by Ron Chernow
On April 17, Sherman met with Johnston northwest of Raleigh. Far from confining himself to the narrow military terms hammered out at Appomattox, Sherman extended to Johnston a sweeping political settlement. However demonized as a scourge of the South, Sherman furnished terms of shocking leniency. Overplaying his hand, he agreed that southern soldiers should stack their arms in state capitals; existing state governments would be recognized and carry on as before; and the Constitution would protect the “rights of person and property” of citizens in the former Confederacy, even though that might seem to condone slavery.69 In framing this agreement, Sherman claimed to rely on memories of his meeting with Lincoln at City Point, arrogating to himself civilian powers that rightly belonged to the president and Congress in fixing the postwar status of seceded states.
On April 18, Sherman sent the agreement to Grant and Stanton for presidential approval, appending a breezy note that promised peace and gave no forewarning of the storm about to break. Sherman believed he had wisely bolstered existing state governments in the South, preventing an upsurge of guerrilla violence. When he dispatched Major Henry Hitchcock to Washington with the agreement, Grant, instead of going to Burlington for a brief rest, stayed behind in Washington to await his arrival. “It looks as if I was never to have any rest,” he grumbled to Julia.70 On the afternoon of April 21, as soon as Grant set eyes on Sherman’s dispatch, he knew instantly that Sherman had vastly exceeded his authority and committed a colossal blunder by negotiating a full-blown peace treaty. Grant had known where to draw the line between military and civilian matters, whereas Sherman had blurred the two worlds.
Grant promptly contacted Stanton and suggested that Johnson summon an emergency cabinet session to discuss the new agreement. That evening, Grant stood before a tense cabinet and read aloud Sherman’s message, which was roundly condemned. Only days after Lincoln’s funeral, members still sulked in a hawkish, unforgiving mood. Johnson called Sherman an outright traitor and Stanton was especially vocal, ticking off on his fingers his many objections to Sherman’s decision. Gideon Welles noted that while Grant was “decidedly opposed” to Sherman’s agreement, he carefully retained personal loyalty to “his brother officer and abstained from censure.”71 Still fuming, Stanton instructed Grant to have Sherman resume hostilities immediately. In his Memoirs, Grant argued that Sherman thought he had followed the Appomattox agreement and the wishes of the slain president, who had authorized the convening of the Confederate Virginia legislature.72 That order had been revoked, but Sherman didn’t know it. Wasting no time, Grant secretly departed for Raleigh at midnight to confer with Sherman, imagining a personal visit would draw the sting from Stanton’s reprimand. Wild rumors flew through the capital. “Sherman’s conduct is that of a madman,” wrote Senator Charles Sumner. “Stanton was disposed to recall him & send him before a court-martial; but Grant was full of tenderness for his lieutenant & undertook at once to go down & relieve him, thus breaking his fall.”73
Stanton seized on Sherman’s surrender agreement to pursue a vendetta against him. Despite Sherman’s extraordinary record, Stanton attempted to turn him into a public pariah, leaking the story to the press. Aside from their clashing personalities, Stanton may have regarded Sherman as a political threat, accusing him of angling for the “Copperhead nomination for President.”74 Two days after the cabinet meeting, newspapers printed Sherman’s dispatches along with Stanton’s slanted version of events. The war secretary was not content to lambast Sherman’s agreement with Johnston, but insinuated that Sherman had fallen under malevolent Confederate influences and might even help to aid Jefferson Davis’s escape. Grant was appalled that Stanton had turned so savagely on Sherman, telling Badeau it was “infamous” that four years of meritorious service should be thus rewarded.75 He came to characterize Stanton’s scurrilous campaign as “that inexplicable and cruel storm of defamation.”76
Stopping at Fort Monroe en route to Sherman, Grant reverted to battlefield mode, giving orders that Sheridan and his cavalry should move to Greensboro, North Carolina, with all possible haste. Perhaps not wishing to alarm him, Grant did not telegraph to Sherman that he was coming. He had a difficult boat journey to New Bern, North Carolina, where he disembarked having been “dreadfully seasick and he looked sad and careworn,” noted a spectator.77 Grant showed tact by going only as far as Raleigh, instead of continuing a bit farther to Sherman’s headquarters, because he still hoped his friend would receive full credit for Johnston’s surrender and did not mean to upstage him. On April 24, when Major Hitchcock appeared back at Sherman’s headquarters, an officer quizzed him as to whether “you bring peace or war?” “I brought back General Grant,” he disclosed.78
