Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  It was in Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia, that things became uglier. Reaching there on the ninth day of their march, the troops saw for the first time some Union soldiers who had escaped from the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. Starved and sick, with what a colonel from Indiana described as a “wild-animal stare” as they spoke, these living skeletons told tales of their mistreatment that quickly spread through Sherman’s ranks. When a Southern woman walked up to a federal soldier on the street in Milledgeville and spat on him, he and his comrades did not touch her but burnt down her house. At the same time, the men became aware of an order from Jefferson Davis to all Confederate officers in Georgia, exhorting them to make “every effort” to obstruct the Union advance, these measures to include “planting sub-terra shells [land mines].” (Sherman’s response to this was, when his men suspected land mines had been laid in front of them, to have Confederate prisoners take the risks of digging them up.) On a lighter note, a group of troops spontaneously conducted a mock session in the state’s legislative chamber in Milledgeville, voting Georgia out of the Confederacy and back into the Union, and named a committee to punish Jefferson Davis, if he were captured, by kicking him repeatedly from behind.

  The army that left Milledgeville was required to move only ten, instead of fifteen, miles a day. One reason for this was the intensification of the manner in which the countryside was being laid waste. Foragers who had begun by rounding up chickens and pigs now decided that wrecking farm equipment and burning barns was in keeping with the idea of destroying the South’s ability to raise food. Although many houses were left standing, the next step went from torching a farmer’s barn to setting fire to his house, and a lot of bummers took the added time to do that. The headquarters companies of Sherman’s major units had brought with them flares that could be shot aloft at night, so that each of the four columns would know where the others were. This was no longer necessary: the location of each advancing corps could be seen by the flames along its route.

  There were exceedingly few cases of rape, murder, or beating of civilians, but the original standards of behavior for the march largely vanished. Sherman later wrote: “I know that in the beginning, I too had the old West Point notion that pillage was a capital crime, and punished it by shooting.” In that view, confiscating crops and all kinds of food, as well as animals and equipment, was acceptable as long as it was for the good of the army as a whole, but a man was severely punished for stealing for his own profit. As the campaign progressed, this distinction vanished, and Sherman said that he and his officers “ceased to quarrel with our own men about such minor things, leaving minor depredations to be charged up to the rebels who had forced us into the war, and deserved all they got and more.”

  The troops became particularly aggressive when they came to the handsome houses of those who were both slaveholders and the owners of objects they might steal. The mistress of a plantation described the scene as Union cavalrymen entered her house and plundered it. “It is impossible to imagine the horrible uproar and stampede through the house, all of them yelling, cursing, quarreling, and running from one room to another in wild confusion. Such was their blasphemous language, their horrible countenances and appearance … their mouths filled with curses and bitterness and lies.”

  The thousands of freed blacks, most of them determined to stay right with the Union troops they hailed as their liberators, added liveliness and confusion to the daily scenes of the march. The black men walked beside the troops, happy to carry their muskets. At night they cooked spicy dishes and danced around the campfires. Many black girls gave themselves freely to the young troops, and one man noted that “I have seen officers themselves very attentive to the wants of pretty octoroon girls, and provide them with horses to ride.”

  It was not all levity and licentiousness. An officer from Indiana wrote his wife:

  It was very touching to see the vast number of colored women following us with babies in their arms, and little ones … clinging to their tattered skirts. One poor creature, while nobody was looking, hid two boys, five years old, in a wagon, intending, I suppose, that they should see the land of freedom if she couldn’t. Babies tumbled from the back of mules to which they had been told to cling, and were drowned in the swamps, while mothers stood by the roadside crying for their lost children and doubting whether to continue with the advancing army.

  Ironically, Sherman, who was being hailed by the freed blacks as their savior, still saw them as greatly inferior beings and remained opposed to enlisting black men as soldiers. At the moment, he was out of communication with anyone in the North, but he would soon write to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, “The negro should be a free race, but not put on any equality with the Whites,” and to an old friend in St. Louis he said in a letter, “A nigger as such is a most excellent fellow, but he is not fit to marry, to associate, or vote with me, or mine.” Sherman was far more interested in military victory than in ending slavery, and he worried about how he could continue to feed the increasing masses of freed slaves who insisted on accompanying his troops on their way to the sea. Nonetheless, he had moments of revulsion at things he saw. Coming to a plantation near Milledgeville owned by the Confederate general Howell Cobb, who had been President Buchanan’s secretary of the treasury before the war, Sherman inspected the wretched slave quarters and was struck by the pitiful condition of the slaves who greeted him as their hero. He ordered his men to “spare nothing,” and the destruction began.

  Amid all this, Confederate bullets were still killing a number of Union soldiers as they moved through the countryside. Because this army had no rear bases with hospitals, the wounded had to be carried along day after day in wagons, with no hope of receiving full medical attention until the march ended. Some Union troops were captured in surprise Confederate forays. Two days after leaving Milledgeville, a major in an Illinois regiment wrote in his diary of the determined, punitive frame of mind that “has settled down over the army in its bivouac tonight. We have gone so far now in our triumphant march that we will not balk. It is a question of life and death for us, and the considerations of mercy and humanity must bow before the inexorable demands of self preservation.”

