Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  Johnston’s decisive repulse of Sherman’s attacks on Kennesaw Mountain in (Georgia underscored the fact that Sherman was better at executing such sweeping moves as his March to the Sea than at fighting pitched battles like this, (Rights owned by the University of Mississippi Press)

  Sherman’s bold and brutal March to the Sea, moving from Atlanta to the coast, resulted in the capture of Savannah on December 21. 1864. Sherman wired Lincoln. “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.” (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  A representation of the historic meeting at City Point, Virginia, on March 28, 1865, as Lincoln met with Grant and Sherman to Discuss the closing phases of the war. LEFT TO RIGHT: Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, Admiral Porter. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  General Robert K. Lee. This photograph was taken by Mathew Brady a few days after Lee’s return to his house in Richmond, Virginia, after surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Lincoln’s able, irascible, dictatorial secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  A contemporary drawing of the two-day Grand Review, held in Washington in May of 1865. It was the (Union’s farewell to its victorious army. With Grant and Sherman on the reviewing stand, 135,000 men, most of them soon to he demobilized, marehed past wildly cheering crowds, Rights owned In the of Mississipi Press)

  When Grant understood what Sherman wanted to do, he gave his approval for the campaign to march into the heart of the South, headed for Atlanta, which was a vital center for manufacturing and the storage of supplies, as well as being a major railroad hub. Whether Sherman hoped even then to extend this immense movement another 225 miles from Atlanta to Savannah, to complete his epic March to the Sea, is not clear. What is abundantly clear is that, in good part due to his association with Grant, the Sherman of 1864 bore no resemblance to the man who in 1861 had begged Lincoln not to make him the departmental commander in Kentucky but to keep him always as a second in command, serving directly under a superior officer. Even to move his headquarters down to Chattanooga from Nashville meant that Sherman had to leave his most secure, heavily supplied base 110 miles to his rear, connected to his forward headquarters by a single-gauge railroad track that could be struck by Confederate cavalry raids, but he was not looking to his rear. Sherman needed thirteen hundred tons of supplies a day for his hundred thousand men and hoped that the railroad would bring forward as much of that as possible, but he also intended to live off the land, in the heart of the Confederacy, and travel light as he went. (Sherman underscored his intention to carry a minimum of supplies and equipment when he wrote, “My entire headquarters transportation is one wagon for myself, aides, officers, orderlies, and clerks.”)

  As spring came to Washington, Grant first had a different kind of battle to fight. In his effort to add to the combat strength of the Union Army, he was sending to the front thousands of soldiers who had been assigned to garrison duty or to guard supply lines. Relying on the traditional civilian control of the military, Stanton told Grant that he was pulling too many men out of the defenses of Washington and ordered it stopped. When Grant politely replied, “I think I rank you in this matter, Mister Secretary,” Stanton answered, “We shall have to see Mister Lincoln about that,” and they walked from the War Department building over to the White House, which was next door.

  While Lincoln listened, with Grant remaining silent, Stanton set forth the matter as he saw it. When he finished, Lincoln smiled and said, “You and I, Mr. Stanton, have been trying to boss this job, and we have not succeeded very well with it. We have sent across the mountains for Mr. Grant, as Mrs. Grant calls him, to relieve us, and I think we had better leave him alone to do as he pleases.”

  As Grant readied himself to fight Lee, some of the officers of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia made disparaging remarks about him. Now, they said, Grant would find out what real opposition was. Julia Grant’s cousin James Longstreet, back with Lee’s army in Virginia after seeing how Grant had turned around the situation after Chickamauga by the victory at Chattanooga, warned them not to underestimate his old West Point classmate and friend, whom he had seen in constant fiery action when they fought in the same regiment during the Mexican War. He said to one officer, “We must make up our minds to get into line of battle and stay there, for that man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of this war.”

