by H. W. Brands
John Rawlins heard the part of the story about Grant’s taking a drink. “The General was at the front today, and I learn from one of his staff he deviated from the only path he should ever travel by taking a glass of liquor,” Rawlins wrote his wife. “It is the first time I have failed to accompany him to Petersburg, and it was with misgivings I did so. Nothing but indisposition induced me to remain behind. I shall hereafter, under no circumstances, fail to accompany him.”
Ben Butler denied Smith’s whole tale, which didn’t become public until after Grant’s death. Smith was simply trying to explain away his own firing, Butler said. “There never was any such happening as Smith relates,” Butler wrote in his memoir. “I never saw General Grant drink a glass of spirituous liquor in my life.” The story was ludicrous on its face, Butler asserted, especially the part about Grant getting liquor surreptitiously. “Surreptitiously? The lieutenant general could have commanded all the whiskey of the United States to his army if he thought proper, and it would have come. If he had let it be known that he would use it, his admiring friends all over the North and West would have sent him the choicest brands in the most boundless profusion.”
Whatever the basis of Smith’s story, it did nothing to boost confidence in Grant at a time when the political classes in Washington required reassuring. The impatience at the slow pace of the war transmuted into fear when the fighting accelerated dramatically and came shockingly close to home. Since the spring Grant and Lee had fought for control of the Shenandoah Valley. Grant got the upper hand first, as David Hunter rolled south seizing everything he could put to use and destroying much of the remainder. Hunter’s success, which Grant valued for the damage it did to Lee’s supply base, served the additional purpose of compelling the Confederate general to dispatch forces from his own army to stop Hunter. Jubal Early met Hunter at Lynchburg and drove him back north. Early reclaimed the valley for the Confederacy before crossing the Potomac into Maryland and heading for Washington.
Grant was slow to respond. He knew Early lacked the troops to do serious damage to the Union capital, and he remained as convinced as ever that Lee’s army was the objective that truly mattered. Yet political Washington didn’t uniformly share his priorities and his equanimity, and as Early approached the city many there took fright. “I have sometimes thought that Lee might make a sudden dash in the direction of Washington or above, and inflict great injury before our troops could interfere or Grant move a column to protect the city,” Gideon Welles recorded in his diary on July 6. Two days later Welles asserted, “Profound ignorance reigns at the War Department concerning the Rebel raid in the Shenandoah Valley.… They know absolutely nothing of it—its numbers, where it is, its destination.… I think we are in no way prepared for it, and a fierce onset could not well be resisted.” In another three days the enemy was at the capital’s edge. “The Rebels are upon us,” Welles cried.
Lincoln alarmed less easily than Welles, and he did his best to appear calm. “Let us be vigilant but keep cool,” he told a resident of Baltimore who feared for his own city. “I hope neither Baltimore or Washington will be sacked.” Yet the president’s nervousness showed in a telegram to Grant. “General Halleck says we have absolutely no force here fit to go to the field,” he said. He wanted Grant to march his army to Washington at once. “What I think is that you should provide to retain your hold where you are, certainly, and bring the rest with you personally and make a vigorous effort to destroy the enemy’s force in this vicinity.”
Grant believed the situation was under control or soon would be. He had already dispatched reinforcements, which should be arriving shortly. “I have sent from here a whole corps commanded by an excellent officer, besides over 3000 troops,” he assured the president. And he respectfully declined the suggestion that he should head the capital’s defenses himself. “It would have a bad effect for me to leave here.”
Grant’s measures saved the situation, although not without additional shudders in Washington. Lew Wallace, the Union commander first on the scene, suffered significant casualties but bought time for the forces behind him to dig in. Early approached to within sight of the Capitol, where he exchanged fire with Union troops holding Fort Stevens. Lincoln rode out to watch; his tall figure on the parapets became a target for Confederate sharpshooters. Gideon Welles went to the front too. “Could see the line of pickets of both armies,” the navy secretary recorded. “There was continual firing.… Two houses in the vicinity were in flames, set on fire by our own people because they obstructed the range of our guns and gave shelter to Rebel sharpshooters.” Welles still wasn’t sure the defenses would hold, and he blamed Grant for leaving the city vulnerable. “The forts around Washington have been vacated and the troops sent to General Grant, who was promised reinforcements to take Richmond. But he has been in its vicinity more than a month, resting, apparently, after his bloody march, but has effected nothing since arrival on the James, nor displayed any strategy.” Welles expressed the nakedness many residents of Washington felt. “We are without force for its defense.”
In fact the defense was already in place. Early realized he lacked the troops to occupy the capital and, after frightening the residents a bit more, backed off. “We haven’t taken Washington, but we’ve scared Abe Lincoln like hell,” Early remarked. Gideon Welles finally exhaled as the danger passed, but he gave no credit to the men who were supposed to safeguard the government. “The Rebels have lost a remarkable opportunity,” he said. “They might easily have captured Washington. Stanton, Halleck, and Grant are asleep or dumb.”
