Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Widespread whispers attributed the disaster to Grant’s old nemesis: alcohol. He was drunk in Savannah when the Confederate fury struck his army, these rumors maintained. The arrival of Buell, many held just as incorrectly, had alone saved Grant from annihilation; in truth, just four frazzled Confederate brigades had made the final attack, which they soon abandoned at seeing Grant’s cannons, while only twelve Buell companies crossed the river in time to be of any help. But Buell took credit nevertheless. His report highlighted the chaos at Pittsburg Landing and indicated, without quite saying so, that the arrival of Colonel Jacob Ammen’s brigade of Bull Nelson’s division had been vital in fighting off the first day’s final Confederate attack.5

  Grant’s wily second in command, ex-congressman turned general John McClernand, was similarly quick with the verbal dagger. He ignored the chain of command and wrote a report directly to his long-term Illinois acquaintance and sometime-associate, President Abraham Lincoln. This letter overstated McClernand’s role in the battle and focused blame on Grant for the inordinate slaughter and failure to mount more than token pursuit of the Confederates.6

  Lincoln asked Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to investigate whether any misdeeds by Grant had contributed to the Shiloh carnage. Stanton telegraphed Halleck, who typically sidestepped. He did not name Grant, saying only that the totals of killed and wounded reflected the leadership of officers “utterly unfit for their places” and reserving opinion as to misconduct by specific individuals until he had received all battle reports. He added that great victories are rarely won without many casualties. But to Major General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, whom he had tried throughout the Henry-Donelson campaign to get promoted into Grant’s job, Halleck trashed Grant. The high-toned Hitchcock, one of the prides of West Point, responded in kind, denouncing Grant as “little more than a common gambler and drunkard” deserving of censure and oblivion.7

  Publicly, though, Halleck stayed mum. Perhaps he felt guilty for delaying and minding other business in St. Louis while assuring Grant throughout late March and early April that he was on his way to Pittsburg Landing to take field command of the Grant and Buell armies—a measure that, he doubtless felt, would have avoided the Shiloh horror. The professorial Halleck preferred houses and armchairs to tents and camp stools, but he finally hurried to Shiloh, leaving St. Louis on April 9 and arriving two days later. He found a vast graveyard, with monsoon-scale rains washing thin layers of mud off hundreds of half-buried corpses.8

  Halleck then began doing what he did best: paperwork. He issued orders tightening up guard duty, instituting drills, bettering latrine facilities, and establishing rigorous bureaucratic standards throughout the chain of command. Each departmental communication “should relate to one matter only, and be properly folded and indorsed,” he decreed. Grant got special attention. “Your army is not now in condition to resist an attack,” Halleck wrote his subordinate with marked belatedness on April 14. “It must be made so without delay.”9

  Grant apparently was glad Halleck had taken over. Believing his chief had interceded with Lincoln to overturn his post-Donelson removal, he claimed to welcome the prospect of Halleck’s arrival, terming him in a letter to Julia “one of the greatest men of the age.” On April 25, he wrote Julia that he was happy to surrender the top command to Halleck. He hoped the newspapers would leave him alone henceforth. He said he avoided reading them and “consequently save myself much uncomfortable feeling.”10

  Almost immediately, though, Halleck cast Grant into limbo. Once again, as after Fort Donelson, he took away Grant’s command of his army. This time, though, Halleck named his unloved subordinate, now the second-ranking officer in the department, his second in command. It was a position with few duties. Halleck possibly did this to avoid again upsetting Lincoln, which his previous removal of Grant had appeared to do. He may also have realized, if only half consciously, that never having been in combat himself, he needed Grant’s experience and battlefield aplomb.

