Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  As Grant’s troops began this move, news came of the brilliant Confederate victory over the far larger Union forces under General Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville in Virginia. (Three weeks before Robert E. Lee’s victory over Hooker, Sherman had written Ellen, “I know Hooker well, and tremble to think of his handling 100,000 men in the presence of Lee.”) The news of the Confederate success was accompanied by the details of the death of Stonewall Jackson. Just after the supreme triumphal moment of the war’s other great military partnership, that between Lee and Jackson, Lee learned that Jackson, wounded by musket balls mistakenly fired at him by his own men, had been operated on and his left arm removed. In sending a chaplain to Jackson with a message of “affectionate regards” and wishes for a speedy recovery, Lee said to the clergyman, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.” Now Jackson was dead—a great blow to Confederate arms, but Lee’s tour de force at Chancellorsville left the North once again disheartened and thirsting for news of a success. (When Lincoln heard of the Union defeat, he exclaimed, “My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!”)

  Whatever the reverses in the East, Grant kept up his characteristic momentum in the West. Assisted by a bold diversionary cavalry raid through east Mississippi made by Colonel Benjamin Grierson and seventeen hundred men, in the next two weeks he brought off a military masterpiece. Marching 180 miles, he changed directions twice and fought five large-scale engagements against different forces whose total numbers were greater than his own. At the end of this sweep, his troops had killed, wounded, or taken prisoner more than seven thousand Confederates while suffering less than half that many casualties themselves. The results were impressive, and they demonstrated Grant’s mastery. As far back as the Battle of Belmont in November 1861, he had shown that he understood how to work with rivers and ships, but this was the first time that he had shown his ability to employ cavalry in the strategy of a campaign. Always, he kept the ball moving—on May 7, as Sherman began a march from Grand Gulf, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg, to join him, Grant wrote, “It’s unnecessary for me to remind you of the overwhelming importance of celerity in your movements.”

  Sherman understood the need to keep things going, but worried about traffic jams of wagons along Grant’s lines of supply, he wrote Grant on May 9 urging him to “stop all troops” until the wagons could bring up supplies for the marching men. Grant had other ideas: he decided to leave the supply wagons behind as he marched to attack and briefly hold Jackson.

  The manner in which Grant made this march again showed boldness and originality similar to that which enabled him to get his army past the guns of Vicksburg. Breaking with the traditional ideas of feeding an army from its existing supplies, Grant told Sherman that he intended to start off with “what rations of hard bread, coffee & salt we can and make the country furnish the balance.” They would live off the land, foraging for fruit, corn, and other vegetables, while slaughtering whatever chickens, sheep, hogs, and cattle they found, and let nothing slow them down. Sherman learned from what he was about to see.

  By now, Grant understood Halleck. Saying later of the general in chief in Washington that “I knew well that Halleck’s caution would lead him to disapprove this course” and hold him in place if he knew that he intended to cut loose from his slow-moving supply lines, Grant simply sent Halleck a brief telegram whose last words were, “You may not hear from me for several days.” By the time Grant’s next communication arrived in Washington, he had taken Jackson. His advance was so swift that Joseph E. Johnston, now in overall command of the Confederate forces in Mississippi, after some initial fighting on the outskirts quickly ordered the six thousand men defending the city to evacuate it, and the Union forces took it without further bloodshed.

  Sherman had come up quickly from Grand Gulf, and on the morning of May 14 his corps was one of the two that had swept away the last of the Confederate resistance. Jackson had fallen so swiftly that when Grant and Sherman rode into the city together during a driving rainstorm, many of the residents did not know anything had happened. The two men entered a textile mill where women workers were weaving cloth to make tents for the Confederate Army. None of the women looked up from working at their looms. After watching for a while, Grant finally told Sherman he thought they had done work enough. He later described how “the operatives were told they could leave and take with them what cloth they could carry.” As they left, Grant, knowing that he would soon give up the city to turn back toward Vicksburg, ordered Sherman to burn down the factory and to wreck everything else that could be useful to the Southern cause—the city’s other factories and machine shops, its foundries and railroad facilities, and the state arsenal.

