by Bruce Catton
Halleck stood by Smith, then, and saved him for further service; and the whole tangle is worth going into here because it represents one of the problems that could confront any Civil War general at any moment. Volunteer troops had Volunteer officers, many of them men of political influence, all of them men who would be listened to if they wrote to home-town newspapers or to Congressmen. Rigorous application of Army discipline, failure to appreciate a subordinate’s gifts as a soldier, apparent softness toward Rebel civilians or inability to respond to the pressing demands of the antislavery people—any of these could, and often did, enmesh a soldier in anonymous accusations of the sort which a Regular of Smith’s type might find it all but impossible to answer.
In the East, trouble of this sort had already beset Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, who was ruined despite the fact that both the President and the Commanding General had full confidence in him. One year later the same problem would end the career of Fitz-John Porter, one of the ablest officers in the Army of the Potomac; it would greatly handicap and finally help to close the military career of McClellan himself, and in the West it would contribute much to the ultimate downfall of Don Carlos Buell. No general officer could consider himself safe. The war was being fought in an era of unlimited suspicion, and as Smith had so bitterly pointed out, simply to be suspected was just about as bad as to be convicted.
All of which was deplorable but perfectly natural. War and politics were inextricably blended and the conflicting strains and pressures which resulted had to be taken into account. No lover of the Union could fail to note that professional soldiers of long experience and high reputation were now trying to destroy the government that had nurtured them. (That these men had been moved by the loftiest motives of inner loyalty was a point Northerners could not at the moment recognize, nor would it have mattered to them greatly if they had recognized it.) What some men had done, it seemed, other men might do. In a civil war unquestioned loyalty to the government’s cause was the one virtue that counted more than all others put together, and it was precisely the professional soldier, temperamentally unable to imagine that his loyalty could possibly come under suspicion, who was the most likely to get into trouble because of this fact.
Halleck could understand this where many abler generals could not understand it, and he could come to the rescue of a man like Smith in a way McClellan was unable to do for a man like Stone. Halleck was also, this fall, saving for the Union cause the undeniable talents of the thorny and outspoken General Sherman, whose troubles were even worse than Smith’s.
Sherman had had what would now be called a nervous breakdown and had had to give up his command in Kentucky. Halleck fixed him up with a minor post in Missouri and gave him the breathing spell and the encouragement that Sherman desperately needed, but as the autumn wore away Sherman was deeply despondent. From Sedalia, Missouri, he wrote to his wife saying that Sedalia was “A bleak, desolate place without water or timber or any shelter,” and predicting that “if Price does not wipe us out, winter will.” The papers had asserted that Sherman was insane, and Sherman himself seems almost to have believed it. To his brother, Senator John Sherman, he wrote: “I am so sensible now of my disgrace from having exaggerated the forces of our enemy in Kentucky that I do think I should have committed suicide were it not for my children. I do not think that I can again be entrusted with a command.” And, to Mrs. Sherman, he confessed frankly; “Could I live over the past year I think I could do better, but my former associations with the South have rendered me almost crazy as one by one all links of hope were parted.… The idea of having brought disgrace on all associated with me is so horrible to contemplate that I cannot rally under it.”4
Once this fall Mrs. Sherman herself wrote to Halleck, reciting the dreadful things the newspapers were saying about her husband and asking his help. Halleck wrote her a soothing letter, but he himself was disturbed, and to Mrs. Halleck he wrote:
I enclose a letter just received from Mrs. Sherman. How do you suppose I answered it? I could not say her husband was not crazy, for certainly he has acted insane. Not wishing to hurt her feelings by telling her what I thought, and being unwilling to say what I did not believe, I treated the whole matter as a joke and wrote her that I would willingly take all the newspapers said against General Sherman if he would take all they said against me, for I was certain to gain by the exchange.5
