Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  When the cuts in military appropriations also reduced the pay for generals, Sherman pointed out that he felt all the Union generals had been underpaid during the war and certainly should not be treated this way. He wrote to a friend, “What money will pay Meade for Gettysburg? What Sheridan for Winchester and the Five Forks & what Thomas for Chickamauga, Chattanooga or Nashville?” Referring to what the taxpayers would save by these reductions in military pay, Sherman added, “Few Americans would tear these pages from our national history for the few dollars saved from their pay during their short lives.”

  Never politically adept and always disliking the press, Sherman’s views caused more controversy than he wanted. Convinced by the concept of Manifest Destiny, which held it self-evidently right that the American white population should spread across the plains and settle all of the Western lands, he regarded the Indians as being an inferior people, who, he told a graduating class at West Point, had an “inherited prejudice … against labor.” (Grant, who had written in a letter to Julia of the future international power of the United States that was an extension of the idea of Manifest Destiny, was for a gentler treatment of the Indians, but his efforts were hampered by both the inefficiency and occasional corruption of the Indian Agency, and the enormous thrust of post-Civil War Western expansion.)

  At times Sherman tried to ensure that white settlers treated the Indians fairly, but as he became increasingly convinced that the Indians would not change and become the kind of domesticated, productive citizens he wanted them to be, he came to something like his wartime policy toward the South. It would be more realistic, and better in the long run for everyone concerned, to crush the Indians’ resistance to white settlement sooner than later, by applying harsh force. The Indians simply had to be gotten out of the way of the inevitable settlement of the Western lands that they persisted in thinking were theirs. His underlying attitude toward the Indians was not a desire to wipe them out, but at least once, voicing his belief in the need to take strong military measures against the Indians, he admitted that he “believed in the doctrine” expressed in the saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

  During the immediate postwar years, before Grant became president, Sherman’s resentment of what he considered to be the dictatorial attitude toward him taken by President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of War Stanton increased the tension between him and his two civilian superiors. Nonetheless, his wartime fame ensured that he would be sounded out by one group or another as a possible presidential candidate during every election from 1868 to the one to be held in 1892, overtures that he most memorably finally dismissed with, “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”

  When Grant was elected president in the autumn of 1868, he named Sherman to replace him as the army’s commander. Taking that position of general of the army in March of 1869, Sherman felt that he and his old friend Grant would work well together, as they had during the war. At that moment, the secretary of war was General John M. Schofield, who had served under Sherman during the war. Schofield had been a compromise appointment made by Andrew Johnson after Johnson failed in his efforts to remove Stanton during their dispute about Reconstruction policies, with Stanton resigning on his own initiative after Johnson’s impeachment. Sherman, who on Grant’s recommendation had just been promoted to the new rank of full general, had reason to assume that, among himself, Grant, and Schofield, three greatly experienced West Pointers, army matters would be dealt with in a harmonious and effective fashion.

  No sooner had Sherman taken command of the army than Grant replaced Schofield as secretary of war with his old wartime chief of staff and confidant John A. Rawlins, who was now gravely ill. In an action that substantially reduced Sherman’s authority, Rawlins immediately issued orders that in effect rescinded Grant’s own recent order setting forth the wide scope of the general of the army’s powers. Hurrying to the White House, Sherman tried to get this reversed, only to encounter Grant’s statement, about Rawlins and his illness, “I don’t like to give him pain now; so, Sherman, you’ll have to publish the rescinding order.” When Sherman still protested, with the two men still addressing each other as “Grant” and “Sherman” in the manner of their wartime meetings, Grant said, “Well, if it’s my own order, I can rescind it, can’t I?”

  Sherman, who had written his brother during the war that Grant “has an almost childlike love for me,” stood up and said, “Yes, Mister President, you have the power to revoke your own order; you shall be obeyed. Good morning, sir.”

  Things were never quite the same between them after that. When Rawlins died five months later, Grant named Sherman as his interim secretary of war, but when the post was filled by W. W. Belknap, a civilian who was another of Sherman’s former subordinate generals, Belknap soon exceeded Rawlin’s actions in restricting the powers of the general of the army. Sherman began to see that Grant was in the hands of politicians. Nonetheless, Sherman remained in command of the army for a total of fourteen years, serving not only under Grant through his two terms as president but also under President Rutherford B. Hayes, another Civil War general, as well as James A. Garfield, who had fought as a brigadier general at Shiloh, and Chester A. Arthur. On his sixty-fourth birthday, February 8, 1884, nearly forty-eight years after he was sworn in as a cadet at West Point, William Tecumseh Sherman resigned from the army.

