With that, there was some conversation while the papers were copied and then signed by Sherman and Johnston. During this, Sherman, perhaps acting on his memory that Lincoln had observed at City Point that Jefferson Davis should for everyone’s sake “escape the country” if he could, advised Breckinridge to do that himself. Breckinridge replied that he would “speedily leave,” and Sherman soon took his special train back to Raleigh. At that moment, despite the acclaim Grant had received in Washington during the days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Sherman’s reputation throughout the North was nearly as great as Grant’s: a grateful Union saw him as the remarkable leader who had served prominently in one successful battle or campaign after another, all the way from Shiloh and Vicksburg to planning and riding at the head of his epic marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. No one, including Sherman, would have imagined that he would soon be in a predicament from which he could be saved only by Grant.
17
SHERMAN IN TROUBLE
The morning after his second meeting with Joseph E. Johnston, Sherman sent Major Henry Hitchcock of his staff to Washington, carrying two copies of the surrender terms he had devised. One copy was to go to Grant, who since Appomattox was commanding the United States Army from an office in the War Department. The other was addressed to General Halleck, who, unknown to Sherman, Grant had shifted from his chief of staff position in the War Department to take command of forces in Virginia. Probably thinking that Halleck still had quicker access to President Andrew Johnson that Grant did, in his covering letter to Halleck, Sherman asked him to urge Johnson “not to vary the terms at all, for I have considered every thing, and believe that, the Confederate armies once dispersed, we can adjust all else fairly and well.” In a second letter to both Grant and Halleck, he said that what he had worked out would, “if approved by the President of the United States, produce peace from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.” To Ellen he wrote, “I can see no slip. The terms are all on our side … If I accomplish this I surely think I will be entitled to a month[’]s leave to come and See you … I now expect a week of Comparative leisure till my messenger returns from Washington, and I will try to write more at length.”
The terms that Major Hitchcock was carrying north, to a capital aflame with new vengeful feelings toward the Confederacy, included several conditions. Rather than surrendering their muskets and cannon directly to the federal forces in the field, as had been done at Appomattox, the enemy regiments, apparently still carrying their muskets, were “to be conducted to their several State capitals.” There they would put all their weapons and equipment in each state arsenal, where they would remain available “to maintain peace and order”—in whose hands was not specified. Sherman also set forth procedures by which enemy soldiers would “file an agreement to cease from acts of war, and to abide the action of both State and Federal authority,” and guaranteed to the citizens of the Confederate states “their political rights and franchises … as defined by the Constitution of the United States and of the States respectively.”
All that language about the ongoing authority at this time of states, when they were the states that had seceded from the Union and started a war that cost 360,000 Northern lives, was bad enough, but Sherman reinforced this by the article in his agreement that pledged the president of the United States to leave the present Southern state governments in place, as soon as their “officers and Legislature” took an oath of allegiance. There was in addition a provision about restoring to Southerners “their rights of person and property” that could be construed as continuing the right to own slaves.
Whatever he thought he had written and signed, Sherman had in fact abandoned his statement to Grant and Stanton that he would “be careful not to complicate points of civil policy.” His terms greatly exceeded the purely military surrender agreement that Grant and Lee had signed. In the last paragraph of his own agreement, Sherman stated that neither he nor Johnston was “fully empowered by our respective principals [the governments of the United States and the Confederacy] to fulfill these terms,” but went right on to say that “we individually and officially pledge ourselves to promptly obtain the necessary authority and to carry out the above programme.” Sherman and Johnston also agreed to give each other forty-eight hours’ notice before resuming the fight, if either of their governments rejected the document they had signed, but they clearly thought they had brought the war in the South to an end.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of April 21, two days after Sherman sent Hitchcock north to Washington carrying the copies of the signed surrender document, the major delivered one copy to Grant in his office at the War Department. As soon as Grant read its terms, he saw that they were unacceptable and immediately wrote this note to Stanton.
I have rec’d, and just completed reading the dispatches brought by Special Messenger from Gen. Sherman. They are of such importance that I think immediate action should be taken on them, and that it should be done by the President, in council with his whole Cabinet.
I would respectfully suggest whether the President should not be notified, and all his Cabinet, and the meeting take place tonight?
At eight that evening, with Grant present, President Andrew Johnson sat down with his cabinet. The preceding days had been ones of immense drama and tension. Two days before, Lincoln’s funeral services had been held in the overflowing East Room of the White House, with Grant standing alone at the head of the coffin as its chief military guard, tears rolling down his cheeks during the ceremony. The following day, thousands of grieving ordinary citizens had filed past Lincoln’s body as it lay in state in the Capitol’s rotunda. Twelve hours before this cabinet meeting, crowds had silently lined Washington’s streets to watch the procession as the slain president’s body was taken to the Baltimore and Ohio railroad station and placed aboard the black-wreathed train that would carry him to Philadelphia, New York, and other cities that would honor him during a twelve-day trip through the grieving North, before he was buried in his home state of Illinois.
