by Bruce Catton
Once this took place, slavery was doomed. What happened in western Tennessee in the middle of 1862 was important, not just because it meant unlimited woe for plantation owners and ordinary farmers, but because the Western soldiers had, in effect, ratified the Emancipation Proclamation before it was even written. They did this by instinct rather than by thought. Back of Grant, Sherman and the others was the vast, still shapeless body of enlisted men, whose emotions were beginning to be dominant for the entire war. The steps by which this happened are worth reciting.
More and more, the Northern soldiers this summer were coming to feel that they were in a foreign land, whose people were not merely hostile but were deserving of rough treatment, their very foreignness being, somehow, just cause for blame. The Southland was set apart, not by the fact that it was in rebellion, but by its strangeness; its fields and houses were not like the fields and houses of the Middle West, its habits of speech and action were different—outlandishly different, to Western eyes—and the strangeness and irritating differences all seemed to center around the existence of human slavery. An officer would write to his wife: “If slavery existed in every state in the Union, we would as a nation be miserably sluggish and stupid.” An enlisted man felt that the countryside and the people “all bore the impress of another life,” and said that it was almost a surprise to find that Southerners spoke the same language as Northerners spoke. Marching boys jeered at the tumble-down quality of occasional country schoolhouses, and marveled that there were so few of them; they began to talk, as the slaves themselves talked, about poor white trash, “a poor, degraded, ignorant, thriftless people,” scoffed at the primitive equipment they saw on eroded farms, and commented that hardly any of the towns seemed to have sidewalks.
Grant’s fellow townsman, Dr. Edward Kittoe, wrote that the only friends of the Union in Tennessee were the slaves. “The darkies seemed joyous at our presence,” he wrote, when he entered the railroad junction town of Jackson, “but the whites are sullen and look spitefully and with an evident attempt to appear disdainfully indifferent. The women, I cannot say ladies, are peculiarly vindictive.” The looked-for Union sentiment had not appeared; the doctor was convinced that it did not exist, and he asked plaintively: “Why is it that we are to submit to open insult and secret injury, and yet our tired and poorly-fed soldiery are to guard the property of these scoundrels?” All in all, he confessed that he was “at a loss to understand how this very remarkable war is to be finished, if the government continues to pursue a course so well calculated to foster the views of these rebels, the iron gauntlet must be used more than the silken glove to crush this serpent.”18
If all of this had represented nothing more than the arrogant provincialism of young men who had never before been fifty miles away from home it would not have meant much, but it went a great deal deeper than that; it marked the beginning of a profound shift in Army opinion. Not only were the soldiers beginning to believe in hard war; they were seeing slavery as the justification for this belief, were blaming it for the war itself, and were coming to feel that slavery must be stamped out along with rebellion, as if the two were indeed different aspects of the same thing. As the generals grew more ruthless, the enlisted men (not to mention the company officers who reflected their viewpoint so completely) ran on ahead of them and turned the war into a conflict which was certain to destroy the peculiar institution.
Not long after he got to Washington, Halleck sent Grant specific instructions about the need for a harder attitude: “It is very desirable that you should clear out West Tennessee and North Mississippi of all organized enemies. If necessary, take up all active sympathizers, and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use. As soon as the corn gets fit for forage get all the supplies you can from the rebels in Mississippi. It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of war on our side.”19
The key to all of this lay in the admonition to “take their property for public use.” Slaves were property, and because they were property they were to be taken from their owners. When Grant undertook to fortify Memphis, he rounded up a small army of contrabands to do the spadework, and the soldiers suddenly realized that the orders under which they had been operating before—that fugitive Negroes were not to be allowed within their lines—had been suspended. At Trenton, Tennessee, Grenville Dodge took the cue, writing, in mid-July: “The policy is to be terrible on the enemy. I am using Negroes all the time for all my work as teamsters, and have 1,000 employed. I do it quietly and no fuss is made about it.” One of Sherman’s soldiers remembered that the old policy of exclusion lapsed at this time, and that the thousands of roving Negroes who tried to follow the army were no longer driven off: “All that came within our lines were received and put to work and supplied with clothing and subsistence. This policy was viewed by the soldiers with very general approbation.” In the middle of June, Sherman had warned his troops that “the well-settled policy of the whole army now is to have nothing to do with the Negro,” but the policy was collapsing. Brigadier General James A. Garfield, who served in the Corinth area that spring, said later that “the Army soon found, do what it would, the black phantom would meet it everywhere, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the battlefield and at all times”; from this, he said, grew the conviction in the mind of every soldier that “behind the Rebel army of soldiers, the black army of laborers was feeding and sustained the rebellion and there could be no victory until its main support was taken away.”20 It was no longer possible to fight the war on the old basis.