  During the last year of Grant’s life, it would be the newly retired Sherman’s turn to lift his friend’s spirits. In 1884, seven years after he left the White House, Grant, then living in New York, lost all his money because of the fraudulent machinations of a Wall Street figure to whom he had entrusted everything he had. To try to regain the loss and provide for his family, he began to write his accurate, powerful, historically valuable memoirs, a work that brings the reader to the close of the war. Lavishly praised across the next century by figures as diverse as Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, and Edmund Wilson, the book was destined to succeed with the public immediately and guarantee Julia a comfortable income, but soon after he began to write, Grant started to suffer from the throat cancer finally brought on by thousands of cigars. Racing against his illness as he wrote, Grant welcomed Sherman’s repeated visits to him: on December 24, 1884, Sherman wrote Ellen, “Grant says my visits have done him more good than all the doctors.”

  In a gallant final effort, Grant finished his classic work on July 19, 1885, and died four days later. A crowd of one and a half million—the largest to assemble in the United States to that time—lined the streets of Manhattan to watch his funeral cortege pass. In the solemn parade were not only Union Army veterans but also a contingent of Confederates who had served in the Stonewall Brigade. Sherman was a pallbearer at the funeral ceremony and bowed his head and wept as a bugler played Taps. Two months later, Sherman said of his friend, “It will be a thousand years before his character is fully appreciated.” He became the defender of Grant’s military reputation: when an argument was made that Lee was the greater general, Sherman countered that it was Grant who had seen the Civil War as a strategic seamless web, and added, of Lee, “His Virginia was to him the world … [He] stood at the front porch battling with the flames whilst the kitchen and whole house were burning, sure in the end to consume the whole.”

  In that future, still far distant on the day of the Grand Review, Ellen would be the next to go. To the end, she and Sherman were very different and disagreed on many things as they always had—twelve years after the war, they lived apart for close to two years—yet deep in Ellen was the little five-year-old girl who “peeped with great interest” as her father brought the red-headed nine-year-old boy from next door home to live with them. Two years after Sherman retired from the army in 1884, they went to live in New York City, where she remained at home in the evenings while he consorted with the millionaires of the age—the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—as well as with actresses, artists, and assorted celebrities. His flirtatious friendships with women, including those w
ith a sculptress and a Philadelphia socialite, were well-known, but in the middle of all that, while she was away on a trip, Ellen wrote him a letter that rang the truth for both of them. “You are the only man in the world I ever could have loved,” she said, and then told him that, whether he knew it or not, “You are true to me in heart and soul.” They would never reconcile their views on Catholicism—when their son Tom, eight years old at the time of the Grand Review, decided at the age of twenty-three to become a Jesuit priest, his decision broke Sherman’s heart and pleased Ellen—but their unending love for their dead son Willy was one of the bonds that held them together like steel.

  The end for Ellen came on November 28, 1888, when she was sixty-four. She had been sick for some weeks, lying in bed upstairs in the house on Manhattan’s West Seventy-first Street into which they had recently moved. Sherman wishfully thought she was exaggerating the gravity of her illness but had installed a nurse to take care of her. He was reading in his office when the nurse suddenly called down to him that Ellen was failing. Sherman raced up the stairs, crying out, “Wait for me Ellen, no one ever loved you as I love you!” When he reached her bed, she was gone.

  After a time of mourning so deep as to worry those who remembered the mental states of his wartime years, Sherman resumed his New York social life. Cared for by his unmarried daughter Lizzie and with frequent visits from his married daughters Ellie and Minnie, he resumed his combination of sophisticated New York life and reunions of his veterans—he attended several hundred of those gatherings during the first fifteen years after the war, always as the guest of honor—but his fabled energy was deserting him. On February 8, 1890, his seventieth birthday brought forth greetings and tributes from all over the nation, and he was surrounded by a family that now included seven grandchildren, but a year later, he was stricken by an illness that appeared to be related to the asthma from which he had suffered earlier in his life. This soon became pneumonia. Sherman lay in bed, steadily growing weaker, with his mind sometimes wandering. On February 11, 1891, he asked his daughter Minnie to make certain that the words “Faithful and Honorable” be carved on his headstone. Three days after that, he died.

  Sherman’s body was to be taken west for burial in St. Louis, but first there would be a massive funeral service for him in New York, attended by President Benjamin Harrison, who had served in his ranks, former president Rutherford B. Hayes, another of his veterans, former president Grover Cleveland, and five of the surviving major generals of the Army of the West. The funeral procession from Sherman’s house to the church would have thirty thousand men marching, in organizations ranging from the entire West Point Corps of Cadets to regiments of the Regular Army and National Guard, as well as thousands of Civil War veterans from the association known as the Grand Army of the Republic.

  As the funeral procession was being organized, an erect, frail, eighty-four-year-old man got off a train in New York, bringing with him a valise and the honor of the South. From the time he had met Sherman in North Carolina for the purpose of surrendering his army to him, General Joseph E. Johnston had remained his admiring friend. They had corresponded and had frequently dined together in Washington during the postwar years during which Johnston had, among other things, served the reunited nation as a congressman from Virginia from 1879 to 1881, and was appointed United States commissioner of railroads in 1885. Learning that Sherman had named him an honorary pallbearer, Johnston had headed north from his home in Washington, despite the concern of his family and friends that he was not used to the winter weather he would find in New York in mid-February. As he stood at attention bareheaded outside Sherman’s house while the casket containing his friend’s body was brought down the steps to be placed in a hearse, someone behind him leaned forward and said, “General, please put on your hat, you might get sick.” Johnston replied, “If I were in his place and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat.” By the end of the day, Johnston had a severe chill, which caused complications for his weakened heart. Back in the South, Johnston died a month later.

