by Ron Chernow
I have had no communication with General Grant for more than a week. He left his command without my authority and went to Nashville . . . It is hard to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he richly deserves it. I can get no returns, no reports, no information of any kind from him. Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it without any regard to the future.63
Privy to prewar gossip about Grant’s alcohol abuse, he wrote again to McClellan and, with thinly veiled innuendo, depicted Grant as a drunkard. “A rumor has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson General Grant has resumed his former bad habits. If so, it will account for his neglect of my often-repeated orders. I . . . have placed General Smith in command of the expedition up the Tennessee. I think Smith will restore order and discipline.”64
McClellan’s draconian response to his first telegram must have shocked even Halleck:
Your dispatch of last evening received. The future success of our cause demands that proceedings such as Grant’s should at once be checked. Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers. Do not hesitate to arrest him at once if the good of [the] service requires it, & place CF Smith in command.65
Both Halleck and McClellan, having been upstaged by Grant, were determined to knock him down. Their grossly unfair and shocking treatment of him bespeaks settled malice instead of sound military judgment. Neither man bothered to give Grant the benefit of the doubt or await his explanation.
There was no truth about Grant drinking during the preceding weeks. On March 20, Colonel Joseph D. Webster of Grant’s staff wrote home of this charge: “It is a vile slander, out of whole cloth. During all my acquaintance with him I have never seen him drinking anything intoxicating but once, & then he put a little brandy into some medication to disguise the taste.”66 Halleck may have been deflecting attention from his own persistent problems with alcohol. Later on, Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana told Rawlins, “The testimony of those best informed says that Halleck’s mind has been seriously impaired by the excessive use of liquor and that as [a] general thing it is regularly muddled after dinner every day.”67 The surgeon John Brinton remembered Halleck as “fond of good living, and of good wine . . . After dining, he was often sleepy.”68 The diarist George Templeton Strong walked away with this impression of Halleck: “His silly talk was conclusive as to his incapacity, unless he was a little flustered with wine.”69 Halleck was to die of chronic heart and liver disease.
Grant had been innocent of insubordination and had faithfully filed daily reports of his troop strength. Hence, he reacted with “utter amazement” when he received the following dispatch from Halleck on March 4: “You will place Maj. Genl C.F. Smith in command of expedition, & remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength & positions of your command?”70 Grant reassured Halleck about his daily reports, to no avail, and, in despair, asked to be relieved from command. “I have done my very best to obey orders . . . If my course is not satisfactory remove me at once.”71 Halleck made plain that in dealing with McClellan, he had been embarrassed by a shortage of information; Grant would pay the price. With tears in his eyes, a perplexed and deflated Grant showed Halleck’s dispatch to a fellow officer. “I don’t know what they intend to do with me . . . What command have I now?”72
After Fort Donelson Grant started to appreciate what he meant to the Union war effort. “I began to see how important was the work that Providence devolved upon me.”73 It was a rare allusion to a religious meaning of his work. Yet at this moment, implausibly, he was “virtually in arrest and without a command.”74 The staggering reversal of fortune was profoundly hurtful to a man who had recently escaped such misery in his life. It later turned out the telegraph operator at Cairo, who forwarded telegrams to Halleck in St. Louis, was a rebel spy and had not transmitted Grant’s dispatches. Not until March 3 did Grant receive Halleck’s dispatch of February 16, asking for daily reports of his combat readiness.
Isolated at Fort Henry with a small garrison, Grant was crushed by the abrupt loss of faith in him. He could never seem to savor good fortune without fresh troubles appearing. Lacking in guile, he was stunned to encounter it in those who specialized in it. Halleck treated him in the patronizing manner he had known in the 1850s when he did not yet possess the supreme confidence, born of repeated success, to resist it. The dispiriting sequel to Fort Donelson must have made him feel he would never shake off the ill luck that had bedeviled him in antebellum years. It was as if the dark, powerful undertow of the past always tugged him backward, forcing him to relive ancient misery.
During this impasse, Grant was heartened by a rousing message of support from John A. McClernand and his staff that put his strange purgatory in perspective: “You have slain more of the enemy, taken more prisoners and trophies, lost more men in battle and regained more territory to the Union than any other leader.”75 Grant spent his confinement aboard the flagship Tigress, which lay anchored in the Tennessee River off Fort Henry. One friend who visited him saw how despondent the outcast commander was. “No one was on board but a watchman and Grant; not a damned soul beside. He was the most disconsolate looking man you ever saw and he was mad too. Grant said, ‘This is no time for red tape; this is a time for war. Halleck has arrested me for a breach of red tape.’”76
Another man who would repeatedly rescue Grant from the doldrums was William Tecumseh Sherman. During the Fort Donelson siege, Sherman had been assigned to forward supplies to Grant from Smithland, at the mouth of the Cumberland River. Grant had been favorably impressed by the way Sherman, his senior in rank, rushed him whatever he needed.
The bond between the two men was to become the war’s most consequential military friendship. About six feet tall, weighing less than 150 pounds, the lanky Sherman had close-cropped reddish hair, a stubble beard, and a leathery, pocked face that perfectly expressed his hard-bitten nature. He was a restless, jittery character, who carried more nervous energy than his lean body could contain, his sharp eyes flashing with emotion. With surplus verve, he paced, smoked, stroked his beard, and fiddled with his coat buttons. Like Grant, he was a compulsive smoker plagued by stress-induced headaches. He had an overly active mind that always simmered with strong opinions, and sarcastic asides poured forth in rapid utterance. He dabbled in watercolors, attended the theater, and quoted liberally from Shakespeare and Dickens. Passionate in his hatreds, he directed withering scorn at the world’s follies. In his stern morality, he saw a purity in soldiers that civilians could never match. Whether people liked or detested him, they found Sherman a fascinating figure, a human dynamo who never rested.
