by H. W. Brands
35
AT THE END OF AUGUST 1863 HENRY HALLECK WROTE A CONFIDENTIAL letter to William Sherman on a difficult question: how to reconstruct the governments of Southern states occupied by Union forces. The question had arisen to some degree already, but the capture of Vicksburg and the opening of the Mississippi made it suddenly more pressing. “Not only the length of the war, but our ultimate and complete success, will depend upon its decision,” Halleck told Sherman. Reconstruction would raise vexing issues, to be sure. “But I believe it can be successfully solved if the President will consult opinions of cool and discreet men who are capable of looking at it in all its bearings and effects. I think he is disposed to receive the advice of our generals who have been in these States, and know much more of their condition than gassy politicians in Congress.” Halleck was writing Sherman because Sherman had been forthright in expressing his views on matters of occupation. But Halleck wanted him to sound out his fellow officers as well. “I wish you would consult with Grant, McPherson, and others of cool, good judgment, and write me your views fully, as I may wish to use them with the President.” Halleck added a caution he knew Sherman would appreciate: “You had better write me unofficially, and then your letter will not be put on file, and cannot hereafter be used against you. You have been in Washington enough to know how everything a man writes or says is picked up by his enemies and misconstrued.”
Sherman’s reply was probably fuller than Halleck expected, but it was quite as candid as the general-in-chief hoped. Lincoln had already commenced reconstruction in Louisiana with an eye toward using that state as a model for the restoration of Southern participation in national political life. Sherman thought the president should slow down, especially as Louisiana’s reconstruction involved the lower Mississippi, which controlled so much of the rest of America. “The inhabitants of the country on the Monongahela, the Illinois, the Minnesota, the Yellowstone, and Osage are as directly concerned in the security of the lower Mississippi as are those who dwell on its very banks in Louisiana,” Sherman asserted. “And now that the nation has recovered its possession, this generation of men will make a fearful mistake if they again commit its charge to a people liable to misuse their position, and assert, as was recently done, that, because they dwelt on the banks of this mighty stream, they had a right to control its navigation.”
Sherman spoke with experience of the region based on his residence in Louisiana before the war, and he identified four classes of the white inhabitants of the South. First were the planters. “These are, on the whole, the ruling class. They are educated, wealthy, and easily approached.… None dare admit a friendship for us, though they say freely that they were at the outset opposed to war and disunion.” Sherman thought the planters could be managed but only by action rather than words. “Argument is exhausted, and words have lost their usual meaning. Nothing but the logic of events touches their understanding.” The recent Union victories were having an effect; a few more would clinch the case. “When these are done, then, and not until then, will the planters of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, submit.”
Sherman’s second class comprised the small farmers and the merchants and laborers of the South. “They are essentially tired of the war, and would slink back home if they could,” he said. But they would take their cues from the planters. “They will want the old political system of caucuses, legislatures, etc., to amuse them and make them believe they are real sovereigns; but in all things they will follow blindly the lead of the planters.”
The third group were the Unionists of the South. “I have little respect for this class,” Sherman said. “They allowed a clamorous set of demagogues to muzzle and drive them as a pack of curs. Afraid of shadows, they submit tamely to squads of dragoons, and permit them, without a murmur, to burn their cotton, take their horses, corn, and everything; and, when we reach them, they are full of complaints if our men take a few fence rails for fire, or corn to feed our horses.” They weren’t worth bothering about. “I account them as nothing in this great game of war.”
Sherman’s last group was “the young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will.” These were the most worrisome. “War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness, and dangerous subjects in every sense. They care not a sou for niggers, land, or anything. They hate Yankees per se, and don’t bother their brains about the past, present, or future. As long as they have good horses, plenty of forage, and an open country, they are happy.… They are the most dangerous set of men that this war has turned loose upon the world.” And they had to be dealt with, one way or the other. “These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace. They have no property or future, and therefore cannot be influenced by anything, except personal considerations.”
The nature of the Southern population caused Sherman to advocate continued military rule for the occupied South. “A civil government now, for any part of it, would be simply ridiculous,” he told Halleck. The people of the region had little respect for their own civil institutions and would have still less respect for institutions imposed by the North. Considerations of force were all that guided their actions. “The only government needed or deserved by the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi now exists in Grant’s army.” Force should be applied to the utmost degree; any lessening of the war effort, any reaching out to Southerners, would be a mistake. “I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” The South must realize that the North would stop at nothing to achieve victory—“that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained.”
