by H. W. Brands
At length he severed Atlanta’s final link to the outside world. “That night I was so restless and impatient that I could not sleep,” he remembered. “About midnight there arose toward Atlanta sounds of shells exploding, and other sound like that of musketry. I walked to the house of a farmer close by my bivouac, called him out to listen to the reverberations which came from the direction of Atlanta (twenty miles to the north of us), and inquired of him if he had resided there long. He said he had, and that these sounds were just like those of a battle.”
But the battle had already been fought. What Sherman and the farmer were hearing was Hood exploding the ordnance in Atlanta as he abandoned the city.
“Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Sherman telegraphed Washington on September 3. Lincoln proclaimed the nation’s thanks to Sherman and his men. “The marches, battles, sieges, and other military operations that have signalized this campaign must render it famous in the annals of war,” the president said.
Grant got the news via Washington. He congratulated Sherman for a mission well accomplished and said he had arranged a practical demonstration of thanks. “In honor of your great victory I have ordered a salute to be fired with shotted guns from every battery bearing upon the enemy.”
Even as he congratulated Sherman, Grant urged him to fight all the harder. “As soon as your men are properly rested and preparations can be made, it is desirable that another campaign should be commenced,” he said. “We want to keep the enemy continually pressed to the end of the war. If we give him no peace whilst the war lasts, the end cannot be distant.”
44
CAVALRY COMMANDERS WERE THE POPULAR IDOLS OF THE CIVIL War. They were typically young, invariably dashing, necessarily brilliant on horseback, temperamentally headstrong, famously brave and utterly irresistible to the smitten journalists who chronicled their exploits for rapt readers. J. E. B. Stuart captured the imagination of every Southerner and more than a few Northerners as he rode circles, literally, around the Union army, galloping across hundreds of miles of forest and farm, leaping and swimming creeks and rivers, seizing enemy soldiers, horses and supplies and sowing fright and confusion far behind Union lines. Lee called Stuart the “eyes of the army” and relied on him for intelligence regarding the disposition and movements of Union forces. A Stuart slip at Gettysburg, where he let the thrill of the ride distract him from his informational mission, cost the Confederates but didn’t alienate Lee, who saw much of his younger self in Stuart and continued to indulge the junior officer’s audacity.
Stuart’s exploits evoked envy and then emulation among the Union horse soldiers. Phil Sheridan complained to George Meade after the battle of the Wilderness that he hadn’t been allowed to do his job. He insisted—in language “highly spiced and conspicuously italicized with expletives,” Horace Porter remembered—that if he could concentrate his forces and strike directly at Stuart, he would whip the Confederate cavalryman. Meade told Grant of the exchange. “Did Sheridan say that?” Grant responded. “Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.”
Sheridan detached his cavalry from the main body of the Army of the Potomac and skirted Lee’s left en route to Richmond. Stuart raced to cut him off. The battle Sheridan sought took place at Yellow Tavern, just north of the Confederate capital, and in a sharp clash he beat Stuart, who died of wounds suffered in the engagement. Sheridan might have entered Richmond, but, lacking the heft to hold the city, he veered off to disrupt Lee’s supply lines. He destroyed many miles of railroad and telegraph, liberated a large group of Union prisoners and killed or captured hundreds of Confederates.
His achievements inspired Grant to give him greater authority in a major campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. “I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field”—infantry and artillery, as well as cavalry—“with instructions to put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death,” Grant wrote Halleck in early August 1864. “Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.”
Lincoln liked Grant’s plan. “This, I think, is exactly right,” the president said. But he warned Grant that others in Washington would resist it. “It will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day and hour and force it.”
Halleck and Stanton proved Lincoln right, asserting that Sheridan was too young—at thirty-three—for command of an entire army. But Grant insisted, and he sent Sheridan off to the Shenandoah. Sheridan’s first objective was to keep Jubal Early away from Washington; his broader mission was to deny Lee the resources of the valley, including its manpower. “Carry off the crops, animals, negroes, and all men under fifty years of age capable of bearing arms,” Grant ordered. “All male citizens under fifty can fairly be held as prisoners of war and not as citizen prisoners. If not already soldiers, they will be made so the moment the rebel army gets hold of them.” Grant particularly wanted to neutralize the partisan forces mobilized by John Mosby. “The families of most of Mosby’s men are known and can be collected,” he told Sheridan. “They should be taken and kept at Fort McHenry or some secure place as hostages for good conduct of Mosby and his men. When any of them are caught with nothing to designate what they are, hang them without trial.” In a subsequent dispatch Grant reiterated his basic message and described his desired outcome: “Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions and negroes, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”
Sheridan showed himself to be the general for the job. “I endorsed the program in all its parts,” he recalled afterward, “for the stores of meat and grain that the valley provided, and the men it furnished for Lee’s depleted regiments, were the strongest auxiliaries he possessed in the whole insurgent section. In war a territory like this is a factor of great importance, and whichever adversary controls it permanently reaps all the advantages of its prosperity.” Sheridan articulated the philosophy of modern war that was coming to summarize much of the Union approach. “I do not hold war to mean simply that lines of men shall engage each other in battle, and material interests be ignored. This is but a duel, in which one combatant seeks the other’s life; war means much more, and is far worse than this. Those who rest at home in peace and plenty see but little of the horrors attending such a duel, and even grow indifferent to them as the struggle goes on, contenting themselves with encouraging all who are able-bodied to enlist in the cause, to fill up the shattered ranks as death thins them. It is another matter, however, when deprivation and suffering are brought to their own doors. Then the case appears much graver, for the loss of property weighs heavily with the most of mankind—heavier, often, than the sacrifices made on the field of battle. Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life.”