  Grant’s army had two interesting supernumeraries riding with it: Charles Dana, and Grant’s son Fred, now thirteen, whom Julia had willingly left behind when she returned north after her visit. Dana and Fred, riding together, seemed to have an ability to get near the action without bothering anyone or being hurt. Grant remembered seeing them on the quick forced march to Jackson, “mounted on two enormous horses grown white with age.” Fred, wearing the sword his father never used, got into Jackson ahead of the main Union force and had to duck down a side street to avoid a company of Confederate foot soldiers who were hurrying out of the city as part of Joseph E. Johnston’s evacuation. A few minutes later he saw an advance party raise the Stars and Stripes above the statehouse and was there to greet his father when he and Sherman rode into the city at the head of the main force.

  Grant’s presence in Jackson made Johnston think he had a great opportunity. Assuming that if a good part of Grant’s army was in Jackson, it meant that there were supply lines stretched all along the more than forty miles back to the Mississippi River, Johnston ordered the general commanding Vicksburg to come out of the city and strike at those wagon trains. As Johnston saw it, any combination of advantages could be gained: supplies could be destroyed or captured, and if Grant headed back the way he had come—from the west—to protect the route under attack, Johnston could take reinforcements around to the north side of Vicksburg and add to its defenses.

  The Confederate leader who brought a large part of the defending force out in response to Johnston’s order was General John C. Pemberton, a West Pointer from Pennsylvania who, as a young lieutenant, had been involved in the same attack on Mexico City’s Garita San Cosme during which Grant had managed to place a mountain howitzer in a church’s belfry and lob cannonballs behind enemy lines. At least partly influenced by his beautiful Virginian wife and her family, Pemberton had chosen to fight for the South. Now, at the head of twenty-three thousand men, Pemberton started moving back and forth in the area south of Vicksburg, looking for convoys of wagons that did not exist because of Grant’s new policy of living off the land.

  By now, Grant was already moving back toward Vicksburg, not with convoys but with regiments of combat infantrymen. A spy gave Grant information about Pemberton’s movements; coming forward to reconnoiter as fast as he could, Grant saw that he had been given a chance to fight many of the defenders of Vicksburg in open country, rather than having to attack all of them when they were behind the strongest entrenchments either side had built during the war. His intuition, correct as it so often proved to be, was that there was an opportunity to fight Pemberton without having to fight Johnston at the same time. Grant ordered Sherman, still back in Jackson destroying that city’s warmaking capacity, to bring his corps to join him with the same “celerity” he had previously asked for, and prepared to strike the bewildered Pemberton.

  The result was the crucial battle of Champion’s Hill, eighteen miles east of Vicksburg. Starting at seven in the morning on May 16, with Sherman still on the way from Jackson, Grant moved his thirty thousand men into action, and the opposing armies began grappling with each other. By ten o’clock, Pemberton had his forces placed in good defensive positions atop an L-shaped ridgeline. At the corner of this forested higher ground was Pemberton’s defens
ive anchor, Champion’s Hill, 140 feet high. With the capricious and controversial Union general McClernand inexplicably failing to move his corps forward as ordered, and Sherman still not there despite a remarkably swift march, Grant fought the battle with the three divisions available to him on the right side of his line. After bloody attacks and counterattacks, at two-thirty in the afternoon, with McClernand still not putting pressure on the enemy and Sherman six miles away, the Confederates poured down the side of Champion’s Hill toward Grant’s men, threatening to scatter them.

  In a situation where everything seemed to be going against him, Grant was smoking a cigar while he quickly organized all his available artillery. He turned to one of his generals who was just now bringing some fresh troops up to the battle. Matter-of-factly, Grant said that he was ready to make his last stand then and there, and sensed that the enemy “is not in good plight himself. If we can go in there again and make a little showing, I think he will give way.” As he spoke, an enlisted man was struck by his calm, recalling that “I was close enough to see his features. Earnest they were, but signs of inward movement there were none.”

