The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  It didn’t become necessary; Johnston surrendered to Sherman a short while later. Grant got the news directly from Sherman. “I enclose herewith a copy of an agreement made this day between General Joseph E. Johnston and myself, which, if approved by the President of the United States, will produce peace from the Potomac to the Rio Grande,” Sherman wrote proudly. Grant winced as he read these words, for Sherman had no authority to negotiate anything so sweeping. Sherman evidently had anticipated Grant’s objection, for he explained: “You will observe that it is an absolute submission of the enemy to the lawful authority of the United States, and disperses his armies absolutely, and the point to which I attach most importance is that the dispersion and disbandment of these armies is done in such a manner as to prevent their breaking up into guerrilla bands.” Grant couldn’t dispute the importance of this accomplishment, which was the central issue at this stage of the conflict from a strictly military standpoint. His nightmare had been that the Confederate army would take to the hills and continue fighting a partisan campaign for months, even years. Yet he had to question, in light of his own experience in the Mississippi Valley, Sherman’s subsequent observation: “I know that all the men of substance in the South sincerely want peace.” And he wondered at Sherman’s conclusion: “I have no doubt that they will in the future be perfectly subordinate to the laws of the United States.”

  Then he read the agreement itself, beginning with the most immediately operative clause: “The Confederate armies now in existence to be disbanded and conducted to their several State capitals, there to deposit their arms and public property in the State arsenal, and each officer and man to execute and file an agreement to cease from acts of war and to abide by the action of both State and Federal authority.” Grant shook his head. Sherman appeared to be allowing the Confederates to surrender to themselves. And a promise to abide by state and federal authority begged the question of what they would do when state authority clashed with federal—which had been the central issue of the whole war.

  There was more, including “the recognition by the Executive of the United States of the several State governments on their officers and legislatures taking the oaths prescribed by the Constitution of the United States.” Aside from the fact that the Constitution prescribed no oaths for state officials, Grant saw this clause as the primary deal breaker. Where did Sherman think he got the authority to commit the president to recognize the governments of the Confederate states? By Sherman’s interpretation, there was nothing to reconstruct; the old governments would remain in power.

  And yet there was more: “a general amnesty, so far as the Executive of the United States can command, on condition of the disbandment of the Confederate armies, the distribution of the arms, and the resumption of peaceful pursuits by the officers and men hitherto composing said armies.” This provision of the surrender agreement and others would take effect upon approval by the responsible authorities on both sides.

  Grant appreciated that Sherman’s outline for reconstruction followed the spirit of Lincoln’s plan for restoring the Southern states to their places in the Union. Leniency had informed Lincoln’s policy toward Louisiana and other states brought under federal control during the war. And leniency had inspired his second inaugural address, in which he summoned the spirit of charity to bind the nation’s wounds.

  But Grant also appreciated that Lincoln was dead, slain by a Southerner who knew nothing of charity and had no desire to bind the nation’s wounds. He appreciated that the death killed the chance of an easy reconstruction. Those in the North who wanted vengeance would receive it, or at least they would fight for it. Sherman’s agreement said nothing about slavery; at the very least the North would insist—rightly, Grant thought—that the South formally abjure the institution that had brought the conflict on.

  He shook his head once more as he reread the letter and the agreement. He sympathized with Sherman in wanting to end the bloodletting. He understood Sherman’s desire to put military considerations above politics. He himself had desired the same thing throughout war. But the war was over, to all intents and purposes. And politics again prevailed.

  He forwarded Sherman’s letter and agreement to Edwin Stanton. “They are of such importance that I think immediate action should be taken on them, and that it should be done by the President, in council with his whole Cabinet,” Grant said.

  Johnson and the cabinet convened that day and emphatically rejected Sherman’s agreement. Grant was summoned to the White House and directed to travel to North Carolina to take personal charge of Sherman’s army.