  Sherman was later to speak of the way the “magnetic telegraph” enabled him to keep in constant touch with Grant, despite their geographical separation. At this moment, he was sending daily reports to Halleck’s office in Washington, and Halleck was relaying what was relevant to Grant’s headquarters in the field. By the beginning of May, the only question was whether it would be Grant or Sherman, each now in his new role, who first engaged the enemy. As it happened, Grant was sitting in his tent near Germanna Ford on the Rapidan River in Virginia on the evening of May 4, smoking a cigar and talking with Meade as they prepared for the first day’s fighting in what became known as the Battle of the Wilderness, when he received by telegraph from Washington the news that Sherman was advancing from Chattanooga into Georgia.

  Sherman’s march toward Atlanta began with several days of maneuvering toward Resaca, Georgia, but on his own front in Virginia, Grant ran straight into some of the war’s fiercest and most constant fighting. The two opposing leaders, Grant and Lee, were certainly different. Lee was a strikingly handsome, courtly Virginia aristocrat, while Grant was an ordinary-looking man who was once described as having a genius for vanishing into a crowd. Nonetheless, when Adam Badeau said of Grant, “In battle, the sphinx awoke,” he was paralleling a comment by a Southerner who observed that General Lee on the battlefield was a different man from General Lee in the drawing room, a remark echoed by Confederate general Henry Heth, who said that he found Lee to be “the most belligerent man in the Confederate Army.” There was no doubt that Grant and Lee were the two most aggressive generals to fight in the war; in this first clash it was Grant who crossed the Rapidan in an effort to move around Lee’s right flank and get between him and Richmond, and it was Lee who saw what he was trying to do and threw everything he had straight at him.

  For two of the bloodiest days of the war, May 5 and 6, the armies of these two determined opponents fought each other in the tangled underbrush, fallen trees, and marshes of Virginia’s Wilderness, a rectangular area of sixty-four square miles. Before it was over, Grant had poured into the battle 101,895 foot soldiers and artillerymen, while Lee committed an estimated 61,000. A combination of gunsmoke and the smoke of fires started by battlefield explosions created such thick clouds that some commanders, seeing only murky thickets and losing all sense of direction, had to move their units by looking at pocket compasses. Captain Horace Porter of Grant’s staff described the inferno. “At times the wind howled through the tree-tops, mingling its moan with the groans of the dying, and heavy branches were cut off by the fire of artillery, and fell crashing upon the heads of the men, adding a new terror to battle. Forest fires raged; ammunition-trains exploded; the dead were roasted in the conflagration; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along, with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair, to escape the ravages of the flames, and every bush seemed hung with shreds of blood-stained clothing.” In an almost perfect metaphor of war, correspondent Charles A. Page of the New York Tribune described watching stretcher-bearers carrying wounded men to the rear and then seeing those stretcher-bearers rush back to the front, using the same stretchers to carry forward boxes of cartridges to maintain the supply of ammunition.

  At the end of his first day fighting Lee, Grant threw himself down in despair on the cot in his tent: one of his staff, Captain Charles Francis Adams Jr., a member of the distinguished Massachusetts family that included two presidents, said, “I never saw a man so agitated in my life.” Other accounts describe him a
s being composed, but in any case on the next day Grant was right back in the thick of battle. A Northern soldier described the kind of combat he experienced: “We fought them with bayonet as well as bullet. Up through the trees rolled dense clouds of battle smoke, circling about the pines and mingling with the flowering dogwoods. Each man fought on his own, grimly and desperately.” The generals on both sides were right at the front. On the second day, Union General Alexander Hays of Pennsylvania was killed, as was Confederate General Micah Jenkins of South Carolina, and Union General James S. Wadsworth of New York was mortally wounded. In a nearly fatal repetition of what happened to Stonewall Jackson the year before, Confederate soldiers mistakenly fired at Longstreet, seriously wounding him in the throat and shoulder.