  Grant let loose a blast from his artillery, stopping the Confederate advance. He had only two depleted regiments ready to counterattack, totaling five hundred men, but he threw them in. The Seventeenth Iowa and Tenth Missouri charged forward against larger numbers, but in those few minutes they changed the tide of battle. The Confederates began an orderly withdrawal, with Grant finding and sending in more units to add to the momentum of his counterattack. By four in the afternoon, Grant’s men had Champion’s Hill, and Pemberton’s Confederates were headed back in the direction of Vicksburg.

  Unlike many battles, in which both sides knew in advance roughly where the fighting would take place, this action had materialized and been fought within twenty-four hours. Pemberton’s force had lost 3,840 men killed, wounded, or missing, in contrast with a Union loss of 2,441. The disparity in numbers was less important than the fact that Grant, deep in Confederate territory and opposing forces under the overall command of the greatly admired Joseph E. Johnston, was outmaneuvering the enemy at every turn and winning every engagement.

  Within hours of losing at Champion’s Hill, Pemberton fell back that night to the Big Black River, which was the last natural defensive position he could hold outside of Vicksburg. The next day, a spirited Union attack forced Pemberton’s men back across the Big Black River Bridge, eight miles east of Vicksburg, but the Confederates destroyed it before making the final march of their retreat into the fortress city. Pemberton had lost 1,751 men and twenty-seven cannon at the Big Black River, while Union losses were just 200.

  That night, Sherman was back with Grant’s main force. The immediate problem was to get across the river at the place where the Confederates had destroyed the bridge; once that was accomplished, the entrenchments of Vicksburg lay just eight miles ahead, and the job of taking the great bastion could at last begin. Grant came toward Sherman in the dark, and Sherman described the quietly dramatic time they had together:

  A pontoon-bridge was at once begun, finished by night, and the troops began the passage. After dark, the whole scene was lit up by fires of pitch-pine. General Grant joined me there, and we sat on a log, looking at the passage of those troops by the light of those fires; the bridge swayed to and fro under the passing feet, and made a fine war-picture.

  The essence of this moment was not that two increasingly important generals were watching their forces cross a river by night, but that two soldiers who had been under fire together were sitting on a log in friendly comradeship. Undoubtedly Sherman was talking and Grant was as usual politely listening, but the bond between them was that known only to those who become friends at a time when they know that any day may be their last.

  The next day, May 18, 1863, Sherman marched his corps around to the north of Vicksburg. Johnston had remained away from the city, and Grant achieved the objective he had sought for months: Union troops surrounded the enemy bastion on three sides, and on its west side, Porter’s warships controlled the waters of the Mississippi. In the final movement that sealed the ring around the city and its miles of defenses, Grant and Sherman rode among the advanced skirmishers at the front of one of their columns to secure the entrenchments atop Chickasaw Bluffs, which Sherman had been unable to take during the torrential rains five months earlier. Grant described what happened as they approached the hostile trenches: “These were still occupied by the enemy, or else the garrison from Haines’ [sic] Bluff had not all got past on their way to Vicksburg. At all events the bullets of the enemy flew thick and fast for a short time. In a few minutes Sherman had the pleasure of looking down from the spot coveted so much by him the December before where his command had lain so helpless for offensive action.”

  As they rode into the just-abandoned Confederate positions, all was quiet. Now the muddy slopes of the previous December were dry, and the swamps below them bore no resemblance to the boiling brown rapids that had tumbled Sherman’s men back when they tried to advance under fire. The cannon still in the enemy trenches had been spiked by the withdrawing defenders to make them useless.

  Sherman, usually talkative, remained silent for a while. It was he who had at one point urged Grant to take his army back to Memphis and strike out again for Vicksburg on a different route. Along with virtually everyone else, including Halleck and Stanton, Sherman had disapproved of Grant’s plan to move ships down the river under Vicksburg’s guns. When he had urged Grant to wait for his supply trains to catch up to the troops, Grant had cut loose, foraged off the country, and, movement upon movement, seized every opportunity to bring them to this day. Now he and Grant were sitting on their horses, atop strategically placed heights that looked toward the great Southern bastion that their army had surrounded. Inside Vicksburg were thirty thousand men who, no matter how well they defended their positions, could no longer get out to help other Confederate forces.