  Whatever his reason, it was just the right move. Soon after Shiloh, Pennsylvania Republican Alexander K. McClure went to the president to argue that Grant was an inept sot who embarrassed the war effort and should be dismissed. According to the sometimes creative memory of McClure, Lincoln replied, “I can’t spare this man: he fights.” But the president’s wish to keep Grant in a decision-making role was not so firm. When Halleck kicked him upstairs, the White House did not protest. Lincoln’s behavior was classically political, keeping Grant viable for the future while responding to public outrage over Shiloh’s rivers of blood.11

  Halleck handed the Army of the Tennessee to a much more highly respected junior of Grant’s. Recently promoted Major General George H. Thomas, a career soldier who had spent his final year at West Point as Grant was in his first, had been victor in the obscure but important battle back in January at Logan’s Crossroads, or Mill Springs, Kentucky. Grant’s erstwhile army, now Thomas’s, was one of three corps gathered into a 110,000-man horde under Halleck’s direct supervision. Its task would be to capture Corinth.12

  III

  MISSISSIPPI AND KENTUCKY: TIDAL EBBS AND FLOWS

  13

  MID-APRIL-LATE JUNE 1862—GRANT FROM CORINTH TO MEMPHIS

  “I Am in the Way”

  Shiloh was the most decisive, but by no means the only, Union gain in the spring of 1862. Federal forces were on the march—or, in the case of the navy, afloat—seemingly everywhere.

  In Virginia, Abraham Lincoln finally had his endlessly cautious and procrastinating general in chief, George McClellan, moving. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac had forced Confederate evacuation of Yorktown on the peninsula between the York and James Rivers sixty miles southeast of Richmond; that army now inched warily toward the Confederate capital. Union troops occupied the naval ports of Norfolk and Portsmouth in Virginia as well as Beaufort in North Carolina, Port Royal in South Carolina, and, on the Gulf of Mexico, crucial New Orleans. The president declared all these ports again open for commerce—Union commerce. And notes of slavery’s death dirge were sounding. Congress voted to abolish it in the District of Columbia, and, in an act Lincoln the politician temporarily disapproved of, a Union general at Hilton Head, South Carolina, freed slaves there as well as in captured areas in Georgia and Florida.

  But the Federals could have done more, much more. Their efforts east and west were hobbled by the perfectionism and timidity of McClellan and western-theater commander Henry Halleck. Holding the critical railroad junction of Corinth, Mississippi, P. G. T. Beauregard’s was the only notable Confederate force shielding Mississippi and Alabama; yet Halleck moved his huge army toward Beauregard as if dreading a collision. Determined not to be surprised the way Grant had been at Shiloh, the famed military intellectual ordered his horde entrenched every night, reducing marching time to near nothing. Daily forward progress over the nineteen miles averaged three-fourths of a mile, turning a one-day ride into an all but endless odyssey.

  Grant, supplanted by George H. Thomas, had little to do. His new position as second in command of the Army of the Tennessee carried few duties, and Halleck made sure that whatever Grant did do got close supervision. He ordered that Grant’s headquarters be near his own.1

  Grant chafed as the army set its deliberate pace toward what promised to be a major battle at Corinth. Twelve days after the order establishing his new post, he wrote Halleck to complain that his position felt superfluous. That he had to write at all, rather than just speak to Halleck in person, suggests the thickness of his limbo’s walls. He told Halleck he was determined to have the situation corrected as soon as the impending crisis of battle was past. He complained that to the rest of the army, it looked as if he were under arrest because Halleck had been sending orders directly to the commanders of the right wing and the reserve, the two corps supposedly under Grant. Grant noted Halleck’s assurance, back in March, that he had protected Grant from higher-ups. He said he was certain Halleck now meant him no harm but was obeying orders. He plainly me
ant from Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and McClellan. He asked to be relieved or have his present duty defined so “there can be no mistaking it.”

  The next day, Halleck wrote back. Grant, he said, should leave command matters to him. Halleck’s headquarters would send its orders directly to whomever it pleased, and Grant’s position as second in command of the full army was the specific spot to which his rank entitled him. As for Grant’s suspicions of injustice, Halleck only reinforced what he had told him in the brief and temporary removal in the aftermath of Fort Donelson. Since February, Halleck said, he had “done everything in my power” to defend Grant; if Grant trusted him so little that Halleck had to explain further, explaining would be useless.2

  Grant’s avowed intention to have his present situation corrected was no empty threat. He laid groundwork for a new assignment. He wrote Julia that he was “thinking of going home, and to Washington.” He edged closer to a personal relationship with his one Washington supporter, Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne. He offered to write Washburne reports of army affairs. But they would be confidential, he said, “not to make public use of.”3

  Grant later condemned Halleck’s Corinth pace and timid tactics, but at the time he justified the army’s dawdle in letters home. Moving a large army over poor roads worsened by months of rain was difficult, he said. He looked forward to the last great battle in the west. Its aftermath, he said, would free him to request transfer or resign.

