Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  On March 8, 1861, two days after Abraham Lincoln was sworn into office and thirty-five days before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Sherman’s brother John steered him into the White House, and he found himself shaking hands with the new president. Introducing him to the lanky, sallow-skinned Lincoln, John Sherman used the rank given him at the southern military school: “Mister President, this is my brother, Colonel Sherman, who is just up from Louisiana. He may give you some information you want.”

  To this the affable Lincoln replied, “Ah! How are they getting along down there?”

  “They think they are getting along swimmingly,” Sherman answered, eager to convey his sense of urgency to the nation’s new commander in chief. “They are preparing for war.”

  “Oh, well!” Lincoln spoke cheerfully. “I guess we’ll manage to keep house.”

  A few moments later, possibly in response to some remark that Sherman be considered for reinstatement in the army, Lincoln remarked dismissively that he would not be needing “military men” and indicated that the secession crisis could be solved peacefully.

  Emerging from the White House, Sherman turned angrily to his brother. “I was sadly disappointed and I broke out on John damning the politicians generally … adding that the country was sleeping on a volcano that might burst any minute, but that I was going to St. Louis to take care of my family and would have no more of it. John begged me to be patient, but I said I would not, that I had no time to wait; that I was off for St. Louis; and off I went.”

  And so it was that, when Fort Sumter was attacked, with Lincoln’s views changing from “I guess we’ll manage to keep house” to what he said the day of Fort Sumter’s surrender—“I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force”—Sherman was in an office in St. Louis running the Fifth Street Railroad’s trolley service, being paid well and swiftly improving its efficiency and profits. While Ulysses S. Grant trained Galena’s company of Jo Daviess Guards, accompanied them to Springfield, Illinois, and began looking for ways of entering military service, Sherman remained in his civilian job, his fourth job in four years. In a letter to his brother John, who with his Ewing in-laws was using every kind of influence on his behalf in Washington, he expressed his desire to make enough money “so as to be independent of any body so I can not be kicked around as heretofore.” He added, with the air of being above the fray, “If the country needs my services, it can ask for them.”

  Ellen Sherman, pregnant with their sixth child, began to realize that, no matter what her husband said, he wanted to be back in uniform. Writing to John Sherman, who was becoming impatient with his brother’s sensitivity and entire stance in what was now a time of war, she said, “I am convinced that he will never be satisfied out of the army & I know that you can obtain for him a high position in it.”

  As a result of the family’s lobbying on his behalf in Washington, Sherman was offered an important War Department civilian position, which he turned down, but on May 14, 1861, his brother telegraphed him that he had been appointed colonel of one of the newly authorized Regular Army regiments, which was yet to be organized. “Of course I could no longer defer action,” Sherman said of this moment. Arriving in Washington in early June, he was not sent to the still-forming regiment to which he had been assigned but was immediately utilized in the inspection of the capital’s defenses. This task involved reporting daily to the army’s infirm seventy-five-year-old commander, General Winfield Scott, who was well aware of Sherman’s political connections and formed a good opinion of him as one of the badly needed officers who had Regular Army experience.

  Sherman was soon given a brigade to command, of units all encamped in the Washington area: the Thirteenth, Sixty-ninth, and Seventy-ninth New York Volunteer Infantry, and the Second Wisconsin, along with a battery of the Regular Army’s Third Artillery. His units totaled thirty-four hundred men, a force roughly four times the size of the Twenty-first Illinois that Grant was leading toward Missouri.

  Sherman was later to speak as if these regiments had been good units at the time he took command of them, but when he walked in to take over his brigade on June 30, he encountered the same kind of disdainful reactions that Grant experienced a few weeks earlier when the enlisted men of the Twenty-first Illinois had their first look at him. One soldier remembered a “tall gaunt form in a thread bare blue coat, the sleeves so short as to reveal a bony wrist, the trousers at least four inches shorter than the usual length.” Others recalled that the troubled, prematurely wrinkled face looking out from under a most unmilitary “broad brimmed straw hat”—quite sensible to wear in a Washington summer—had “hollow cheeks,” a bushy untrimmed beard,” and “a pair of piercing eyes.”