  There were examples of how Lee, fighting Union forces that in this case outnumbered his men nearly two to one, could inspire the martial feats of the Army of Northern Virginia. Soon after sunrise on this same singularly bloody second day in the Wilderness, Lee found himself almost alone, mounted on his horse Traveller, as veteran Confederate regiments streamed past him, retreating in the face of a powerful federal assault that was about to capture a Confederate artillery battalion. The advancing blue lines were only two hundred yards away. Then, out of the drifting smoke through which Southern regiments were retreating, twenty men in ragged clothes ran forward with their muskets at the ready, entering the field at the end of a long forced march to reach the front.

  “Who are you, my boys?” Lee shouted to these scarecrows, as scores more dashed up to form a line of battle.

  “Texas boys!” they yelled. In a few more seconds, there were hundreds of them.

  “Hurrah for Texas!” Lee stood in his stirrups and waved his hat. “Hurrah for Texas!” He rode to the left of the line, and the Texans realized that he intended to lead the counterattack, right at the blue lines.

  “Go back, General Lee!” they shouted. “Go back! We won’t go on unless you go back!”

  “Texans always move them!” Lee roared, about to spur Traveller right into the enemy. It was only when the combination of a sergeant, a colonel of his staff, and Brigadier General John Gregg of the Texans closed in on him, the sergeant grabbing Traveller’s reins and Gregg maneuvering his horse to block Traveller from plunging forward, that Lee was led back from the very front, still waving his hat and cheering on the Texans as they swept forward to save the Confederate artillery positions.

  The men of the Army of the Potomac were learning about their new leader, Grant. Even before the horrible struggle in the Wilderness, with Grant ordering troops forward under conditions in which the Army of the Potomac’s previous commanders would have stopped them where they were, a veteran soldier from Wisconsin saw him for the first time and said, “He looks as if he meant it.” At one point on the morning of the terrible second day, when it appeared as if Lee’s forces might overrun Grant’s headquarters, an officer came up to Grant, who was standing on a knoll smoking a cigar as he studied the battlefield. “General,” the man said, “wouldn’t it be prudent to move headquarters to the other side of the Germanna road until the result of the present attack is known?” According to Horace Porter, “The general replied very quietly, between puffs of his cigar, ‘It strikes me it would be better to order up some artillery and defend the present location.’”

  That evening, Porter saw his chief in yet another revealing situation. At sundown, the fighting had seemed to come to an end. Then, with darkness, a roar of gunfire began, as Lee struck in a surprise attack. As Porter recalled, “Aides came galloping in from the right, laboring under intense excitement, talking wildly, and giving the most exaggerated reports of the engagement.” One of the generals of the Army of the Potomac—Porter never did say who it was—appeared out of the night, “speaking rapidly and laboring under considerable excitement.” Telling Grant that he knew from experience what Lee was going to do next, he said that Lee was about to put his entire army behind Grant’s and cut them off from their communications and supplies. Grant “rose to his feet, took his cigar out of his mouth, turned to the officer, and replied, with a degree of animation he seldom manifested: ‘Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do. Some of you always think he is about to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.’”

  The following morning, it appeared that Lee’s surprise attack had resulted in the capture of eight hundred Union soldiers, but this was a small part of the total picture: the losses on both sides during the two-day battle were frightful. Of the 100,000 troops that Grant had thrown into the Wilderness, 17,666 were either killed, wounded, or missing, while Lee, beginning with 60,000, lost about 11,000 of his gallant, outnumbered men. Except for some minor skirmishing on this third morning, the struggle in the Wilderness was over. Both sides had lost 18 percent of the men they sent into the battle, but it was easier for Grant, who smoked twenty cigars during the second day, to replenish his brave ranks. Of itself, the Wilderness was not an area worth fighting for; it was simply an obstacle between the federal troops and Richmond, an objective the Army of the Potomac had been fitfully trying to reach for three years. Grant’s army now possessed the smoldering battlefield; Lee had withdrawn into defensive positions some distance away.

