At three-thirty in the afternoon, the last of Meade’s eighty thousand men passed the reviewing stand where Grant and Sherman had been since morning. The spectators poured from the sidewalks into the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, a sea of little American flags and white handkerchiefs waving good-bye to the backs of the last ranks of the Army of the Potomac as they marched into history.
Grant and Sherman parted, and Grant went into the White House grounds and mounted the horse that had been brought there for him. On an impulse, he told an enlisted orderly to mount another horse and come with him, and rode out into the crowd that was slowly dispersing along Pennsylvania Avenue, all talking about what they had seen. Grant on a horse always was an imposing figure, one of the great horsemen of his day. Startled to see him right there, a few feet away, the people cheered as he rode quietly among them, occasionally lifting his hat. Perhaps he too did not want the day to end.
During the first day of the Grand Review, Sherman’s army had moved to new bivouac areas just south of the Long Bridge across the Potomac, and that night Sherman held a meeting with his generals and their adjutants. Sharing his observations of what he had seen from the reviewing stand, he said, “Be careful about your intervals and your tactics. I will give [the troops] plenty of time to go to the Capitol and see everything afterward, but let them keep their eyes fifteen feet to the front and march by in the old customary way.”
These were the kinds of instructions Sherman was giving, with his generals noting what they were to do, but The New York Times had a different idea of what might happen in the morning. Citing the Washington Tribune as its source, the Times said that “it is mentioned in political circles that an influence is organizing among the superior officers of Sherman’s army to demand of President Johnson the removal of Secretary Stanton, for his warfare upon their Commander … There is a public expectation throughout the city of a demonstration of the feeling of the rank and file of Sherman’s army toward the Secretary of War when it shall march past the official stand in front of the White House.” In an example of praise being so faint as to be inaudible, the Times added that, while the actions of Stanton and Halleck might have been “somewhat hasty and ill-advised,” it was to be hoped that Sherman would not “forfeit the respect in which he is held by the great body of the people, and add another to the many proofs already existing, that one may be a great commander without being a wise man.”
Whether Sherman even saw this article is unknown; he and his generals were concentrating on the last march they would make together, and nothing else, and his army finally got to sleep. At first light, a correspondent from The New York World heard bugles blowing, and he described Sherman’s men forming up and following their regimental colors across the river on the Long Bridge: “Directly all sorts of colors, over a wild monotony of columns, began to sway to and fro, up and down, and like the uncoiling of a tremendous python, the Army of Sherman winds into Washington.” The column was fifteen miles long.
Around the Capitol, young women were everywhere, chatting flirtatiously with Sherman’s weather-bronzed soldiers as they pushed roses into the lapels of the men’s uniforms and stuck flowers into the muzzles of their muskets. Numbers of girls had set up tubs of water with blocks of ice in them on street corners and brought cups of cold water for the men to drink as they waited for the parade to start. Everything was fair game for decoration: garlands were attached to the tops of the staffs of regimental battle flags, and horses were draped in flowers, as were cannon. The weather was even better than it had been the day before.
Sherman rode through all this, wearing a clean uniform and with his wiry red hair freshly cut. His men smiled as they saw their Uncle Billy “dressed up after dingy carelessness for years.” His splendid horse, a “shining bay,” was not only perfectly groomed for the occasion but was already covered in flowers put there by young women. For the rest of his life, female admirers would fuss over Sherman—and he loved the attention—but this morning he had just one thing on his mind: he wanted his army to make a good showing. He knew how well his men could fight, but he did not know if they could march well in a massive parade like this, and he was not sure that they cared what Washington thought of them. His officers cared: they were passing along their ranks, saying, “Boys, remember it’s ‘Sherman’ against the ‘Potomac’—the west against the east today.”