By the time Sherman met Grant, he already anticipated stiff opposition to his agreement but for the wrong reason. Unaware of the ruckus raised by Stanton, he had received a batch of northern newspapers reflecting northern wrath over Lincoln’s assassination. Passing them along to Johnston, he noted ruefully that “I fear much the assassination of the President will give such a bias to the popular mind, which . . . may thwart our purpose of recognizing ‘existing local governments.’”79 Sherman, professing pleasure at Grant’s arrival, must have been startled all the same. Grant explained that the original deal with Johnston had been scuttled in Washington, pointed to the furor over Lincoln’s death, and said Sherman should offer Johnston the identical terms extended to Lee at Appomattox. Johnston was duly notified that the truce was terminated. Even while reining in Sherman, Grant handled the situation with consummate finesse, allowing Sherman to save face by negotiating the surrender, while he stayed discreetly in the background. On April 26, Sherman extracted from Johnston the same agreement Lee had signed and an undoubtedly relieved Grant scrawled across the bottom, “Approved: U.S. Grant.”80
Grant’s brief southern sojourn opened his eyes to widespread misery in the region. As he awaited the results of Sherman’s dealings with Johnston, he sent Julia a letter notable for its tenderness, mercy, and forgiveness toward his former foes:
Raleigh is a very beautiful place. The grounds are large and filled with the most beautiful spreading oaks I ever saw. Nothing has been destroyed and the people are anxious to see peace restored so that further devastation need not take place in the country. The suffering that must exist in the South the next year, even with the war ending now, will be beyond conception. People who talk now of further retaliation and punishment, except of the political leaders, either do not conceive of the suffering endured already or they are heartless and unfeeling and wish to stay at home, out of danger, whilst the punishment is being inflicted.81
His mission complete, Grant returned to Washington and may have survived an assassination plot as he headed northward. With a small entourage of officers, he traveled on a train consisting of a single car that was thrown from the track. Adam Badeau, for one, thought the derailment “left little doubt of the design” behind the accident.82 The episode received little attention, likely because nothing was ever proven. Stopping at Goldsboro, Grant saw scathing newspaper reports about Sherman planted by Stanton and was outraged. As he pored over Stanton’s comments, Badeau wrote, “his face flamed with indignation, his fist was clenched, and he exclaimed: ‘It is infamous—infamous! . . . After four years of such service as Sherman has done—that he should be used like this!’”83 As Grant foresaw, Sherman was shocked when he saw the press clippings and learned Halleck was telling Union troops not to obey him. He criticized Stanton vehemently for failing to advise him to “limit our negotiations to purely military matters.”84 In his view, Stanton had deliberately humiliated him by informing the press of the cabinet’s flat rejection of his peace deal. With deep anguish Sherman wrote to Grant that his officers would now “learn with pain and amazement that I am deemed insubordinate & wanting in common sense” and that someone who brought “an army of seventy thousand men in magnificent condition across a country deemed impassible, and placed it just where it was wa
nted almost on the day appointed have brought discredit to our Governm[en]t.”85
Trapped in the Sherman-Stanton cross fire, Grant did not answer this letter or send his friend any message after leaving Raleigh. The silence gnawed at Sherman, and on May 10 he sent Grant a scalding telegram, spilling out his rage with Stanton, Halleck, and, implicitly, Grant himself. He had waited to receive guidance from Grant, he said, but had received none. By now Sherman had brought his army up to Manchester, Virginia, near Richmond. Citing the “great outrage” perpetrated against him, he forbade Halleck, now posted to Richmond, from reviewing his army. He went further and warned Halleck that he would march through Richmond and “asked him to Keep out of sight lest he should be insulted.”86 He also warned that he would ignore his orders unless issued in the president’s name. “I deny his right to Command an Army,” he told Grant. “No amount of retraction or pusillanimous excusing will do. Mr. Stanton must publicly confess himself a Common libeller.”87 If Grant didn’t vindicate him from Stanton’s insults, Sherman warned, he would have to do the job himself. “No man shall insult me with impunity, even if I am an officer of the Army.”88
With Grant being discussed as a future presidential candidate, Sherman concluded his message by warning him, in almost Shakespearean language, against the wiles of the intriguing Stanton: “He seeks your life and reputation as well as mine. Beware, but you are Cool and have been most skillful in managing such People, and I have faith you will penetrate his designs . . . The lust for Power in political Minds is the strongest passion of Life, and impels Ambitious Men (Richard III) to deeds of Infamy.”89 Aside from ventilating his anger, Sherman clearly believed Grant was entering an alien world where he might be led astray by the dangerous allure of power.