  The trip of Sherman’s body west to be buried in St. Louis was symbolic in itself—a man from Ohio, a soldier of the West, the commander of the Army of the West, returning to be buried near the Mississippi River that he and Grant had used as the strategic avenue that led them to the victory at Vicksburg and all that followed from that—but there was something more. Along the route of his funeral train, his veterans waited for him in daylight and darkness, ready to salute him a final time. Many of them had gathered in squads, small groups of survivors wearing their broad-brimmed slouch hats, saved from the days when they fought and marched beside their “Uncle Billy.” Some even had their old muskets, loaded with a blank charge of powder, to raise and fire at the sky in the manner of military funerals. What they saw when the train came was a big picture of Sherman, fixed to the headlight, and his sword swinging beneath it as he went west.

  The last survivor of the two couples, the Grants and the Shermans, was Julia Grant. She loved her eight years in the White House as first lady and greatly enjoyed the two and a half years that she and Grant spent traveling around the world after he left office. Nation after nation hailed him with twenty-one-gun salutes, and United States Navy vessels were placed at their disposal whenever they wanted to travel aboard them. When the Grants dined with Queen Victoria at Windsor Palace, before Grant took the queen into dinner on his arm, Julia and Victoria had a chance to talk and told each other about their children. “The Paris I remember,” Julia wrote in her own wise and charming memoirs, “is all sunshine, the people all happy,” and she also noted that “the President of France, that grand old soldier Marshal MacMahon and Madam MacMahon were unceasing in their attentions.” At Heidelberg, Richard Wagner “performed some of his own delightful pieces of music for us.” Arriving at Cairo by train from the port of Alexandria, the Grants were met by officials representing the khedive of Egypt, including former Confederate general William W. Loring, a West Pointer who had lost an arm in the Mexican War and had commanded troops fighting Grant in the Vicksburg campaign, and was employed by the khedive in modernizing and training his army. (Grant promptly asked Loring to ride with him in his carriage, and the two talked of Civil War campaigns.)

  After Grant’s death, Julia moved from New York to Washington, where she lived in a large, comfortable house on Massachusetts Avenue, receiving prominent visitors of every sort and often dining at the White House. In good health, lively as always, interested in everything, she began to outlive many of her contemporaries; when the Spanish-American War started in 1898, she became the active head of the Women’s National War Relief Association, which sent its first shipload of supplies to Manila. (During that conflict, which began thirty-three years after the Civil War ended, former Confederate cavalry general Joseph Wheeler served as a major general of United States Volunteers at the age of sixty-one, and Robert E. Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh Lee, who had been another young Confederate cavalry general, also became a major general and was a corps commander in Cuba, being present at the Battle of San Juan Hill when he was sixty-two. The Grants’ son Frederick, who as a boy of thirteen was with his father at the surrender of Vicksburg, later graduated from West Point, and after time out of the service, including acting along with his brother Ulysses Jr. as confidential secretary to the president while Grant was in office, came back into the army when he was forty-seven to serve as a major general in the Philippines.)

  In 1902, at the age of seventy-six, Julia Dent Grant had an attack of bronchitis, combined with heart and kidney failures. To the end, she remembered and cherished all of Ulysses S. Grant, not just the general and the president but also the young lieutenant who had ridden up to her house at White Haven so long ago. The squint-eyed girl from Missouri had gone with him every loving, supportive step of the way, from the morning rides across bright pastures along the shining Gravois Creek, through hard times when Grant was peddling firewood on the streets of St. Louis, to battlefield areas, to t
he White House, to Windsor Castle, to caring for him in his last illness as he wrote his account of the battles he fought and the campaigns he commanded. They had done it together, they had lived one of the great American love stories, and now in her last days she still yearned for her “Ulys,” who signed all his letters with, “Kisses to you and the children.” In the last lines of her memoirs she wrote, “I, his wife, rested in and was warmed in the sunlight of his loyal love and great fame, and now, even though his beautiful life has gone out, it is as when some far-off planet disappears from the heavens; the light of his glorious fame still reaches out to me, falls upon me, and warms me.”

  L’ENVOI

  And so the living echoes of the friendship between Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman came to an end. Both of them failures before the war, the two men, alike in some ways and so different in others, discovered their talents and strengths in the crucible of the great national crisis. They formed a partnership in which, often after significant differences of opinion, each resolutely and successfully supported the decisions and movements of the other. Both were formidable leaders, but it was their combined abilities and coordinated campaigns that proved literally irresistible and played such a major part in winning the Civil War.