Sherman’s orders to his men instructed that the first units of his army were to form “opposite the northern entrance to the Capitol grounds, prepared to wheel into Pennsylvania Avenue at precisely 9 A.M.,” and at the sound of the signal gun Sherman turned up Pennsylvania Avenue on his flower-decked horse. At his side rode Major General O. O. Howard, who had lost his right arm in combat three years before. In a sense, Howard symbolized both the sacrifices of war and the hopes of the peace for which it had been fought: still holding his military rank, just eleven days earlier he had been named to head the Freedmen’s Bureau, the new federal agency formed to protect the interests of the former slaves.
From the outset, Sherman’s march up the avenue conveyed the reality of his army when it was campaigning: a contemporary account said that behind the mounted officers of his staff “was a group of orderlies, mounted servants, pack mules, &c., and behind these a body of cavalry, known as the headquarters guard and escort.” Only after that came a band, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” One observer’s first impression of Sherman’s troops, muskets with fixed bayonets on their shoulders, was that these leathery young men, their faces made old by war, were marching along sullenly, but their expressions changed as the successive columns “wheeled” into Pennsylvania Avenue and saw what awaited them. The crowd was larger than the day before; a New York Times reporter wrote, “The enthusiasm to-day far exceeded that of yesterday.” Many thousands of men from the Army of the Potomac who had marched the day before had come back today on their own, ready to cheer the Army of the West. Two new banners had gone up overnight, stretching across the avenue: the first read in part, “HAIL TO THE HEROES OF THE WEST!” and the second said, “HAIL CHAMPIONS OF BELMONT, DONELSON, SHILOH, VICKSBURG, CHATTANOOGA, ATLANTA, SAVANNAH, BENTONVILLE—PRIDE OF THE NATION.” People in the crowd were holding up babies, so that the infants could one day be told they had seen Sherman’s men. Some of Sherman’s regiments were marching behind bare flagstaffs, because their battle flags had been literally shot away, while other banners were darkened and stained from powder burns and weather. Yesterday the crowds had shouted, “Gettysburg!”; today, the cry of “Vicksburg!” rang along the avenue.
Sherman and his men, so many of them barefoot and in rags, were showing the North the “sea of bayonets” that had recently convinced the residents of Raleigh, North Carolina, that for them the war was over. At the end of large units, ambulances came along, the horses drawing them well groomed and the ambulances clean; the crowds hushed as they saw the rolled-up canvas stretchers on the sides of the ambulances, which had been washed but still had deep brown bloodstains from the wounded men they had carried. Sometimes wild cries came from the crowd, giving voice to feelings that perhaps none understood. Other people “raised their hands to heaven in prayer.” So many flowers were thrown from the sidewalks that barefoot men marched through petals that lay ankle-deep.
Sherman’s progress up Pennsylvania Avenue was literally triumphal: the Times said, “He was vociferously cheered all along the line,” and added, “The greeting of this hero was in the highest degree enthusiastic.” When he rode by, raising his hat in answer to the shouts of admiration and welcome, people jumped up and down to get a better look at him, waving flags and handkerchiefs as they did. One spectator caught up in the crowd felt that “there was something almost fierce in the fever of enthusiasm.” A woman journalist observed “in his eye … the proud, conscious glare of the conqueror, while his features, relieved of the nervous anxious expression of war times, assumed an air of repose which well became him.” Sherman’s soldiers began responding to what Sergeant Upson o
f the 100th Indiana called “one constant roar,” and Upson noted that his troops marched better and better: “on the faces of the men was what one might call a glory look.”
A young private from Wisconsin was thinking about Abraham Lincoln: if he had been there, this veteran of many battles decided, the units would simply have broken ranks to crowd around him, and the parade would have stopped right then. Even in the midst of the bands playing and the crowds cheering, some houses still bore wreaths of mourning; it was as if Lincoln, the man with the solemn face and the sudden sweet smile, still hovered over the soldiers of whom he asked so much and loved so well.
At the head of his sixty-five thousand men, Sherman had a great deal happening in only a few minutes. As he rode up the incline to the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue where he and the leading division of his army would come to the first two turns before passing the reviewing stand in front of the White House, Sherman gave in to an impulse to look back and see if his soldiers were marching as well as he fervently hoped they were. Underneath the roar of the crowd he had been hearing behind him what a soldier from Minnesota called “one footfall”—a good indication that the men were marching in step—but now, at the top of this little slope, he turned on his horse to see the column of thousands of men that stretched more than a mile behind him down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. “When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.”