The fright of July segued into the angst of August. Lincoln felt and exhibited it. For weeks the cost of the war and the lack of progress had burdened his soul. Isaac Arnold, an Illinois Republican, saw the president conclude an encounter with a line of ambulances carrying the wounded to hospitals. “The sun was just sinking behind the desolate and deserted hills of Virginia,” Arnold recalled. “The flags from the forts, hospitals, and camps drooped sadly.… The haze of evening was gathering over the landscape, and when I met the President his attitude and expression spoke the deepest sadness. He paused as we met, and pointing his hand towards the line of wounded men, he said, ‘Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering, this loss of life is dreadful.’ ” Arnold responded that victory would eventually come. “Yes, victory will come,” Lincoln replied. “But it comes slowly.”
Its slowness drove increasing numbers of Americans to look away from Lincoln for leadership. “The people are wild for peace,” Thurlow Weed observed in August. Weed, a charter member of New York’s Republican party and a figure essential to Lincoln’s 1860 election, had visited Lincoln to convey the opinion that the president’s reelection was “an impossibility.” Weed told William Seward that defeat for the president and for the party was unavoidable. “Nobody here doubts it, nor do I see anybody from other states who authorizes the slightest hope of success.”
Lincoln understood the odds against him. He asked New York’s Schuyler Hamilton to stump for the administration, but Hamilton replied, “No, sir. As things stand at present I don’t know what in the name of God I could say, as an honest man, that would help you. Unless you clean these men away who surround you and do something with your army, you will be beaten overwhelmingly.”
Lincoln responded that Hamilton’s words were harsh but not unwarranted. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten,” he said. “But I do, and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.”
Unable to foresee the requisite change, Lincoln prepared for defeat. In late August he drafted a memorandum unlike anything composed by a president before him or after. “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be reelected,” he wrote. “Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”
Lincoln folded and sealed this memo and took it to a meeting of his cabinet. He had the secretaries sign the back, without telling them what it said. He later explained that he intended, in the event of McClellan’s election, to approach the general personally. “I would say, ‘General, the election has demonstrated that you are stronger, have more influence with the American people than I. Now let us together, you with your influence and I with all the executive power of the Government, try to save the country. You raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assisting and finishing the war.’ ”
William Seward answered, on hearing the later explanation, that McClellan would have responded as he always did: by saying yes but doing nothing.
“At least I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience,” Lincoln replied.
43
“IT IS ENOUGH TO MAKE THE WHOLE WORLD START AT THE AWFUL amount of death and destruction that now stalks abroad,” William Sherman had written his wife, Ellen, in June 1864. “Daily for the last two months has the work progressed and I see no signs of a remission till one or both or all the armies are destroyed.… I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash—and it may be well that we become so hardened.”
Sherman was speaking of Grant’s grim work in Virginia but also of his own in Georgia. At the same time that Grant crossed the Rapidan toward Richmond, Sherman moved south from Chattanooga toward Atlanta. He traveled light, leaving behind inessentials and hoping to live off the land to the extent he could. His staff had acquired the 1860 federal census tables and data derived by Georgia’s prewar tax office, which showed where the best farms and most prosperous villages were located. He didn’t abandon the railroad, relying on the line from Chattanooga for ammunition and other vitals that didn’t spring from the ground, but his men ranged far out from the road in their search for food and forage.
“Dalton will be our first point, Kingston next, then Allatoona and then Atlanta,” Sherman explained to Ellen. “Thomas is my centre and has about 45,000 men; McPherson my right, 25,000; and Schofield my left, 15,000—in all 85,000.” His destination was Atlanta, but his objective was Joe Johnston’s army. If Johnston would stand, they would settle the issue at once; if Johnston retreated, Sherman would follow.
Johnston chose to do a bit of both. With fewer men than Sherman, he couldn’t afford to fight in the open, so he prepared defensive positions and invited attack. Sherman accepted, and a series of small battles ensued, in each of which Johnston fought awhile and then fell back. Engagements at Resaca, Dallas and Kennesaw Mountain cost Sherman two to three thousand casualties each but left the overall balance between his and Johnston’s forces unchanged.
Sherman wished he could push the campaign harder but couldn’t see how to do so. “I cannot leave the railroad to swing on Johnston’s flank or rear without giving him the railroad, which I cannot do without having a good supply on hand,” he told Ellen. Nor could he be careless with his men. “At this distance from home we cannot afford the losses of such terrible assaults as Grant has made.” The landscape, besides, favored the defenders. “All of Georgia, except the cleared bottoms, is densely wooded, with few roads. And at any point an enterprising enemy can, in a few hours with axes and spades, make across our path formidable works, whilst his sharpshooters, spies, and scouts, in the guise of peaceable farmers, can hang around us and kill our wagon-men, messengers, and couriers. It is a big Indian war.” Yet Sherman was satisfied so far. “I have won four strong positions, advanced a hundred miles, and am in possession of a large wheat-growing region and all the iron mines and works of Georgia.”