  Halleck’s haughtiness was continual. When at one point in the seemingly endless march toward Corinth they reached a strong position on a substantial creek, Grant suggested that a secondary force could hold that spot while Halleck moved a large body to the right and took the city from the flank. Halleck’s response made plain that he wanted no advice. “I felt that possibly I had suggested an unmilitary movement,” Grant recalled. Halleck replied in such an “insulting and indignant manner” that Grant struggled to hold his temper, his chief of staff later recalled.4

  So the army’s inching along continued. In a letter of May 13, Grant reported to Julia that they were “now encamped . . . within hearing of the enemies drums at Corinth.” Two and a half weeks later they remained outside the city.

  They could hear trains chugging into Corinth to Confederate cheers. Halleck feared they heralded reinforcements, but Grant suspected otherwise. Railroad men told him they could put their ears to the rails leading into the city and discern not only which way trains were moving but whether they were loaded. They said the trains entering Corinth were empty; those leaving carried troops. But Halleck believed that the trains and cheers meant he was about to be attacked. On the overnight of May 29 to 30, Major General John Pope, commanding the Union left east of Corinth, reported he expected that very thing the next morning, and Halleck shifted troops to support him. No attack came. On May 30, with suspicion dawning that the Confederates had gone, Halleck pushed into the town in line of battle. Corinth was all but empty, stripped of not only Confederate defenders but every useful military article. The attack preparations Pope had thought he heard were final Confederate arrangements to retreat fifty miles south to Tupelo.5

  Grant knew from his capture of an all-but-empty Fort Henry in February what the public reaction would be. He wrote Congressman Washburne that “much unjust criticism” would swirl, “but future effects will prove it a great victory.” Sure enough, the Chicago Tribune branded Halleck’s achievement a “barren triumph.” In his assessment to Washburne, Grant may have been attempting to be politic. A day earlier he had written Julia a seemingly more candid opinion of the upshot of Halleck’s “capture” of Corinth: “The rebels . . . will turn up some where and have to be whipped yet.”

  That observation differentiated Grant not just from Halleck but also from virtually everybody in the Union high command. Most of its officers, especially Grant’s fellow West Pointers, shared Halleck’s aversion to blood, an element with which the tanner’s son was highly familiar. Halleck told Pope, who was pursuing Beauregard, that he only wanted to push the Confederates far enough south to allow the Federals to use the railroads across northern Mississippi and Alabama. Halleck wrote his wife that he had gained a “most important military point . . . with very little loss of life. I have won the victory without the battle!”6

  Halleck and too many other West Point theorists of his time approached war with a minimalist mind-set. To them, it was an academic exercise, with its textbooks studying conflicts fought by small professional armies, sometimes mercenaries, whose numbers because of lack of size were hoarded. Grant, by contrast, had to know in his bones—from hard experience with Missouri farm life alongside the working-class kind of men who marched in the Confederate armies—that this was no exercise. Wars as increasingly bitter as this one were different from those in the textbooks, the armies exponentially larger and fiercer. This war was national, reaching into every town and hamlet to affect practically every able-bodied man from North and South. In such a war, triumph could come only from capturing or annihilating armies, not towns. One of those men in the other army, Nathan Bedford Forrest, perhaps put Grant’s conviction most succinctly: “War means fightin’, and fightin’ means killin’.” This war would want more than maneuver. It would require blood, and lots of it.