Sherman’s conception of total war would inform Union strategy before long, but meanwhile Grant had his own ideas about governing the region his army occupied. He renewed his battle with the Treasury over trade. “The people in the Mississippi Valley are now nearly subjugated,” he explained to Salmon Chase. “Keep trade out for but a few months and I doubt not but that the work of subjugation will be so complete that trade can be opened freely with the states of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.” To let the traders in prematurely would risk losing what had been gained. “My experience in West Tennessee has convinced me that any trade whatever with the rebellious states is weakening to us of at least thirty per cent of our force. No matter what the restrictions thrown around trade, if any whatever is allowed it will be made the means of supplying to the enemy all they want.”
Grant lost this battle as he had lost previous rounds. Chase again proved a more formidable foe than Pemberton or Johnston. Southern cotton was too important to American diplomacy and, increasingly, to the economy of the North, which traded and processed the white stuff, for a mere theater commander to meddle with it.
A more complicated matter involved treatment of former slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation rode south in Grant’s saddlebags; with each county his army occupied he extended the writ of freedom. But the freedmen had to be fed, and Grant was reluctant to provision them from the stores that fed his soldiers. He decided that they should support themselves whenever they could. “It is earnestly recommended that negroes who can will make contracts to labor for their former owners,” Grant declared in a general order on August 1. “When such contracts cannot be made, then to hire themselves to such persons as are willing to employ their services.”
Grant’s earnest recommendation failed to overcome the reluctance of former slaves to return to the plantations where they had been bound and of former slaveholders to pay their servants and field hands. The dearth of cash in an economy erected on unpaid labor multiplied the difficulty of implementing his policy. So ten days later he authorized a supplementary order: “At all military posts in States within th
e Department, where slavery has been abolished by the Proclamation of the President of the United States, camps will be established for such freed people of color as are out of employment.” The freedmen would be fed at these camps, whose superintendents would be responsible for finding them work. “All such persons supported by the Government will be employed in every practicable way, so as to avoid, as far as possible, their becoming a burthen upon the Government.” They might be hired out to planters; they might be put to work building roads and bridges; they might be sent to gather crops from abandoned plantations. To encourage cash-short planters to join the program, Grant authorized sharecropping, with the freedmen to receive “not less than one-twentieth of the commercial part of their crops.”
When the freedmen poured into the Union camps but the planters still failed to cooperate, Grant issued another order, this one foreshadowing aspects of the “black codes” of the postwar Southern state governments. “All able-bodied negro men who are found, ten days after the publication of this order, without a certificate of the officers or persons employing them, will be regarded as unemployed and may be pressed into service,” Grant’s order declared. “Certificates given to negroes must show how, where, and by whom they are employed.”
From employing the former slaves to arming them was a natural step, but one fraught with difficulty for the Union government and danger for the freedmen. Negro soldiers from the North served in segregated regiments and more capably than many whites had thought they would. Black troops fought bravely at Port Hudson in the spring of 1863 and with special gallantry at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, that summer. Yet sufficient prejudice existed in the North toward blacks that the War Department refused to accord them anything like equality in the ranks or particularly in the officer corps.
Service in the Union army entailed hazards for the black troops beyond those experienced by white soldiers. The mere idea of weapons in the hands of black men conjured the longstanding nightmare of slave insurrection in the minds of Southern soldiers, who were disinclined to give quarter to surrendering black troops. If the black troops were Southerners—former slaves—the nightmare became a reality and the reaction was even stronger.
Lincoln understood the danger the freedmen-soldiers faced, yet he decided he couldn’t forgo the added strength the new troops could bring to the Union cause. “I believe it is a resource which, if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest,” he wrote Grant in August 1863. “It works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us.” Lincoln thought the timing auspicious. “We were not fully ripe for it until the river”—the Mississippi—“was opened. Now, I think at least a hundred thousand can and ought to be rapidly organized along its shores, relieving all the white troops to serve elsewhere.”
Grant concurred. “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support,” he wrote Lincoln. “This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.… By arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers, and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion they strengthen us.” White Southerners understood the equation. “The South rave a great deal about it and profess to be very angry,” Grant said. The Confederates were doing their best to keep slaves out of the path of his army and keep freedmen out of his ranks. “There has been great difficulty in getting able-bodied negroes to fill up the colored regiments in consequence of the rebel cavalry running off all that class to Georgia and Texas.” A twenty-mile stretch on either side of the Mississippi had been emptied of young male slaves. But Grant told Lincoln he had dispatched two expeditions in search of black recruits. “I am also moving a brigade of cavalry from Tennessee to Vicksburg which will enable me to move troops to a greater distance into the interior and will facilitate materially the recruiting service.”
The value of the black troops confirmed Grant’s conversion on the issue now twinned in Northern war aims with preservation of the Union. “I never was an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery,” he wrote Elihu Washburne. “But I try to judge fairly and honestly, and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace reestablished, I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.”