Sheridan initially heard prayers of another sort. Grant’s failure to produce a victory over Lee or prevent the Confederates from reaching the suburbs of Washington had put the Republicans in a partisan panic. Their hopes came to rest, for the moment, on Sheridan. “Mr. Stanton kept reminding me that positive success was necessary to counteract the political dissatisfaction existing in some of the Northern states,” Sheridan recounted.
Sheridan first answered the Republican prayers at Winchester on September 19. After weeks of skirmishing he got Early to stand and fight, and the Union general put his greater numbers to good effect. He lost more than Early did, but he could afford to, and he forced the Confederate commander to withdraw. “I have just received the news of your great victory and ordered each of the armies here to fire a salute of one hundred guns in honor of it,” Grant telegraphed. He urged Sheridan to follow up at once. “If practicable push your success and make all you can of it.”
Sheridan did push and a month later delivered the decisive blow. His signal officers had broken the Confederate flagging code and they
deciphered a message sent from James Longstreet to Early: “Be ready to move as soon as my forces join you, and we will crush Sheridan.” Sheridan wasn’t sure the message wasn’t deliberate disinformation, but he didn’t feel he could ignore it, and consequently when Halleck summoned him to Washington for consultation he initially refused. But Halleck assured him Longstreet couldn’t link up with Early imminently and insisted that he come ahead. Sheridan went to Washington, consulted quickly and headed back to the valley. He arrived at Winchester on his return on the night of October 18, intending to reach his command at Cedar Creek the next day.
At six o’clock the next morning the picket officer awoke him and said he heard artillery fire from the direction of Cedar Creek. Sheridan asked if the fire was continuous or intermittent. The officer said it sounded intermittent, leading Sheridan to conclude that his own artillery was simply feeling out the enemy. He lay back in bed but couldn’t sleep. A short while later the picket officer said the firing was louder and still intermittent. Sheridan grew a bit more worried and ate a hasty breakfast. He mounted his horse and with a cavalry escort rode through the streets of Winchester. “I noticed that there were many women at the windows and doors of the houses who kept shaking their skirts at us and who were otherwise markedly insolent in their demeanor,” he recalled. “But supposing this conduct to be instigated by their well-known and perhaps natural prejudices, I ascribed to it no unusual significance.” By the time he reached the edge of town the distant artillery rumbled a constant thunder, and he concluded that a regular battle had begun. “I now felt confident that the women along the street had received intelligence from the battlefield by the ‘grape-vine telegraph’ and were in raptures over some good news while I as yet was utterly ignorant of the actual situation.”
Sheridan and his escort raced toward the battle sounds. Several miles from Cedar Creek they crested a low hill. “There burst upon our view the appalling spectacle of a panic-stricken army—hundreds of slightly wounded men, throngs of others unhurt but utterly demoralized, and baggage wagons by the score, all pressing to the rear in hopeless confusion, telling only too plainly that a disaster had occurred at the front.” Sheridan stopped some of the fugitives and demanded to know what was happening. “They assured me that the army was broken up, in full retreat, and that all was lost—all this with a manner true to that peculiar indifference that takes possession of panic-stricken men.”
Sheridan ordered part of his escort to remain behind and try to halt the headlong retreat. He took two aides and the rest of his escort and pushed toward the front. At first the going was difficult, for the rearward tide clogged the road. But as the men recognized their commander, first a few and then more stopped, reconsidered their retreat and reversed their steps, following him toward the front. Officers galloped beside the road spreading the word that Sheridan was back. More and more of the stragglers shouldered the muskets they had been trailing and turned again toward the enemy. “I already knew that even in the ordinary condition of mind enthusiasm is a potent element with soldiers,” Sheridan remarked, “but what I saw that day convinced me that if it can be excited from a state of despondency its power is almost irresistible.”
Among those happiest to see Sheridan was George Armstrong Custer, who had rocketed from West Point cadet at the start of the war to commander of a cavalry brigade and then a division. Custer caught Sheridan in a bear hug of relief before tearing off to lead his men against the enemy.
Sheridan’s appearance at the front transformed the battle. His troops repulsed the Confederate attack and launched a counterattack. The dazed rebels surrendered by the hundreds; those who avoided surrender fled the field as quickly as they could.
Grant again congratulated Sheridan on a brilliant victory, which definitively deprived the Confederacy of the Shenandoah Valley. To Edwin Stanton he boasted of his protégé: “Turning what bid fair to be a disaster into glorious triumph stamps Sheridan what I have always thought him, one of the ablest of generals.”
