Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  By the time of this meeting, Sherman, not outnumbered but thinking he was, had become so worried about the situation in his large area of operations that he could be found pacing the corridors of the hotel at all hours, smoking eight to ten cigars a night, and waiting for dispatches at the telegraph office at three a.m. He drank too much; his hands sometimes shook. Sherman’s experiences with the press in San Francisco had given him a permanent hostile mistrust of reporters, and he banned them from his headquarters. When journalists found the opportunity to ask him questions, he replied with a snarl, and on one occasion had a reporter jailed for disobeying his order that the man stay out of military camps. (When Sherman heard that the Confederates had shot two Northern reporters they considered to be spies, he expressed his pleasure, and said, “Now we’ll have news from Hell by noon.”)

  As Cameron and General Thomas entered Sherman’s rooms on October 17, they were accompanied by six or seven reporters, some from local papers and some from the East who were traveling with the secretary of war. After the hotel manager sent in what Sherman described “as a good lunch and something to drink,” Cameron, who had arrived feeling sick, lay on Sherman’s bed and said, “Now, General Sherman, tell us of your troubles.” When Sherman remarked that he felt uneasy discussing military matters “with so many strangers present,” Cameron answered expansively, “They are all friends, all members of my family, and you may speak your mind freely and without restraint.”

  Sherman stepped to the door, locked it, and started talking. He described the Union defenses in that part of Kentucky as being so weak that if Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston chose to do so, “He could march to Louisville any day.”

  As Sherman described that moment, “Cameron exclaimed, ‘You astonish me! Our informants, the Kentucky Senators and members of Congress, claim that they have in Kentucky plenty of men, and all they want are arms and money.’”

  Sherman pressed on, describing the situation in the darkest terms. Holding up a large map of the United States,

  I argued that, for the purpose of defense, we should have sixty thousand men at once, and for offense, should need two hundred thousand, before we were done. Mr. Cameron, who still lay on the bed, threw up his hands and exclaimed, “Great God! Where are they to come from?” I asserted that there were plenty of men at the North, ready and willing to come, if he would only accept their services … We discussed these matters fully, in the most friendly spirit, and I thought I had aroused Mr. Cameron to a realization of the great war that was before us, and was in fact upon us. I heard him tell General Thomas to make a note of our conversation, that he might attend to my requests on reaching Washington. We all spent the evening together agreeably in conversation.

  That is the way it seemed to Sherman. Although Cameron sent telegrams from Louisville ordering that additional forces be sent to reinforce Sherman, on his way back to Washington Cameron told reporters at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that Sherman was “absolutely crazy.” Thomas soon wrote a report of the meeting at the Galt House, something that was supposed to be a confidential War Department memorandum. On October 30, the New York Tribune, one of whose reporters had been at the Galt House meeting and had since been given an unauthorized look at Thomas’s report, published an article that made no distinction between Sherman’s estimate that he needed sixty thousand men for defense but that it would take two hundred thousand to mount and sustain a successful long-range offensive. The piece said only that when Cameron asked him how many men he had to have, Sherman “promptly replied 200,000.”

  Sherman saw the handwriting on the wall. Still hoping to salvage his disintegrating reputation, on November 1 he wrote Ellen that he was “riding a whirlwind unable to guide the Storm,” and added, “God knows that I think of you and our dear Children all the time, and that I would that we might hide ourselves in some quiet corner of the world.” He told her that “the idea of going down to History with a fame such as threatens me nearly makes me crazy, indeed I may be so now.” Two days later he received a telegram sent from Washington by General George McClellan, who had just succeeded the aged and retiring Winfield Scott as general in chief of the United States Army, asking him to set forth the exact situation in Kentucky.

