by H. W. Brands
As modern as the Civil War was in certain respects, notably the application of industrial processes to organized destruction, it was almost ancient in other ways. The fighting tended to be seasonal, as fighting had been for millennia. Winter rains made roads in Tennessee and Virginia impassable; snow exposed soldiers to frostbite and hypothermia. By convention, too, as well as necessity, winter was a time for regrouping. Soldiers were furloughed to visit their families: to tend the home fires, if only briefly, and to remind themselves what they were fighting for.
Grant had less need for a furlough, with his family often at hand. Julia and the children resumed their visits to his headquarters during the months after the capture of Vicksburg. She ardently supported her husband without possessing either deep feeling or basic knowledge about the cause for which he fought. She later described discussions she had with some Confederate women in Mississippi who observed that she was accompanied by one of the Dent family’s slaves. “You are Southern, are you not?” they said. “No,” she said, “I am from the West. Missouri is my native state.” “But Missouri is a Southern state,” they rejoined. “Surely you are Southern in feeling and principle.” “No, indeed,” she answered. “I am the most loyal of the loyal.” Her interlocutors lifted the discussion to constitutional grounds, asserting that secession was constitutional and suppressing it was not. Julia at once felt herself out of her depth. “I did not know a thing about this dreadful Constitution and told them so,” she recalled. They were astonished. “Surely you have studied it?” they said. “No, I have not,” she replied. “I would not know where to look for it even if I wished to read it.” Decades later she confessed embarrassment at her ignorance, yet added: “But since then I have learned that even the chief justice is sometimes puzzled over the interpretation of this same Constitution.”
Grant continued to keep Julia and the children away from the battle front with its dangers of violent death, but he couldn’t shield them from the more insidious hazards of war—and of nineteenth-century life. Fred, who turned thirteen during the siege of Vicksburg, contracted a fever at the captured city and was sent with Julia and the other children to St. Louis, where the Dents and their doctor looked after him. The illness lingered for months and in the following winter worsened till his parents feared for his life. Grant traveled to St. Louis in January 1864 to be at the bedside. A change of doctor and medication fortunately reversed the situation, and soon Fred was his hale normal self.
William Sherman had a similar experience during this period, with sadly different results. Sherman had likewise brought his family to Vicksburg after the fall of the city, and when he arranged to return to Memphis that autumn they prepared to travel up the river with him. As the boat was about to leave, Sherman’s nine-year-old son, Willie, was missing. Sherman thought he was with his mother; she thought Willie was with his father. Soldiers were dispatched to find the boy, who arrived on the dock carrying a double-barreled shotgun—“captured property,” his proud father joked. On the voyage north the boy didn’t appear well, and his mother put him to bed. An army surgeon was called in; the doctor diagnosed typhoid. The best chance for recovery lay in reaching Memphis and the medicines that might be found there. But low water slowed the journey, and Willie sank fast. By the time they reached Memphis he was beyond help. He died a short while later.
Sherman was devastated. “Why should I ever have taken them to that dread climate?” he asked himself. “It nearly kills me when I think of it. Why was I not killed at Vicksburg, and left Willy to grow up?” Years afterward he wrote: “Of all my children he seemed the most precious. I had watched with intense interest his development, and he seemed more than any of the children to take an interest in my special profession.” One of Sherman’s battalions had informally adopted Willie, and its officers and men stood at attention at a military funeral for the boy. That evening Sherman thanked its commanding officer:
My Dear Friend:
I cannot sleep tonight till I record an expression of the deep feelings of my heart to you, and to the officers and soldiers of the battalion, for their kind behavior to my poor child. I realize that you all feel for my family the attachment of kindred, and I assure you of full reciprocity.
Consistent with a sense of duty to my profession and office, I could not leave my post, and sent for the family to come to me in that fatal climate, and in that sickly period of the year, and behold the result! The child that bore my name, and in whose future I reposed with more confidence than I did in my own plan of life, now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land, with a weeping mother, brother, and sisters clustered about him. For myself, I ask no sympathy. On, on I must go, to meet a soldier’s fate, or live to see our country rise superior to all factions.…
But Willie was, or thought he was, a sergeant in the Thirteenth. I have seen his eye brighten, his heart beat, as he beheld the battalion under arms, and asked me if they were not real soldiers. Child as he was, he had the enthusiasm, the pure love of truth, honor, and love of country which should animate all soldiers.
God only knows why he should die this young. He is dead, but will not be forgotten till those who knew him in life have followed him to that same mysterious end.
Please convey to the battalion my heart-felt thanks, and assure each and all that if in after-years they call on me or mine, and mention that they were with the Thirteenth Regulars when Willie was sergeant, they will have a key to the affections of my family that will open all it has; that we will share with them our last blanket, our last crust!