It was in this highly charged atmosphere that President Johnson and his cabinet heard Stanton announce that Grant would read them the terms written and signed by Sherman. As soon as Grant finished, everyone immediately agreed that the document must be disavowed and rejected, but that was only the beginning. Grant characterized the meeting as being in a state of “the greatest consternation.” Johnson, Stanton, and Attorney General James Speed denounced Sherman as a traitor. According to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Stanton, who was still fearful that he might be assassinated himself, “seemed frantic,” and the attorney general voiced the fear that Sherman might march his “victorious legions” up to Washington and take over the government.
Certainly Stanton, who just a week before had walked through blood in Secretary of State Seward’s house and been at Lincoln’s side when he died, might in his present state have associated what he knew of Sherman’s racial views, and these lenient terms Sherman had now committed himself to in dealing with Joseph E. Johnston, with an effort to undermine the victory. Stanton, like the other cabinet members present, was determined that the fighting should come to an end on terms acceptable to them and lead to a peace in which the victor’s word was law. Some Radicals felt that even the terms Grant gave Lee at Appomattox had been too generous and that Lee should now be in prison, awaiting trial and a possible death sentence for treason.
There were no notes taken at this tempestuous meeting; one secondhand account said that in the midst of this uproar, Grant, who had been the first to see that the terms could not stand, defended Sherman’s motives, but others made no mention of that. For the moment, in the still-shocked atmosphere of these days after Lincoln’s death, Sherman’s enormous contribution to victory was forgotten amid this sudden suspicion that he might somehow be selling out the Union at the last hour, or undercutting the results of all that had been sacrificed and won.
The thrust of the meeting became to undo what Sherman had don
e, and to do it swiftly. Again, there is some question as to whether Grant volunteered to take the next step and was then given authorization to implement it, or whether the meeting simply turned to him to solve the problem, or whether he was ordered to act. In any event, before the evening was out, he received from Stanton instructions that read, referring to Sherman’s agreement with Johnston, “You will give notice of disapproval to Gen Sherman and direct him to resume hostilities at the earliest moment.” Stanton enclosed a copy of the message he had sent Grant after Lee’s earlier peace overture in March, stating on Lincoln’s instructions that, concerning a political settlement, “such questions the president holds in his own hands,” and added that this also expressed “the views of President Andrew Johnson, and will be observed by Genl Sherman.” Stanton’s instructions closed with, “The President desires that you proceed immediately to the Hd Qtrs of Gen Sherman and direct operations against the enemy.”
This was in its way an order as difficult to execute wisely as any Grant had ever received, and it had the possibility of cutting the oft-tested bond between Sherman and Grant. Stanton’s language was clearly bellicose, indicating a perfect willingness to start shooting at the Confederates again and keep it up until they agreed to anything put before them. The order that Grant should “direct operations against the enemy”—words used in referring to battlefield movements, not to negotiations for a surrender—reinforced the authority that Grant possessed as general in chief to supersede Sherman and take active field command of his army.
Grant made plans to leave for North Carolina at midnight. At that moment, a telegram might have reached Sherman a few hours before Grant could get to Raleigh himself, but evidently not wishing any telegraph operator to see his words, and perhaps worried that he himself might be struck down by an assassin en route, Grant chose to write a letter stating what he wanted Sherman to know. He told Sherman of the “disapproval” of his agreement and instructed him to inform Johnston that, as matters stood, the truce would come to an end. With characteristic clarity, Grant set forth what was expected of the Confederates: “The rebels know well the terms upon which they can have peace and just where negociations [sic] can commence, namely: when they lay down their Arms and submit to the laws of the United States.”
For whatever reasons, Grant did not use any means of communication to tell Sherman that he was on his way to join him in North Carolina. As events would show, he intended this to be a mission of peace, not of war; determined that the fighting should not resume, he also hoped to save his friend Sherman from the crisis he had created. He enclosed to Sherman the copy of Lincoln’s distinction between military surrender and political settlement—Sherman was to say that he had never heard of that letter or its contents, and that may well have been true—and then wearily wrote Julia. Tired as he was, near the end of his letter he wrote words that indicated his sense of the international destiny that awaited the nation whose future unity he had done so much to ensure. “It is now nearly 11 O’Clock at night and I have received instructions from the Sec. of War, and the President, to start at once for Raleigh North Carolina. I start in an hour … I find my duties, anxieties, and the necessity for having all my wits about me, increasing instead of diminishing. I have a Herculean task to perform and shall endeavor to do it, not to please any one, but for the interest of our great country which is now begining [sic] to loom far above all other countries, modern or ancient.”
Despite the hour and the pressures on him, Grant developed this thought concerning the country’s future international role: “That Nation, united, will have a strength which will enable it to dictate to all others, conform to justice and right.” Speaking of the limits of power, the good it could achieve if used wisely, and the dangers of using it in an immoral way, he added, “Power I think can go no further. The moment conscience leaves, physical strength will avail nothing, in the long run.” Then Grant reverted to the purpose of his letter.
I only sat down to write you that I was suddenly required to leave on important duty, and not feeling willing to say what that duty is, you must await my return to know more.
Love and kisses for you and the children.