  The new commander was no more impressed by his men than they were with him, referring to them in his letters as “rabble”; at one point Sherman wrote Ellen that he commanded “volunteers called by courtesy Soldiers, but they are all we have got.” Two weeks after taking command, he received orders from Brigadier General Daniel Tyler to begin moving his green troops from their base on the south bank of the Potomac, marching slowly west into Virginia. The Union Army was about to take the offensive, and Sherman faced the possibility that he might soon be killed. On July 16, about to put his columns in motion, he wrote to Ellen, who had given birth to a baby daughter a few days before, and told her, “Whatever fate befals [sic] me, I know you appreciate what good qualities I possess—and will make charitable allowances for defects, and that under you the children will grow up on the safe side.” Speaking of his two sons, his favorite child Willy, age seven, and four-year-old Tommy, he said, “Tell Willy I have another war sword, which he can add to his present armory … when I come home again … though truly I do not choose for him or Tommy the military profession. It is too full of blind chances to be worthy of a first rank among callings.” Sherman closed this letter to Ellen with, “Goodbye—and believe me always most affectionately yours.” He signed it, as he did all his letters including those to his ten-year-old daughter Minnie, “W. T. Sherman.” Then he led his brigade to a succession of night encampments in the field. “The march,” Sherman recalled, “demonstrated little but the general laxity of discipline.”

  The first big movements of the war were now under way. After Fort Sumter fell, the United States Navy had dispatched its ships in an effort to blockade Southern ports, but in the land war, both sides had initially devoted most of their efforts to organizing their armies rather than to attacking each other. (It was during this period that Sherman wrote, “As soon as real war begins, new men, heretofore unheard of, will emerge from obscurity, equal to any occasion.”) Then, after some movements in Missouri that brought most of that state under Union control, McClellan won some minor engagements in western Virginia, feeding the Northern hope for a quick series of bigger victories. The Washington newspapers were clamoring for a large and decisive battle. The slogan “On to Richmond!” expressed a widespread belief that Union forces could thrust aside any opposition and sweep on to capture the Confederate capital, 105 miles to the south. (Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was both explicit and demanding, with a headline that read “FORWARD TO RICHMOND!” and a subheadline that said of the Confederate Congress scheduled to meet there on July 20, “By That Date the Place Must Be Held by the National Army.”)

  At the time Sherman’s brigade, part of a force of thirty-five thousand, made the first of two overnight bivouacs at Centreville, Virginia, seventeen miles west of Washington, they knew that large Confederate units were in that area. But there was something the Union commanders did not know: several days before, a beautiful dark-haired Southern intelligence courier named Bettie Duvall, wearing a smart riding habit and with her long black hair swept up under her hat, had come out of Washington and ridden into Confederate headquarters at Fairfax Court House, a few miles from Centreville. Taking off her hat and loosening her tresses, she pulled out something hidden in her hair: a tiny package wrapped in black silk, containing the Union Army�
�s plan for its advance into Virginia and the approximate time of the movement. This, and a later more specific message brought by another courier, swiftly reached the headquarters of Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard southwest of Centreville at Manassas Junction, an important railroad hub located west of a wide, slow-moving stream called Bull Run. Alerted, Beauregard, who had twenty-two thousand men, telegraphed Jefferson Davis in Richmond, and the Confederate president immediately sent him by railroad a reinforcement of twelve thousand troops led by Joseph E. Johnston, the general whose decision to go with the South so many knowledgeable Union officers regretted. Not only were the Confederates in the area now equal in numbers, but thirteen of the fifteen senior Southern commanders were West Pointers of exceptional ability, including Ulysses S. Grant’s best man and cousin by marriage, James Longstreet, and the gifted cavalry officer Jeb Stuart. Taking the role of principal commander and knowing what to expect, Beauregard deployed his forces on favorable higher ground and awaited the clash.