  Sherman stuck to his assessment but saw the end coming for him as commander of the Department of the Cumberland. In a flurry of communications, he requested that McClellan relieve him of command, but his ordeal was not over. On November 5, McClellan sent him a letter saying that the highly regarded Don Carlos Buell would relieve him, but the letter took time to arrive, as would Buell. The following day, when Ulysses S. Grant was embarking three thousand soldiers aboard ships for his first battle of the war, an attack on the Confederate positions twenty miles south of Cairo at the riverfront town of Belmont, Missouri, McClellan sent Sherman a telegram asking for daily reports on all military affairs in Kentucky. While waiting for Sherman’s replacement to arrive, the Union Army’s commander was placing Sherman under close and mistrustful scrutiny. McClellan even quietly sent to Louisville Colonel Thomas M. Key of his staff, with instructions to observe Sherman’s behavior; after some days, Key reported that Sherman was close to a nervous breakdown. In Washington, rumors about Sherman grew: at one point Assistant Secretary of War Thomas W. Scott was heard to remark, “Sherman’s gone in the head, he’s looney.”

  At the same time that Sherman’s position was dramatically deteriorating, there was a shift in army commanders that would affect Sherman and also reflected the political battles Lincoln faced. In St. Louis, Frémont was relieved of command and would be sent to the soon-to-be-created Mountain Department, consisting mostly of what had been the Department of Western Virginia. (During the war, the Union Army frequently reorganized its geographical departments and renamed armies operating in various areas.) Frémont’s transfer, in effect a demotion, was caused in part by his military ineptitude as well as the suspicions of corruption that Secretary of War Cameron had been sent out to investigate, but it was also an early example of the never-resolved tensions between Lincoln and the Radical faction of the Republicans in Congress. Both Lincoln and the Radicals shared the war aim of restoring the Union, but the Radical Republicans wanted the earliest possible end to slavery everywhere, while Lincoln continued to defer the emancipation issue in the interest of trying to keep the slaveholding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in the Union. When Lincoln had rescinded Frémont’s declaration that the slaves of Missouri were free, the Radicals were enraged, and now Lincoln added to their anger by this downgrading of one of their favorite generals.

  The man taking Frémont’s place and now commanding both Sherman and Grant was Henry Wager Halleck, a pop-eyed, gray-haired, portly forty-six-year-old, who before starting West Point earned a Phi Beta Kapa key at Union College. A scholar who continued his reading and writing while in the army, at the age of thirty-one he had published an important military textbook, Elements of Military Art and Science. He resigned from the army with the rank of captain, doing it in the same year that Grant did, and became a lawyer whose books on international law and land-title issues were widely praised. In San Francisco he served as a railway president and director of a quicksilver mine. The recently retired Winfield Scott had brought this capable administrator back into the army at the beginning of the war, giving him a Regular Army commission as a major general. What remained to be seen was how Halleck, a greatly ambitious man who was no stranger to intrigue and whose Regular Army commission made him one of the most senior Union officers, would handle Grant, Sherman, and the other generals in the Mississippi River theater of operations he now commanded.

  On November 8, back in Lancaster, Ohio, Ellen Sherman opened a telegram from Louisville for her prominent father, who was in Washington. It was from Sherman’s aide, Captain Frederick Prime, and said: “Send Mrs. Sherman and youngest boy down to relieve General Sherman’s [sic] and myself from the pressure of business—no occasion for alarm.” Ellen, always aware of the
history of mental instability in her husband’s family, immediately made the fourteen-hour trip by railroad to Louisville, taking along her older brother Philemon, a lawyer, and both boys, Willy and Tommy. When they arrived at three in the morning, Philemon said, they came upon Sherman “in a great, barnlike room with blazing lights, with a lounge at one end, on which he tried from time to time to catch snatches of sleep, and messengers rushing in at all hours bringing details of disaster or threat.”

  The next day Ellen wrote Sherman’s brother John an agonized letter: “Knowing insanity to be in the family and having seen Cump in [sic] the verge of it once in California, I assure you I was tortured by fears, which have been only in part relieved since I got here … I have not been here long enough to judge well his state of mind. He wrote me that he felt almost crazy, and I find that he has had little or no sleep for some time.” She added that he had been eating almost nothing, and that his officers, worried about him, had told her that “he thinks the whole country is gone irrevocably & ruin and desolation are at hand.” The immensely loyal John Sherman immediately rushed to see his brother in Louisville. Within five days, Sherman’s replacement, General Buell, arrived, and John and Ellen felt that they could return to Lancaster, leaving her somewhat calmer husband to continue his military duties.

