Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  12

  PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT AND PERSONAL FRIENDSHIP: SAVANNAH FOR CHRISTMAS

  After Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in early September of 1864, the remainder of the autumn brought about the supreme test for Grant and Sherman’s personal and military relationship. Four months before, Sherman had received Grant’s approval for his bold campaign that had moved through Georgia for a hundred miles and resulted in his taking Atlanta. Now, in a letter that Horace Porter carried back to Grant, he sent word that he wanted to march on to the southeast from Atlanta, cut through Georgia for 225 more miles, and capture the great coastal port of Savannah.

  Sherman initially presented his plan in a confident, high-hearted way. In his letter of September 20 carried by Porter, he closed a long description of his proposed campaign with these words. “I admire your dogged perseverance and pluck more than ever. If you can whip Lee and I can march to the Atlantic I think Uncle Abe will give us a twenty days’ leave to see the young folks.”

  Despite the recent superb performance of Sherman and his army, Grant was doubtful that this would be the best use of Sherman’s forces, and Lincoln and Stanton were even more skeptical about the idea. As Grant and Sherman discussed the strategic situation in the South in a series of letters and telegrams in late September, Grant first proposed that Sherman move south to Mobile and crush the remaining Confederate strength on the Gulf Coast. Sherman soon persuaded him that, as a campaign in itself, the march to Savannah would be feasible, but Grant was worried about what Sherman would be leaving in his rear when he did that. If Sherman headed for the Atlantic Ocean, he would be marching away from John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, which would then be opposed only by the Union forces under General George Thomas. Grant feared that Hood, who had been beaten by Sherman, would in his turn be able to defeat Thomas. If that happened, no matter how much progress Sherman was making as he went in the opposite direction southeast of Atlanta, Hood could march his army north into areas that had for some time been under Union control. Hood could move up through Tennessee and Kentucky, and might even reach Cincinnati on the Ohio River. Leaving Hood’s army intact was a terrible risk, and one that need not be taken. With this frightening prospect in mind, Grant told Sherman that he could strike out for Savannah, but only after destroying Hood’s forces.

  Relying on Grant’s willingness to hear something more about all this, Sherman argued that Thomas was equal to any threat from Hood, and then he went beyond advocating the purely military aspects of his proposed march to the coast. This, he told Grant, was the chance to break the South’s will, its thus far remarkable fighting spirit. If he could march from Atlanta right to the sea, this demonstrated ability to move through the heart of the South on a path of the Union Army’s choosing would show everyone, North and South, that night was descending upon the Confederacy. Sherman wanted to convince every adult white Southerner that continuing to fight for the cause of secession would result in personal catastrophe and ruin. “Even without a battle,” Sherman now wrote Grant of the dramatic march he wanted to undertake, “the result operating on the minds of sensible men would produce fruits more than compensating for the expense, trouble, and risk.” In another letter to Grant, he unveiled his concept of waging war upon everything in his path, the countryside itself, in a harsher fashion than he had been able to do on the way to Atlanta, when he had to face Johnston’s troops at every turn. Speaking of Georgia, he said that “the utter destruction of its roads, houses and people will cripple their military resources.” He wanted to move ahead and keep going, letting his men and horses live off the land through which they passed, without worrying about what might happen if he had to guard supply lines to his rear: “By attempting to hold the roads, we will lose a thousand men monthly and gain no result.” He added this chilling reassurance to Grant: “I can make the march and make Georgia howl.”

  In his headquarters at City Point, Grant considered all of this, balancing his confidence in Sherman against his responsibility to avoid a disaster that could change the entire course of the war. Fighting Lee in Virginia was supremely hard, taxing the Union’s strength and resolve to its utmost. If Hood should get loose, bring his forces north on the inland side of the Appalachian Mountains, and open a new front well to the west of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, no one could foretell the calamities that might visit upon the Union.