  At dawn on Sunday, July 21, Union forces under General Irvin McDowell, who had no idea the Confederates were there in such strength, began to attack, and the federal troops poured across Bull Run at Sudley Ford. During the morning, both sides committed more regiments to the battle, and by noon the Confederates had set up what proved to be their final line of defense, on a wooded ridge.

  It was at this point that Sherman’s brigade crossed Bull Run, some of his men fording the stream while others marched over a stone bridge, and entered the thickly wooded area in which the battle was already raging. At the age of forty-one, twenty-one years after graduating from West Point, Sherman said that “for the first time I saw the Carnage of battle— men lying in every conceivable shape, and mangled in a horrible way,” as well as horses “with blood streaming from their nostrils, lying on the ground hitched to [artillery] guns, gnawing their sides in death.” Bullets grazed his shoulder and knee, and his horse was shot through the foreleg, but Sherman kept moving his men forward.

  Three hours into his brigade’s part in the battle, with Sherman about to make the mistake of sending his four regiments up Henry Hill one after another, rather than making one massive attack with his entire force, he encountered a Confederate brigade that had come into position opposite them on higher ground and was mowing down his men. Speaking of his troops, Sherman said, “Up to that time all had kept their places, and seemed perfectly cool … but the short exposure to an intense fire of small arms, at close range, had killed many, wounded more, and had produced disorder in all of the battalions that had attempted to encounter it.” His men were now facing the regiments commanded by Thomas Jonathan Jackson, whose performance that day in defense of Henry Hill prompted a general from South Carolina to cry admiringly, “There stands Jackson like a stone wall!”—a tribute that gave the commander and his brigade the name by which they were thereafter known.

  Sherman described how he became aware of an even bigger problem than the effect being produced by Jackson’s brigade. Referring to the past hours, he said, “After I had put in each of my regiments, and had them driven back … I had no idea that we were beaten, but reformed the regiments in line in their proper order, and only wanted a little rest, when I found that my brigade was almost alone … I then realized that the whole army was ‘in retreat,’ and that my men were individually making back for the stone bridge.”

  What Sherman was seeing as a commanding officer was mirrored by the experience of one of his soldiers. Private Alexander Campbell belonged to the Seventy-ninth New York, a regiment known as the Highlanders because its ranks were filled with men born in Scotland, or of Scottish ancestry; this unit had a bagpipe band, and early in the war some of its soldiers wore kilts. Campbell, whose brother James served in the Confederate Army’s First South Carolina Battalion, wrote his wife, Jane, of this same moment of the Union collapse: “We could see our army retreating and the men cutting their horses Loose from the wagons and mo[u]nting there [sic] backs and galloping off as fast as they could … Then we came across a field running across as fast as we could … [Later] we came into centervall [Centreville] and the regiments that was at the fight tried to get themselves together but it was impossable [sic].” After trying vainly to find some of his comrades, “I gave them up for Lost then started with a small party for arlington heights”—all the way back to the Potomac River and Washington.

  Sherman’s official report gave more glimpses of what became a chaotic nightlong flight back to Washington, with the carriages of civilian spectators who had come out to see the battle mixed in with horse-drawn ambulances and carts filled with groaning wounded men. The mercurial Sherman, always craving a sense of organization, conveyed his own bewilderment and inability to change the course of events.

  There was no positive order to retreat, although for an hour it had been going on by the operation of the men themselves. The ranks were thin and irregular, and we found a stream of people strung … across Bull Run, and far toward Centreville … About nine o’clock that night [at Centreville] I received … the order to continue the retreat to the Potomac. This retreat was by night, and disorderly in the extreme. The men of the different regiments mingled together … reached [the Potomac River, at a point opposite Washington] at noon the next day, and found a miscellaneous crowd crossing over the aqueduct and ferries.