The soldiers who helped to create the new policy were not reflecting any reasoned change in sentiment about the rights or wrongs of slavery. Most of them came from areas which detested abolitionists, and sentiment back home had not changed appreciably. At the very time when the Army was beginning to emancipate the Negro, Abolitionist Wendell Phillips was mobbed in Cincinnati; speaking from the stage of the Opera House, he was met by a shower of eggs and stones, while “whisky-faced, blatant wretches roared in the galleries and lobbies,” with the mayor of the city sitting by unmoved. Crowds on the sidewalk outside brandished knives and muttered threats of a lynching, and a reporter said that the most furious outburst was provoked by Phillips’s assertion that no one could any longer doubt that “the war is between the real democracy of the country and the sectional aristocracy that wields the power of African slavery in one hand and that of the ignorance of the whites in the other.” Sentiment in regard to the Negro himself had not changed; what was rising was a cold fury with secession and secessionists, a back-home attitude which, as one of Buell’s officers said, “led the men to think they were justified by their friends at home in indiscriminate plunder when operating in the seat of war.” A chaplain in an Ohio regiment noted that the men in his regiment expressed satisfaction when they marched past a fine plantation house which had been set on fire, and wrote: “This thing of guarding rebel property when the owner is in the field fighting us is played out. That is the sentiment of every private soldier in the army.”21 Beauregard himself noted the new attitude, reflected that it did not mirror a genuine change in Western notions about slavery, and wrote a word of advice to Bragg: “By the bye, I think we ought hereafter in our official papers to call the Yankees ‘Abolitionists’ instead of ‘Federals,’ for they now proclaim not only the abolition of slavery but of all our constitutional rights and that name will have a stinging effect on our western enemies.”22
But the word “abolitionist” was losing its sting. In the middle of this July the Congress in Washington passed a Confiscation Act, decreeing freedom for the slaves of all persons who supported the rebellion. President Lincoln was not yet ready to issue his great Proclamation, but the lines had been drawn. The North was becoming emancipationist in spite of itself, driven to it by the conviction that the war had to be hard and merciless. Men who would cheer the burning of a Southern manor house were bound to do something about the s
laves who supported that manor. They might continue to despise the Negro as a man, they might throw eggs at those who said that he ought to be a free citizen, but they would set him free simply because his bondage propped up the power of the Confederacy.
Grant himself found no difficulty in adjusting to the new situation. He was a complete realist in regard to slavery and the war, and while he was still in Cairo, in November of 1861, he had set forth to Jesse the views we have quoted: “My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go.” Shortly before Shiloh, he had been denounced by antislavery people at home for returning to their owners certain slaves captured at Fort Donelson, but the anti-slavery people had their facts mixed. Grant had sent cavalry to recover slaves which had been used to build the Donelson fortifications—under the rules, at that time, these chattels were legal contraband—and the cavalry, instead of rounding up the working gangs, had swept up a miscellaneous handful of Negro women and children, burning various cabins and looting farmhouses along the way. Grant had put the cavalry commander under arrest and had returned the Negroes and the inanimate loot, and he had made his position clear in a letter to Washburne: “I have studiously tried to prevent the running off of Negroes from all outside places, as I have tried to prevent all other marauding and plundering. So long as I hold a commission in the army I have no views of my own to carry out. Whatever may be the orders of my superiors and the law I will execute.… When Congress enacts anything too odious for me to execute, I will resign.”23
Now, with Halleck’s new orders about the confiscation of property in effect, and with the new act of Congress before him, he wrote to Jesse Grant: “I am sure that I have but one desire in this war, and that is to put down the rebellion. I have no hobby of my own with regard to the Negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage. If Congress pass any law and the President approves, I am willing to execute it.” A little later, he mused more at length about the subject in a letter to his sister Mary:
The war is evidently growing oppressive to the Southern people. Their institution are beginning to have ideas of their own; every time an expedition goes out many of them follow in the wake of the army and come into camp. I am using them as teamsters, hospital attendants, company cooks and so forth, thus saving soldiers to carry the musket. I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end, but it weakens the enemy to take them from them.24
Once established at Corinth, Grant had Julia and the children come down for a visit. After the war, men said that Julia Grant hurried to the General’s side as soon as each battle was finished; when a reporter asked her about this, in 1880, she replied, simply: “That was not true at all. The General would not have put up with it.” But Grant always wanted to have his family with him when active campaigning was not in progress, and during the early part of this August he was able to gratify his wish. On the edge of Corinth there was a pleasant house owned by a thick-and-thin Confederate sympathizer, one of the few Southern civilians whom Grant ordered to a northern prison camp for inflexibly rebellious actions, and this house became Grant’s headquarters. (When he wrote his Memoirs, Grant said that he did not remember having arrested one civilian during all of the war. His memory apparently failed him; he had caused the arrest of at least this one Mississippian in the summer of 1862, and in a note to his father early in August he remarked that “we are keeping house on the property of a truly loyal secessionist, who has been furnished free lodging and board at Alton, Illinois.”)25 The surroundings were pleasant, and Grant hastened to quiet Jesse’s fear that an Army camp might not be a wholesome place for small children; the house was far enough from camp to be homelike, and there was room for the children to play just as they would have done back in Galena. A company of Ohio cavalry acted as headquarters guard.
