lee’s extended and continually thinning lines. Sherman would march southeast from
Chattanooga, Tennessee, disemboweling the South.

  Turning that strategy into action, Grant’s forces and Sherman’s Army of the West supported each other as effectively as if the two men had remained together. By then the two leaders thought alike, and any differences they had were quickly resolved.

  After Grant came east to take the Union supreme command, he and Sherman did not meet again for a year. When they did, it was Sherman who traveled north on a swift courier vessel from his successful Carolina campaigns to meet Grant at City Point, Virginia, prior to a conference with Lincoln concerning what all three knew would be the closing scenes of the war. As Grant walked down the dock to where Sherman was coming ashore, one of Grant’s staff witnessed this:

  In a moment, they stood upon the steps, with their hands locked in a cordial grasp, uttering words of familiar greeting. Their encounter was more like that of two school-boys coming together after a vacation than the meeting of the chief actors in a great war tragedy.

  Soon after that conference at City Point, Grant forced Lee’s final defeat at Appomattox Court House, and in North Carolina Sherman brought to an end the resistance of the South’s other remaining large army under Joseph E. Johnston.

  Grant and Sherman learned the lessons that led to the final victory during many desperate hours in dramatic campaigns. Those who believe that the North’s greater industrial strength and manpower guaranteed the South’s eventual defeat forget that those well-equipped Union columns had to be led by generals. The North had other good generals besides Grant and Sherman, as well as many that Lincoln tried in various areas who failed, but the partnership between these two leaders was unique. Grant and Sherman’s way to victory required intelligence, luck, and brave soldiers, but it was built on the mutual trust that their friendship inspired.

  1

  TWO FAILED MEN WITH GREAT POTENTIAL

  In December of 1860, five months before the Civil War began, two men who had resigned from the United States Army earlier in their lives reviewed their respective situations.

  From Galena, Illinois, a small city of fourteen thousand, four miles east of the Mississippi River and just south of the Wisconsin border, the first of these men, former captain Ulysses S. Grant, wrote a friend, “In my new employment I have become pretty conversant … I hope to be made a partner soon, and am sanguine that a competency at least can be made out of the business.”

  A man who had graduated seventeen years before from the United States Military Academy at West Point, something that in itself conferred a certain prestige and social status, Grant was now a clerk in his stern father’s small company, which operated a tannery as well as leather goods stores in several towns. Just six years previous, after four years as a cadet and eleven as an officer, including brave and efficient service during the Mexican War, his military career had come to a bad end. Stationed at remote posts in California without his wife and two children, Grant became bored and lonely. During the long separation from his wife, Julia, a highly intelligent, lively, affectionate woman who adored him as he adored her, he began to drink. In 1854, when Grant was thirty-two, his regimental commander forced him to resign from the army for being drunk while handing out money to troops on a payday.

  Returning to Missouri, Grant struggled for four years to support his little family by farming land near St. Louis that belonged to his wife and father-in-law. Despite working hard, avoiding alcohol, and remaining optimistic—at one point he wrote to his father, who then lived in Kentucky, “Every day I like farming better and I do not doubt money is to be made at it”—events worked against him. A combination of weather-ruined crops and falling commodity prices left him with with one slim chance to get by. Hiring two slaves from their owners, and borrowing from his father-in-law a slave whom he later bought and set free, Grant and his new field hands began cutting down trees on the farm, sawing them into logs, and taking them to St. Louis to sell as firewood. Sometimes Grant brought his logs to houses whose owners arranged for deliveries, and on other days he peddled them on the street.

  Wearing his faded old blue army overcoat, from which he had removed the insignia, he sometimes encountered officers who knew him from the past. Brigadier General William S. Harney, “resplendent in a new uniform” as he passed through St. Louis to campaign against the Sioux, saw Grant handling the reins of a team of horses pulling a wagon stacked with logs. Harney exclaimed, “Why, Grant, what in blazes are you doing here?” Grant answered, “Well, General, I’m hauling firewood.” On another day, an old comrade looking for Grant’s farm asked directions of a nondescript man driving a load into the city, only to realize that he was speaking to Grant. In response to his startled, “Great God, Grant, what are you doing?” he received the laconic reply, “I’m solving the problem of poverty.”