Very slowly but surely, Sherman was rallying, and there would presently be work for him to do. Oddly enough, both he and Smith, who were to prove magnificent leaders of volunteer troops in action, were saying now that they simply were not qualified for such command. Sherman confessed to his brother: “I do not feel confident at all in volunteers. Their want of organization, the necessity to flatter them, is such that I cannot prosper with them.” And Smith, in precisely the same vein, was writing: “Whilst my experience of human nature teaches me to know the manner in which Voln troops ought to be treated to make them soldiers with the least jar on their previous habits of life, neither my education, habits, associates nor temper fit me to command them to the best advantage. This is a frank confession for those who seek my position.”6
Grant, meanwhile, was busy with the endless routine involved in getting his military district in order. Accusations of disloyalty were not brought against him, and in an odd way the old legend about excessive drinking seems to have been almost protective; when Grant was accused of anything—and accusers were not lacking, this fall—he was simply accused of drinking too much, and in the strange temper of that era this somehow carried less weight than the accusation of softness toward the Rebels and toward slavery. Like all other Federal commanders in or near slave territory, he was pestered by slaveowners demanding the return of fugitive slaves, and in such cases he had one answer: if the slaveowner was not a man of unquestioned loyalty to the Union, the Army would not help him regain any slave that had run away. He made his position clear in a letter one of his aides sent to a subordinate just at the end of this year:
The slave who is used to support the master who supports the Rebellion is not to be restored to the master by military authority. If such a master has a civil right to reclaim such property he must resort to the civil authority to enforce that right. The general commanding does not feel it his duty to feed the foe or in any manner contribute to their comfort.7
But this did not mean that Grant’s troops were to hold open house for all runaways. To Colonel John Cook, commanding at Fort Holt, where stray contrabands were alleged to be in hiding, Grant sent a tart warning that departmental orders did not permit Union camps to harbor escaped slaves, and he tried to make the position clear:
I do not want the Army used as negro-catchers, but still less do I want to see it used as a cloak to cover their escape. No matter what our private views may be on this subject there are in this department positive orders on the subject and these orders must be obeyed. I direct therefore that you have a search made, and if you find these or any other fugitive slaves in camp at Fort Holt you have them expelled from Camp, and if hereafter you find any have been concealed or detained you bring the party so detaining them to punishment.8
Grant was quite ready to be very stern with secessionist civilians. Early in January four Union pickets were shot from ambush at Bird’s Point, and to General Paine, now commanding there, Grant sent drastic orders. If, on investigation, it seemed that the men had been shot by civilians and not by Confederate soldiers, “the whole country should be cleared out for six miles around and word given that all citizens making their appearance within these limits are liable to be shot.” Paine was to send out patrols to bring everyone into camp, using surplus Army tents to shelter them, and he was to be very firm about it: “The intention is not to make political prisoners of these people but to cut off a dangerous class of spies.” Women and children might retire to any refuge they chose outside the six-mile limit, but at all costs the camp was to be made secure.9
Much more difficult was the long fig
ht to straighten out the tangle of wasteful and frequently fraudulent supply contracts which had burgeoned here as in every Western area. Needed supplies of every sort were lacking, and when they were bought they were obtained at inflated prices; and the resulting waste and fraud came less from villainy than from desperate haste, the pressure of war, and probably also from the War Department’s habit of centering its attention on affairs in Virginia and letting the West fend for itself. In his first report to Halleck, on November 21, Grant gave a picture of the situation at Cairo:
The condition of this command is bad in every particular except discipline. In this latter I think they will compare favorably with almost any volunteers. There is great deficiency in transportation. I have no ambulances. The clothing received has been almost universally of an inferior quality and deficient in quantity. The arms in the hands of the men are mostly the old flint-lock repaired, the “Tower” musket and others of still more inferior quality.
My cavalry force are none of them properly armed—the best being deficient in sword-belts and having the old pattern carbines. Eight companies are entirely without arms of any description.
