Sherman was indeed on his way to Kentucky, but his request to remain as a second in command betrayed a lack of self-confidence. Perhaps under there was still the boy whose father had died when he was nine, the boy sent to a prominent family by whom he had always felt overshadowed, or it could be that the disaster at Bull Run made him wish that there would always be someone higher in command to take the blame if things went wrong.
Arriving in Louisville, Kentucky, Sherman threw himself into the work of assisting Anderson in trying to assemble a new army in a new theater of war. Here he now found more confusion, in a border state of great strategic importance with a population whose loyalties were mixed. There was little fighting, but Sherman struggled with shortages of trained personnel, weapons, and supplies, an ill-organized command structure, no clear picture of when and where additional troops would arrive, and a volatile political situation.
Sherman began to exaggerate things; there were indeed Confederate spies and sympathizers about, but he saw the Kentuckians as “nearly all unfriendly.” Military intelligence was poor on both sides: on the same day that Sherman reported that he had four thousand men to oppose a force led by Simon Bolivar Buckner that he estimated to number fifteen thousand, Buckner was telling his superiors that the six thousand men he actually had could easily be defeated by the thirteen thousand he felt certain were with Sherman. On October 5, Sherman wrote his brother John, “I’m afraid you are too late to save Kentucky. The young active element is all secession, the older stay at homes are for Union & Peace. But they will not take part.” To Ellen he wrote the following day, “I don’t think I ever felt so much desire to hide myself in some obscure place, to pass the time allotted to us on earth, but I know full well that we cannot if we would avoid the storm that threatens us, and perforce must drift on to the end. What that will be God only knows.”
He soon found his deepest fear realized: Anderson, in poor health since his ordeal at Fort Sumter and overwhelmed by the night-and-day task of trying to organize this new Department of the Cumberland, resigned from his command on October 8 and went home. Sherman wrote that Anderson “said he could not stand the mental torture of his command any longer, and that he must go away or it would kill him … I had no alternative but to assume command, though much against the grain, and in direct violation of Mr. Lincoln’s promise to me.”
Already under the strain of constant work, Sherman became increasingly apprehensive about the balance between the unreliable forces at his disposal and the unknown numbers of Confederates opposing him. As he assessed the placement of federal forces along the Union’s east-to-west front from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, a distance of 825 miles, he found that of the 175,000 men defending this line, he had a total of 14,000 to cover approximately a third of that area. He believed himself to be facing 55,000 Confederates.
Going completely out of the chain of command, Sherman, who had earlier written Ellen that he intended “to meddle as little as possible with my superiors, and to give my opinion only when asked for,” sent a telegram to President Lincoln. It said in part, “My own belief is that Confederates will make a more desperate effort [to] join Kentucky [to them] than they have for Missouri. Force now here or expected is entirely inadequate[.] The Kentuckians instead of assisting, call from every quarter for protection against local secessionists.” It closed with the one-word imperative, extraordinary to be coming from a brigadier general to the commander in chief: “Answer.” This produced a response, also out of any normal chain of command, from Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, one of Senator John Sherman’s political allies. Chase told him that keeping Kentucky in the Union was indeed crucial, but that Lincoln thought Sherman already had enough troops. Sherman replied, “I am sorry if I offended the President, but it would be better if all saw things as they are, rather than as we would they were.”
As his anxiety mounted, Sherman sent Ellen letters so pessimistic that she wrote back, “Do write me a cheerful letter that I may have it to refer to when the gloomy ones come.” To this, Sherman answered, “How any body can be cheerful now I cant tell … Give my love to all at home and tell Willy that I am very anxious to leave him a name of which he will not be ashamed if the tools are furnished me for the task to which I am assigned.”
On the same October day that Sherman wrote Ellen he feared he might leave his son Willy a shameful legacy, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant, now commanding the military district headquartered at Cairo, Illinois, a grimy, bustling port located where the Ohio River entered the Mississippi, issued orders referring to “our Gun Boat Fleet.” These were flat-bottomed paddle-wheeler riverboats, each with two tall side-by-side funnels, that had cannon poking out of their slanted dark armor superstructure; the men called them “mud turtles.” Officers and sailors of the United States Navy manned these ships. The other vessels now at Grant’s disposal, to carry troops and supplies, were the colorful riverboat steamers of the type immortalized by Mark Twain, each also with two funnels, some propelled by one large paddle wheel at the stern, and others with a paddle wheel on each side.
In contrast with Sherman’s recent war experience, which began with the stunning rout at Bull Run and was continuing with what he saw as an impending disaster in Kentucky, Grant was having a varied and productive apprenticeship in command. He had sent his son Fred home to Julia after a week of his comradeship as he led his Twenty-first Illinois west. Rather than being ordered into battle, Grant found himself peacefully encamped with his regiment at different points in northern Missouri, ensuring that the population did not take up arms against the Union. This gave Colonel Grant time to train his regiment. To improve his men’s already good morale, he organized a group of mail wagons to serve his command alone, which increased the speed of communications between his soldiers and their families. At this point, Grant still believed that the war would end within nine months, and that his time as a colonel of Volunteers would be only an episode in his life. In answer to a letter from his father, who asked Grant if he would not be wise to consider staying in the army as a career, he answered, “You ask if I should not like to go into the regular army. I should not.”