Sherman was to say in later years that “I believe it was the happiest and most satisfactory moment of my life,” and it may well have been: he would serve as both commander of the United States Army and as secretary of war, honors would descend upon him, he would remain nationally and internationally famous, and be lionized during the final years of his life in his adopted New York City, but he would always be happiest when he was among his groups of veterans at their frequent reunions in many states, occasions he unfailingly attended.
Coming into Lafayette Square, Sherman rode over to the side of the street toward the front of the house that served as the army’s headquarters for the defense of Washington. Secretary of State Seward, who was still recovering from the knife wounds he received during the attempt to assassinate him, had been brought there to watch the parade. Sherman brought his horse to a halt and “took off my hat to Mr. Seward, who sat at an upper window. He recognized the salute, and returned it.” Finally, as Sherman came to the presidential pavilion and the other grandstands, with the bands striking up “Marching Through Georgia,” the New York World said, “The acclamation given Sherman was without precedent … The whole assemblage raised and waved and shouted as if he had been the personal friend of each of them … Sherman was the idol of the day.” When he entered the pavilion after dismounting from his horse in the White House grounds, everyone was still on his feet to welcome him. Witnesses would differ on whether Secretary of War Stanton extended his hand to Sherman or simply nodded in greeting but, in a historically memorable instance of one person “cutting dead” another, Sherman walked past Stanton as if he were not there. He shook hands with President Johnson and every other member of the cabinet. Then, to loud applause, he and Grant greeted each other warmly.
There it was: the apotheosis of the friendship and military partnership that had brought the Union and its armies to this day. They were the men, the two generals, who more than any other soldiers had made this moment happen, and everyone there knew it. Sitting on either side of Johnson as the Army of the West continued to pass, Grant and Sherman rose and returned salutes whenever it was appropriate, but they seemed to become lost in thought, occasionally saying a few words to each other, and it was others who studied and recorded what the celebrities and the crowd now saw. Journalists remarked on how the Western soldiers were bigger men and marched with longer strides. One reporter reacted this way: “‘Veteran’ was written all over their dark faces, browned by the ardent Southern sun, and health almost spoke from their elastic step and erect figures … They seemed almost like figures from another planet.” Walt Whitman saw them as “largely animal, and handsomely so.” Two New York Times stories vied with each other in praise, one describing the Westerners as “tall, erect, broad-shouldered, stalwart men,” and the other calling them “the most superb material ever molded into soldiers.”
Sherman’s army kept passing, like a torrent controlled only by itself. Someone in the crowd noted that so many garlands were draped on the musicians that the bands as they marched past appeared to be “moving floral gardens.” There were not only the muskets and bayonets and some highly polished brass cannon gleaming in the sun, but also heavy supply wagons and the components for pontoon bridges like those in Meade’s column the day before. Signalmen carried slender staffs sixteen feet high, at the top of which were little emblazoned flags that a New York World reporter likened to “talismanic banners” that might be found in some medieval pageant.
And there was this: marching at the head of each brigade of the Fifteenth Corps, and at some other places in the parade, was “a battalion of black pioneers [engineering troops] … in the garments he wore on the plantation, with shovel and axe on the shoulder, marching with even front, sturdy step and lofty air.” Sherman had not brought these freed slaves into his army as combat soldiers, but he had come to appreciate their strength and skill as they laid the plank roads through the Carolina swamps that Joseph E. Johnston thought Sherman’s army could never pass. In other similar units, a reporter saw “the implements being carried on the shoulders of both white and black soldiers.”
At the end of each of several brigades came some of Sherman’s “bummers,” the independent operating foragers, “first in an advance and last in a retreat”—with examples of their foraging and of the newly freed slave families that had attached themselves to the army as it moved through the South. The crowd reacted to this as if watching a circus parade, and a Times reporter described it this way.