U. S. GRANT
In speaking of the “Herculean task” that lay before him, Grant almost certainly was thinking of more than what awaited him in North Carolina, pressing and crucial though the need to solve that problem was. In the days since Lincoln’s death he had seen political polarization in Washington. Vice President Andrew Johnson, sworn in as president three and a half hours after Lincoln’s death, was an unknown quantity; minutes after learning of the attack on Lincoln, Grant had told Julia, “I dread the change.” The Radical faction of the Republicans had already wanted to enforce an iron peace in the Confederate states as soon as they surrendered, and Lincoln’s murder greatly strengthened their hand. Before his death, Lincoln had agreed to the arrangement that the conquered South would for a time at least be divided into military districts, administered by the army and other federal officials. With every hour in his office at the War Department, Grant could see that, whatever else lay ahead, he had three major tasks before him. He had to stop the fighting throughout the South and Texas, prepare the postwar United States Army for some type of military occupation of the former Confederate states, and plan and execute across the next seven months of 1865 the demobilization of more than eight hundred thousand of his soldiers, almost all of whom were wildly eager to go home.
In addition to that, there was a problem involving Mexico, the land in which Grant first experienced combat. In December of 1861, while Washington was preoccupied with the war, European troops had landed in Mexico in a punitive response to President Benito Juarez’s decision to suspend payments of foreign debt. There were forty thousand excellent French troops still there, including regiments of the Foreign Legion, serving the puppet regime of the Austrian Duke Maximilian, who had been installed by Emperor Napoleon III.
This situation was a dramatic affront to the Monroe Doctrine, but there was more to it than that. Although Maximilian had refused the Confederacy’s overtures to create an alliance, some thousands of Confederate soldiers, among them former guerrillas fearing federal punishment, were now crossing into Mexico, where Maximilian was willing to have them join his forces and was ready to condone ownership of slaves. Combined with the fact that organized Confederate units in Texas still had not surrendered, there was a need for a strong United States Army force to resolve the situation within Texas and on its borders. (A few days after Appomattox, Grant had said lightly to an aide that the new slogan would soon be, “On to Mexico.”) Ironically, considering that the Mexican War in which Grant, Lee, and other American soldiers fought resulted in the taking of a vast area of northern Mexico, there would now be both overt and secretive American efforts to help Juarez and his Mexican nationalists in their successful struggle to throw out Maximilian and these more recent foreign invaders.
To deal with all these matters, Grant brought to the challenge the prestige of a victorious general, the authority of his rank as lieutenant general and position as general in chief, a wealth of administrative as well as battlefield experience, and his legendary determination. At the same time, the famous soldier who wrote Julia at eleven that night, readying to leave Washington in an hour on a daunting mission, was a tired man who had for four years borne a steadily increasing load. A few days earlier, he had balanced these assets and liabilities in a letter to his old friend Charles W. Ford: “For myself I would enjoy a little respite from my cares and responsibilities more than you can concieve [sic]. But I have health, strength and endurance and as long as they are retained I am willing to devote all for the public good.”
The next day, April 22, as Grant traveled south along the Virginia coast aboard the “special steamer” Alhambra accompanied by three of his officers, a servant, and Major Hitchcock of Sherman’s staff, Secretary of War Stanton received a letter from General Halleck, writing from his headquarters in Virginia. “Old
Brains,” who had received the same explosive report from Sherman to Grant that precipitated the tempestuous cabinet meeting, knew that Sherman and Johnston had resumed surrender talks but did not know their status. Halleck told the secretary of war he was receiving intelligence that Davis and his fleeing Confederate governmental colleagues were carrying a large amount of gold with them and added, “They hope, it is said, to make terms with General Sherman or some other Southern [Union] commander by which they will be permitted, with their effects, including this gold plunder, to go to Mexico or Europe. Johnston’s negotiations look to this end. Would it not be well to put Sherman and all other commanding generals on their guard in this respect?”
Stanton, who had “seemed frantic” the day before, was no more calm today. He added to Halleck’s just-arrived letter his own misunderstanding of a cavalry movement that Sherman had recently ordered: the troopers would actually be placed directly across the route along which Davis was thought to be moving, but Stanton thought that Sherman had deliberately sent them in the opposite direction, to aid Davis in his effort to elude capture.
At that point, Stanton decided on his own initiative to disavow publicly anything Sherman had recently done or might do, and in the process distance himself and Johnson’s cabinet from Sherman. Stanton prepared a signed statement for a number of newspapers, including The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Acidly referring to “a memorandum for what is called a basis for peace,” he released to the public his account of the previous night’s heretofore secret meeting of the cabinet. Stanton wrote that Sherman’s agreement with Johnston had been disapproved, and that Sherman had been “ordered to resume hostilities immediately.” After including the text of Lincoln’s earlier instructions to Grant that, regarding the political aspects of a peace settlement, “such questions the President holds in his own hands,” Stanton set forth the text of Sherman’s agreement with Johnston and then wrote that “this proceeding of Gen. Sherman was unapproved for the following among other reasons.” Putting the darkest construction upon every ambiguity, he said that “by the restoration of the rebel authority in their respective States, they would be enabled to reestablish slavery.”
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 43