The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  When the leading divisions of Eleventh corps reached Howard on Cemetery Hill, he sent two through Gettysburg to engage the Confederates and held the third to prepare defenses on Cemetery Hill. Reinforced, the Confederates drove Howard’s two divisions back through town to the Cemetery Hill, where Howard arranged his own units and others arriving as reinforcements in defensive positions.

  At this juncture Major General Winfield Scott Hancock arrived on the hill bearing an order from General Meade to take command. Howard pointed out that he ranked Hancock and suggested that Hancock take charge of the left of the line while Howard directed the right. Hancock acquiesced. In this way the first day’s battle played out on Cemetery Hill until General John Slocum, senior to both, rode up and took command.

  Howard, believing he had performed admirably, resented Meade’s implied criticism and seeming partiality toward Hancock, his junior in rank. After all, Howard had selected and held the hill at the center of the Union line that would prove crucial in the remaining two days of the battle. And for this he later received congressional thanks, although Hancock and his friends took offense at the omission of Hancock’s name from the congressional resolution. Thus the Battle of Gettysburg placed a second stain on Howard’s reputation.

  Howard found escape from ill feeling in the Army of the Potomac by transferring to the western theater of the war. The Confederate victory in the Battle of Chickamauga on September 19–20, 1863, bottled up the Union forces in Chattanooga, Tennessee, choking the supply lines running to the city. A new team of generals—Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and George H. Thomas—sought to reverse the tide at Chattanooga when reinforcements from the East arrived to help in the form of General Joseph Hooker and his Eleventh and Twelfth Corps.

  On the night of October 28, scarcely two weeks after arriving, Howard’s corps played a prominent part in a confused battle at Wauhatchie. His Germans drove attacking Confederates down a slope and won victory. In his first fight in the West Howard had the opportunity to leave the misfortunes of the East behind him and get a fresh start. “God has been good and sparing,” he wrote.2

  The Eleventh Corps played a supporting role in the Union assault on Missionary Ridge and a major role in the dash to relieve the beleaguered command of General Ambrose Burnside at Knoxville, Tennessee. With the Confederate army withdrawing south into Georgia, the Union troops settled into winter quarters at Chattanooga. Spring 1864, however, brought preparations for General Sherman’s advance on Atlanta. During the Chattanooga fighting, Sherman had come to admire Howard and mentioned him favorably in his official reports, penning a personal note that characterized him as “one who mingled so gracefully and perfectly the polished Christian gentleman and the prompt, zealous, and gallant soldier.”3 In reorganizing the army, Sherman gave Howard command of the Fourth Corps, a much larger and more important unit than the Eleventh Corps.

  From May through August 1864 Sherman’s force—George H. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland and James B. McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee—pushed south toward Atlanta. General Joseph E. Johnston tried to stop the Union advance, but Sherman succeeded in flanking some Confederate defenses and launched an attack where flanking proved impossible. General McPherson was killed in a hard-fought action on July 21. General John A. Logan, a highly competent and popular political general, inherited the army by virtue of seniority. He and Hooker contended for the permanent command, but Sherman instead named Howard to head the Army of the Tennessee, at 27,000 men the largest unit that he had yet led. In the remaining fighting around Atlanta Howard demonstrated the soundness of Sherman’s judgment. He especially distinguished himself in the Battle of Ezra Church, on July 28, 1864, when Lieutenant General John B. Hood, his West Point classmate, assaulted his position. Hood threw more than 18,000 Confederates against Howard’s 13,000 but was decisively routed with a loss of 3,000 men. Howard’s casualties numbered 642. Ezra Church was Howard’s battle; he conceived it and shared it with no other general. For this action he was breveted major general in the Regular Army. Howard had not wiped Chancellorsville and Gettysburg from his record but had redeemed his name as a competent Union general.