A surgeon in the 11th Iowa was called to headquarters one day, and he supposed that he was to prescribe for one of the headquarters servants and so came, informally, in his shirt sleeves. When he got there, however, Rawlins introduced him to Grant, whose manner and looks struck the surgeon as a pleasant surprise—he was prejudiced against the General, he admitted, because the only picture he had ever seen of him was an absurd woodcut made at Cairo, more caricature than portrait, which showed Grant with a high felt hat and a beard reaching nearly to his waist. What he saw, now, was a neat, well-shaven officer, with the sort of hat anybody could wear, a grave but affable man who asked him to come upstairs and see his son. Ulysses Grant, Jr.—“Buck,” to the family—was ten, and he had just been kicked by a horse. The surgeon attended to him, came back next day for a final visit, and went away feeling that both the General and Mrs. Grant were gracious and unassuming folk.26
In moments of relaxation, Grant liked to leave off his uniform and dress like a civilian. Mrs. William H. Cherry of Savannah, Tennessee, whose house Grant had used as headquarters before the battle of Shiloh, remembered that Grant once asked her to present him to her mother; knowing that the mother had firm Southern loyalties, he wore civilian clothing, and when he was introduced he touched himself on the shoulder—where his insignia of rank would have appeared, if he had been in uniform—and remarked, “I thought you would like this best.” A reporter noticed that Grant was in mufti at an Independence Day celebration in Memphis, and felt that he gave “a fair representation, to all outward appearance, of a well-to-do Southern planter.”27 Men remembered that headquarters was always cheerful when the Grant family was together. Grant spent much time with the children, who “used to play about and over and around the general by the hour,” with neither General nor children saying a word.28
This was too good to last, and after little more than a fortnight Julia and the children left for St. Louis, to visit Mrs. Grant’s father, old Colonel Dent. It was necessary to go to some place where the children could attend school during the fall and winter months; also, there were ominous signs of renewed Confederate activity in Mississippi, and Grant felt that it was time his family returned to a place of safety. He was feeling the strain, he frankly confessed, and he wished that he could go North too and get some rest, but it was not possible. Meanwhile, he had to admit that the responsibility of command had perhaps been good for him; since he left Cairo, at the end of January, he had gained fifteen pounds!29
By the end of July it was clear that Braxton Bragg was up to something. Colonel Phil Sheridan, now commanding a two-regiment brigade of cavalry, went roving south of Corinth, and he came back with disturbing news. Bragg’s army had been based at Tupelo; now, Sheridan learned, he was moving up through northern Georgia in the direction of Chattanooga—moving roundabout, by way of Mobile, to take advantage of railroad transportation and avoid a long hike cross-country—and fresh troops under Price were active in northern Mississippi, spread out over the territory from Tupelo to Holly Springs. Sheridan raided a Confederate camp and seized a quantity of soldiers’ letters, which expressed a new confidence: the Yankees were about to be attacked on the right and on the left, and would soon have to “skedaddle.” Sheridan’s activities impressed Rosecrans so much that he and some of his subordinates got off a telegram to Halleck urging that Sheridan be made a brigadier general: “He is worth his weight in gold.”30
Observing the Federals’ inaction, Bragg had formed a bold resolve. He would put the bulk of his forces around Chattanooga and would drive straight north for Kentucky and the Ohio river, gambling that the luckless Buell, wholly engrossed in railroad building operations, could be outmaneuvered. Price and Van Dorn would keep Grant busy, and with luck might be able to knock his scattered forces out of the way and go north to help Bragg. In any case, the Confederacy would be on the offensive, and if all went well everything that had been lost at Donelson, Shiloh and Corinth might presently be regained.
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p; Grant’s strength was not adequate for a decisive countermove. All told, he commanded 63,000 effectives, but most of the men were tied down on garrison duty. Two divisions, Sherman’s and Hurlbut’s, were at Memphis. General E. O. C. Ord was at Corinth with another division and McClernand was at Jackson, Tennessee, fifty-five miles to the north on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Several thousand men were posted in small detachments at various places in Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Brigadier General Isaac F. Quinby had nearly five thousand at Columbus, and Rosecrans with twenty-five thousand men occupied the line of the Memphis and Charleston in the general neighborhood of Iuka, east of Corinth. That was the lot, and there was very little flexibility. Buell had already called George Thomas’s division away, and it seemed likely that he would need reinforcements in the near future. When Grant wired Halleck for permission to move forward and attack the Confederates in the area below Corinth, Halleck replied he could maneuver his forces as he saw fit, but that he must not scatter them because he might at any time be called on to send troops to Buell.31
For the moment, nothing could be done but mark time and maintain a vigilant watch. At one point Grant felt that the thing Washington had been dreading might actually be happening—the Confederates might be detaching troops from Mississippi for use in front of Richmond—and on August 7 he warned Halleck about it, remarking that the Price-Van Dorn contingents might be trying to do no more than “hold the Western army in check,” but this delusion did not last long. Halleck himself believed that it would be possible for the Federals to open a new western campaign in the fall, but the fall was still some time away; “All we can hope to do for the next month is to hold our positions and prepare for an onward movement.”32 He added that the administration was very unhappy about Buell’s “want of energy,” and said frankly that Buell would soon be removed unless he accomplished something.