Grant quickly secured Stanton’s permission to go in person to Raleigh, where Sherman had established his headquarters, and take with him Stanton’s order stating that Johnson disapproved of the convention, that Sherman was to resume hostilities, that Lincoln’s views to Grant of March 3, 1865, forbidding conference except on military matters, applied to Sherman, and that Grant should take charge of operations against the enemy. Johnson was later to claim that the only part of this order that he authorized was the disapprobation he felt concerning the truce; Stanton, in the name of the President, was virtually removing Sherman from command. If so, it is remarkable that Grant made no protest either to Stanton or to Johnson on this score. To be sure, everything was done in haste, and all the officials concerned had little time in which to consider the implications of their words and action. But if Grant, as his biographer suggests, went to Raleigh “to soften the blow,” part of the responsibility for its harshness is his.5
Another factor in the situation rasped Stanton’s strained nerves. After the fall of Richmond, the Confederate officials had fled to Greensboro, North Carolina. Sherman, confident that his peace terms with Johnston would be approved, had ordered General Stoneman to withdraw his troops from the railroad leading south from Greensboro and join him at Raleigh.
On April 22, Halleck, who had recently been put in charge of Virginia and that part of North Carolina not occupied by Sherman’s troops, wired Stanton from Richmond of rumors that Jefferson Davis had taken a large store of specie with him in his flight from the fallen rebel capital. Halleck was concerned that the Confederates might try to make terms with Sherman, or some other Union commander, by which they might be permitted to flee abroad with this plunder. Not knowing of Sherman’s terms with Johnston, Halleck wondered whether Sherman had not opened an escape route for the refugee rebel officials by withdrawing Stoneman from the railroad. Stanton impulsively leaped to action.
Announcing to the press the terms that Sherman had offered Johnston and the action taken with respect to them by the President and the cabinet, Stanton stated that Sherman had deliberately disobeyed Lincoln’s instructions to Grant of March 3 after those instructions had been approved and reiterated by President Johnson as a definition of the authority of military commanders in negotiating with the enemy, and asserted that the withdrawal of Stoneman’s force might open Davis’s path of escape with the specie. With this dispatch Stanton sent a nine-point explanation, also for publication, and solely on his own responsibility, of why Sherman’s action had been repudiated. It amounted to a castigation of Sherman and virtually accused him of disloyalty.6
Stanton knew that he was risking his own career in releasing this statement. Next to Grant, Sherman was the most popular general with the public, and Grant had supported his favorite subordinate many times before Lincoln, the War Secretary, and Congress. The general’s brother, John, the influential Ohio senator, and, through General Sherman’s wife, the potent Ewing family would inevitably be involved in his criticism of their relative.
But too much was at stake now for Stanton to hesitate. He knew that Sherman had disagreed with him and the Lincoln administration concerning Negro troops, and also that the general had been contemptuous of the political implications of military actions and had simply ignored occupation responsibilities as much as he could. For example, Sherman’s was the only major command which never developed a provost marshal system—which other officers used as occupation administrations—into anything more than military police units. Having helped immeasurably to win the war, Sherman was now presuming to structure the peace. Stanton never denied Sherman’s martial achievements, but he could not feel that the general possessed equal political acumen.
Although Sherman professed contempt and resentment for politics, Stanton knew that Democratic politicians had great interest in the general. He knew, too, that Sherman had little understanding of or even sympathy for political democracy, and had recently admitted that he preferred monarchy as a ruling system. It seemed to Stanton that if he hesitated at rebuking Sherman, there might develop a popular movement to support the convention terms with Johnston, along with a copperhead drive to elevate Sherman into the White House. “I think father never managed anything so well,” Stanton’s son wrote at this time to Pamphila. “Had there been any delay a powerful opposition might have been organized, and all might have been lost.”