In early July, Johnston retreated to the Chattahoochee, the last stream before Atlanta. Sherman readied what he hoped would be the final blow. “I propose to study the crossings of the Chattahoochee, and when all is ready to move quick,” he wrote Halleck, for Grant’s eyes. “As a beginning I keep the wagons and troops well back from the river and display to the enemy only the picket-line, with a few batteries along at random.” Timing would depend on the weather. “The waters are turbid and swollen by the late rains, but if the present hot weather lasts the water will run down very fast.” Sherman’s engineers had pontoons ready for bridges. He expected resistance at the river and even more in Atlanta if he let Johnston fight from behind his fortifications. This he intended not to do. “Instead of attacking Atlanta direct, or any of its forts, I propose to make a circuit, destroying all its railroads.” Johnston would have to come out and fight or surrender the isolated city.
Johnston did neither. He fell back from the Chattahoochee, burning his bridges as he went. But before he took his next step, he was fired. Jefferson Davis concluded that endless retreat would never win the war, and he replaced Johnston with John Bell Hood. Sherman, surprised, sought information about the new man. “I immediately inquired of General Schofield, who was his classmate at West Point, about Hood, as to his general character, etc., and learned that he was bold even to rashness, and courageous in the extreme.”
Sherman took this as a good sign, for it might lead to the battle that would decide the war in the western theater. In the event, Hood gave him all he wanted. He came out of the city and struck Sherman’s lines furiously. The attack caught Sherman off guard and the Confederates got the better of the early fighting. But Sherman’s advantage in numbers and experience eventually told and Hood had to withdraw, leaving a large part of his army on the field or in Union hands.
One Union casualty cost Sherman dearly. James McPherson had become to Sherman what Sherman was to Grant: a close friend and invaluable lieutenant. Sherman remembered the last time he saw McPherson alive. Sudden artillery fire from an unexpected direction had caused the two officers to exchange puzzled looks. “McPherson was then in his prime (about thirty-four years old), over six feet high, and a very handsome man in every way, was universally liked, and had many noble qualities,” Sherman wrote. “He had on his boots outside his pantaloons, gauntlets on his hands, had on his major-general’s uniform, and wore a sword-belt but no sword. He hastily gathered his papers (save one, which I now possess) into a pocket-book, put it in his breast-pocket, and jumped on his horse, saying he would hurry down his line and send me back word what these sounds meant.”
A short while later one of McPherson’s aides galloped breathlessly back, to report his superior either killed or taken prisoner. They had been riding behind the Union lines when McPherson entered a wood and got separated from the aide. His horse emerged shortly, wounded and without its rider.
“Poor Mac, he was killed dead instantly,” Sherman told Ellen after the details became known. McPherson’s death revealed the essential caprice of war. “He was not out of his place or exposing himself more than I and every General does daily. He was to the rear of his line, riding by a road he had passed twice that morning. The thing was an accident that resulted from the blind character of the country we are in. Dense woods fill all the ravines and hollows, and what little cleared ground there is is on the ridge levels, or the alluvion of creek bottoms. The hills are all chestnut ridges with quartz and granite boulders and gravel. You can’t find a hundred acres of level, clear ground between here and Chattanooga, and not a day passes but what every general officer may be shot as McPherson was.” Sherman understood his own reputation in the South, and he recognized that for every bullet with McPherson’s name on it there were several with his. “I know the country swarms with thousands who would shoot me and thank their God they had slain a monster.”
There was nothing to do except press on. “We have Atlanta close aboard, as the sailors say,” he told Ellen. “But it is a hard nut to handle. These fellows fight like devils and Indians combined, and it calls for all my cunning and strength. Instead of attacking the forts, which are really unassailable, I must gradually destroy the roads which make Atlanta a place worth having. This I have partially done, two out
of three are broken and we are now maneuvering for the third.”
The campaign became a siege. “Atlanta is on high ground and the woods extend up to the forts which look strong and circle the whole town,” Sherman observed during the first week in August. “Most of the people are gone—it is now simply a big fort.” The static nature of the contest made him more irritable than usual. He fretted that some of his soldiers would leave at the expiration of their terms of service and not be replaced. “I have no faith in the people of the North. They ever lose their interest when they should act.” The regular army was too good for the nation it defended. “I sometimes think our people do not deserve to succeed in war; they are so apathetic.” He refought old battles, telling his father-in-law how he had resolved a conflict in Nashville regarding civilian-military priorities. Merchants were crying for space on the trains that served the city, but he forbade anything that didn’t advance the war effort. “It was the Gordian knot, and I cut it. People may starve, and go without, but an army cannot and do its work. A howl was raised, but the President and Secretary of War backed me, and now all recognize the wisdom and humanity of the thing.”