45
SHERMAN’S CAPTURE OF ATLANTA AND SHERIDAN’S SWEEP OF THE Shenandoah Valley brought relief and joy to Lincoln and the Republicans. Where the summer’s defeatism had favored the Democrats, the autumn’s resurgence revived the Republicans. Lincoln’s reelection suddenly seemed not merely possible but likely.
And Grant appeared poised to be his successor. The guiding genius of the Union victories, the common man become defender of democracy, Grant was the obvious heir to George Washington and Andrew Jackson in the lineage of hero-presidents. Reporters flocked to his camp to describe the great man to their readers and to solicit his views on the issues before the public. Candidates for office vied for his endorsement.
Grant disliked politics as much as ever, but more than ever he appreciated that tending to politics was the cost of defending the Union. Elihu Washburne wrote him asking for a statement that would benefit the Republicans. Washburne had sponsored Grant so well and long in Congress that Grant couldn’t refuse his request, but he probably would have answered anyway, for he believed that a Republican victory over the Democrats was vital to a republican victory over the disunionists.
He chose his words carefully. “All we want now to insure an early restoration of the Union is a determined unity of sentiment North,” Grant said. “The rebels have now in their ranks their last man. The little boys and old men are guarding prisoners, guarding railroad bridges and forming a good part of their garrisons for entrenched positions. A man lost by them cannot be replaced. They have robbed the cradle and the grave equally to get their present force. Besides what they lose in frequent skirmishes and battles they are now losing from desertions and other causes at least one regiment per day. With this drain upon them the end is visible if we will but be true to ourselves. Their only hope now is a divided North.” Grant detected the influence of the approaching election upon Lee’s strategy, which had reduced to playing for time. “The enemy are exceedingly anxious to hold out until after the Presidential election.… They hope the election of a peace candidate.” Northern peace advocates, however sincere, were gravely mistaken that acquiescence in separation could result in an end of hostilities. “The South would demand the restoration of slaves already freed. They would demand indemnity for losses sustained, and they would demand a treaty which would make the North slave hunters for the South.… It would be but the beginning of war.”
Grant’s words were widely reproduced and disseminated. Lincoln’s advisers, notably Washburne, urged the president to use various of Grant’s other letters to confirm the case for returning the administration to office. Washburne asked for Grant’s permission and received it. “I have no objection to the President using anything I have ever written to him as he sees fit,” Grant said. Yet as a tactical matter he wondered how effective such letters or any rebuttals to the president’s critics would be. “For him to attempt to answer all the charges the opposition will bring against him will be like setting a maiden to work to prove her chastity.”
Grant felt obliged to weigh in, albeit confidentially, on one of the most contentious political issues facing the administration. While no subsequent single protest against the draft had matched the New York riots of 1863, the administration worried that resistance to the draft would intensify as the election approached. Some of Lincoln’s advisers urged the president to suspend the draft until after the balloting and rely on voluntary enlistments, which for obvious reasons were much less unpopular. Grant understood that this was a question that properly belonged to civilian officials, but he also realized that it would influence his ability to carry on the fight against Lee. “I hope it is not the intention to postpone the draft to allow time to fill up with recruiting,” he wrote Edwin Stanton in September. “The men we have been getting in that way are nearly all deserters, and out of five reported north as having enlisted, we do not get more than one effective soldier.”
Another matter had philosophical/conduct implications for the future of American democracy.
The administration and the Republicans wanted to ensure that soldiers voted, as they assumed that most of those who had taken up arms in the Union cause would wish to see their efforts carried to a successful conclusion. Some in the administration desired to furlough troops to let them return home to vote, especially in states where the outcome might be close. “The first, third, and fourth regiments of Delaware Volunteers are now near Petersburg, two of them numbering about one hundred each, one numbering about four hundred,” Stanton informed Grant. “The vote of the State will depend on them. If it be possible, please give them leave of absence to go home for the election.”
Grant acquiesced in this case and in others where the men could get home and back quickly. But he preferred a kind of absentee balloting whereby special election officials would visit the camps and collect the troops’ ballots. He appreciated the objections some people might have to this mingling of the military and civilian realms. “The exercise of the right of suffrage by the officers and soldiers of armies in the field is a novel thing,” he wrote Stanton. “It has, I believe, generally been considered dangerous to constitutional liberty and subversive of military discipline.” But novel circumstances required novel solutions. “A very large proportion of legal voters of the United States are now either under arms in the field, or in hospitals, or otherwise engaged in the military service of the United States.” The traditional concern about the militarization of politics didn’t apply now. “Most of these men are not regular soldiers in the strict sense of that term; still less are they mercenaries who give their services to the Government simply for its pay, having little understanding of political questions and feeling little or no interest in them. On the contrary, they are American citizens, having still their homes and social and political ties, binding them to the States and districts from which they come and to which they expect to return.” They had demonstrated their devotion to the Constitution by defending it against its enemies. “In performing this sacred duty, they should not be deprived of a most precious privilege. They have as much right to demand that their votes shall be counted, in the choice of their rulers, as those citizens who remain at home. Nay, more, for they have sacrificed more for their country.”