Two months earlier when defeatist peace rumors were abroad in the North, Lieber had pleaded in a letter to Halleck that Stanton and Lincoln avoid any movements toward an armistice. “The very word makes me grave,” Lieber asserted. “An armistice would be the death to our cause.… We want the peace of the lands, but this implies the submission of the revolted states. An Armistice was one of the very points of the detestable [Democratic] Chicago Platform, & no armistice, one of the distinct points on which Mr. Lincoln was re-elected.”
From Stanton’s reaction to the news of Sherman’s truce, as he advised Dana, it is obvious that he saw it as an armistice involving all the implications Lieber stated. Secretly, President Johnson agreed with Stanton, although he never admitted his distrust of Sherman, which dated back to his Tennessee military-governorship, to anyone but his intimate friend and adviser Sam Milligan. Johnson preferred to let Stanton chastise the popular general.7
As reports of the nature of Stanton’s dispatch spread over Washington and the country, alert politicians hurried to learn what it was really all about. Montgomery Blair, characteristically, was the first to see Johnson, who quickly convinced him that Stanton was solely responsible for everything the wire contained, that all Johnson had wanted transmitted was a disapproval of the truce terms. While the two men were talking, Senator Chandler came in. He intruded the blunt comment that Sherman “was the coming man of the Copperheads & this blunder had come just at the right time to destroy him.” Blair claimed to be insulted and left. The President then proceeded to condemn the Sherman-Johnston convention in more violent terms than even Chandler felt free to use.
Stanton meanwhile confided to Browning that in his opinion Sherman had “given up all for which we had been fighting, and threw away all the advantages we had gained from the war.” Even now, Jefferson Davis might be escaping with the Confederate treasure because of the Sherman truce, Stanton asserted.8
The Sunday-morning headlines blazoned the startling story for the country at large to ponder over. Stanton worried most about how the Army would take all this. That Sherman’s own men, who had followed him through victory across half the country, would support their leader, was inevitable. But Sherman’s was not the only army of the Union. Grant and Halleck agreed with Stanton, and General Patrick, who had been critical of Stanton for three years, was now unreserved in his support of the Secretary’s stand. Sherman had been “playing the fool,” Patrick felt on reading the Sunday newspapers; his acts were “astounding and humiliating. Sherman must be crazy.” No one seemed able to account for Sherman’s behavior, and in the eastern commands there was “universal surprise” at it, Patrick wrote.
Hitchcock, too, thought Sherman insane for agreeing to the truce, and even some of the western troopers accorded a grudging assent to Stanton’s policy. The weight of informed opinion was heavily with Stanton. So the President remained quiet and let events develop.9
On April 24, Grant informed Stanton that Sherman had obeyed instructions and had given Johnston notice of the termination of the truce, and that Sherman was not really surprised at the order. Since signing the truce with Johnston, he had heard that Grant had withdrawn permission for the Virginia legislature to meet. But Sherman believed that he had followed Lincoln’s program as prescribed in the past and the one that the dead President would have wanted in force at the present. Writing to Stanton directly the next day, Sherman admitted his “folly” in mixing civil and military matters, but he felt that they were “inextricably united.” Sherman had thought that Stanton at Savannah had implied that the financial difficulties of the North “demanded milita
ry success, and would warrant a little bending to policy,” and insisted that he had emulated Grant’s terms to Lee, and Weitzel’s invitation to the Virginia legislators to assemble. He still felt that the rejection of his terms to Johnston was an error, “but that is none of my business,” he wrote, and concluded by saying that he would obey orders.
Sherman’s tone infuriated Stanton. In informing the press that the truce with Johnston had been terminated, Stanton supplied only the first part of Grant’s dispatch, omitting his explanation of why Sherman had granted the Confederates such liberal terms and completely ignoring Sherman’s own explanation. In fact, he did not even acknowledge it. On the same day Stanton received it, April 25, he wired Grant: “The arrangement between Sherman and Johnston meets with universal disapprobation. No one class or shade of opinion approves it. I have not known as much surprise and discontent at anything that has happened during the war.… The hope of the country is that you may repair the misfortune occasioned by Sherman’s negotiations.”