  Despite energetic efforts by Sherman and other commanders to keep the men on the battlefield, and then to reorganize them at various places during the nightlong retreat, the first major battle of the Civil War had ended in a rout. At times during the retreat, Sherman himself was separated from his command, and there was a question about his own behavior : the men of the Seventy-ninth later successfully petitioned to be removed from his command because of an alleged incident in which, on the rainy day after the defeat, he had some of the Highlanders ejected from a barn so some horses could be sheltered there. In the wake of this defeat and his own baptism by fire, Sherman, the lover of orderly procedure, poured out his descriptions and feelings in three letters to Ellen, telling her of the “Shameless flight of the armed mob,” and said that he had in the past “seen the confusion of crowds of men at fires and Shipwrecks, but nothing like this. It was as disgraceful as words can portray.”

  There was confusion indeed. Leaderless soldiers wandered the streets of Washington, some begging for food, while many saloons were packed with officers getting drunk instead of trying to find and care for their demoralized men. Other soldiers boarded trains north and were never seen again. Sherman later summed up Bull Run in these terms: “Though the North was overwhelmed with mortification and shame, the South had not much really to boast of, for in the three or four hours of fighting their organization was so broken up that they did not and could not follow our army, when it was known to be in a state of disgraceful and causeless flight.”

  Back in camp after they finished pouring into the Washington area, some of Sherman’s troops “were so mutinous, at one time, that I had ordered the [Regular Army artillery] battery to unlimber, threatening, if they dared to leave camp without orders, I would fire upon them.” His brigade was soon visited by President Lincoln, accompanied by Secretary of War Simon Cameron, whose brother James, the colonel commanding the Seventy-ninth New York, had been killed at Bull Run. During the visit, Lincoln stood in his carriage, surrounded by hundreds of soldiers, and spoke to them in a way that Sherman described as “one of the … best, most feeling addresses I ever listened to, referring to our late disaster at Bull Run, the high duties that still devolved on us, and the brighter days yet to come.” The talk steadied and encouraged the shaken young soldiers; as for his own feelings and those of his fellow commanders during these days, Sherman said, “We were all trembling lest we should be held personally accountable for the defeat.”

  Still in this troubled mood, Sherman was speaking one evening with several other worried colonels in a large, high-ceilinged room at Arlington House, the Custis family mansion that until a few weeks before had been
the home of Robert E. Lee and his family. (Arlington House and its farmland, sitting directly across the Potomac from Washington in Virginia and clearly visible from the Capitol, was one of the first places in Virginia to be occupied by federal troops. Some of the dead from Bull Run were being buried on the extensive Arlington lands, which later became the Arlington National Cemetery.) As the group of colonels talked in this room that was now serving as an adjutant general’s office, important news arrived in a way that Sherman later described.

  Some young officer came in with a list of the new brigadiers just announced at the War Department, which embraced the names of Heintzelman, Keyes, Franklin, Andrew Porter, W. T. Sherman, and others, who had been colonels in the battle, and all of whom had shared the common stampede. Of course, we discredited the truth of the list, and Heintzelman broke out with, “By————, it’s all a lie! Every mother’s son of you will be cashiered.” We all felt he was right, but, nevertheless, it was true, and we were all announced in orders as brigadier generals of Volunteers.

  Another name on this list was that of an officer serving far to the west who had nothing to do with the Bull Run disaster: Ulysses S. Grant. Ten days after receiving his own promotion, Sherman opened a note from a more senior brigadier general, Robert Anderson, commander of the Union force that had, after surrendering Fort Sumter, been allowed to come north. Early in his army career, Sherman had served under then-Captain Anderson, who found him impressive: when they met now in Washington, Anderson told Sherman that, as Sherman recounted it, he had been “offered the command of the Department of the Cumberland, to embrace Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., and that he wanted … me as his right hand.” This led quickly to a meeting between the two officers and President Lincoln, during which Sherman made a prophetic request. “In this interview with Mr. Lincoln, I explained to him my extreme desire to serve in a subordinate capacity, and in no event to be left in a superior command. He promised this with promptness, making the jocular remark that his chief trouble was to find places for the too many generals who wanted to be at the head of affairs, to command armies, etc.”