  Halfheartedly at first, Grant began to make a great act of faith in his friend Sherman. He started in early October by writing him, “If there is any way of [your] getting at Hood’s army, I would prefer that, but I must trust to your own judgement.” A few days later, he added, “On reflection, I think better of your proposition.” Sherman realized that he still did not have the kind of support from Grant that he needed. He knew that only Grant could convince Lincoln and Stanton to agree with this hazardous strategy—on October 13, Stanton wired Grant that Lincoln was worried that “a misstep now by General Sherman might be fatal to his army”—and he sensed that Grant was still not ready to approve his plan. On November 1, with Hood already moving up toward Chattanooga to confront the Union army under George Thomas, Grant worriedly wrote Sherman, “Do you not think it would be advisable now that Hood has gone so far north, to entirely settle him before starting on your proposed campaign? With Hood’s army destroyed, you can go where you please with impunity.”

  Sherman responded to this on the same day with two telegrams. In the first, he assured Grant that Thomas would be able to stop Hood before he could do any significant damage. In the second, he told Grant that “if I turn back, the whole effect of my campaign will be lost … I am clearly of [the] opinion that the best results will follow my contemplated movement through Georgia.”

  Grant was reluctantly persuaded. Within hours, he gave his approval: “I do not really see that you can withdraw from where you arc to follow Hood, without giving up all that we have gained in territory. I say, then, go on as you propose.”

  The two friends had disagreed and set forth their positions. Grant, Sherman’s superior and a man capable of saying no to anything, had decided that Sherman had made his case and agreed to let him go forward, even though Lincoln and Stanton remained doubtful about the movement. Grant knew that the stakes were huge but acted in accordance with his conviction that if a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing wholeheartedly. Five days after giving his approval, when Sherman had his forces ready to head out of Atlanta toward Savannah, Grant wrote him, “Great good fortune attend you. I believe you will be eminently successful, and, at worst, can only make a march less fruitful of results than hoped for.”

  Sherman’s preparations for leaving Atlanta indicated that this march would be unlike anything seen before. He cut his own telegraph lines to the North, as well as the railroad links. For a month, no one, not Grant, not Halleck, not Stanton, was going to be able to find him. Sherman was moving out with sixty-two thousand men, to advance in four huge columns, on a front sixty miles wide; the Confederates in the path of this advance, most of them in understrength cavalry units, were not going to know just where this behemoth was going, let alone be able to stop it. This army was taking a twenty-day supply of food, including three thousand beef cattle they herded along, but as Sherman’s columns cut their wide swath through Georgia, they would have no supply lines behind them; in language that profoundly understated the harsh reality to come, Sherman’s orders were that “the army will forage liberally on the country during the march.”

  The night before the Union troops marched out of Atlanta, much of which had earlier been laid waste by the withdrawing Confederates, Sherman ordered the commercial and manufacturing sections of the city to be burned. When he rode from the city at seven o‘clock on the morning of November 16, he looked back and saw the results of his orders: “Behind us lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air, and hanging like a pall over the city.” As for his army, he remembered “the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south” and the troops w
ith their “gun-barrels glistening in the sun … marching steadily and rapidly, with a cheery look and swinging pace … Some band had, by accident, struck up the anthem of ‘John Brown’s soul goes marching on’; the men caught up the strain, and never before or since have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ done with more spirit.”

  In a diary entry, a sergeant from Iowa captured the esprit de corps of Sherman’s men, many of whom had been fighting for more than two years under the man most of them now called “Uncle Billy”: “Started this morning early for the Southern coast, somewhere, and we don’t care, as long as Sherman is leading us.” Other men were less confident. Captain Orlando Poe of Sherman’s staff, an engineer officer who was teaching the troops how to tear up Confederate rail lines, looked at this army as it headed into thousands of square miles of the enemy heartland, hoping to reach the coast, and wrote his wife that “this may be the last letter that you ever get from me.” As for Sherman’s own frame of mind, he felt that he and Grant were working in complementary fashion, toward a common end. He was in command of the largest force acting as light infantry the world had seen, an enormous flying column with which he intended to destroy both the enemy’s rear area and its will to fight, while Grant, 450 miles to the northeast, continued to bleed Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to death in a form of trench warfare at Petersburg. (Lincoln put it this way: “Grant has the bear by the hind leg while Sherman takes off its hide.”) Adding to the pressure being put on Confederate military resources in Grant’s overall Northern theater of operations, Grant’s cavalry chief Philip Sheridan had defeated Confederate general Jubal Early’s outnumbered forces in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