  Turning to Grant, Sherman spoke words that combined apology and admiration: “Until this moment I never thought your expedition a success. I never could see the end clearly until now. But this is a campaign; this is a success if we never take the town.”

  As for taking the town, Grant intended to do that as soon as he could. Pemberton was behind his fortifications with about thirty-three thousand soldiers, with another six thousand civilians of all ages and both sexes in the little city, but Grant knew that Pemberton was not the only enemy general he needed to think about. After his clashes with Grant, Joseph E. Johnston had decided not to come into Vicksburg but stay out in the open country to the east of Jackson for the time being, and, as Grant put it, “was in my rear, only fifty miles away, with an army not much inferior in number to the one I had with me, and I knew he was being reinforced. There was danger of his coming to the assistance of Pemberton.” Grant hoped to take Vicksburg at one stroke, so that he could be free to turn east again and face Johnston, if need be. Accordingly, at two in the afternoon on May 19, the day after he and Sherman were under fire together at Chickasaw Bluffs, Grant struck the Vicksburg defenses with all three of his corps: the one led by Sherman, the one belonging to the self-promoting McClernand, and the one under young Major General James B. McPherson, who had moved swiftly upward through the officer ranks and was a man both Grant and Sherman saw as a great future leader in the war.

  As they headed up the slopes of the Vicksburg defenses, Grant’s men ran into a wall of fire. Grant later minimized the extent of that repulse, saying that the overall attack “resulted in securing more advanced positions for all our troops,” but Sherman wrote Ellen a more accurate appraisal: “The heads of Colums [sic] are swept away as Chaff thrown from the hand on a windy day.” Echoing Grant’s concerns, he added, “We must work smartly as Joe Johnston is collecting the shattered forces, those we beat at Jackson and Champion’s Hill, and may get reinforcements from Bragg … and come pouncing down on our Rear.” Telling Ellen about one of her younger brothers, Captain C
harles Ewing, he said, “Charley was very conspicuous in the 1st assault, and brought off the colors of the Battalion which are now in front of my tent[,] the Staff 1/4 cut away by a ball that took with it a part of his finger.” Summing up the campaign to this moment, he said, “Grant[’]s movement was the most hazardous, but thus far the most successful of the war. He is entitled to all the Credit, for I would not have advised it.” As for his fellow corps commanders, “McPherson is a noble fellow, but McClernand a dirty dog.”

  Three days after this, on May 22, Grant once again threw all three of his corps at the slopes of Vicksburg. This time it was another of Ellen Sherman’s younger brothers, Brigadier General Hugh Ewing, who was in the thick of the action. Lying with his men in a ditch just down the slope below an enemy parapet from which they had fallen back under a withering fire, he handed a captain a new regimental battle flag and said, “I want this planted on the top.” The captain took the banner forward and was killed; the man’s younger brother managed to spike the flag’s staff into the earth at the crest and rolled back down the slope to safety. The area became a no-man’s-land; for hours, the Confederates kept trying to rush that battle flag at the edge of their defenses and capture it, while Ewing’s men exposed themselves to rise up and shoot them down. At dusk, when orders came to withdraw down the slope, a private volunteered to crawl forward and yank the flag out of the earth. He succeeded, and Ewing and his men came down the slope with their flag.

  It had been an afternoon of brave fighting on both sides, but of this effort, which cost him more than three thousand casualties, Grant said, “The attack was gallant, and portions of each of the three corps succeeded in getting up to the very parapets of the enemy and placing their battle flags upon them; but at no place were we able to enter.” As for an additional attack during the afternoon that Grant ordered in deference to repeated messages from McClernand that he was about to break through and needed additional support from Sherman on his right and McPherson on his left, Grant commented, “This last attack only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit whatever.”