  After a few days spent showing Buell around, days during which Buell telegraphed McClellan that he saw no reason to expect a significant Confederate move on that front, Sherman received orders to report to Halleck in St. Louis. When they had served together in the army in California during the time of the Mexican War, a dispute had arisen between them about the proper placement of some coast artillery positions, and they had deliberately not spoken to each other for years, including the later period when they had both been businessmen in San Francisco. Halleck greeted Sherman in a friendly way, but intended to give him only a perfunctory task that would greatly reduce the pressures he had been feeling. Halleck sent him to inspect regiments placed in quiet areas to the west, but made the mistake of authorizing Sherman to take actual command of those regiments if he felt it necessary.

  At Sedalia, Missouri, Sherman decided that General John Pope, the commander of the units he was inspecting, had his forces spread so wide that Confederate General Sterling Price, who was not in fact advancing, could fall upon and destroy them. That was a future possibility, but when Sherman assumed command and started ordering Pope’s regimental commanders to consolidate their positions, Pope fired off a strong protest to Halleck, who sent his department’s medical director out to judge Sherman’s condition. The doctor reported that Sherman was in a state “of such nervousness that he was unfit for command.” Halleck telegraphed Sherman to make no further movements of troops. At the same time, Ellen Sherman arrived in St. Louis, alone and terribly worried. She was now also concerned about the effect on her husband of additional newspaper reports criticizing him. Ellen went to consult Halleck, who had his adjutant send Sherman a message that his wife was at headquarters, and added that “General Halleck is satisfied, from reports of scouts received [in St. Louis] that no attack on Sedalia is intended. You will therefore return to this city, and report your observations on the condition of the troops you have examined.”

  When Sherman saw Ellen in St. Louis and learned that she intended to take him home for a rest, he at first resisted the idea, but when Halleck told him to take a twenty-day leave, Sherman recognized that a gently worded order had just been issued. As soon as Halleck saw Sherman off with the comforting observation to Ellen that a good workhorse needed an occasional rest in the barn, he expressed his real views in a message to McClellan in Washington. Halleck told the general in chief that officers in Sedalia had sent him word that Sherman was “completely ‘stampeded,’ and was ‘stampeding’ the entire army … I am satisfied that General S’s physical and mental condition is so completely broken by labor and care as to render him for the present entirely unfit for duty. Perhaps a few weeks’ rest will restore him … in his present condition it would be dangerous to give him a command here.” To his wife, Halleck wrote that Sherman had without doubt “acted insane.”

  At the time Sherman returned home with Ellen to Lancaster, in a state of near collapse, the public was still hearing much of Grant’s recent November 7 attack on Belmont, twenty miles down the Mississippi River from the headquarters at Cairo. Hailed in the Northern press as a victory, this attack was actually much less than that. Grant had no authority to bring on this battle, but this was not the Grant who sat indifferently in his family’s leather goods store the year before. Weeks earlier, he had written Julia that “I would like to have the honor of commanding the Army that makes the advance down the river, but unless I am able to do it soon cannot expect it. There are too many Generals who rank me that have commands inferior to mine for me to retain it.” In short, despite Frémont’s confidence in him, some other general senior to Grant might appear, entitled to lead the big offensive. Even the soon-to-be-relieved Frémont, who had suffered the unexpected loss of Lexington, Missouri, 180 miles west of St. Louis on the Missouri River, now wanted Grant to delay any thrust down the Mississippi until he recaptured that strategic mercantile center. The moment Grant heard of Frémont’s being relieved of command, he decided not to wait for any successor to Frémont to appear and, without orders to do so, launched his attack on the Confederate positions at Belmont.