During this quiet period, James Crane, chaplain of the Twenty-first, was sitting in a tent reading a newspaper when he came across Grant’s name in a list of newly promoted brigadier generals of Volunteers. Grant said that he had no idea this was coming and commented that it must be “some of Washburne’s work.” So many military matters were intertwined with politics: Lincoln, who never forgot his original power base of Illinois, had granted the Illinois congressional delegation the right to appoint six brigadier generals of Volunteers—two more than he apportioned to any other state. That gave Republican Representative Elihu Washburne, Grant’s congressman, the opportunity to urge his fellow Illinois representatives to include the man he had spotted as an obscure former Regular Army captain. This same list of promotions to brigadier general of Volunteers, all backdated to May 17, contained the name of William T. Sherman, with Sherman being senior to Grant because he graduated from West Point three years before Grant did.
With this promotion, Grant was suddenly given important responsibilities. First he was sent to St. Louis to confer with Major General John Frémont, a most interesting figure who had just been assigned to command the Department of the West—the critical and complicated theater of war that had the Mississippi River at its heart.
Here was yet another case of a politically based military appointment. Frémont (whom Sherman also went to see in his fruitless quest for reinforcements and the formation of a cohesive strategy, concluding that “I could not discover that he was operating on any distinct plan”) was a man of considerable accomplishments and checkered background, but he had no experience commanding large bodies of soldiers. Not a West Pointer, at the age of tweny-five Frémont had been appointed as a second lieutenant in the Army’s Topographical Engineers. In that capacity, sometimes using Kit Carson as a scout, he made the first maps of the Or
egon Trail, explored the Sierras, discovered Lake Tahoe, and later gave the name Golden Gate to the entrance to San Francisco’s harbor. His prewar army career had ended in a court-martial for disobedience of orders; the military tribunal handed down a sentence that was remitted by President James K. Polk, but it was an affair that ultimately forced him to resign.
Known to the American public as “the Pathfinder,” in civilian life Frémont had become one of California’s first two senators and was the Republican Party’s first candidate for president, being beaten in 1856 by the Democrats’ Buchanan. Twenty years before the war began, he had married the attractive and ambitious daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri; Frémont’s national reputation, and his alliance with a family of influential Republican politicians, motivated Lincoln to entrust him with the complexities of the Department of the West.
In this first effort that Grant and Sherman made to establish themselves in their new western commands, Grant fared better with Frémont than Sherman did. This was partly because Frémont, who sent his wife to Washington to ask Lincoln for more troops for his own command, was intent on making a name for himself by thrusting down the Mississippi River rather than in diverting much of his strength to help Sherman defend neighboring Kentucky. After an initial Union defeat at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri for which Grant had no responsibility, Frémont ordered Grant to organize an effective defense of Jefferson City.
When Grant did that and no Confederate attack materialized, Frémont then ordered him to go to the Union riverfront headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, and prepare to lead offensive actions from there. In picking Grant over a number of other brigadier generals, Frémont overruled those on his staff who reminded him of Grant’s old reputation for drunkenness, and had only one fault to find: Grant was wearing a civilian suit, possibly the one he had worn most of the past year. Frémont told his chosen general to get into uniform. Chaplain Crane described how Grant obeyed that order: “He usually wore a plain blue [enlisted man’s] blouse coat, and an ordinary black felt hat, and never had about him a single mark to distinguish his rank.” (In fact, Grant sometimes wore pinned-on shoulder straps that had emblems of rank.)
The port where Grant had his headquarters in a hotel that the correspondent of the London Times found “almost untenable by reason of heat and flies” was on a strategically located south-pointing peninsula. To its west, the Mississippi moved downstream from St. Louis. To its east, the Ohio River ran down from Cincinnati, passing Kentucky’s riverfront cities of Louisville and Paducah, and joined the Mississippi at Cairo. Back up the Ohio River near Paducah were the entrances to the Tennessee River and the Cumberland, both of which flowed north from hilly country to empty into the Ohio, resulting in a situation in which an advance into the South along those rivers had to be made by going upstream. (The war had turned Cairo into a rip-roaring Western town: in his General Orders No. 5, issued within a week of taking up his headquarters there, Grant deplored what he found: “It is with regret that the Genl Comdg sees and learns that the closest intimacy exists between many of the officers and soldiers of his command; that they visit together the lowest drinking and dancing saloons; quarrel, curse, drink and carouse generally on the lowest level of equality … Discipline cannot be maintained where the officers do not command respect and such conduct cannot insure it.”)