  Grant didn’t tell Sherman he was coming. Security suggested not wiring ahead lest assassins intercept the telegram and waylay the Confederacy’s principal antagonist. Grant had another reason for discretion: he didn’t wish to embarrass Sherman. He reached Sherman’s camp at dawn; the two men repaired to Sherman’s headquarters for a confidential discussion. Grant told him the president had rejected his surrender agreement with Johnston. Sherman was to resume hostilities pending Johnston’s surrender on the same terms Grant had offered Lee—that is, surrender of Johnston’s army, with nothing said about broader political issues.

  The hostilities did not resume, however. Johnston accepted the new terms on April 26. Grant left for Washington the next day without, Sherman believed, the country’s knowing that he had been in Carolina. “I thought the matter was surely at an end,” Sherman recalled afterward.

  He discovered his mistake upon the arrival of a copy of the New York Times, dated April 24. The paper printed a statement by Stanton that reflected humiliatingly on Sherman. It recounted the administration’s overwhelmingly negative response to Sherman’s initial peace agreement with Johnston. It explained that Grant had been sent to North Carolina to take charge of Sherman’s army. And it reproduced, with the specificity of a criminal indictment, Stanton’s reasons why Sherman’s agreement was insubordinate, wrongheaded and illegitimate: “It was an exercise of authority not vested in General Sherman.… It was a practical acknowledgment of the rebel government.… It undertook to reestablish the rebel State governments, that had been overthrown at the sacrifice of many thousand loyal lives and an immense treasure, and placed arms and munitions of war in the hands of the rebels at their respective capitals, which might be used as soon as the armies of the United States were disbanded, and used to conquer and subdue the loyal States.… By the restoration of the rebel authority in their respective States, they would be enabled to reestablish slavery.” Adding personal insult to professional injury, Stanton asserted that Sherman was all but conspiring with Jefferson Davis in the Confederate president’s efforts to escape justice. Stanton reproduced a statement from a source in Richmond regarding Davis, his fellow Confederate officials and the gold they were reported to have spirited out of the city: “They hope, it is said, to make terms with General Sherman or some other Southern commander, by which they will be permitted, with their effects, including this gold plunder, to go to Mexico or Europe. Johnston’s negotiations look to this end.”

  Sherman was outraged at this public dressing-down. He might have acknowledged hoping for too much by way of a deal with Johnston, but as he pointed out, the agreement explicitly said it was not final until approved by the authorities in Washington. He would have accepted a quiet rejection on the order of what Grant delivered when he traveled south. But this public slap, he inferred, was raw politics, an opening round in the fight for control of reconstruction after Lincoln. And it was made at his expense.

  He wrote to Grant complaining of the insult. “I have never in my life questioned or disobeyed an order,” he said, “though many and many a time have I risked my life, health, and reputation in obeying orders, or even hints, to execute plans and purposes not to my liking.” He reminded Grant that he had not been privy to the opinions of the politicians at Washington and therefore could not judge what they would find unacceptable. “For four years I have been in camp dealing with soldiers, and I can assure yo
u that the conclusion at which the cabinet arrived, with such singular unanimity, differs from mine. I conferred freely with the best officers in this army as to the points involved in this controversy, and strange to say they were singularly unanimous in the other conclusion, and they will learn with pain and amazement that I am deemed insubordinate and wanting in common sense; that I, who in the complications of last year, worked day and night, summer and winter, for the cause and the Administration, and who have brought an army of 70,000 men in magnificent condition across a country deemed impassable, and placed it just where it was wanted almost on the day appointed, have brought discredit on our Government.” This alone, Sherman said, should have entitled him to better consideration than he had received.

  But he was happy that he would not have to endure such abuse longer, on the present subject at least. “I envy not the task of reconstruction, and am delighted that the Secretary has relieved me of it.” He assumed from Grant’s refusal to replace him that he still enjoyed the confidence of the general-in-chief. “I will therefore go on and execute your orders to their conclusion, and when done will with intense satisfaction leave to the civil authorities the execution of the task of which they seem to me so jealous.”