  For those in Sherman’s army who thought about justifying it all, some were shocked when they saw that the backs of some freed slaves were a mass of scars from whippings, but for many the most comforting idea was that relatively bloodless violence, right then, could save much more bloodshed on both sides later. A soldier from Wisconsin said in a letter to his parents, “Anything and Everything, if it will help us and weaken them, is my motto,” but another enlisted man probably got closest to the soldiers’ deepest feelings when he wrote: “The prevailing feeling among the men was a desire to finish the job; they wanted to get back home.”

  On December 10, Sherman neared Savannah. He had moved sixty-two thousand men through 225 miles of enemy territory in twenty-four days. His troops could smell but not see the ocean, because Savannah’s defender, General William J. Hardee, had flooded the rice fields along the coast, leaving just five causeways running into the city. Sherman decided not to attack Savannah along these exposed perilous approaches but to begin a siege and see if the enemy garrison of some eighteen thousand men would surrender.

  Since no one in the North knew just where Sherman and his army were, he could not yet make contact with the federal ships that he was sure were offshore. His men would soon need more to eat, and for the moment they could not get any of the supplies of all kinds that he had been promised would be aboard those vessels.

  Fort McAllister, a lightly garrisoned post on the south bank of the Ogeechee River, below the city, protected the city’s access to the Atlantic, and its twenty-three cannon denied any invading fleet the opportunity to come close enough to bombard it. Although keeping to his decision not to launch a major attack at Savannah itself, within three days Sherman had one of his divisions ready to storm this fort. Just before sunset on December 13
, with his selected division about to make its attack, Sherman was watching from the roof of a rice mill beside the river. A Union steamship came into view down the river and used its signal flags to ask Sherman’s staff, “Is Fort McAllister taken?” Sherman signaled in response, “Not yet, but it will be in a minute.” Fifteen minutes later, after a tactically perfect assault that cost eleven men killed and eighty wounded, the fort surrendered.

  Even after this loss of one of the keys to the city’s defenses, Hardee did not give up. Sherman, having brought sixty-two thousand men all the way from Atlanta with a total of only seven hundred killed, wounded, and missing, wanted to spare his men’s lives if he could and decided for the moment not to make further attacks but continue the siege in hopes of seeing a white flag run up over Savannah. (Either because his troops could not get there, or because he hoped Hardee would avoid a battle by withdrawing his troops from the city, Sherman left open a route of retreat to the north along one of the causeways that ran through the flooded rice fields.)

  Now, with easy access to the many ships that had been waiting for him offshore, Sherman was able to get food and supplies for his army, and from an inland direction he also received the first communications from the North that he had seen in a month. He learned that his son Charles, born on June 11, had died on December 4, making this the second child that he and Ellen had lost in fourteen months. Sherman appears not to have written Ellen immediately, and when he did, his words about this infant he had never seen sounded distant, stoical:

  The last letter I got from you … made me fear for our baby, but I had hoped that the little fellow would weather the ailment, but it seems that he too, is lost to us, and gone to join Willy. I cannot say that I grieve for him as I did for Willy, for he was but a mere ideal, whereas Willy was incorporated with us … But amid the Scenes of death and desolation through which I daily pass I cannot but become callous to death[.] It is so common, so familiar that it no longer impresses me as of old—You on the contrary surrounded alone by life & youth cannot take things so philosophically but are stayed by the Religious faith of a better and higher life elsewhere[.] I should like to have seen the baby of which all spoke so well, but I seem doomed to pass my life away so even my children will be strangers.

  At the same time, Sherman received a disquieting letter from Grant in Virginia, who, once again in the spirit of “keep the ball moving,” wanted him to waste no more time in massively besieging or attacking Savannah, which was now effectively cut off from aiding the Confederate cause. Just throw a screen of men around the city and build up a base anywhere near there on the coast, Grant told him, and as soon as we get enough transport ships down to you, embark your army and “come here by water with all dispatch.” He explained that he wanted to bring Sherman’s army straight to Virginia because “I have concluded that the most important operation toward closing the rebellion will be to close out Lee and his army.”

  This was not what Sherman wanted, but he began turning captured Fort McAllister into the base that Grant told him to create. Reminiscent of the way that Grant, commanding smaller forces along the Mississippi earlier in the war, had taken advantage of every opportunity that was not specifically prohibited, Sherman decided to try to seize the city before the transports arrived to take his men up the coast to Virginia. With the escape corridor still open north of the city, Sherman began closing in on Savannah.