Taking the military initiative under the authority given him by Frémont, Grant first quickly and bloodlessly seized Paducah, located thirty-two miles to the east of him at the point where the Tennessee River flows into the Ohio. Occupying the city on the morning of September 6, he issued a proclamation to its citizens in which he said, “I have nothing to do with opinions. I shall deal only with armed rebellion and its aiders and abbetors [sic] … The strong arm of the Government is here to protect its friends, and to punish only its enemies.” (Grant’s entrance into Kentucky ended the state’s attempt at neutrality and brought war to the commonwealth.) Leaving a subordinate commander and two regiments to occupy Paducah, Grant was back in Cairo by late afternoon, ready to concentrate on the many matters involved in preparing to take the war into Confederate territory down the Mississippi.
This daily work of gathering forces and planning for an offensive brought Grant into several activities new to him. In his headquarters beside the Mississippi, he had daily contact with the officers of the United States Navy who commanded the “mud turtle” gunboats, and he also conferred with the captains of the paddle-wheeler riverboats that would be needed as transports and cargo vessels to support landings, crossings, and other movements along the shores of the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers. Vessels carrying supplies for the Confederacy also plied these rivers, at some distance from Cairo, and on September 9 he reported the capture of three Confederate “Steamers … prizes just brought into this port by Gun Boat … The [civilian] officers and crew will be detained as prisoners until instructions are received from St. Louis what disposition to make of them.”
In another aspect of his varied responsibilities, Grant became involved with intelligence activities: he acted on information received from a former Russian army officer who was a spy in the Confederate stronghold of Memphis, and read telegrams from Frémont that were sent from St. Louis in Hungarian and translated back into English at Grant’s headquarters, on the assumption that even if the messages were intercepted the Confederates had no one who could read them. Twice in one week in September, Grant had to ask Frémont for money “required here to pay for secret services.”
Despite his growing importance and the constant demands on his time, Grant thought frequently of home. The closing passage in one of his letters to Julia echoed Sherman’s concern for what the world might think of his performance in the campaign to come.
Remember me to all in Galena. Kiss the children for me and a hundred for yourself. You should be cheerful and try to encourage me. I have a task before me of no trifling moment and want all the encouragement possible. Remember that my success will depend a greatdeel [sic] upon myself and that the safety of the country, to some extent, and my reputation and that of our children greatly depends upon my acts.
Interestingly enough, the sequence of events that would soon draw Grant and Sherman together was caused in good part by ethical questions concerning General Frémont. When Sherman went to St. Louis in his vain effort to strengthen his shaky new Department of the Cumberland and bring it into concerted action with Frémont’s Department of the West, he found the famous Californian surrounded by several San Francisco businessmen Sherman remembered from his days there as a banker. The man who ushered him in to see Frémont was a recently commissioned major Frémont had brought onto his staff: Isaiah C. Woods, who had been head of the San Francisco branch of the St. Louis bank whose failure had started the run on the other eighteen banks in the city, hurting all of them and causing six to collapse. Of Frémont’s making Woods his commissary of subsistence, Sherman wrote Ellen that “Woods should not be appointed to an office of Trust, when money is to be handled.” The next man he saw was another San Francisco banker, Joseph Palmer, a major contributor to Frémont’s political campaigns whose fraudulent handling of state and federal funds entrusted to him caused his bank to close its doors for good. Another of Frémont’s advisers was Abia A. Selover, an investor in mines and real estate owned by Frémont. At the hotel where Sherman stayed, he saw “old Baron Steinberger, a prince among our early California adventurers … His presence in St. Louis recalled the maxim, ‘Where the vultures are, there is a carcass close by.’” Rounding out the picture was a Mormon from California named Beard, who had been awarded the contract for building a line of fortifications around the city. Sherman did not say that Frémont was involved in conflicts of interest but only that he “had drawn to St. Louis some of the most enterprising men in California.”
News of what Sherman and others had seen and suspected reached Washington. Frémont had failed to achieve the military success Lincoln expected, and he had also issued an
unauthorized political proclamation harmful to Lincoln’s efforts to win over the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. In it Frémont announced the confiscation of all “real and personal” property owned by Confederate sympathizers in Missouri, language that included the concept that slaves could be taken from their owners—something Lincoln intended to accomplish in time but not an idea he wished at the moment to force upon slaveholders who might remain neutral. Now came these reports of possible corrupt dealings involving public funds. Secretary of War Simon Cameron set out for St. Louis to investigate, accompanied by Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army.
On their return east, talking freely of the military disappointments, political ineptitude, and unresolved questions of disbursement that soon caused Frémont to be relieved of command, they met with Sherman in his rooms at the Galt House hotel in Louisville. Had it not been for Frémont’s deficient performance and rumors of a version of the spoils system, the secretary of war would not have been within five hundred miles of Louisville, and Sherman would not have had the opportunity to see him face-to-face. (Cameron had lost his brother James, colonel of the Seventy-ninth New York, the Highlanders, when that officer was killed while under Sherman’s command at Bull Run, and Cameron also had approved the Highlanders’ request to be removed from Sherman’s command after the alleged incident in which Sherman had some men of that regiment ejected from the shelter of a barn during the Bull Run retreat so some horses could be stabled there.)
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 8