  51

  HAD LINCOLN LIVED, THE WAR’S END WOULD HAVE FORCED HIM TO answer questions he had avoided amid the fighting. He would have been required to say whether emancipation implied citizenship for the freedmen; whether citizenship entailed suffrage; how far political equality, if it came to that, demanded social equality; and who would enforce the rights of African Americans against the resistance the assertion of such rights must inevitably evoke. In short, he would have been required to specify what reconstruction meant.

  The task fell instead to Andrew Johnson. Little was known of the new president outside his small circle, and what was known wasn’t promising. He had been added to Lincoln’s ticket in 1864 entirely to facilitate the president’s reelection; no one envisioned Johnson’s becoming president himself. The Tennessee Democrat fairly represented neither the ruling party nor the war’s winning section. All he brought to his new job were his personality and individual gifts, which didn’t give him a great deal to work with. Oliver Temple knew Johnson from the selective world of Tennessee Unionist politics. “Johnson was a man of the coolest and most unquestioned courage,” Temple granted. “When he was assailed on account of his loyalty”—to the Union—“by a mob of ruffians in Lynchburg, Virginia, on his way from Washington, in the spring of 1861, and one of them attempted to pull his nose, he drew his revolver and kept the whole pack at bay.” Yet Johnson was also a man of deep character flaws. “Johnson’s life was full of stormy passions,” Temple said. “It had no rest, and but little sunshine in it. He was strong and self-willed; had excessive confidence in his own power; was obstinate and dogmatic, and had little respect for the opinion of others.” Everything Johnson gained in life he earned by his own effort, as he had been born poor and received no formal education. In part as a result, he despised the rich and the wellborn even as he envied them. “He denounced aristocrats, yet imitated them, and if not one at heart himself, he had all their worst ways,” Temple said. Johnson seemed to have but one goal in life, one interest. “Never was a human breast fired by a more restless, inextinguishable love of power. His ambition was boundless. To it he sacrificed everything—society, pleasure, and ease.”

  Johnson’s initial pronouncements as president were unexceptional and broadly in keeping with Lincoln’s sentiments. He proclaimed amnesty and pardon for all participants in the rebellion who swore allegiance to the laws of the United States, specifically including the laws emancipating slaves. Various persons were excluded from this amnesty offer—the most visible of the rebels and the wealthiest—but such persons might apply individually to the president for a case-by-case review. At the same time, Johnson announced a protocol for reintegrating North Carolina into the Union, a protocol that was generally interpreted as providing a model for the reintegration of other Southern states. He appointed a provisional governor, who, with the assistance of the military commander of the district that included North Carolina, would supervise a convention to amend the state’s constitution to make it conform with federal law. The voters for delegates to the convention would be those citizens who had qualified to vote under the state’s laws in 1860 and who had taken the loyalty oath.

  Grant watched, at first from a distance. Some admirers in Philadelphia, hoping to entice the Union hero to take up residence in the City of Brotherly Love, gave him a fine house. He moved the family in and attempted to make Philadelphia his base of operations. But a brief experiment convinced him he couldn’t afford the luxury of distance from Washington, and he accepted Henry Halleck’s offer of the use of a house in Georgetown until he and Julia could find one of their own in the capital.

  Meanwhile he did what he could to facilitate the reknitting of North and South. He argued for the broadest possible amnesty for Confederate officers and men. “Although it would meet with opposition in the North to allow Lee the benefit of amnesty, I think it would have the best possible effect towards restoring good feeling and peace in the South to have him come in,” he wrote Halleck. “All the people except a few political leaders South will accept whatever he does as right and will be guided to a great extent by his example.” Grant pressed to allow Confederate veterans to enlist in the Union army and urged that Confederate prisoners of war be released and transported to their home states in order to get that season’s crops planted. “By going now they may still raise something for their subsistence for the coming year and prevent suffering next winter.” And he worked to keep the army out of the politics of reconstruction. “Until a uniform policy is adopted for reestablishing civil government in the rebellious states, the military authorities can do nothing but keep the peace,” he said.