  Everything fell into place for him. On December 21, Hardee used the causeway that Sherman’s men had not closed, hurried his defenders out of the city, and fled north across the Savannah River into South Carolina, leaving behind one of the Confederacy’s largest concentrations of heavy artillery. Sherman marched into Savannah, in the heart of the South; as had been the case with Atlanta, where Hood evacuated the city, there was no significant capture of enemy troops, but he had successfully completed his epic March to the Sea. The next day he sent a telegram to Abraham Lincoln that said in its entirety: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”

  Sherman became the Union’s man of the hour. The joyous news thrilled the North: strangers on the street stopped each other to cry out, “He’s made it! Sherman’s at Savannah!” In a headline, the Chicago Tribune called him “Our Military Santa Claus.” Praise engulfed him. Lincoln wrote:

  My Dear General Sherman:

  Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift—the capture of Savannah. When you were about to leave Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful … Now the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours, for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce …

  But what next? I suppose it will be safe if I leave it to you and General Grant to decide.

  Grant, adding his praise in a letter to Sherman marked “Confidential,” said, “I congratulate you, and the brave officers and men under your command, on the successful termination of your most brilliant campaign … the like of which is not read of in past history.” He included the somewhat questionable statement that “I never had a doubt of the result,” and closed with, “I subscribe myself, more than ever, if possible, Your Friend, U. S. Grant.” Writing to his father, Grant underscored his enthusiasm by saying, “Sherman has now demonstrated his great Capacity as a Soldier by his unequalled campaign through Georgia.”

  The news of Sherman’s March to the Sea and its climax resonated in Europe. The Edinburgh Review described it as being among “the highest achievements which the annals of modern warfare record,” and the London Times, comparing him with the duke of Marlborough, said of his campaign, “military history has recorded no stronger marvel.” For many in the South, the inability of Confederate forces to stop a march right through its heart signaled the end of any chance of turning the tide. Even the bravest men quailed at the thought of an enemy army marching upon their homes and families: a Confederate officer wrote that his worries about his family made his “soul to sink in anguish” and his hopes “perish.” Southern women remained bitterly opposed to the Northern invasion and hated the often rude and sometimes brutal and thieving incursions into their homes. Many still expressed their hopes for a Confederate victory—when the Northern columns occupied Savannah, Mrs. William Henry Stiles wrote her son William, a Confederate soldier serving in Virginia, “After seeing what we have, we know how formidable Sherman’s army is … Still with General Lee at our head, and with the blessing of the Almighty, we shall not be made slaves to these wretches.” But some women who had not done so before began to see that the men they had sent off to war could not save the way of life dear to them all. Allie Travis, of Covington, Georgia, thirty-two miles east of Atlanta, was described by a correspondent traveling with Sherman’s army as “very pretty and intelligent.” She wrote of the day the Union troops marched through on their way to Savannah, “The street in front of our house was a moving mass of ‘blue coats’—infantry, artillery, and cavalry—from 9 o’clock in the morning to a late hour at night.” She reflected, “Who can describe our feelings on that morning! All human aid was gone. Prayers for personal safety went up to Heaven from the depths of [a] woman’s agonized heart.”

  For the moment, Sherman’s aggressive side seemed to be at rest. From Savannah, on January 2, 1865, he wrote Ellen, “I feel a just pride in the Confidence of my army, and the singular friendship of Genl. Grant, who is almost childlike in his love for me.” Sherman had instituted a comparatively courteous and orderly military occupation of Savannah reminiscent of his policies when he served as military governor of Memphis earlier in the war. Writing Ellen again on January 5, he referred to families he had met during his tours of duty in the Deep South as a young officer more than twenty years before: “There are some very elegant people here, whom I knew in Better days and who do not seem ashamed to call on the Vandal Chief. They regard us just as the Romans did the Goths and the parallel is not unjust. Many of my stalwart men with red beards and huge frames look like Giants.
”

  As for how Sherman actually felt about his epic March to the Sea, he also wrote this to Ellen: “I can hardly realize it for really it was easy, but like one who has walked a narrow plank I look back and wonder if I really did it.” He added, “People here talk as though the war was coming to a close, but I know better.”

  At this point Sherman was confronted with an unusual result of his famous march, involving an incident at which he had not been present. On December 9, twelve days before Sherman entered Savannah, the commander of his Fourteenth Corps had some of his troops crossing Ebeneezer Creek near the city on a pontoon bridge. This officer was Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis (not related to the Confederate president). Davis had a well-known capacity for anger and violence: on September 29, 1862, after his superior officer General William Nelson had criticized him, Davis provoked an argument with Nelson in the lobby of the Galt House in Louisville and had returned with a pistol and mortally wounded him. There were those who thought he should be tried for murder, but he was restored to duty through the intercession of his friend and political patron Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana and went on to distinguish himself at Chickamauga and other actions. On the day Davis was crossing Ebeneezer Creek, with Confederate cavalry general Joseph Wheeler’s men closing in on the rear of his column, a crowd of black refugees was following just behind the Union troops. As soon as the last of Davis’s soldiers crossed the pontoon bridge, he ordered it to be taken down: stranded on the far side, the freed slaves were terrified that the advancing Confederates would kill them for casting their lot with the Northern troops they regarded as being their liberators. They began leaping into the water in an effort to escape by crossing the creek. Most could not swim: despite the efforts many Union soldiers made to save them, an undetermined but significant number of black men, women, and children drowned.