36
THE CAPTURE OF VICKSBURG GUARANTEED THAT GRANT WOULD BE given a larger command. Many in Washington wanted to bring him east to replace Meade at the head of the Army of the Potomac. But Grant resisted the idea. “My going could do no possible good,” he wrote Elihu Washburne, his continuing advocate in the nation’s capital. “They have there able officers who have been brought up with that army, and to import a commander to place over them certainly could produce no good.” He was happy and useful where he was. “I can do more with this army than it would be possible for me to do with any other without time to make the same acquaintance with others I have with this. I know that the soldiers of the Army of the Tennessee can be relied on to the fullest extent. I believe I know the exact capacity of every general in my command to command troops, and just where to place them to get from them their best services.”
Lincoln saw the wisdom in Grant’s reasoning and let him stay in the West with greater responsibilities. In October Grant traveled to Indianapolis to meet with Edwin Stanton, who explained that a new command was being created for him. The Military Division of the Mississippi would stretch from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi and comprise the Departments of the Ohio, the Cumberland and the Tennessee. Ambrose Burnside would head the Ohio department and William Rosecrans the Cumberland; Sherman would take over the Tennessee.
Grant’s first action in his new post was to fire William Rosecrans. He remembered the troubles Rosecrans had caused him during the summer of 1862, and he recounted them to Stanton, who related them to Halleck. “He considers it indispensible that Rosecrans should be relieved because he would not obey orders,” Stanton told Halleck of Grant. Halleck accepted Grant’s decision. The firing came easier since Rosecrans had just suffered a serious setback on Chickamauga Creek, near where southeastern Tennessee meets northwestern Georgia, at the hands of Confederate forces commanded by Braxton Bragg and James Longstreet. Rosecrans blundered in the battle while George Thomas, his subordinate, showed decisiveness and courage in covering the Union retreat to Chattanooga. Grant knew and respected Thomas, and he gave him Rosecrans’s job.
Thomas could have wished for better timing. The Union hold on Chattanooga was uncertain at best. “By the middle of October it began to look as if we were in a helpless and precarious position,” Charles Dana wrote of the Union position in eastern Tennessee. Dana had left Grant after the capture of Vicksburg and gone to spy for Stanton on Rosecrans. He rode to the battle of Chickamauga and joined the retreat to Chattanooga. “No reinforcements had yet reached us,” he continued. “The enemy was growing stronger each day, and, worse still, we were threatened with starvation.” Supplies for Chattanooga traveled by rail from Nashville to Bridgeport, forty miles west of Chattanooga, where the railroad crossed to the south bank of the Tennessee River. But the Confederates controlled the south bank, depriving the Union of the railroad from Bridgeport. And their batteries prevented steam transports from getting through, while sharpshooters made the road on the north bank of the river nearly impassable. As a result the Chattanooga garrison was reduced to surviving on what trickled down inferior roads through the mountains north of the river. “These were not only disturbed by the enemy, but were so bad in places that the mud was up to the horses’ bellies,” Dana wrote. “On October 15 the troops were on half-rations, and officers as they went about where the men were working on the fortifications frequently heard the cry of ‘Crackers!’ ”—a plea for hardtack, even. The situation grew only worse. “On the 17th of October five hundred teams were halted between the mountain and the river without forage for the animals, and
unable to move in any direction. The whole road was strewn with dead animals.” Dana nearly despaired for the garrison’s survival. “I never saw anything which seemed so lamentable and hopeless. Our animals were starving, the men had starvation before them, and the enemy was bound soon to make desperate efforts to dislodge us.”
Chattanooga became Grant’s responsibility at just this moment. He set off for the city to determine for himself its condition and prospects. He could have gone faster but for the effects of a second injury suffered when his horse again slipped and fell on him. For three weeks in September he was unable to move. “Am still confined to my bed, lying flat on my back,” he wrote Halleck. “My injuries are severe but still not dangerous. My recovery is simply a matter of time. Although fatiguing I will still endeavor to perform my duties, and hope soon to recover, that I may be able to take the field.”
The threat to Chattanooga left him no choice. “Hold Chattanooga at all hazards,” he telegraphed Thomas upon assuming command. “I will be there as soon as possible.” The journey wasn’t easy. “I arrived here in the night of the 23rd, after a ride on horseback of fifty miles, from Bridgeport, over the worst roads it is possible to conceive of, and through a continuous drenching rain,” he wrote Halleck. The experience made him realize that his first task was to improve the route from Nashville. “It is barely possible to supply this Army from its present base. But when winter rains set in it will be impossible.” Beyond that, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “What force the enemy have to my front I have no means of judging accurately. Deserters come in every day, but their information is limited to their own brigades or divisions at furthest. The camps of the enemy are in sight, and for the last few days there seems to have been some moving of troops. But where to I cannot tell.”