The feud between Sherman and Stanton exposed a deep fissure that would shortly divide the country over Reconstruction. With the war ending, Sherman’s old fondness for the South became more apparent. His views on slavery had remained strictly reactionary. When teaching in Louisiana before the war, he had written, “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery . . . Negroes in the great numbers that exist here must of necessity be slaves.” He also wrote: “Niggers won’t work unless they are owned, and white servants are not to be found in this parish.”90 Now he was flabbergasted that Stanton gave serious consideration to granting blacks the right to vote. In many ways, Sherman wanted to re-create the status quo ante in southern states, minus slavery. “The South is broken and ruined and appeals to our pity,” he told Rawlins. “To ride the people down with persecutions and military exactions would be like slashing away at the crew of a sinking ship.”91
When Sherman appeared in Washington for the Grand Review of the Union armies, he met with President Johnson, who claimed he had not known in advance about the bulletins published by Stanton attacking Sherman. Almost everyone in the cabinet reprised the same sentiment. Stanton never offered any apology or explanation. To his credit, Grant tried to mediate a truce between the two men, telling Sherman, “I want to talk to you upon matters about which you feel sore. I think justly so, but which bear some explanation in behalf of those who you feel have inflicted the injury.”92 Sherman nursed his wounds and vowed “to resent what I considered an insult, as publicly as it was made.”93
With Johnston’s surrender, the Civil War effectively ended, but isolated pockets of resistance remained in Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas. Grant tracked the movements of Jefferson Davis as he fled south incognito. On May 10, he was captured in a pine forest in Irwinville, Georgia. For the next two years, he languished in Fort Monroe, sometimes shackled, becoming a southern martyr. Lincoln’s prediction that it would be best if Davis quietly left the country was posthumously vindicated. Grant believed an overriding strategic necessity governed Davis’s capture: “I feared that if not captured, he might get into the trans-Mississippi region and there set up a more contracted confederacy. The young men now out of homes and out of employment might have rallied under his standard and protracted the war yet another year.”94
The capture of Jefferson Davis didn’t cause quite the sensation expected because it competed with another drama riveting the nation’s attention that day. Just as he was taken into custody, eight defendants charged with the attempted murder of Lincoln, Johnson, Seward, and Grant went on trial in Washington in the grim precincts of the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, a place of barred windows and thick walls. Johnson made a controversial decision to try the defendants before a military court, which decided to conduct the trial in secret and brief one reporter at the close of each day. Alarmed by this precedent of a secret trial, Grant, after testifying on May 12, went to the White House to protest these opaque proceedings. Although Johnson was noncommittal, Grant’s intervention seems to have had the desired effect, for the court soon opened proceedings to visitors for the first time.