So far Sherman had not learned of Stanton’s “nine reasons” for repudiating his actions. When he read them in the newspapers without having been officially informed of them, he in turn felt outraged, particularly because he thought that Stanton had given the public the impression that he had previously been furnished with a copy of Lincoln’s March 3 instructions to Grant, and that Stanton “gave warrant” to the impression that he had been bribed from the rebel treasure hoard to let Jeff Davis escape.10
Sherman’s rage reached a new pitch, however, when Halleck, on Grant’s secret instructions, interjected himself into the situation. Halleck ordered Meade, Sheridan, and Wright, of Sherman’s command, to send troops into North Carolina irrespective of any “truce or orders” of Sherman’s, and to “push forward, regardless of any orders save those of Lieutenant-General Grant, and cut off Johnston’s retreat.” A second dispatch of Halleck’s ordered Thomas, Stoneman, and Wilson, also of Sherman’s command, to disregard their chieftain’s orders. To Sherman, Halleck’s orders were gratuitous insults which Stanton further aggravated by releasing all the details to the press; the peppery warrior “exploded instanter” at their mention, Dahlgren recorded.11
If Grant could have had his way, the troublesome affair would have stopped at this point. He had achieved what he had set out to do in his hurried trip to Raleigh. His mere presence there had quieted the western troops, one of them, General Manning Force, noting that “Grant is here, and it is his judgment, and who would question that?” The truce was disavowed and Grant’s reputation was secure. But Sherman, now angered beyond control, feeling that he could never forgive Stanton’s publication of selected portions of the pertinent correspondence and Halleck’s vexatious order, refused to remain quiet. He never learned of Grant’s role.
“I am not a politician,” he wrote Grant, “never voted but once in my life, & never read a political platform.” He was “hurt, outraged, & insulted by Mr. Stanton’s public arraignment of my motives and actions.… I respect his office but I cannot him personally, till he undoes the injustice of the past.” Sherman also wanted Grant to tell the President that the rumors of his own political ambitions were groundless.
Along with Grant, Senator Sherman wanted Tecumseh to accept the censure as a due penalty for overstepping the limits of military functions. The senator wrote to Stanton that he felt “distressed beyond measure” by the terms his brother had offered Johnston, but he also felt that grave injustice had been done. The worst that could be said against General Sherman was that, like Lincoln, he had been too lenient toward the rebels, and had trusted them too far, “while we know that to arm them with the electoral franchise … is to renew the war.” He did not want his brother to be unjustly treated, however, if only because to do so might drive the general into an alliance with the copperheads.12
But the Sherman-Ewing clan soon took a different tone, and commenced to pressure Stanton to retract his criticisms, which he refused to do. Then, on April 28, word came that Johnston had surrendered on the same terms Lee had accepted. Immediately, the tide of opinion that had set so strongly against Sherman began to turn in his favor as his great war services were remembered. Meanwhile, Stanton’s enemies hurried to feast on his latest difficulty.13
A scheme to oust Stanton from the cabinet had already been initiated behind the scenes, and now the plotters came cautiously into the light, drawn by the opportunity which the Stanton-Sherman rift offered. It was fomented by friends of Ben Butler, with allies among other radical Republicans who felt that Johnson needed men in the cabinet who fully agreed with them, and Stanton was not accounted a radical. The intrigue involved Chase, who expressed every support for Tecumseh; but to President Johnson, the slippery Chief Justice agreed with the War Secretary’s analysis, though in milder terms.
What Chase hoped to gain by getting Stanton out of the cabinet at this time is unclear; perhaps he feared Stanton and Sherman as possible political rivals in 1868 and hoped that, if both men were egged on, each would kill the chances of the other. Stanton suspected what was going on, and though deeply hurt at the undeserved knife in the back from his friend, had already countered the plot, though unknowingly. On April 28 his son wrote to Pamphila: “A faction in favor of Sherman is reported as being organized here under the leadership of Chase and Butler; the object of course being to break down father.” But the War Secretary’s promptness in acting against the Sherman-Johnston truce, and President Johnson’s quiet support of Stanton, had ruined the plot. “They are too late,” the younger Stanton wrote.14 As the Secretary had acted to disavow the truce before he learned of this plot to unseat him, this fortuitous result must be accounted as a bonus for his stern and unswerving, if untactful, devotion to his duty.