  For thirty-one days, no one in Washington knew just where Sherman and his army were or how they were faring. When Sherman’s brother Senator John Sherman saw Lincoln one day, he asked if there had been any communications from his brother in Georgia. The recently re-elected president answered, “Oh, no, we have heard nothing from him. We know what hole he went in, but we don’t know what hole he will come out of.”

  If Grant was angry about this lack of information, there is no record of it. When Lincoln told Grant that he was concerned about what might be happening to Sherman and his army, Grant answered that he was confident that Sherman would reappear “on Salt Water some place.” Grant’s biggest worry was the one he had discussed with Sherman weeks before; as he had expected, Hood was marching his Confederate columns north into Tennessee, and it remained to be seen whether George Thomas could stop him from going on up through Kentucky to Cincinnati. At first, it seemed that Grant had been all too right and should have insisted that Sherman “settle” Hood’s forces before heading from Atlanta to the coast. For many weeks, Thomas repeatedly delayed executing Grant’s orders to attack Hood promptly, citing such reasons as bad weather, which finally brought him a pointed response in a telegram from Grant sent on December 11: “If you delay attack longer the mortifying spectacle will be witnessed of a Rebel army moving for the Ohio River and you will be forced to act, accepting such weather as you find. Let there be no further delay.” Four days later, Thomas attacked Hood’s twenty-three thousand men at Nashville with his own force of forty-nine thousand in a two-day battle, and, as Sherman had predicted, decisively defeated Hood’s army and removed the threat to Tennessee and Kentucky.

  On his march, Sherman set the astonishing initial goal of moving his sixty-two thousand men fifteen miles a day and kept to that for a week. No ordinary men could have done this. A soldier from Illinois wrote that his comrades “had been in the service from the beginning and what they did not know about campaigning was not worth inquiring into. Each soldier was practically a picked man. Such was the ratio of casualties that he may be said to be the sole survivor of four men who had set out from Cairo [Illinois] in 1861; all but he having succumbed to disease or death.” Sherman’s aide Major Henry Hitchcock expanded on this theme of confident pride: “It is a magnificent army of veterans, brimful of spirit and deviltry, literally ‘spoiling for a fight,’ neither knowing nor caring where they are going, blindly devoted to … the ‘old man[,]’ in splendid condition, weeded of all sick, etc., and every man fully understanding that there is no return, no safety but in fighting through.”

  The “old man” watched over his army like a nervous mother hen, moving around to check his different units at night and “prowling around a camp fire in red flannel drawers and a worn dressing gown.” He was also seen, like his men, swimming naked in a river to get himself clean, and on the march he sometimes hiked along beside the enlisted men, talking with them as equals. A major new to Sherman’s command described him:

  General Sherman is the most American looking man I ever saw, tall and lank, not very erect, with hair like thatch, which he rubs up with his hands, a rusty beard trimmed close, a wrinkled face, sharp prominent red nose, small bright eyes, coarse red hands; a black felt hat slouched over his eyes … field officer[’]s coat with high collar and no shoulder stripes, muddy trousers and one spur. He carries his hands in his pockets, is very awkward in his gait and motions, talks continually and with rapidity.