The trial wasn’t the finest hour of American justice as the treatment of the prisoners seemed medieval in its barbarism. Almost all of the male prisoners were dragged into the courtroom with linen masks shielding their faces and chains and heavy iron balls strapped to their ankles. With clanking irons, they shuffled in and, once seated, their hoods were removed. The military commission took testimony for seven weeks and ultimately found all eight defendants guilty, with four of them (Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt) sentenced to hang while three others (including Michael O’Laughlen) were given life imprisonment and one a six-year term. Mary Surratt, who ran a boardinghouse where Booth colluded with other conspirators, went down in historical annals as the first woman ever executed by the federal government.
On May 18, orders were issued for a festive march of the victorious Union armies, which would last two days and feature on the first day, May 23, George Gordon Meade and the Army of the Potomac, followed by William Tecumseh Sherman and his Army of the Tennessee and Army of Georgia on the second. Because of the widely discussed brouhaha between Stanton, identified with the eastern army, and Sherman, identified with the western army, Grant made sure their camps were cleanly separated by the Potomac River.
The Grand Review would commence at the Capitol and proceed down Pennsylvania Avenue past a grandstand erected before the White House, where Johnson, Grant, Stanton, and other cabinet members would survey the troops. For the first time since Lincoln’s death, the emblems of mourning that had decorated the capital—flags flying half-mast, masses of funereal crepe—were withdrawn, superseded by a spirit of jubilation.
In all, two hundred thousand soldiers were slated to participate. On the first morning, with becoming modesty, Grant sauntered over to the temporary bleacher from army headquarters at Seventeenth and F Streets; he didn’t wish to arrive by horse or coach or attract any fuss. The entire city seemed adorned with flags and bunting, and every window and doorway was jammed with expectant spectators. Poor whites and blacks alike jostled on the sidewalks. At 9 a.m., on a morning of spectacular sunshine, a signal gun announced the parade’s start and martial bands began to thump and blare. With flowery garlands wreathing his horse, Meade set off at the head of the Army of the Potomac. His army had been chosen to lead the extravaganza because of its seniority and because it had been charged with defending the capital. Upon reaching the White House, Meade on horseback delivered to Johnson and Grant a brisk salute, then joined them to watch his army march past. By common consent, Andrew Johnson was at his presidential best: as each regiment passed and presented their colors, he acknowledged them with salutes and handshakes and formally tipped his hat.
Ulysses S. Grant held an honored spot in the day’s festivities. As soldiers passed him, they lustily chanted, “Grant! Grant! Goodbye Old Man!”95 To those who searched his face for special emotion, there shone only serene dignity and quiet joy, consistent with his modest demeanor at Appomattox. As one Ohio lawyer remembered, “There was no vindictiveness in his face; the fires that lighted up his eyes were not those of grim satisfaction at being the conque
ror, but rather those of a man who was pleased to know that the country was once more united and that the war, with all its horrors, had ceased.”96 Julia Grant savored the tributes tendered to her beloved husband, who had emerged from deep obscurity to lead a million-man army. “How magnificent the marching!” she wrote. “What shouts rent the air!”97
For more than six hours, close ranks of cavalry (twelve abreast) and infantry (twenty-five abreast) flowed down the broad avenue with all the pride and élan of their hard-earned victory, parading on a thick carpet of flower petals strewn in their paths by spectators. It was a brilliant pageantry of war, stripped of its bloodshed, horror, and disease. The sights that stirred onlookers most were battle flags, many shredded by bullets, that had fluttered through the smoke of war. Some people in the crowd, overcome with emotion, rushed forward to kiss and embrace the banners. For soldiers in the surging mass moving down the boulevard, the experience was enthralling. As Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain wrote: “At the rise of ground near the Treasury a backward glance takes in the mighty spectacle: the broad Avenue for more than a mile solid full, and more, from wall to wall, from door to roof, with straining forms and outwelling hearts.”98 Among many colorful figures prancing down the avenue on horseback, perhaps none was more captivating than George Armstrong Custer, whose horse suddenly bolted forward, tearing the hat from his head. “His long golden locks floating in the wind,” wrote Horace Porter, “his low-cut collar, his crimson necktie, and his buckskin breeches, presented a combination which made him look half general and half scout, and gave him a daredevil appearance which singled him out for general remark and applause.”99