At the time, it had been only one incident in a massive campaign, and Sherman had supported Davis’s removal of the pontoon bridge as an act to save his troops from an attack by enemy forces that were right on their heels. In the North, while Sherman remained an immensely popular hero, some in Congress saw the drowning tragedy as demonstrating a cruel indifference to the blacks’ fate and as being indicative of Sherman’s sometimes expressed views on their racial inferiority. On January 9, Secretary of War Stanton arrived at Savannah aboard the ship Nevada; he had been in poor health and this trip was in part supposed to give one of the hardest-working men in the government something of a rest in a warm climate, but he had a number of important matters he wished to discuss with Sherman, and the drowning was uppermost. When Sherman again defended Davis’s decision to dismantle the pontoon bridge, Stanton asked Sherman to organize a meeting with representatives of Savannah’s black population. Sherman invited twenty men, most of them ministers, to meet with Stanton and was offended when Stanton asked him to leave the room when he finished the questions about the tragedy and turned to soliciting the black leaders’ impressions of Sherman.
Sherman need not have worried about the black leaders’ view of him. The notes made by Assistant Adjutant General Edward D. Townsend, who had accompanied Stanton from Washington, included, “His conduct and deportment toward us characterized him as a friend and gentleman. We have confidence in General Sherman, and think what concerns us could not be in better hands.” After that, developing the document in conference with Stanton, Sherman promulgated his Special Orders No. 15, in which parts of Georgia and South Carolina’s Sea Islands were reserved exclusively for black land ownership. Reversing his views at least publicly on having black soldiers in the Union Army, Sherman offered them, as an incentive for enlisting, a guarantee that they would receive their share of the Sea Island lands after the war.
Seemingly satisfied on that issue, although in fact Sherman would do little to implement his order, Stanton discussed the overall conduct of the war with Sherman, pointing out among other things the desirability of bringing the war to an end quickly because the federal government was nearly bankrupt. He also made the argument, with which Grant had already agreed, that bringing more black troops into the army and using them for garrison duty would free experienced white regiments to participate in the offensives to end the war.
These meetings between the tall, rangy, gesturing Sherman with his short red beard, and the stocky five-foot-eight intense fifty-year-old Stanton with his long graying beard and small steel-rimmed spectacles brought together two men with complicated personalities. Stanton, who had suffered from asthma his entire life, had endured personal suffering that exceeded even Sherman’s loss of his beloved son Willy. At the age of twenty-seven, when Stanton was a rising lawyer, his year-old daughter Lucy died; three years later, when his wife, Mary, suddenly died of a “bilious fever,” in his grief he came close to insanity, leaving his room night after night carrying a lamp as he searched the house, crying out, “Where is Mary?” Stanton had always been fond of and proud of his younger brother Darwin, whom out of the profits from his hardworking law practice he had helped send to Harvard to study medicine, and whom he was also able to assist in being elected to the Virginia legislature; in 1846, two years after his wife died, Dr. Darwin Stanton committed suicide by cutting his throat. It was not clear whether Stanton came upon the scene himself, but an account of the death written by a doctor said, “The blood spouted up to the ceiling,” and Stanton ran into the woods in the night, with his law partner and other friends searching for him until they found him and were able to lead him home. From that time on, Stanton had become outwardly colder and more hardworking and efficient. He went on to remarry and became an important lawyer and politician, serving as President James Buchanan’s attorney general and then returning to his private practice of law in Washington until Lincoln asked him to serve as his secretary of war.
Of these two leading figures of the Union war effort now meeting in Savannah, Stanton had the more difficult wartime role to play. As a soldier, Sherman’s objective, like Grant’s, was to defeat the enemy. Serving as Lincoln’s highly effective secretary of war, Stanton also clearly had victory as his objective, but he found himself in the midst of the frequent tension between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans. Stanton had great quiet admiration and sympathy for Lincoln, who had to put down the Confederate rebellion and yet wished to impose a gentler peace than the one the Radicals wanted. In addition to that, as president, Lincoln was leader of his Republican Party, which had very nearly foundered during the election year just past. Trying to be president of all the people, not just Republicans and Democrats but all Americans—whites, blacks, the people not only of the North but also of the South when its seceded status ended—Lincoln was engaged in the greatest balancing act in American history. Stanton saw and understood all that, and had indeed thrown much of his great energy and administrative skill into being an important initiator and coordinator of many aspects of Lincoln’s 1864 presidential campaign. As a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, he was fulfilling his duty to carry out the commander in chief’s policies, but as the politically astute creature he was, Stanton had also kept on good terms with the leading Radicals. (A measure of Stanton’s adroitness was that, when Lincoln had named him secretary of war, every faction in Congress felt that he was the man to further their agendas.)
So it was that the two men conferring in Savannah had at least some identical interests. They wanted to end the war quickly; Stanton, who was a friend of Sherman’s father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, was talking with the general who seemed destined to play a large role in bringing that about, and Sherman knew that Stanton was ready to throw all the available military resources into the effort. After four days in Savannah, Stanton returned to Washington.
