Grant Comes East - Civil War 02 Read online

  As Grant looked over at him he realized yet again that he had a true friend in Elihu, an absolute rarity in the game of politics, where too many congressmen would blow with the wind of newspaper coverage and abandon friendship if doing so got them more votes. Elihu had been the one to back him when there was the falling out with Halleck the year before and Halleck's people had openly spread stories about his drinking. The fact that Elihu was one of the men behind Lincoln was a help, not something he had ever deliberately calculated on... but it was a help.

  He knew the reasons Elihu was here, riding with him on a train headed east Elihu was an observer from the White House, sent to evaluate him. That didn't bother him. He was also here as a shepherd, to keep an eye on him and the bottle. The last thing the republic needed now was for their new commander to break down. That didn't bother him either. And finally Elihu was just here as a friend, and that was a pleasure. Once he was fully in command, Grant's nature was such that he would take counsel from no man but the president But it was good to have Elihu here now.

  Though the president had directed that the war would continue no matter what the cost it was now his job to bring an end to it in the field. Every death, whether it was a death that accomplished something or a death wasted, as so many now were, would be upon his shoulders, and his alone.

  As he contemplated this, he reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a battered cigar case, and drew out a Havana. Elihu struck a match on the side of the table that separated them and, nodding a thanks, Grant leaned over and puffed his twelfth cigar of the day to life.

  The open window of the car drew out the swirling smoke and flickering bits of flaming ash.

  Grant looked around his staff car, actually a railroad president's car that Haupt had "borrowed" for the "emergency." The appointments were rich: red-silk wallpaper, heavy, ornate tables, stuffed leather chairs, and a plush burgundy sofa upon which Ely Parker, a full-blooded Seneca whom he had just "drafted" on to his staff, was fast asleep. He had known Parker casually before the war in Galena. In his mid-thirties, Parker was well educated, a lawyer by training, articulate, and a paragon of organization, capable of keeping the vast mountains of paperwork moving smoothly. Behind his back, some of the men ribbed Parker about his Indian blood, claiming he kept Confederate scalps hidden in his haversack. Parker took it good-naturedly, to a point then his cold gaze shut them down, something Grant admired.

  Since leaving Cairo the day before, Parker had not known a moment's rest until Grant finally ordered him to take a break. Within minutes Parker was out, his snoring almost as loud as the rattling of the train as they raced east

  Ornate, cut-glass, coal oil lamps with what looked to be real gold gilding lined the walls of the car, the carpet underneath his feet, also burgundy, had been thick and clean, though tracked dirty now with the constant coming and goings of staff from the other cars.

  Elihu had laughed when they first boarded, claiming that the car had a certain look to it. Naively Grant had asked what it looked like, and smiling, Elihu said it reminded him of a bordello in Chicago. That had actually embarrassed Grant. He had never stepped foot in such a place, even during the agonizing loneliness out in California, and though Elihu tried to act sophisticated, Grant knew him well enough to believe that while the man might have been in the lobby of such an establishment Elihu never went "upstairs."

  There was even a private compartment in the front, with a real bed. He was tempted to try and find a few minutes' solitude there but knew it would be useless, his head throbbing to every beat of the iron wheels. Besides, like many a man who has been in the field for months, he found a soft bed with clean cotton sheets to be uncomfortable, and a reminder as well of other times, when such a bed would be shared.

  There had only been a brief moment to spare with Julia before heading east to take up command. She would come along later, and as always the separations from her were an agony. If nothing else, he missed her soothing touch when the headaches came, how she would hold his head in her lap, whisper softly, hour after hour rubbing his brow with a cool, wet cloth until he drifted to sleep.

  The door to the privy at the back of the car opened and Herman Haupt stepped out looking a bit pale.

  Elihu chuckled softly.

  "Still got it?" the congressman asked.

  Haupt nodded grimly as he slipped his jacket back on, not bothering to button it

  "General, if you don't mind, I think our railroad man needs a little Madeira; it's good for his stomach complaint"

  Grant nodded, saying nothing. Around his headquarters the custom of asking if a drink was all right had evolved. It was a subtle reminder, as well, that he should think twice before indulging himself.

  Haupt at first hesitated as Elihu opened an ornate, inlaid cabinet set against the other wall and pulled out a decanter and two thick crystal goblets. Elihu poured the drinks himself, handing one to Haupt, who sat down by his side, across from Grant

  "Feeling all right Haupt?" Grant asked.

  "It'll pass, sir. I've had worse."

  Grant actually smiled, remembering the agony of the army in Mexico, when nearly all the men were down with either dysentery or the flux. More than one man had been reduced to cutting the bottom out of his trousers, so frequent and violent were the attacks, and many a man had died, more than from Mexican bullets. He motioned for Haupt to go ahead and indulge himself with the drink.

  Haupt settled back in the leather chair, nodded his thanks to Elihu, and downed half the glass of Madeira. He looked over at Grant

  "How is the headache, sir?"

  Most of his staff had learned long ago to never inquire on that subject His pale features and the cold sweat should be indication enough and it always set his temper on edge. But he indulged Haupt who was new to working with him and obviously not feeling too well himself.