38
THE EXCEPTIONS TO THE WINTER RULE OF RESTING FROM COMBAT involved those parts of the war zone where winters were mild. Grant had tried to fight in Mississippi during the early months of 1863, without much luck; he sent Sherman to fight from a base at Vicksburg during early 1864 and hoped for better. The Chattanooga campaign, by pulling Union troops east, had permitted the Confederates to recommence sporadic operations in central Mississippi and to look to that region to provision rebel armies elsewhere. “I shall direct Sherman therefore to move out to Meridian with his spare force, the cavalry going to Corinth, and destroy the roads east and south of there so efficiently that the enemy will not attempt to rebuild them during the rebellion,” Grant told Halleck. “The destruction which Sherman will do the roads around Meridian will be of material importance to us in preventing the enemy from drawing supplies from Mississippi and in clearing that section of all large bodies of rebel troops.”
Sherman understood what was needed to accomplish his destructive goal. “The expedition is one of celerity,” he told his officers and men at the start of the Meridian campaign. “All things must tend to that. Corps commanders and staff officers will see that our movements are not encumbered by wheeled vehicles improperly loaded. Not a tent, from the commander-in-chief down, will be carried.… Wagons must be reserved for food and ammunition.… The sick will be left behind.”
Sherman’s army swept across Mississippi, driving Confederate forces ahead of it, laying waste to arsenals and storehouses and tearing up rail lines. Sherman hoped to catch Nathan Bedford Forrest and his irregular cavalry, which roamed across Mississippi and Tennessee striking against Union forces and positions. In this he failed, for as swiftly as Sherman moved, Forrest moved even faster. Yet the campaign succeeded in its larger purpose. It deprived the Confederacy of Mississippi and freed perhaps twenty thousand Union troops for missions elsewhere.
“The bill reviving the grade of Lieutenant General in the Army has become a law and my name has been sent to the Senate for the place,” Grant wrote Sherman in early March. “I now receive orders to report at Washington, in person, immediately, which indicates either a confirmation or a likelihood of confirmation.” He would leave the next morning for Washington, though not to remain. “I shall say very distinctly on my arrival there that I accept no appointment which will require me to make that city my headquarters.”
But he was writing Sherman for another reason. “
Whilst I have been eminently successful in this war, in at least gaining the confidence of the public, no one feels more than me how much of this success is due to the energy, skill, and harmonious putting forth of that energy and skill, of those who it has been my good fortune to have occupying a subordinate position under me.” This applied to all the officers in his command, but to two in particular. “What I want is to express my thanks to you and McPherson as the men to whom, above all others, I feel indebted for whatever I have had of success. How far your advice and suggestions have been of assistance, you know. How far your execution of whatever has been given you to do entitles you to the reward I am receiving you cannot know as well as I do. I feel all the gratitude this letter would express, giving it the most flattering construction.”
Sherman thanked Grant for the generous sentiments and congratulated him on the promotion. And he offered more of the candid advice he had been giving Grant since they started collaborating. “You are now Washington’s legitimate successor, and occupy a position of almost dangerous elevation,” Sherman said. “But if you can continue as heretofore to be yourself—simple, honest, and unpretending—you will enjoy through life the respect and love of friends, and the homage of millions of human beings who will award you a large share for securing to them and their descendants a government of law and stability.”
Sherman said he valued Grant’s quiet style of leadership above all. “The chief characteristic in your nature is the simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in his Saviour. This faith gave you victory at Shiloh and Vicksburg. Also, when you have completed your best preparations, you go into battle without hesitation, as at Chattanooga—no doubts, no reserve—and I tell you it was this that made us act with confidence. I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come, if alive.” Sherman conceded that he had wondered at first whether Grant possessed the knowledge of strategy commanders typically acquired from books. “But I confess your common sense seems to have supplied all this.”
Sherman urged Grant to stick with his aim of keeping clear of politics. “Do not stay in Washington,” he said. Grant should let Halleck deal with the War Department and Congress. “Come out West; take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley; let us make it dead-sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and Pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk! We have done much; still much remains to be done. Time and time’s influences are all with us; we could almost afford to sit still and let these influences work. Even in the seceded States your word now would go further than a President’s proclamation or an act of Congress.” Sherman couldn’t make this point strongly enough. “For God’s sake and for your country’s sake, come out of Washington!…Come out West. Here lies the seat of the coming empire; and from the West, when our task is done, we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond and the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.”
Grant could face enemy fire without flinching, and he could send armies into battle without faltering. But the thought of speaking before a group caused him to tremble and flush. He often flatly refused. The loyal citizens of St. Louis feted him on his visit in January 1864, throwing lavish dinners in his honor. In return they asked him to say a few words. “I cannot make a speech,” he responded. “It is something I have never done, and never intend to do.” When they insisted, he simply repeated himself: “Making speeches is not my business. I never did it in my life, and never will.”
The president was harder to deny. Grant followed orders to travel to Washington, on what he naively hoped would be a low-key journey. But word of his transit outpaced his train and at every stop large crowds gathered to cheer the man who seemed destined to save the Union. In Washington he was whisked to a White House reception, where another horde waited. All eyes followed the general as he approached the president. The two men had never met, but they of course recognized each other and shook hands without an introduction. They chatted briefly before Lincoln introduced Grant to William Seward and then Mrs. Lincoln. They walked to the East Room, where the guests abandoned decorum and rushed Grant at once. Their insistence to shake his hand drove him to climb onto a sofa lest he be buried by the onslaught.