  Lew Wallace, riding by one day soon after the occupation of Corinth, saw a tent off to itself with a solitary figure in front: Grant. Wallace likely was not saddened at this evidence of the misfortune of his former commander. Grant had not endorsed Wallace’s Shiloh report and its account of the roundabout march from Crump’s Landing. In Grant’s mind, that had cost his army the use of Wallace’s division on the first day of the battle.7

  Halleck had made no move to give Grant more responsibility. In early June the impatient underling still had nothing more consequential to do than he had during the crawl to Corinth: write a few promotion recommendations and communicate with home. He had time to treat all sorts of topics. He informed Julia of the money he was sending her and complained now and then at the amounts she required. Several times he mentioned a “five-shooter” pistol he had gotten for his little son Jess. He also showed conflicting inclinations regarding the burning social question of the day. Julia’s father had given a relative some slaves, and Grant now advised her to tell her father to do the same with all his others “to avoid the possibility of their being sold.”

  MAJOR GENERAL HENRY W. HALLECK

  In making this recommendation, Grant seemed mindful of the best interests of the slaves. He told Julia he did not want her “to have any of them, as it is not probable we will ever live in a slave state again”—and added that he would not like to see them abandoned to the highest bidder in an auction by a slave trader.8

  Weary of his limbo, Grant had almost immediately decided to go home. Three days after the Federal occupation of Corinth, General William T. Sherman heard the news at Halleck’s headquarters and asked why Grant was leaving. Halleck claimed not to know. Sherman rode over to Grant’s solitary tent to see.9

  Sherman’s chances for advancement would have been better had he dissociated himself from Grant. Likely because of his Washington connections, Sherman was a favorite of Halleck, who must have looked askance at Sherman’s developing attachment to Grant. Sherman had emerged from Shiloh to public acclaim, but he likely was not seeking advancement at this point. Shunning Grant would have cost him a crucial source of personal strength. During the weeks following Fort Donelson, Sherman and Grant had gotten closer. During the maelstrom of Shiloh, Grant’s firm expression of faith in ultimate victory on the horrid night of April 6 had been a driftwood log that kept Sherman’s skeptical head above water.

  Press abuse of Grant following the battle pushed the two men closer. At Shiloh, they had been the generals most culpable for ignoring the approach of the Confederate attackers. Yet, contrary to prevailing practice among their high-ranking comrades, they had not turned on each other. They had stood back to back, praising each other, disputing the claims of
Major General Don Carlos Buell and others, and maintaining—against all evidence—that the army had not been surprised by the scope of the Confederate assault.

  Grant seemed to want, if not exactly need, military soul mates, and he was finally finding them. In addition to Sherman, there were two prospects on his staff. One, Major John Rawlins, was becoming so trusted that Grant allowed this blustering, impassioned subordinate a privilege accorded no other: that of challenging his drinking. The other, Colonel James B. McPherson, Halleck had sent on the Fort Donelson expedition as a spy to monitor Grant’s imbibing, but McPherson—another Ohioan from far beneath the elite—had instead sided with Grant almost overnight. Rawlins, Grant wrote Julia, “would make one of the best General officers to be found in the country,” and McPherson was “one of the nicest gentlemen you ever saw.”10

  Grant’s attachment to Sherman, which would become more consequential nationally than his attachment to the other two, was also growing. Shiloh and its aftermath had forged a bond far stronger than the two had enjoyed before. In a letter to Julia on May 4, Grant paid homage to his revered friend and advisor General Charles Ferguson Smith, who had just died from illness contracted in the wake of the Donelson campaign, then immediately turned to his ripening friendship with Sherman as if he regarded it as similarly important: “In Gen. Sherman the country has an able and gallant defender and your husband a true friend.”

  By then, Grant had an inkling of how truly he wrote. Just a day or so earlier, Sherman had ridden from Halleck’s headquarters to find Grant packing. Sherman asked why. “Sherman, you know I am in the way here,” Grant replied. “I have stood it as long as I can.” Where he was going? “St. Louis,” Sherman remembered him replying, although Grant’s letters to Julia indicate the destination was Covington, Kentucky, where she and the rest of the family were. Sherman asked if he had business there. “Not a bit.”