Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  If ever there was a commonplace meeting that nonetheless foreshadowed great events, this was it. Anyone watching the brief conversation between the shorter, brown-haired Grant in his rumpled clothes, who was then thirty-five, and the tall, red-headed, constantly gesturing thirty-seven-year-old Sherman could never have dreamt what lay ahead for them. Within five years the two would be winning immense military victories that preserved the American nation as one country; eleven years after their brief chat, the shabby shorter man would be elected president of the United States. As for what they discussed that day on the street, all Sherman could recall of their talk was that he walked on feeling “that West Point and the regular army were not good schools for farmers [and] bankers.”

  On what proved to be Sherman’s final return from San Francisco, Ellen and her parents once again urged him to take on the job of running the family saltworks near Lancaster. He still refused and in effect fled to Leavenworth, Kansas, where Thomas Ewing had set up his sons Thomas Jr. and Hugh Boyle Ewing in a combination of law firm and real estate management business. It was hardly a meaningful act of defiance: Sherman dabbled in a few legal matters, but his primary job there was to manage large tracts of farmland owned by his father-in-law. That entire venture failed; during the winter in Kansas, laboring in the wind and snow as he and some hired hands built storage barns to house corn, he wrote to Ellen, who was pregnant with their fifth child, in despairing terms, using the language of cockfighting, where the birds fought to the death: “I look upon myself as a dead cock in the pit, not worthy of further notice.”

  When Sherman came back from his galling struggles in Kansas, through Thomas Ewing’s influence he received an offer to be the manager of an American bank in London. Burnt by his experience with banking, and still wanting to accomplish something on his own in a position that did not come to him because of his father-in-law, Sherman now tried to get back into the United States Army. This proved fruitless: the small peacetime army could not even retain all the junior officers who had stayed in the service since graduating from West Point, and had no way of bringing back in those who had resigned. Out of these efforts to reenter the Regular Army, however, he learned that Louisiana had created a new school to be known as the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, a name that Sherman considered to be awkward and pretentious. Its Board of Supervisors was accepting applications for the job of leading this institution with the title of superintendent.

  Sherman applied for the position, was accepted, and on November 12, 1859, two months after the birth of his and Ellen’s fifth child, a daughter, arrived by himself at the school in Alexandria, Louisiana. At that moment the newspapers were filled with stories about the recent seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry led by the fanatical abolitionist John Brown—an abortive raid put down by a company of United States Marines under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army, assisted by an army lieutenant nicknamed “Jeb” Stuart. The bloodshed at Harpers Ferry was small—ten of John Brown’s nineteen followers were killed, including two of his sons, along with five townspeople shot by his men—but its portents were immense. Brown’s purpose had been to seize the weapons at the federal arsenal and distribute them to slaves to use against their owners in an uprising. This threat of a slave revolt was an old nightmare in the South, and Southerners were shocked not only by the raid itself but also by the way many Northern abolitionists hailed Brown, who was tried and hanged for his act, as a martyr in the cause of freedom. Increasing numbers of white Southerners began to feel that the only way to preserve slavery would be to form a separate nation. This would involve seceding from the Union. Millions of Americans outside the South were not particularly incensed about slavery but were prepared to fight, if necessary, to preserve that Union.

  Considering that Louisiana’s military academy had hired a Northerner at a time when many in the North and South were taking irreconcilable political positions, things at the school went surprisingly well for nearly a year. As a result of Sherman’s past postings in the South, he liked and admired its people and felt comfortable among them. As for the great issues agitating so many Americans, Sherman regretted that slavery existed but did not want to see war waged to abolish it, and he was content to live among white slaveholders; as for their black slaves, he considered them to be inferior beings and sympathized with Southern fears of a slave uprising. Secession from the Union, on the other hand, offended Sherman’s need for the world to be a logical place. He wrote to Ellen, “I have heard men of good sense say that the union of the states any longer was impossible, and that the South was preparing for a change. If such a change be contemplated and overt acts be attempted of course I will not go with the South.” In a later letter he continued to express his anxiety: “All here talk as if a dissolution of the Union were not only a possibility but a probability of easy execution. If attempted we will have Civil War of the most horrible kind.” As the crisis heightened, with statements of some bellicose Southerners proclaiming that the North had no stomach for a war, and that if it came, one Southern soldier would prove to be equal to two or more Northern men, Sherman argued this to David French Boyd, the seminary’s professor of ancient languages and a Virginian who liked and admired Sherman:

  You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people and will fight too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You will fail.