It was a most nonchalant, grotesque spectacle—two very diminutive white donkeys bestrode by two diminutive black contrabands. If that is not paradox, a dozen patient pack mules, mounted with Mexican pack saddles, camp equipage on one side and boxes of hardtack the other; half a dozen contraband females on foot; a dozen contraband males leading the mules; a white soldier or two on horseback, to see that everything was all right; the servants of the mess, and the mess kit, and scattered about on the panniers [cargo baskets] of the mules, reclining very domestically, half a dozen game cocks, a brace of young coons, and a sure-footed goat, all presenting such a scene that brought laughter and cheers from end to end of the avenue.
Here was complex irony again: these black Americans, being treated as figures of fun by the crowd, were no longer slaves because of the sacrifices made by the white men in blue uniforms marching ahead of them, as well as by those made by black regiments. (As many as 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army at one time or another; no uniformed contingent of these United States Colored Troops, as they were designated, was included in the parade.)
Julia Grant was greatly enjoying the Grand Review. She was to remember thinking, “How magnificent the marching! What shouts rent the air!” when suddenly she saw Mrs. Herman Canfield. She was the “tall handsome” woman “clad in deepest mourning” who had come to call after Shiloh, to tell of Grant’s kindness to her when she came to see her wounded husband, the colonel of an Ohio regiment, who died before she could reach his hospital bed. The last thing she had said to Julia that day three years before was, “I have determined to devote my time to the wounded soldiers during the war.” Julia saw that she had. “I saw Mrs. Canfield, the soldier’s widow, the soldiers’ nurse, when all this was passing. She, yes, she had grown older in these three long, weary years, for her dark hair showed threads of silver, her fair face and brow were furrowed and browned by exposure, her mourning robes looked worn and faded, as did the flag of her husband�
��s old regiment as it passed on that glorious day up Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Grant and Sherman continued to return salutes and to greet division commanders who would dismount and sit with them as their regiments passed. This parade was truly a good-bye: most of these tens of thousands of men were marching together for the last time. Their units would be disbanded, some within a few days, and they would return home, honored as veterans but taking up their future lives as individual civilians.
In the midst of this day’s fame and excitement, the future was indeed waiting for Grant, and for Julia, and for Sherman and Ellen. Forty-one months after this parade, Grant would be elected president and serve two terms marred by political scandals caused by men who betrayed the governmental trust he reposed in them. Historians would differ as to what degree it was a failed presidency, but it had its moments. Soon after he entered the White House, Grant invited Robert E. Lee to call on him there. At eleven in the morning of May 10, 1869, six years to the hour after the first shots were fired in his great victory at Chancellorsville and forty-nine months after Appomattox, Lee stepped out of a carriage and walked into the Executive Mansion to be greeted by Grant. The visit was brief and formal, and not without its political repercussions. Many Republicans who had voted Grant into office were aghast at what he had done, but both Grant and Lee understood the meaning of the occasion: Grant was inviting the South back to the White House, and Lee was accepting the invitation.
Grant and Sherman’s friendship would to some extent survive, but it had some exceedingly difficult times. Sherman’s life after the war had in it a mixture of national and even international fame, along with professional frustration and disappointment in his friend Grant. Less than two months after the Grand Review, with Grant remaining the army’s commander, Sherman was assigned to command what was then designated the Military Division of the Mississippi, a territory which, with the exception of Texas, included all the land from the great river to the Rocky Mountains. Named a lieutenant general the following year, he found himself holding a key command in an army whose size the Congress was steadily reducing, at a time when the Indian Wars were under way and federal forces were required for the military occupation of the South during the early Reconstruction years. Fourteen months after the surrender at Appomattox, at which time the Union Army had numbered a million men, Congress reduced the size of the peacetime Regular Army to forty-four thousand, with further reductions coming despite a continuing responsibility to garrison 225 posts ranging from coast artillery installations to wooden forts deep in Indian territory.
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 49