In fact, both Sherman and Stanton remained wary of each other. Before Stanton arrived, Halleck had warned Sherman that Lincoln himself was being urged to punish Sherman not only for the Ebeneezer Creek incident but also for his views on slavery, and even on his way back to Washington Stanton had a wire sent to Grant asking to meet “so as to communicate other matters that cannot safely be written”—presumably Sherman’s political volatility, both as to racial remarks and his ambivalence toward white Southerners, in which he mixed his fire-and-sword policy with fond memories of his prewar experiences in the South, and his evident willingness to extend softer peace terms than those the Radicals relentlessly sought. As for Sherman, he mistakenly felt that he had brought Stanton close to his view that yes, the slaves should be freed, but that they were of an inferior race that, even though they were now in the Union ranks, would never make as good soldiers as white men could. On January 15, two days after Stanton left, Sherman wrote Ellen, “Mr. Stanton has been here and is cured of that Negro nonsense.”
What Sherman may not have fully grasped, despite the political knowledge available to him both through Halleck and his brother the senator, was that Stanton had been sympathetic to the abolitionist cause from a time long before the war and had a deep distrust of West Pointers—a feeling shared by many of the Radicals, who felt that the officers of the Regular Army formed a clique with little interest in the values of a democracy and comprised a group that could seize and hold despotic power. There was also the health-draining pressure that Stanton was feeling from the demands of his position: in addition to his constant responsibilities as one of the key figures in the prosecution of the war, by the end of Lincoln’s presidential campaign, Stanton had come down with a combination of chills and fever that had kept him in bed for three weeks, during which he ran his part of the war from his house. High-strung and driven as always, Stanton was more of an enigma than many of his governmental associates knew. While staying on good terms with the Radicals, he had a great unspoken affection for Lincoln, who would soon memorably proclaim in his Second Inaugural Address his policy of acting “With malice toward none; with charity for all,” and later sa
y of the prostrate South, “Let ’em up easy.”
At this point, with the war yet to be won, Lincoln was still formulating his thoughts as to the terms on which the seceded states were to be readmitted to the Union and the way the freed slaves were to be given their civil rights. Stanton saw in Lincoln the indispensable leader who was guiding the nation through the maelstrom. Like Sherman, Stanton had a great desire for order, an impulse almost constantly thwarted by the realities of the war and wartime politics, and Stanton was ready to see a political dissident as an outright traitor. Just where all this was taking Stanton’s tendency to mistrust Sherman would become dramatically apparent within a few months. When that happened, under circumstances that at the moment seemed unimaginable, Grant would extricate Sherman from the crisis he created for himself.
13
THE MARCH THROUGH THE CAROLINAS, AND AN ADDITIONAL TEST OF FRIENDSHIP
Sherman’s widely praised capture of Savannah still left unanswered Lincoln’s question, “But what next?” Grant and Sherman differed on this and, as was the case before Sherman set out from Atlanta for Savannah, each man held reasonable views and put them before the other. Grant, still locked in daily heavy combat with Lee at Petersburg that was costing many Northern lives, continued to feel that if he could have ships land Sherman’s splendid army near him on the Virginia coast, between them they could swiftly “close out Lee and his army.” That would mean the fall of Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital. The Confederate forces under Beauregard in North Carolina would still be in existence, but Beauregard, hugely outnumbered at that point, might well surrender, and the war could be over then and there.
Sherman saw it differently. Trusting in himself and his men—he wrote Grant, “I don’t like to boast, but I believe this army has a confidence in itself that makes it almost invincible”—Sherman wanted to turn his army north and make another march, up through the Carolinas, continuing to disembowel the South and destroy its will and capacity to make war. This northward march—it was 270 miles in a straight line between Savannah and North Carolina’s capital of Raleigh, but the real distance to be covered through swamps and on terrible roads was more than 400—would keep Beauregard, soon to be replaced by Joseph E. Johnston, from moving up to Virginia to reinforce Lee. Sherman’s plan was to defeat the enemy in the Carolinas wherever they were, then move on and attack Lee’s rear while Grant smashed at his front, and bring the war to an end that way.
Although Grant and Sherman laid out their differing points of view on Sherman’s next move in a quick series of telegrams and letters, this time a logistical reality decided the matter. Grant found that there were not enough ships available to bring Sherman’s army up to the Virginia coast quickly enough to justify his strategy. On December 27, he approved Sherman’s plan for his inland march.