  Seven hundred and fifty miles to the north, Ulysses S. Grant had already written a friend, “It is hard to realize that a State or States should commit so suicidal an act as to secede from the Union, though from all the reports, I have no doubt that at least five of them will do it.” What both Sherman and Grant failed to comprehend was the degree of military skill that many of their fellow West Pointers would bring to the Southern cause, as well as the historical heritage that led so many Southerners to see themselves as both right and invincible. By 1860, Southern presidents had led the nation during sixty of its eighty-four years. Of the twenty-nine men who had served on the Supreme Court, eighteen were from the South. More than twice as many presidents pro tem of the Senate, speakers of the House, and attorneys general had been from the South as from the North. In the army and navy, the great majority of the higher ranks had invariably been filled by Southern men and still were. The South believed that its men would prevail, because they always had.

  As the national crisis grew, at the seminary in Louisiana, Sherman, the Board of Supervisors, the faculty, and the new cadets all acted as if the only business at hand was that of teaching, studying, and participating in military drills preparing them to engage an unspecified enemy. (At this point, the academy’s muskets were being supplied by the federal government.) Sherman, who was first addressed as Major and later as Colonel, worked hard and effectively. The board and faculty liked him and appreciated his efforts, and the cadets admired and came to be fond of him. His desire to have a success at last kept him from recognizing just how fragile his own position was, no matter how accurately he foresaw the growing crisis and how efficiently he ran the seminary, and reality descended upon him at the end of 1860. Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party had won the presidential election; at just the time Ulysses S. Grant was writing a friend about his job in the family leather goods store in Galena, the nation learned that South Carolina had seceded from the Union. Sherman’s cadets remained quiet, while Sherman, who burst into tears on hearing of South Carolina’s action, wrote a Southern friend, “You are driving me and hundreds of others out of the South, who have cast [our] fortunes here, love your people and want to stay.”

  In January of 1861, Louisiana state militia units seized the United States A
rsenal at Baton Rouge and sent the captured weapons to be stored at the seminary. Sherman resigned. Even in this hour of hot feeling and impending bloodshed, the board passed two resolutions praising him and thanking him for his services. Men from the governor of Louisiana on down wrote him that they wished he would continue as superintendent. Overtures were made to Sherman, suggesting that high rank awaited him if a separate Southern army came into being, but everyone soon understood and respected his need to go. When Sherman said good-bye to his assembled cadets, all of them clearly sad to see him leave, his emotions overcame him: trying to speak, all he could manage was to point to his heart, say, “You are all in here,” and stride away. (When he later encountered some of these young men as prisoners captured by Union troops he commanded, he did everything in his power to help them, including giving them some of his own clothes; he would write his daughter Minnie that she must remember that he was fighting those “whom I remember as good, kind friends.”) Heading north to Ellen and their four children, even now Sherman hoped for peace.

  2

  GRANT AWAKENS

  On April 12, 1861, artillery belonging to the seceded state of South Carolina began firing on Fort Sumter, the United States Army post in Charleston Harbor, and the fort surrendered two days later. The forces of the United States of America were engaged in combat with those of the Confederate States of America.

  Abraham Lincoln, who had taken the oath as president of the United States five weeks before, still hoped to avert a large-scale war, but he issued a call for seventy-five thousand volunteers from the North, to augment the small Regular Army, then numbering sixteen thousand men, in which Grant and Sherman had once served. The Confederacy, its central government coming into existence overnight, brought its army into being from a collection of militia organizations and companies of volunteers.

  In Washington, the federal government kept its few Regular Army regiments intact and authorized the creation of additional Regular units, but many experienced officers of the peacetime army were quickly moved into posts commanding regiments filled with the new volunteers. In the Union Army as a whole, an important distinction existed between those holding Regular Army commissions—men who had graduated from West Point, or who had in a very few cases been given Regular commissions as they were brought in from civilian life—and those officers holding Volunteer commissions, which, while carrying real responsibilities, were appointments frequently made as a political favor to men with little or no military experience. With the wartime expansion, a West Pointer who had served for years in the Regular Army might find himself advanced several ranks, to make use of his ability and knowledge: a man would, for example, continue to hold his Regular commission as a captain, a rank in which he previously commanded no more than a hundred men, but soon be given the rank of colonel of Volunteers and become the commander of a regiment of a thousand. As for marching into battle, it was all the same Union Army.

  It was a time of fateful, painful decisions: the South gained the services of Robert E. Lee, who declined an offer by an intermediary acting for President Lincoln that he should, in Lee’s words, “take command of the army that was to be brought into the field.” Three months before Fort Sumter was fired upon, Lee had written about the agonizing issue of conflicting loyalties to his son Lieutenant Custis Lee, who had graduated first in the West Point class of 1854: “I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union.” But when his beloved native Virginia seceded, he resigned from the army he had entered as a West Point cadet thirty-five years before, stating, “I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.” Lee urged his son to make his own decision in the matter, but Custis also resigned, to fight for the Confederacy. Of the 1,108 officers serving in the United States Army, a third chose to join the forces of the South; in the navy, a quarter of the officers resigned, to reappear in the new Confederate States Navy.