  Sherman’s legendary “March to the Sea” began in Atlanta on November 15, 1864, and reached Savannah, Georgia, on December 21. From Atlanta Sherman divided his army and left Generals Thomas and Schofield to contend with General Hood’s Confederates. Sherman then took with him 60,000 men, divided into two wings, each consisting of two corps, with Howard commanding the right wing and Henry W. Slocum the left wing. The march was an expedition of foraging, destruction, and terrifying civilians, with occasional skirmishes but no important engagements until the seizure of Fort McAllister on the outskirts of Savannah.

  After resting a month in Savannah, Sherman turned north. His units marched out of the city late in January 1865. His aim was to unite with General Grant’s army at Petersburg, Virginia. Sherman divided his 60,000 men into three wings: Howard with the Army of the Tennessee on the right, a wing consisting of the Army of the Ohio, which had been brought east under General John M. Schofield, and a wing of two corps under Slocum. Sherman’s army marched 425 miles and fought six actions with the Confederate army of General Joseph E. Johnston, which on April 26 surrendered to Sherman near Hillsboro, North Carolina. Lee had already surrendered to Grant. The war had essentially ended.

  During the northward march, Howard learned that on December 21, the same day that Savannah fell, he had been promoted to brigadier general in the Regular Army. His political friends in Maine had worked toward this result, but his record also played a part.

  Although he did not engage in any significant battles after the fall of Atlanta, Howard had demonstrated skill in managing two corps, 27,000 men, in the march to Savannah and then into North Carolina.

  On the second day of the Grand Review of the victorious armies up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C, on May 24, 1865, General Howard expected to ride in front of the Army of the Tennessee. With General Logan still smarting over failure to get that command, Sherman asked Howard to yield him the honor of leading it in the parade. Howard readily consented and at Sherman’s invitation rode next to him at the head of the entire western army.

  THE FREEDMEN’S BUREAU

  Even before Lee and Johnston’s surrender in April 1865, Congress and President Lincoln confronted the issue of what to do with the liberated slaves of the South. On March 3 Congress passed and the president signed the first of a sequence of so-called Freedmen’s Bureau bills, creating a sprawling bureaucracy within the War Department charged with aiding former slaves through food and housing, oversight, education, health care, and employment contracts with private landowners. Both Lincoln and Secretary Stanton wanted General Howard to head the bureau, as did President Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination. Almost certainly, this was due to Howard’s reputation as the Christian General rather than his war record.

  On May 10, probably flattered that Lincoln, Stanton, and Johnson desired him to take on this assignment, Howard accepted. It would be more than daunting, as General Sherman recognized at the time. Pledging his support for Howard in gracious terms, Sherman nonetheless declared (May 15, 1865): “God has limited the power of man, and though in the kindness of your heart you would alleviate all the ills of humanity it is not in your power. Nor is it in your power to fulfill one-tenth part of the expectations of those who framed the bureau of freedmen, refugees, and abandoned estates. It is simply impracticable.”

  And so it proved. Until Congress shut down the bureau in 1872, Howard struggled to supervise a huge bureaucracy, care for 4 million former slaves, fight off the open and sometimes violent opposition of unreconciled Southerners, and deal with the growing rift between Congress and President Johnson. More immediately, Johnson grew increasingly hostile toward the bureau. His benign Southern policy, which emboldened Southerners hostile to the bureau, to congressional Reconstruction, and to the civil rights acts, greatly complicated the task of Howard’s subord
inates on the scene. The bureau—and Howard—became increasingly controversial, battered on one side by political enemies and on the other by elements convinced that the bureau should do more for the former black slaves. One notable success of the bureau, however, was in establishing black educational institutions. Howard University in Washington, D.C., is the enduring monument.

  Predictably, unscrupulous enemies made Howard a target. They publicized a “Freedmen’s Bureau ring” that financially profited from various fraudulent schemes.4 Howard himself was alleged to have grown rich, in part through illegal use of government funds in support of Howard University. In spring 1870 a select committee of the House of Representatives began hearings into the charges against Howard and his bureau. The committee took testimony for four months before submitting a report that essentially exonerated Howard. In fact, the affair had been a Democratic vendetta. Howard had profited by having a Republican majority on the committee. Even so, the hearings generated publicity that cast a shadow over the bureau and its director for decades.