The quartermaster’s department has been carried on with so little funds that Government credit has become exhausted. I would urgently recommend that relief in this particular be afforded at as early a day as practicable.10
Halleck would support anyone who was trying to set up an orderly administration. A few days after receiving Grant’s letter he wrote to McClellan saying that “affairs here are in complete chaos,” and to his cousin, the clergyman Henry W. Whipple, he wrote; “Affairs in this department are in a most deplorable condition—whether made so purposely or not I will not say. If I can ever get any order out of this chaos I shall be satisfied.” To Mrs. Halleck he recited the long hours of work which the job entailed, saying with a touch of self-satisfaction: “I never go to bed leaving anything of the day’s business undone. Nearly all back business is cleaned up, and everything is getting straightened out and put in its place. This is very encouraging and I begin to see my way through the chaos and corruption which Frémont left behind him. Of course all his satellites abuse me in the newspapers, but this does not annoy me in the least.”11
Abuse of this kind was coming Grant’s way, too. Some months later Grant described his problems in a letter to Congressman Washburne. A ring of contractors and speculators, he said, had obtained a near monopoly on Army business around Cairo. Contracts for forage were going at 30 per cent above the market rates, and there was much collusive bidding. Members of the ring would submit bids when a government contract was offered, and after the bids were opened all but the highest bidder would withdraw their offers. If some outsiders submitted a bid under the level set by the highest bidder he would be bought off, or would be cajoled into retiring; the ring boasted that it had enough influence to remove any general who did not play along, and said openly that no contractor who was not on the inside had a chance to get a contract. Grant was in position to crack down, here, partly because his quartermaster department had no funds, which meant that contractors could be paid only by voucher, and the vouchers had to have Grant’s signed approval. Where prices seemed out of line, Grant would not sign. On one occasion he refused to approve a forage contract even though the Department quartermaster at St. Louis had endorsed it. When the indignant contractors displayed this officer’s signature, Grant was unmoved:
My reply to them was that they had got their contract without my consent, had got it approved against my sense of duty to the Government, and they might go on and deliver the forage and get their pay in the same way. I would not approve a voucher for them under that contract if they never got a cent. Hoped they would not. This forced them to abandon the contract and to sell the forage already delivered for what it was worth.
This also brought Grant into collision with Leonard Swett of Chicago, a lawyer whose intimacy with Abraham Lincoln was widely known. Swett, said Grant, “wrote me one or more letters on the subject, rather offensive in their manner.” When Swett threatened to go to President Lincoln about it, Grant told him to do so if he wished; meanwhile, Grant would continue to buy materials at what he considered fair prices, and if he had to he would seize the Illinois Central Railroad (in which Swett had an interest) in order to move the goods. He also ordered Swett out of the District of Cairo forthwith, threatening to lock him up or even to shoot him if he stayed. Long afterward, Swett himself said that he did go to Lincoln and that Lincoln remarked that Swett had better be careful: if this man Grant threatened to shoot him he was as likely as not to do it.12
From Swett there came no real trouble, but from the disgruntled contractors themselves there came plenty. Stories that Grant was drinking heavily began to circulate, coupled with stories that his administration of military affairs at Cairo was hopelessly inefficient. Rawlins blamed all of these stories on the disappointed contractors. In Paducah, Lew Wallace believed that some of them grew out of a visit Grant paid Smith late in October, when Grant, Smith and Wallace sat late in Smith’s quarters enjoying a social glass; and some men on Grant’s staff blamed Wallace himself, accusing him of political jealousy. Early in January, a fellow citizen of Galena, Lieutenant William R. Rowley, then an officer in the 45th Illinois and soon to join Grant’s staff, wrote to Congressman Washburne:
I have had an excellent opportunity of learning as to the truth or falsity of the reports which have without doubt reached you concerning Genl. Grant and I have no hesitation in saying that anyone who asserts he is becoming dissipated is either misinformed or else he lies. I think you will have no cause to be ashamed of the Brigadier you have manufactured.13
Washburne had indeed heard the stories, and in December he wrote to his friend Rawlins asking for a frank report. Rawlins, who was taking his self-chosen duty as guardian of Grant’s morals very seriously, replied that he was “no less astounded at the contents of your note than you must have been at the information reported to you,” and he answered in great detail. And because detailed, seemingly circumstantial accounts of Grant’s drunkenness at Cairo are still in circulation, the letter written by this consecrated teetotaler is worth looking at in some detail.