After an exhausting hour of this, Lincoln pulled Grant aside to a drawing room. They agreed on a time the next day for the presentation of his new commission. “I shall make a very short speech to you, to which I desire for you to reply,” Lincoln said. “And that you may be properly prepared to do so, I have written what I shall say, only four sentences in all, which I will read from my manuscript as an example which you may follow and also read your reply—as you are perhaps not so much accustomed to public speaking as I am.”
Grant didn’t know that Lincoln liked speaking extemporaneously almost as little as he did, but with this modest gesture, which put the two of them on the same footing, with both allowed to read their remarks, Lincoln won Grant to his side forever. Not that Grant didn’t sweat during that night and the next morning. Lincoln gathered his cabinet, Halleck and a few others, including Grant’s son Fred, and, as promised, read his remarks. “The nation’s appreciation of what you have done and its reliance upon you for what remains to do in the existing great struggle are now presented with this commission, constituting you lieutenant general in the Army of the United States,” the president said. “With this high honor devolves upon you also a corresponding responsibility. As the country herein trusts you, so, under God, it will sustain you. I scarcely need to add that with what I here speak for the nation goes my own hearty personal concurrence.”
John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, described Grant’s response. “The general had hurriedly and almost illegibly written his speech on half of a sheet of note paper in lead pencil,” Nicolay recalled. “His embarrassment was evident and extreme; he found his own writing very difficult to read.” But his words suited the moment. “I accept the commission with gratitude for the high honor conferred,” Grant said in a low voice that gradually gained strength. “With the aid of the noble armies that have fought on so many fields for our common country, it will be my earnest endeavor not to disappoint your expectations. I feel the full weight of the responsibilities now devolving on me and know that if they are met it will be due to those armies, and above all to the favor of that Providence which leads both nations and men.”
On the completion of this ordeal, Grant turned to matters more in his line. His new commission gave him command of all the armies of the Union, and though he had intended to return to the West, he decided he needed to be closer to the seat of government. Telegraphy could accomplish only so much; regular meetings between the commanding general and the commander in chief would facilitate the war effort in ways communication from a distance never could. Besides, Lincoln seemed more sensible than most politicians. He didn’t attempt to intrude in matters beyond his understanding. He told Grant in their initial interview that he had never claimed to be a military expert and would have left matters entirely to his generals had they acted with greater energy and success. Lincoln acknowledged that political pressure in the capital was intense and he had felt compelled to respond to it. He said the military orders he had issued might have been all wrong; he was certain some of them were wrong. What he looked for in Grant was the ability and willingness to act independently. He didn’t expect Grant to share his military plans with him; he didn’t even want Grant to share his plans. If Grant would simply take responsibility and act, he would receive all the manpower and resources at the president’s disposal.
Yet Lincoln couldn’t resist offering one suggestion. He produced a map of Virginia with the positions of the Union and Confederate forces carefully marked. He indicated two of the rivers that flowed into the Potomac and said the transfer of Union troops to the strip between them would allow the landing of ammunition and provisions nearby, while the rivers would protect the Union
flanks. Grant said nothing. “I listened respectfully but did not suggest that the same streams would protect Lee’s flanks while he was shutting us up,” he recalled.
Edwin Stanton and Henry Halleck had their own reasons for thinking the president shouldn’t be apprised of military plans. As they told Grant, Lincoln was a soft touch for those who wanted to seem knowledgeable, and he sometimes couldn’t keep a secret. Grant nodded, further persuaded to spare the president the details of his strategy. He simultaneously determined not to reveal more of his plans than necessary to Stanton, who seemed susceptible to the very temptations the war secretary ascribed to Lincoln. Halleck, who became chief of staff upon Grant’s promotion, learned more but by no means all.
Lincoln, for his part, proved quite happy with Grant’s reticence. William Stoddard, assistant to John Nicolay, remembered asking Lincoln what he thought of Grant. “Well, I hardly know what to think of him,” Lincoln replied. “He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw.… He makes the least fuss of any man you ever saw. I believe two or three times he has been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here. It’s about so all around. The only evidence that you have that he’s in any place is that he makes things git! Wherever he is, things move!”
Stoddard asked what kind of general Lincoln thought Grant would be. Lincoln’s answer surprised him. “Grant is the first general I’ve had!” the president said. “He’s a general.” As Stoddard seemed puzzled, Lincoln elaborated. “I’ll tell you what I mean,” he said. “You know how it’s been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, he’d come to me with a plan of campaign and about as much as say, ‘Now, I don’t believe I can do it, but if you say so I’ll try it on’; and so put the responsibility of success or failure on me. They all wanted me to be the general. Now it isn’t so with Grant. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.”