  In the eyes of professional military men, another great loss to the Union was the decision to go with the South made by the exceptionally able Joseph E. Johnston, who had been Lee’s West Point classmate. The Confederacy elected as its president Jefferson Davis, a Southerner who had graduated from West Point, had led with distinction a regiment of Mississippi volunteers in the Mexican War, and had gone on as a civilian to serve as a United States senator and subsequently to become secretary of war in the cabinet of President Franklin Pierce, dealing with reams of paperwork that included accepting the resignations of Captains Sherman and Grant. In early 1861, he was again a United States senator from Mississippi. On the day before he made his farewell address in the Senate and headed south, Davis said, “Civil war has only horror for me, but whatever circumstances demand shall be met as a duty.”

  In Galena, Illinois, President Lincoln’s call for volunteers produced a mass meeting; Ulysses S. Grant, the only man in town who had served as an officer in the Regular Army, was pressed into duty as chairman. The citizens voted to form a company of foot soldiers to be known as the Jo Daviess Guards, named for Jo Daviess County, of which Galena was the county seat. Asked if he would take command of what soon became a hundred volunteers, Grant declined, saying that he intended to offer his services at a higher level, but he threw himself into the business of organizing the town’s company and readying these recruits to proceed to a camp outside the state capital of Springfield for training. “I never went into our leather store after that meeting,” Grant said, “to put up a package or do other business.”

  Suddenly this quiet man was everywhere, helping the patriotically minded ladies of Galena order the right kind of cloth for uniforms from a dry-goods merchant appropriately named Felt, and telling the tailors at Corwith Brothers what the dark blue uniforms should look like. He showed the company’s newly elected captain how to drill the men: the entire state of Illinois had only 905 muskets and rifles on hand, 300 of which needed repairs, so the Jo Daviess Guards had their first instruction in the manual of arms using wooden laths instead of real weapons.

  By the end of the first week, Grant had a tentative plan for himself: Galena’s congressman Elihu Washburne, who had given a fiery patriotic speech at the meeting that voted the Jo Daviess Guards into being, told Grant that he should go with the new company when they went to Springfield. At the state capital, Washburne told Grant, he would use his influence with the governor to find him a suitable position in the state’s effort to mobilize. Writing to his father in Kentucky, Grant urged him to come north from that border state, which might explode in violence at any time, and added that his own duty was clear: “Having been educated for such an emergency, at the expense of the Government,” he must offer his services in the conflict that had begun. At the moment he thought he might be gone for as long as three months. Of his wife’s reaction to both the national crisis and his intention to serve, he told his father that “Julia takes a very sensible view of the present difficulties. She would be sorry to have me go, but thinks the circumstances may warrant it and will not through [throw] a single obsticle [sic] in the way.”

  That was not the entire picture of Julia’s feelings. A woman from a slaveholding family, married to a man who might soon be fighting against the South, she hoped that her home state of Missouri could be kept in the Union, and she had followed closely the events leading to the attack on Fort Sumter. Julia later wrote:

  Oh! how intensely interesting the papers were that winter! My dear husband Ulys read aloud to me every speech for and against secession. I was very much disturbed in my political sentiments, feeling that the states had a right to go out of the Union if they wished to, and yet thought it the duty of the national government to prevent a dismemberment of the Union, even if coercion should be necessary. Ulys was much amused by my enthusiasm and said I was a little inconsistent when I talked of states’ rights, but that I was all right on the duties of national government.

  The news of Confederate shells landing on a United States Army post at Fort Sumter evidently resolved the question
of Julia’s loyalties. “I remember now with astonishment the feeling that took possession of me in the spring of ’61. When reading patriotic speeches, my blood seemed to course more rapidly through my veins.” She added, “Galena was throbbing with patriotism.”

  Two days before his thirty-ninth birthday, Grant said good-bye to Julia and their four children and headed downtown, wearing a tired old civilian suit, a slouch hat, and the faded army overcoat he had worn peddling firewood in St. Louis, and carrying an old bag that had little in it. The Jo Daviess Guards were being sent off in a large and enthusiastic parade through town and across the bridge to the railroad depot, where the recruits would board the train for Springfield to join the many volunteer companies converging there. Grant watched from a sidewalk as different organizations—the Masonic Assembly, the city’s fire companies with their horse-drawn engines, the Odd Fellows, the mayor and various civic groups, all interspersed with brass bands—paraded down the street, followed by the hundred newly uniformed recruits he had equipped, many of them waving high-heartedly to the cheering crowds. As the last of the Jo Daviess Guards passed, the brother of the company’s captain watched Grant standing there on the sidewalk. A man to whom he later spoke of the moment remembered him describing how Grant “fell in behind the column and quietly, with head pensively drooping, marched in their wake across the bridge, and entered the train for Springfield.”