  In February 1872, five months before Congress terminated the Freedmen’s Bureau, the secretary of the interior asked for Howard’s services to journey to Arizona and try to make peace with the warring Apaches. Once again, his reputation as Christian General probably lay behind the selection. Howard gracefully accepted the assignment and by May was in the Department of Arizona. After visiting the various agencies and conferring with the chiefs, he met with the department commander, General George Crook. Although Howard found the Apaches and some other tribes actively hostile to the encroaching white settlers, his arrival, combined with the junket of a previous peace commissioner, Vincent Colyer, forced Crook to suspend a long-planned offensive. Angry at such interference and quietly contemptuous of Howard, Crook greeted him politely and made a good impression.

  Late in June Howard recruited a delegation of chiefs and escorted them to Washington, D.C., to impress them with white society’s civilization. His mission in Arizona had accomplished little and in one major respect had failed. He had been unable to arrange a meeting with the Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise, the most difficult of all. Howard returned to Arizona and tried for a month to gain a meeting with Cochise. He finally succeeded and on October 10, 1872, negotiated an agreement creating a reservation for Cochise and his people. Even though Crook resented the invulnerability that Howard conferred on Cochise, peace with Cochise would remain one of General Howard’s proudest memories.5

  Back in Washington, Howard’s affairs progressed unfavorably. Congress was attempting to wrap up the affairs of the Freedmen’s Bureau, but the clerks in the War Department had lost and mixed up the bureau’s records. The confusion prompted some of Howard’s enemies to charge him with malfeasance, and Secretary of War William W. Belknap proved hostile. Howard’s old opponents in Congress intervened to make matters worse. After Howard’s testimony before the House Committee on Military Affairs, the House debated a resolution calling for the army to court-martial him, but in the final version it settled for a court of inquiry.

  President Grant named General Sherman to preside over the court of inquiry, and the other members proved generally favorable or neutral. The court sat from March 10 to May 9, 1873. Many who took the stand, including some within the War Department, ravaged Howard for all manner of frauds while commissioner of the bureau, but Howard called a formidable array of defenders. Reaching a verdict on May 9, the court found “that General Oliver O. Howard did his whole duty, and believes that he deserves well of the country”—hardly an enthusiastic acquittal.6

  As he struggled through his ordeals with the Freedmen’s Bureau, Howard increasingly considered retiring from the army. Arizona changed his mind. On November 11, 1872, as soon as he returned to Washington, he queried Sherman about a command assignment. Sherman replied at once with words that offered little encouragement:

  I have always endeavored to befriend you all I could, and hope to continue; but I must preserve like relations to others, who have been constant on duty, at remote places where they had no means to plead their own cause. I know you regarded your duties here as of infinite importance to the Government, but they were non-military; and for your own sake I wish you had taken command of a department two years ago, when according to the notions of the army generally your promotion would have met universal favor. Now they would impute it to personal presence, and personal influence with the president.7

  In essence, Howard would have to wait his turn. When death or retirement of officers who had served in a military rather than civilian capacity opened the way, Sherman would see what he could do.

  The business of phasing out the Freedmen’s Bureau occupied Howard into 1873, and he still had to suffer through a congressional investigation and a court of inquiry. When no command was forthcoming, he again addressed Sherman on November 29, 1873, who replied the same day. Sherman reminded Howard that he had warned him when he accepted the Freedmen’s Bureau position in 1865 of the result that seemed inevitable, as it turned out to be. Again in 1869, when Grant’s election to the presidency brought Sherman to Washington, he had advised Howard to accept a departmental command, but Howard had refused. “I am glad therefore that you have come to the manly conclusion to assume your appropriate place among the officers of our army.” When occasion arose, Sherman would assign Howard to a command appropriate to his rank.8

  DEPARTMENT OF THE COLUMBIA

  Howard had less than a year to wait. On September 1, 1874, he assumed command of the Department of Columbia, with headquarters at Portland, Oregon. The department consisted of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska and formed part of the Division of the Pacific, commanded by Major General Irvin McDowell from San Francisco.