… I would say unequivocably and emphatically [wrote Rawlins] that the statement that General Grant is drinking very hard is utterly untrue and could have originated only in malice. When I came to Cairo General Grant was as he is today, a strictly abstinence man, and I have been informed by those who knew him well that such has been his habit for the last five or six years.
Just what had Grant been drinking? Rawlins was specific.
Shortly after Rawlins’s arrival someone gave Grant a case of champagne. Once or twice Grant drank a glass of this with friends, but he never took enough to show the effect. For a time he felt dyspeptic and a doctor told him to drink two glasses of beer or ale each day; he followed this advice for a week or so, found that he felt no better, and then quit. Shortly after the battle of Belmont, friends visited him for a few days and he had a few drinks with them, “but in no instance did he drink enough to manifest it to anyone who did not see him drink.” Rawlins went with Grant to a dinner given by officials of the Illinois Central Railroad and saw the General drink half a glass of champagne; and the fact that he drank at all was remarked on “simply because of his usual total abstinence.” And Rawlins stated flatly:
No man can say that at any time since I have been with him has he drunk liquor enough to in the slightest unfit him for business or make it manifest in his words or actions. At the time I have referred to, continuing probably a week or ten days, he may have taken an occasional drink with these gentlemen and others visiting Cairo at that time, but never in a single instance to excess, and at the end of that period he voluntarily stated he should not during the continuance of the war again taste liquor of any kind, and for the past three or four weeks, though to my knowledge frequently importuned on visits of friends, he has not tasted any kind of liquor. If there is any man in the s
ervice who has discharged his duties faithfully and fearlessly, who has ever been at his post and guarded the interest confided to him with the utmost vigilance, General Grant has done it.… If you could look into General Grant’s countenance at this moment you would want no other assurance of his sobriety. He is in perfect health, and his eye and intellect are as clear and active as can be.
This was explicit enough, but Rawlins went on:
Have no fears: General Grant by bad habits or conduct will never disgrace himself or you.… But I say to you frankly, and I pledge you my word for it, that should General Grant at any time become an intemperate man or an habitual drunkard, I will notify you immediately will ask to be removed from duty on his staff (kind as he has been to me) or resign my commission. For while there are times when I would gladly throw the mantle of charity over the faults of friends, at this time and from a man of his position I would rather tear the mantle off and expose the deformity.
Rawlins was prepared to give references. Specifically, he referred the Congressman to the Navy’s Captain Foote, now wearing the slightly cumbersome title of Flag Officer—the Navy did not at that moment have admirals—a man who had been close to Grant ever since he reached Cairo and whose hatred of alcohol equaled Rawlins’s own hatred of it. Rawlins also mentioned that Halleck had recently sent a board of officers down to Cairo to make a general inspection of the way the commanding general was handling things. Their report must have been favorable, for shortly after they returned to St. Louis Halleck had issued an order formally designating Grant’s command as the District of Cairo and adding to it the Paducah area. Smith, an officer in whom Halleck had vast confidence, now was under Grant: Halleck would never have put him there if he had not felt that Grant was doing his job properly.14
By degrees Grant was getting his supply problem ironed out. When the Chicago Tribune printed a story alleging frauds in the quartermaster department in the purchase of lumber, Grant promptly sent Captain W. S. Hillyer of his staff to make an investigation. By the time the charges had reached Washington and St. Louis, Grant had the facts in hand and was able to submit a satisfactory report. Early in January he got an efficient new quartermaster, Captain A. S. Baxter, placed a former assistant quartermaster and a chief clerk in the quartermaster’s department under arrest, impounded all of their books, and asked Halleck to suspend the auditing of vouchers they had issued. “Every day,” he wrote Halleck, “develops further evidences of corruption in the quartermaster’s department.” Some time later he told a friend that he believed many of the stories that were told about him at this time came from the deposed quartermaster, who was himself something of a sot.15