  "It should run its course by tomorrow," Grant said quietly, trying to force a smile.

  Grant looked down at the reams of paper piled up on the table between them, accounts from nearly every railroad in the North reporting on available rolling stock, supplies, particularly armaments waiting at factories for pickup, locations of nearly every garrison, training depot, and recruiting station from Kansas City to Bangor.

  They'd gone over it for hours, and the sheer waste was appalling. Well over a hundred thousand troops were scattered in remote posts and garrisons up north, or wasted on meaningless fronts. Many of these would not be ready for combat, having lived a soft life for too long, but they could still serve a better function than the one they now occupied, and they'd learn combat soon enough.

  Elihu had pointed out to him how damn near every governor would howl when their pet units were pulled into federal service, men occupying forts in Boston Harbor, watching supplies in Cleveland, guarding river crossings in Iowa. The men who had these assignments usually had some friends in politics who had arranged a safe berth for them to sit out the war in comfort.

  When Parker awoke, he'd pick up the writing of those letters that would set governors howling throughout the North.

  Lincoln had tasked him to end the war and now, after two futile years of watching the stupidity, waste, and outright corruption, he would change anything that kept the Union from winning the war.

  For the first couple of days after receiving notice from Lincoln, he had been overwhelmed by the responsibility of it all. For two years the republic had waged war to heal itself, to re-create a single nation, but had done so at cross-purposes with itself, and often to its own detriment.

  McClellan had been given the best chance to do so the previous year, marshaling close to two hundred thousand men in Virginia and Washington, then had wasted his supreme effort, with only a fraction of those men ever effectively engaged before Richmond.

  The president had not helped, hobbling McClellan with orders to keep an entire army stationed near Washington. Yet it had gone far beyond that Officers had plotted against each other, jockeying for power. Congress had played i
ts usual games of maneuvering and deal-making, even while men died in the swamps below Richmond. Never had there been a single unifying purpose, a single will shaping the republic to this war. A war that had to be fought with brutal, direct efficiency.

  He had sensed from the very beginning that this war would be profoundly different from any other in history. After the bloody battle at Shiloh he had often talked about it with Sherman, late at night... that Sherman who had been called mad when he declared that in the West alone a quarter of a million men would be needed. A poet named Whitman, whom Julia would often read aloud and whom he hoped someday to meet, had sung of it, of a sprawling, muscular, urban nation of factories, and riches undreamed of. In some ways, like the poet's, his own vision was of a republic stirring, rising, waging a war not of glory, for he loathed that concept, but doing it grimly and efficiently and relentlessly until the job was done.

  Here was the new strength, the new kind of war of men and machines to be forged and then used. He had seen it clearly the night Porter ran his fleet down below Vicksburg. Dozens of ships, sparks snapping from boilers, heavy guns firing, shot bouncing off armor, the sky afire, passing unharmed below the Confederate fortifications powerless to stop them. This was the final extension of power created in the smoke-filled factories of Albany, Cleveland, Boston, and New York, directed by men who but a year before were civilians, drawn from factories, fields, counting-houses, and forests to see it through.

  He sat back, rubbing his forehead, looking down at the reports, and then shifted his gaze back, out the window, puffing meditatively on his cigar, a shower of ashes cascading down the front of his jacket

  The troops stationed in major cities, however, would have to wait. The dispatches picked up early in the afternoon as they stopped for wood and water at Dayton were grim. All telegraph lines out of New York City had been cut, but indications were that the entire city was in anarchy. A New Jersey newspaper had claimed that the entire lower part of Manhattan was engulfed in flames, and ferryboats, packed with panic-stricken civilians, were docking in Jersey City reporting that insurgent rioters had taken the city.

  Riots were reported in Philadelphia and Cincinnati as well, and troops in every other city across the North were on alert. The troops deployed to suppress or prevent rioting would have to be held in place for now, and that thought filled him with frustration.

  The train slowed as it approached a sharp curve, and dropped down into a narrow valley to rattle across a trestle bridge. There was a glimpse, for a couple of seconds, of half a dozen tents, troops gathered in formation as if waiting for review, the men saluting as the train raced over the bridge.

  Here was yet more waste, but until the movement of troops and equipment from Cairo to Harrisburg was completed, every bridge on this vital line had to be guarded, especially here in Ohio and Indiana, where rumors abounded of Copperhead conspiracies and even of Confederate raiders coming up from Kentucky.

  This was the core of the problem. Where could he pull troops out, and yet at the same time maintain some level of safety? The motley-looking garrison on the bridge could do precious little if a real force of raiders showed up, but they were still a deterrent against the lone bridge burner or a drunken mob. It was the problem that had bedeviled the Union cause since the first days of the war, exasperated by panicky governors or, worse, selfish governors concerned only with their own state even if it hurt the Union. The thirty men on that bridge, multiplied a thousand times, could be yet another corps facing Lee.

  His frustration was compounded by the entire system of mobilization, of state governors responsible for recruiting troops and only then transferring them over to the federal government The regiments recruited for three years were obviously destined for the front but for each of them created, there would usually be a three-month regiment that never left their state capital, and nine-month regiments that barely had time to learn their jobs before being demobilized.