  At first things went smoothly. While a Union column made a large demonstration on the eastern side of the river, advancing against the Confederate general Leonidas K. Polk, Grant, after keeping a force of three thousand men hidden aboard ships overnight near Belmont on the western bank, poured his troops ashore and smashed through the Confederate ranks that quickly assembled to oppose him.

  Grant, who had a horse shot from under him early in the bloody fighting, described his men’s performance in the initial Union assault, which forced the Confederates to retreat through their camp and hide out of sight along the steep riverbank, demoralized and ready to surrender: “Veterans could not have behaved better than they did up to the moment of reaching the rebel camp … The moment the camp was reached our men laid down their arms and commenced rummaging the tents to pick up trophies. Some of the higher officers were little better than the privates. They galloped about from one cluster of men to another and at every halt delivered a short eulogy upon the Union cause and the achievements of the command.” Even this account did not capture the festival atmosphere. Amid the looting of the enemy camp, the Stars and Stripes was raised on the enemy flagstaff, and at its base Union regimental bands played patriotic airs while soldiers cheered.

  The Confederates, still out of sight along the riverbank and ready to surrender a short time before, now counterattacked and surrounded Grant’s men. “The alarm ‘surrounded’ was given. The guns of the enemy and the report of being surrounded, brought the officers and men completely under control. At first some of the officers seemed to think that to be surrounded was to be placed in a helpless position, where there was nothing to do but surrender. But when I announced that we had cut our way in and could cut our way out just as well, it seemed a new revelation to officers and soldiers. They formed line rapidly and we started back to our boats.”

  The next half hour nearly ended Grant’s participation in the war. With most of his men back on their ships after a retreat in which a thousand Union muskets were lost or thrown aside, Grant rode around near the shore to see that no one was left behind. At one point, coming through a cornfield, “I saw a body of troops marching past me not fifty yards away. I looked at them for a moment and then turned my horse toward the river and started back, first in a walk, and when I thought myself concealed from the enemy, as fast as my horse would carry me.” The nearest Confederates had neither seen nor heard Grant, but from a different vantage point the Confederate general Polk, having crossed the river with reinforcements, spotted this lone Union officer. Polk said to his men, “There is a Yankee; you may try your marksmanship on him,”
but no one did.

  Grant’s problems did not end with that; reaching the steep riverbank, well above the water’s edge, he found that every man of his expedition had hastily embarked, and the vessels had all cast off from the shore. “I was the only man of the National army between the rebels and our transports. The captain of a boat that had just pushed out recognized me and ordered the engineer not to start the engine; he then had a plank run out for me. My horse seemed to take in the situation … [He] put his fore feet over the bank without hesitation or urging, and with his hind feet well under him, slid down the bank and trotted aboard the boat twelve or fifteen feet away, over a single gang plank.” Grant dismounted on the boat’s deck and went into a cabin where he found a sofa. Lying down for a minute’s rest, he then rose to go back out on deck. As he stepped away from the sofa, a Confederate musket ball came through the cabin wall and shattered the wooden frame of the sofa at the place where his head had just been.

  On the way back up the river to Cairo, Grant sat by himself, clearly wishing to be left alone. He later admitted to his departmental surgeon that at one point in the battle he lost control of his forces, and he already knew he had not won the Union victory so many wanted. If he had, his men would not have been steaming back up the river but would have remained in possession of the positions they attacked. The Union losses proved to be 607 killed, wounded, or captured; the Confederate loss was 642. As soon as Grant reached his headquarters, he began sending off reports that made this large-scale raid sound better than it was and estimated that “the enemies [sic] loss must have been two or three times as great as ours.” Then and later, he tried to clothe his attack as having been part of a larger strategic plan to forestall a Confederate advance; no one reading these first reports could have discerned that Grant acted entirely on his own. The following day, in his General Orders, Grant referred to himself and the battle in these words: “The General Comdg. this Military District, returns his thanks to the troops under his command … It has been his fortune, to have been in all the Battles fought in Mexico, by Genls. Scott and Taylor, save Buena Vista, and never saw one more hotly contested, or where troops behaved with more gallantry.”