Ulysses S. Grant was still Sherman’s superior, but both of them knew that Sherman’s brilliant slashes through the South, taking important cities and costing few casualties, were making him greatly popular throughout the North, while Grant remained the general under whose direction the Army of the Potomac was losing many thousands of men every month. On the last day of 1864, with his army unable to start its northward march until widespread flooding in the Carolina coastal lowlands subsided, Sherman wrote a most tactful letter to Grant. Without referring to the change in the public’s perception of the two of them, he said, “I am fully aware of your friendly feelings towards me, and you may always depend on me as your steadfast supporter. Your wish is Law & Gospel to me and such is the feeling that pervades my army.” At the same time, possibly having this letter from Sherman in mind, Grant wrote Julia, “How few there are who when rising to popular favor would stop to say a word in defence of the only one between himself and the highest in command. I am happy to say that I appreciated him from the first feeling him to be what he is proven to the world he is.” During December, Grant had helped to start the Sherman Testimonial Fund of Ohio, which was collecting contributions from businessmen to give to Sherman, who had saved little money and had no house, to help him buy a house for his family when his life became more settled. In sending his own contribution of five hundred dollars, Grant wrote the committee, “I can not say a word too highly in praise of General Sherman’s services from the beginning of the rebellion to the present day … Suffice it to say that the World[’]s history gives us record … of but few equals. I am truly glad for the movement you have set afoot and of the opportunity of adding my mite in testemonial [sic] of so good and great a man.”
The bond between Grant and Sherman was soon to be brought under pressure again. Around the time Sherman commenced his march into South Carolina at the beginning of February 1865, rumors started to circulate that Sherman was going to be promoted to lieutenant general, making him equal in rank to Grant. It would then be possible for Sherman to be named general in chief, replacing Grant as the Union’s top military leader. A bill for Sherman’s promotion was introduced in Congress; as soon as he heard of it, Sherman wrote to his brother the senator, stating that he wanted the effort stopped: “I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant. I want him to hold what he has earned and got. I have all the rank I want.” He also wrote Grant about his feelings on the matter, telling him, “I would rather have you in command than anyone else [and] I should emphatically decline any commission calculated to bring us into rivalry.” Grant replied to Sherman, “I have received your very kind letter in which you say that you would decline, or are opposed to, promotion. No one would be more pleased at your advancement than I, and if you should be placed in my position and I put subordinate it would not change our personal relations in the least. I would make the same efforts to support you that you have ever done to support me, and would do all in my power to make our cause win.”
That cause was nearer to being won than either Grant or Sherman realized. At the beginning of March, by which time Sherman was well on his way up through the Carolinas, Grant received a letter from Robert E. Lee. It developed that, during a meeting in Virginia under a flag of truce to exchange political prisoners, Union general Edward Ord had found himself talking with Grant’s old friend and West Point classmate, Julia’s cousin Confederate general James Longstreet. Ord and Longstreet were also good friends from the prewar army and, with the business of exchanging the prisoners completed, they began to discuss the possibilities for holding peace talks. After Ord told Longstreet that a first step might be for Lee and Grant to meet, Longstreet took the suggestion to Lee, who wrote Grant about what he termed “the possibility of arriving at a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy difficulties.” Lee added, “Sincerely desiring to leave nothing untried which may put an end to the calamities of war, I propose to meet you at such convenient time and place as you may designate.” Grant immediately forwarded this to Stanton, who sent back this equally prompt reply:
The President directs me to say that he wishes you to have no conference with General Lee unless it be for the capitulation of Gen. Lee’s army … He instructs me to say that you are not to decide, discuss or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands.
Nothing came of the matter, but the fact that Lee made this overture demonstrated the deterioration of the Confederacy and its morale. Many men were deserting from Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, but Grant, still locked in combat with Lee at Petersburg, remained wary of his remarkable opponent. He knew that Lee could do to him what he had done to Lee at Cold Harbor: move out overnight, and in this case head south to link up with Joseph E. Johnston. Of these days in March of 1865, Grant wrote that “I was afraid, every morning, that I would wake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone, and that nothing was left but his picket line. I knew he could move much more lightly and more rapidly than I, and that, if he got the start, he would leave me behind so that we would have to fight the same army again further south—and the war might be prolonged another year.”
As for what was goin
g on “further south,” after treating the residents of Savannah gently, Sherman and his army had entered South Carolina in an increasingly vindictive frame of mind toward the state they felt had begun the war and started causing the deaths of their comrades. Just as they were leaving Georgia, Sherman told one of his division commanders, Henry W. Slocum, “Don’t forget that when you cross the Savannah River you are in South Carolina … The more of it you destroy the better it will be.” Speaking of South Carolina, he wrote Halleck in Washington that “I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that is in store for her.” (Halleck had written Sherman, “Should you capture Charleston, I hope that by some accident the place may be destroyed,” and when as the campaign began, Sherman’s cavalry leader Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick asked him, “How shall I let you know where I am?” Sherman replied, “Oh, just burn a barn or something. Make smoke like the Indians do.”)
Once again, there was skepticism about the outcome of a march that flouted the conventional military belief that an advancing army must have lines of supply and communication extending behind it to bases in the rear. The British Army and Nary Gazette said, “If Sherman has really left his army in the air and started off without a base from Georgia to South Carolina, he has done either one of the most brilliant or one of the most foolish things ever done by a military leader.” In any event, Sherman and his army were on their way. Putting down logs to make roads through huge swamp areas that the Confederates had considered impassable, they occasionally engaged in short battles that caused their enemies to fall back before them.
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 36