  As the army advanced, the men acting as foragers quickly established themselves as an odd elite. Each morning some thirty or forty men from each brigade set out, often on captured horses or mules and frequently using captured carts, some men moving ahead of their massive column and others moving along the flanks. Known as “bummers,” their job was to pass through the countryside, taking anything useful that they found on farms or plantations—corn for men and horses, vegetables, livestock—and bring it to the roads on which the main forces were passing, where the regular supply wagons would take charge of what they had stripped from the land. Their skills at finding useful things impressed the blacks on the farms and plantations: one just-freed slave said, “Yankee soldiers have noses like hounds. Massa hid his horses way out dar in de swamp. Some soldiers come along. All at once dey held up dere noses and sniffed and sniffed, and stopped still and sniffed, and turned into de swamp and held up dere noses and sniffed, and … went right straight to where de horses was tied in de swamp.”

  A number of foragers frequently acted for their own profit, sometimes harshly, doing things such as choking an aged plantation owner until he told the soldiers where the family’s silver dinner service was concealed. In addition to their foraging, the bummers acted as scouts, directing larger units forward to attack Confederate patrols they had spotted. Occasionally they were able to team up among themselves and rout small parties of enemy horsemen. Both the bummers and the marching rank and file picked up various animals as pets and brought them along: in addition to dogs and cats, there were lambs, raccoons, and hundreds of gamecocks, the last pitted against one another in nightly cockfights.

  Other men, including freed slaves who were being paid for their labor, pried lengths of rails loose from railroad ties, heated them in the middle until they were orange in color and soft enough to be twisted, and left them wrapped around trees; these became known as “Sherman Neckties.” Occasionally these workers bent the rails into the letters “U” and “S” and placed the “U S” on a hillside for the Southern populace to contemplate. They also became so skilled at rebuilding destroyed bridges and clearing enemy obstructions on the roads that when it became necessary to open closed tunnels, they did it so swiftly that the Confederates began to say that the Yankees had brought their own spare tunnels with them. As for the impression Sherman’s advancing columns made on the slaves who became free as they passed, one of them joyously shouted, “Dar’s millions of ’em—millions! Is dere anybody left up north?”

  The original orders were to restrict the foraging to supplies needed by the army and to avoid entering Southern homes, but a student of the campaign observed that “the distinction between forage and pillage is easily obscured.” In addition to the bummers, rank-and-file soldiers began entering the houses of Southern civilians and stealing whatever objects struck their fancy. In one town
, a Union officer saw “soldiers emerging from doorways and backyards, bearing quilts, plates, poultry, and pigs.” This kind of looting led to confrontations with enraged Southern women, most of whom equaled and often surpassed the most ardent Confederate soldiers in their detestation of the Northerners coming into their neighborhoods. Few among the Union soldiers, to whom one long red road through Georgia looked like another, comprehended the sense of emotional violation, existing quite apart from the issues of secession and slavery, felt by Southerners who saw only an invasion of their land. A man from Iowa was met by a Georgia woman on the porch of her house, and she launched into him: “My husband is a captain in the Confederate army and I’m proud of it. You can rob us, you can take everything we have. I can live on pine straw the rest of my days. You can kill us, but you can’t conquer us.”

  Some of these encounters, including situations in which Union soldiers were not engaged in theft, turned into interesting debates. A major from Illinois found an old woman, the mistress of a plantation, lecturing him that the Northern policy of freeing the slaves would lead to what she called “Amalgamation”—racially mixed children. “The old lady forced it on me,” he recalled, “and as there were three or four very light colored mulatto children running around the house, they furnished me an admirable weapon—She didn’t explain to my entire satisfaction how her slaves came to be so much whiter than African Slaves are usually supposed to be.” When Southern women stared disdainfully at them, one of Sherman’s soldiers wrote, “The boys would stir up the female Rebels, just to hear them talk, like the boys at the menagerie stir up the lions just to hear them roar.”

  Other Union soldiers had more amiable experiences. Brief as some of these meetings with Southern girls were, they made an impression. On the same day, a captain from Ohio met a Miss Glenn, who he noted in his diary was “well dressed polite and agreeable … pretty foot and ankle, beautiful complexion,” and later encountered two sisters, “one talkative, rebellious but sensible in every other way, both good looking and one finely developed bust, luscious.”