  In the confused aftermath of the terrible carnage, the men of the Army of the Potomac thought they might well have been beaten: a soldier from Massachusetts recalled: “Most of us thought it was another Chancellorsville.” Two correspondents, one from The New York Herald and one from the Tribune, certainly thought so, and that conviction was reinforced by the fact that Grant refused to let the journalists accompanying his army use the telegraph to send out their stories of the fighting.

  For the Union troops, who had seen nearly one in five of their comrades become casualties in just two days, their past experiences with inadequate leadership led them to feel certain that, whatever the outcome of a specific battle, their sacrifices would probably come to naught. They would either be held in place, handing the initiative back to Lee, or they would be pulled back toward Washington—in this instance that would involve marching back across the Rapidan—to recuperate and reorganize. That is what their former commanders had done. McClellan, failing to exploit his advantages in the Peninsular Campaign of March to July of 1862, had been ordered by the then new general in chief Halleck to withdraw and reinforce Major General John Pope in the failed Second Bull Run campaign, also known as Second Manassas, which had ended with withdrawal into the defenses of Washington at the beginning of September; McClellan, once again commanding the Army of the Potomac after Pope’s failure, failed to move forward against the withdrawing Lee after the terrible Battle of Antietam with its action at Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862, in which on the war’s single bloodiest day Union forces had twelve thousand casualties in all categories, with the Confederates losing nearly fourteen thousand. When this failure to exploit Lee’s retreat ended McClellan’s career, he was relieved by Ambrose Burnside, whose Fredericksburg Campaign of November-December 1862 ended with the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, in which Burnside lost 12,700 men while Lee lost 5,300. Joseph Hooker then commanded the Army of the Potomac from January 1863, being relieved in late June after Lee’s brilliant victory over him at Chancellorsville at the beginnng of May, a defeat that resulted in yet one more withdrawal to the north, this one being across the Rapahannock on May 6.

  With the appointment of General George Gordon Meade as its new commander only two days before the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, the Army of the Potomac’s fortunes had changed, but even after that great victory for the Union, Meade was so slow in trying to follow Lee’s retreating Army of Northern Virginia that Lincoln had been greatly disappointed in his failure to exploit his success.

  Thus, the frustrations of the long-suffering rank and file of the Army of the Potomac had begun in 1862: in
one week of that summer, from June 25 through July 1, during the Seven Days’ Battles of the Peninsular Campaign, Lee had beaten McClellan at Oak Grove, Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, White Oak Swamp, and Malvern Hill. Now, two years later, after the ghastly fighting in the Wilderness, on the afternoon of May 7 the orders came down to sling their packs and be ready to move out. The troops had no doubt that once again they had fought and bled on the soil of Virginia, only to march away from a battlefield and head back in the direction from which they had so often come. When the first column reached the crossroads where they would turn right to head back over the Rapidan, their officers on horseback turned to the left—south, toward the enemy, toward Lee, toward Richmond. Excited comments went up and down the line. Regiment after regiment turned left; there was no mistake. Grant was not giving up an inch; he was taking them south. “Our spirits rose,” a soldier from Pennsylvania said. “We marched free, and men began to sing.”

  Dusk came; no one stopped. Everything was moving south: the artillery, the cavalry, the engineers who would build bridges, the ambulances, the wagons carrying food and supplies. Around nine in the evening, the word was passed down from the rear, “Give way to the right. Give way to the right.” Something was coming down the road, heading south, heading to the very front, and must be let through.

  Ulysses S. Grant came down the road on his big bay horse Cincinnati, accompanied by Meade and their staffs. Horace Porter described what happened when the men saw Grant coming.

  Wild cheers echoed through the forest. Men swung their hats, tossed up their arms [muskets], and pressed forward to within touch of their chief, clapping their hands, and speaking to him with the familiarity of comrades. Pine-knots and leaves were set on fire, and lighted the scene with their weird flickering glare. The night march had become a triumphal procession.