  For his first two years, Howard confronted no major problems. He toured his department, including Alaska, and undertook religious work in Portland. He attended church regularly, taught a Bible class, presided over the local Young Men’s Christian Association, and strove to get his eldest son, Guy (a recent Yale graduate), a direct commission in the Regular Army. He succeeded.

  In 1875 a long-brewing problem with the Nez Perce Indians drew Howard into affairs that belonged to the Indian Bureau. His humanitarian instincts prevailed, however, as he recognized the wrongs inflicted on the Indians by an influx of miners and settlers. Like most Indian tribes, the Nez Perces grappled with factionalism: progressive versus nonprogressive, Christian versus adherents of traditional spiritual beliefs and customs, and treaty versus nontreaty, derived from an 1855 treaty followed by an 1863 treaty paring the Nez Perce country into an ever-shrinking reservation in Idaho to make way for white gold-seekers. The signatories were mostly Christian and progressive; the nontreaty Nez Perces were those who refused to surrender their homeland.

  The people who attracted Howard’s special sympathy were the nontreaty adherents of Chief Joseph, who occupied Oregon’s Wallowa Valley. Although the valley was their traditional homeland, the fertile, mountain-girt expanse attracted white farmers and ranchers, who began to take land there in the early 1870s. Howard’s solution was not to evict the intruders but to pay Joseph to yield his land and take his people to the reservation in Idaho and to use force and if they refused. In June 1876 two white men killed a Wallowa Valley tribesman. This led Howard to recommend a commission to settle the issue of Joseph’s claim to the valley as well as the murder of the Wallowa Indian. The secretary of the interior responded by appointing a commission, including Howard as a member but not as chairman, charged with the entire issue of roaming nontreaty Indians.

  The commission met on November 13–14, 1876, in a church at the Lapwai Agency, with the meeting centering mainly on a dialogue between General Howard and Chief Joseph. Dignified, thoughtful, and articulate, Chief Joseph made his case, dwelling on his people’s claim to the land and their spiritual ties to it. Joseph emphasized that the earth was his mother and that his father, Old Joseph, had enjoined him never to sell the bones of their ancestors. The commissioners were greatly im
pressed with Joseph’s demeanor and sincerity, even to his point of forgiving the white men who killed his tribesman. But they confronted the reality that Joseph would not budge: the Wallowa Valley was his land and he would not give it up.

  Because of his own spiritual beliefs, General Howard was uniquely unqualified to understand Joseph’s mind. In particular, Joseph’s talk of the earth as his mother struck Howard as nonsense. Deeply meaningful to Joseph, it was completely alien to Howard’s Christian principles. He willingly signed the commission’s recommendation that the Wallowa band, and indeed all roving nontreaty Indians, move within the boundaries of the Idaho reservation established by the Treaty of 1863. If they failed to go voluntarily, force should be used.

  On March 7, 1877, the interior secretary again requested military help in making the nontreaty Indians move to the reservation. Spooked by the prospect of the army being blamed for starting another Indian war, Secretary Belknap, General Sherman, and General McDowell all cautioned Howard to act strictly in support of the Indian Bureau. Any blame attached must fall on the Indian Bureau, not the army.

  On May 3–7, 1877, Howard and agent J. B. Montieth met with Joseph, this time in a tent on the parade ground of Fort Lapwaiand not only with Joseph but with three powerful religious leaders. In three days of rancorous debate, the Nez Perces argued with Howard. For two days, Toohoolhoolzote stood up to the general. In brusque language, he explained Indian concepts of land and faulted the whites for their own antithetical concepts. Howard took offense at what Toohoolhoolzote said and how he said it. He lectured Toohoolhoolzote just as bluntly, declaring that he wanted to hear no more about the earth as their mother, that they had to do what the Great Father commanded: go to the reservation. Toohoolhoolzote refused to back down, so Howard had him removed from the tent and placed in the guardhouse. The Nez Perce chiefs yielded and agreed to move. Howard gave them thirty days.9