  On December 23, 1857, Ulysses S. Grant pawned his gold watch for twenty-two dollars to buy Christmas presents for Julia, who was seven months pregnant, and their three children. Nothing improved: bad weather destroyed most of the crops Grant planted in the spring of 1858, and a freak freeze on June 5 finished off the rest. During the summer, the Grants’ ten-year-old son Fred nearly died of typhoid. In early September Grant wrote to his sister Mary that “Julia and I are both sick with chills and fever.”

  The end had come for Grant as a farmer. In the autumn of 1858, an auctioneer sold off his remaining animals, crops, and equipment. He, Julia, and their four children moved into St. Louis, where a cousin of Julia’s had been persuaded to make him a partner in his real estate firm. Grant’s job was to collect rents and sell houses, but even in a sharply rising real estate market, he could not make money. After nine months he was told that the partnership had been dissolved: he was unemployed. Next, after being turned down for the position of county engineer for lack of the right political connections, he found a job in the federal customshouse but was replaced after a month, again a victim of political patronage. Heavily in debt and behind in his rent, Grant could not support his family. A friend who saw him walking the streets looking for work described a man “shabbily dressed … his face anxious,” sunk in “profound discouragement.” Finally Grant turned in desperation to his austere father, who had earlier rejected his appeal for a substantial loan, and the elder Grant created a job for him as a clerk at the leather goods store in Galena. A man who ran a jewelry store across the street recalled this, from the time when Grant was describing himself as “pretty conversant” with his new job. “Grant was a very poor businessman, and never liked to wait on customers … [He] would go behind the counter, very reluctantly, and drag down whatever was wanted; but hardly ever knew the price of it, and, in nine cases out of ten, he charged either too much or too little.”

  That was Grant as he lived in Galena on the eve of the Civil War—an ordinary-looking man of thirty-eight, five feet eight inches tall and weighing 135 pounds, somewhat stooped and with a short brown beard, a quiet man who smoked a pipe and by then had some false teeth. He had never wanted a military career: he went to West Point only because his autocratic father, who had gotten him a congressional appointment to the academy without consulting him, insisted that he go. While he was there, Congress debated whether to close the nation’s military school, and Grant kept hoping that would happen. In studies, he said, “I rarely read over a lesson a second time,” but he devoured the library’s stock of novels, including the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Washington Irving, and demonstrated skill and sensitivity in the paintings and pen-and-ink sketches he executed in a drawing course.

  When Grant arrived as a plebe, seventeen years old, another cadet, a big, swaggering youth named Jack Lindsay who was the son of a colonel looked at this quiet and unassuming boy who then stood only five foot one and weighed 117 pounds, and mistook Grant’s politeness for weakness. Lindsay disdainfully shoved Grant out of line during a squad drill. Grant asked him to stop. Lindsay did it again—and learned a lot about Ulysses S. Grant when this little plebe knocked him to the ground with one punch.<
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  The incident may not of itself have ensured his acceptance and popularity, but Grant became a member of a secretive group known as the T.I.O., standing for Twelve in One, a dozen classmates who pledged eternal friendship and wore rings bearing a symbol whose significance only they knew. In the evenings, he and his friends sometimes played a card game called Brag. His classmate Daniel Frost, who was destined to become a Confederate general, described him:

  His hair was reddish brown and his eyes grey-blue, We all liked him, and he took rank soon as a good mathematician and engineer … He had no bad habits whatever, and was a great favorite, though not a brilliant fellow.

  He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dance. He had no facility in conversation with the ladies, a total absence of elegance, and naturally showed off badly in contrast with the young Southern men, who prided themselves on being finished in the ways of the world.

  In one area only, Grant stood first, in the entire corps of cadets: horsemanship. From childhood on, he always had this intuitive relationship with horses. At home, he broke them for their owners, trained them, and rode them masterfully. The villain of the West Point stables was a big, strong sorrel named York, who terrorized any cadet assigned to ride him by rearing in the air and then tumbling backward onto the rider. Grant asked the dismayed riding master for permission to work with York; when that was granted, Grant hit the horse on the top of the head twice with the butt of a pistol and began patiently showing the animal what he expected of him. A candidate for admission to West Point who was walking around the academy described the eventual results of Grant’s long work with York, which he saw when he happened upon the part of the graduating class’s final exercises that took place in the riding hall. After various mounted drills performed for the audience of parents and dignitaries and other guests,