  In the fourth week of May he reviewed the victorious Union armies as they marched through Washington. “The sight was varied and grand,” he recalled. “Nearly all day for two successive days, from the Capitol to the Treasury Building, could be seen a mass of orderly soldiers marching in columns of companies. The National flag was flying from almost every house and store; the windows were filled with spectators; the doorsteps and sidewalks were crowded with colored people and poor whites who did not succeed in securing better quarters from which to get a view of the grand armies.” Meade’s Army of the Potomac filled the first day: well equipped, carefully disciplined—the picture of martial order and strength. Sherman’s westerners took up the second day. “Sherman’s army was not so well dressed as the Army of the Potomac,” Grant observed. “But their marching could not be excelled; they gave the appearance of men who had been thoroughly drilled to endure hardships, either by long and continuous marches or through exposure to any climate, without the ordinary shelter of a camp.” Sherman’s traverse of Washington recapitulated aspects of his march across the South. “In the rear of a company there would be a captured horse or mule loaded with small cooking utensils, captured chickens, and other food picked up for the use of the men. Negro families who had followed the army would sometimes come along in the rear of a company, with three or four children packed upon a single mule, and the mother leading it.”

  By the evidence of the applause he received, Sherman had lost nothing of popular support as a result of Stanton’s rebuke. And the acclaim confirmed his ire at the secretary of war. “To say that I was merely angry…,” Sherman recalled, “would hardly express the state of my feelings. I was outraged beyond measure.” Stanton tried to shake Sherman’s hand, but Sherman glaringly refused. “He offered me his hand, but I declined it publicly, and the fact was universally noticed,” he said with satisfaction.

  Grant tried to stay out of the quarrel. He respected and supported Sherman, and by his quiet but firm refusal to carry out Stanton’s order to relieve Sherman he had saved his friend’s job. But he had to work with Stanton, who had no desire to step aside, unless to step up to the pr
esidency, and who was simply a difficult person. “Mr. Stanton never questioned his own authority to command,” Grant wrote later. “He cared nothing for the feeling of others. In fact it seemed to be pleasanter to him to disappoint than to gratify. He felt no hesitation in assuming the functions of the executive, or in acting without advising him.” In public Grant defended Stanton. A committee of Congress charged with investigating Stanton’s oversight of the War Department called Grant to testify. “In what manner has Mr. Stanton, Secretary of War, performed his duties?” he was asked. “Admirably,” he replied. “There has been no complaint.” Grant’s questioners inquired whether there had been any misunderstandings between Grant and Stanton. “Never expressed to me,” Grant said.

  The Stanton-Sherman contretemps receded as other matters pressed forward. The surrender of Lee and Joe Johnston hadn’t quite terminated the war; Grant had to deal with the remnant Confederate armies. One headed by Richard Taylor in Mississippi surrendered in early May, ending resistance east of the Mississippi. On May 17 Grant ordered Phil Sheridan to Texas to conclude operations there.

  He had a second reason for sending Sheridan to Texas. During the war the French government under Napoleon III had concocted a scheme for reviving French influence in the Americas. The centerpiece of the scheme was an underemployed Austrian prince named Maximilian, whom Napoleon’s troops installed in Mexico City to the cheers of Mexican conservatives and the dismay of Mexican republicans. The American government protested this violation of the Monroe Doctrine’s principle of noninterference by Europe in the affairs of the Americas, but under the duress of the war Lincoln could do little more. Grant likewise resented the French influence across the Rio Grande and upon the war’s end determined that there was something that could be done. Sending Sheridan south was a first step. “The Rio Grande should be strongly held whether the forces in Texas surrender or not,” he told Sheridan.