Though Sherman had justification in feeling bitter toward Stanton, he had brought his troubles on himself, and someone in Washington had to intervene. His assurance to Stanton that he would negotiate with Johnston solely on military matters showed that he realized that there were limitations on his authority as a military commander. True, Stanton should have informed Sherman of Lincoln’s instructions to Grant of March 3, and of Lincoln’s revocation of his order to Weitzel to allow the Virginia legislators to assemble. But the Secretary’s remissness gave Sherman no warrant for overstepping his authority. Stanton had given Sherman no authorization to deal with political matters when he visited him in Savannah, and Grant’s terms to Lee at Appomattox afforded no precedent for Sherman’s action. Though Sherman had stipulated that the terms of his agreement with Johnston must be ratified in Washington, he had announced them the next day to his army as though ratification were certain, thus forcing the administration to act quickly and decisively in disavowing the terms of the truce. Sherman, contemptuous of politicians and distrustful of democracy, probably thought that generals were better qualified than civilians to act as peacemakers.
And Sherman was not, as he had thought, following the path toward peace terms which Lincoln had blazed. Lincoln’s thoughts on this matter were pragmatic and dynamic, not ideological and fixed. Sherman’s inability to understand this was shared by many Americans in 1865 and later, and was to produce tragic consequences.15
On the other hand, Stanton had acted toward Sherman with his customary bluntness and disregard of personal feelings, and his “nine reasons” for revoking the truce, combined with the crude orders from Halleck to Sherman’s subordinates to disregard the orders of their commander, had put the general in an unnecessarily bad light. But Grant’s and Halleck’s roles in issuing these orders indicate that the responsibility for them must be shared. Stanton’s error was to publish them.
It was planned to hold a great review in Washington before the volunteers put off their uniforms. The armies moved toward camps near the capital. Sherman received a note from Halleck inviting him to stay at his home while in Richmond, and also informing him that Halleck had arranged to review his troops there. Sherman curtly declined the invitation. His men would not parade for Halleck
, he declared, and suggested that Halleck go into hiding when his army marched through Richmond; he might find himself insulted if seen by Sherman’s angry troops.
Informing Grant of his actions, Sherman declared: “I will treat Mr. Stanton with like scorn & contempt, unless you have reasons otherwise, for I regard my military career as ended, save and except so far as necessary to put my army into your hands. Mr. Stanton can give me no orders of himself. He may, in the name of the President, and those shall be obeyed to the letter; but I deny his right to command an army.… Subordination to authority is one thing, to insult another. No amount of retraction or pusillanimous excusing will do. Mr. Stanton must publicly confess himself a common libeller or—but I won’t threaten.… He wants the vast patronage of the military Governorships of the South, and the votes of [the] negro [es] … for political capital, and whoever stands in his way must die. Keep above such influences, or you will also be a victim. See in my case how soon all past services are ignored or forgotten.”
With the Ewing family and John Sherman now rallying to his support, cocky Tecumseh seemed, as he assembled his veteran troopers at Alexandria, to be having things his own way. Stanton kept quiet, in conformity with Thurlow Weed’s advice: “The Shermans are overacting. You can afford to be silent.”16
Sherman’s troops gave free expression to unflattering opinions of Stanton in Washington’s hotel lobbies and barrooms. Rumors that Sherman planned to take over the government flew around Washington. The Committee on the Conduct of the War became disturbed and decided to put Sherman on the carpet, asking him to appear before it with Grant. Both generals pleaded pressing duties elsewhere, but the members would not be denied. Wade wanted to know particularly whether Sherman, in offering his lenient peace terms, had acted under previous confidential instructions from Lincoln, and at his request Stanton ordered the two generals to appear.
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