  Everyone knew the three-month regiments were a farce, a dodge for those who had political connections to avoid service yet wanted to be able to thump their chests and claim they had served. The hundreds of thousands of men who so briefly wore the blue uniform were worse than useless—in fact a drain on the entire system, taking uniforms, rifles; rations, and pay, while lounging about in garrisons as far north as the Canadian border.

  He smiled grimly at the thought of the reaction that would come when those men were indeed called upon to serve.

  Though he had never put much stock in the idea when it was first proposed, he found that now, in this crisis, colored troops might very well have a role to play, and he looked back at the pile of papers spilling off the desk, remembering the report stating that enough colored men for an entire division would soon be mobilized out of the northeast and Ohio. He looked back over at Parker, still asleep. Once he was awake, a message would have to be sent to the training center in Philadelphia. A division was a division and to hell with its color, as long as it would fight.

  And thus he thought and plotted, a vision of the vast change that an industrial age was creating, a new concept of war, wherein the application of mass upon a single point would transcend the old vision of the past, of lone armies led by an inspired genius fighting but for an afternoon on sunlit fields to decide the fate of nations. He knew that many would claim that this was unfair, but he had nothing but contempt for those who thought thus and had never seen a battlefield the day after the guns fell silent. The job of war was to achieve victory, and in so doing end the slaughter as quickly as possible. How it was achieved, still within the parameters of some basic humanity, was secondary to the final act, the creation of that victory no matter what the cost or how long it took.

  Haupt drained the rest of his Madeira and looked out the window. The shadows were gone now, replaced by a deepening twilight. Already the air drifting in through the open window was cooler, a welcomed relief from the hot, blistering day spent crossing the open farmlands of Indiana and Ohio.

  "We should be passing through the station in Columbus in about ten minutes," Haupt announced.

  Grant said nothing.

  Elihu motioned for Haupt to have another glass, and the general, at first reluctant, surrendered and accepted the offer. Reaching into his own breast pocket, he produced a slightly bent cigar and looked at it.

  "Have one of mine," Grant offered and Haupt smiled and thanked him.

  They were passing the outer edge of the city, transitioning from open farmland to smaller fields of vegetables, a cluster of homes around a church, a blacksmith shop with sparks swirling up into the evening air, several boys, riding bareback astride a heavy plow horse, waving at the train as it passed.

  No sign of war here, no burned-out villages, no rotting abandoned farms with bloated bodies lying in the fields—all was neat, orderly, filled with prosperity.

  More homes now, streetlights, a large warehouse, a siding packed with cars loaded down with the freshly harvested wheat, civilians out for an evening stroll, the distant sound of a band, growing louder as a shudder from the brakes ran through the train, its bell ringing, whistle sounding.

  Elihu leaned out the window for a second to look and ducked back in, grinning.

  "Welcoming committee," he announced.

  Grant shook his head and said nothing, looking over at Haupt.

  "We're scheduled to keep right on rolling," Haupt said, "just slow to pick up dispatches."

  Grant offered a smile of thanks. The last thing he wanted now was a waste of time shaking hands, offering some poor excuse for a speech, and then listening to the endless replies, with every city councilman ready to tell him how to win the war. Other generals, he knew, basked in this.

  'Too much speechifying and not enough fighting," Sherman had grumbled to him once when they were caught at such an affair, and the memory of it made him grin, forgetting the headache for a moment.

  Sherman was furious at being left behind, swearing up a storm right till the moment he had left. But
Sherman knew better than anyone that the decision was the right one, and would throw himself into the task of Commander of the western theater with a mad passion to see it through and not let his friend down. It would have been fine to see Sherman by his side, commanding a corps, but far better to have him out west, commanding an army, cleaning up what was left of resistance along the Mississippi and then, when the time was right, heading east into Tennessee and Georgia.

  Three- and four-story buildings now crowded in to either side of the tracks, a rail yard opening out to the right, filled with dozens of lattice-like boxcars. Half a dozen locomotives ready to pull trains were in the yard, several of them wreathed in smoke. Haupt pointed them out, mentioning quietly that they were most likely ladened with rations, pork, cattle, freshly made hardtack, ready to be shipped east In a nearby stockyard several hundred horses were waiting to be loaded.

  What Lee would give for this one depot, he thought Just for those half dozen locomotives, the supplies, and an open track to move them on.

  A mix of smells wafted in, of the barnyard and steam, oil, wood, and coal smoke.

  The whistle of their train sounded again, louder, the engineer playing it, easing it in and out so that it almost seemed to carry a tune, counterpointing the swelling noise of the band.

  Haupt stood up, buttoning his uniform jacket, went to the rear of the car, paused, and looked back at Grant

  "Sir, I suspect there's a crowd of well-wishers out there. Do you want to greet them?"

  Grant looked at Elihu and shook his head.

  "In spite of the press reports that give my location by the minute, this move is supposed to be secret," he announced.

  Elihu grinned and said nothing, pouring another glass of Madeira for himself. He hesitated, then poured half a glass for Grant

  "It'll help with the headache, General."