For all his rough-hewn character, Sherman came from a refined background, born into a well-to-do family in Lancaster, Ohio. His father, who named him after the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, was a state Supreme Court justice. He died when William was nine, and the boy was taken into the home of Thomas Ewing, a U.S. senator who saw to it that he entered West Point. Sherman ended up marrying Ewing’s daughter Ellen, by which point Thomas Ewing was interior secretary. The wedding sparkled with political luminaries: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Thomas Hart Benton, and President Zachary Taylor attended.
After graduating from West Point and serving in the army, Sherman resigned in 1853 to become a banker in the freewheeling San Francisco that so mesmerized Grant. His exposure there to crooked politicians and corrupt journalists left him with a lasting distaste for both professions. Sherman steered his bank ably through the 1857 panic, but suffered heavy personal losses. Beleaguered by asthma and insomnia, he wound up his bank. In 1859 he became head of a new military college in Louisiana, the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, which opened soon after Lincoln’s election. Although Sherman loved southern culture, he deplored secession as a treasonous act and threatened to resign if Louisiana seceded. One professor remembered that when Sherman read of Louisiana’s secession proclamation in a local n
ewspaper, “he cried like a child, exclaiming, ‘My God, you Southern people don’t know what you are doing! . . . There can be no peaceable secession. Secession means war.’”77 Sherman foresaw that northern determination and technical superiority would annihilate the South and he felt duty-bound to resign a position he adored.
Becoming president of a horse-drawn trolley line in St. Louis, he enjoyed a ringside seat for the virulent conflict there between Confederate and Union sympathizers. In May 1861, he was appointed an infantry colonel and by July led a brigade at Bull Run. No less than Grant, Sherman was prone to depression and viewed northern missteps with consternation. In October 1861, he believed that while Frémont and McClellan were lavishly funded and supplied with men, Kentucky remained a low priority and was starved by Washington. When he confidentially told war secretary Cameron that two hundred thousand troops would be needed to suppress the rebellion in Kentucky, it leaked to the press and Sherman was branded “insane.” Relieved from duty on November 13, 1861, he tumbled into a deep depression, even flirting with suicidal thoughts. He was still being stigmatized as thoroughly unhinged when he was assigned to serve under Halleck, who gave him a second chance. This providential move brought Sherman into direct contact with Grant.
Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war. They were both haunted men, tough and manly on the outside, but hypersensitive to criticism, and they sustained each other at troubled moments. Even though Sherman was more prolix and irascible than Grant, their letters display generosity, trust, and mutual admiration. As one of Grant’s officers wrote, “In all the annals of history no correspondence between men in high station furnishes a nobler example of genuine, disinterested personal friendship and exalted loyalty to a great cause.”78
Sherman spent decades pondering the mystery of Grant’s personality. “He is a strange character,” he wrote. “Nothing like it is portrayed by Plutarch or the many who have striven to portray the great men of ancient or modern times.”79 While never as talkative as Sherman, Grant opened up to him and even confided in him about his drinking problem. “We all knew at the time that Genl. Grant would occasionally drink too much,” said Sherman. “He always encouraged me to talk to him frankly of this and other things and I always noticed that he could with an hour’s sleep wake up perfectly sober and bright, and when anything was pending he was invariably abstinent of drink.”80 With facetious overstatement, Sherman once remarked, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”81
Perhaps the strongest link between the two men resulted from a shared outlook about how to wage war. They both exhibited a bold fighting spirit, preferred to take unexpected actions that flustered the enemy, and hated to be on the defensive. Each complemented the other’s work. Not surprisingly, the literate Sherman was better read in military texts. “I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant; I know a great deal more about war, military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does.”82 But whereas Sherman dwelled on what the enemy might do, Grant was often more fearless and flexible in carrying out his own plans. As Sherman admitted, Grant “knows, he divines, when the supreme hour has come in a campaign of battle, and always boldly seizes it.”83 In an unsurpassed tribute, Sherman said, “Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time.”84 Grant was no less enamored of Sherman’s dauntless skill. “Sherman is not only a great soldier, but a great man,” he later affirmed. “He is one of the very great men in our country’s history.”85 But such accolades lay far in the future.
By mid-March, Grant had emerged from the limbo to which Halleck had consigned him. Either Grant or Rawlins, or the two together, had sent Washburne copies of the correspondence between Grant and Halleck, and Washburne promptly brought them to the attention of the White House. Fuming over chronic stalling by George McClellan, Lincoln could not afford to sacrifice a general who took the initiative and had won an unbroken string of major victories in the West. The president was astute in reading Halleck and sized up the situation. In consequence, Stanton had Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army, dispatch a sharply worded order to Halleck, asking him to back up his charges against Grant. He indicated that he wrote at the direction of Lincoln and Stanton, showing that Grant now had friends in high places and could not be browbeaten.
Two other developments changed Halleck’s mind about Grant. On March 11, Lincoln removed McClellan as general in chief, reducing his authority to just the Army of the Potomac. This meant Halleck no longer had the cover of a superior general patently hostile to Grant. At the same time, Lincoln brought together the armies in Tennessee and the Mississippi Valley under Halleck’s command, making him head of a new Department of the Mississippi with the authority over western armies he craved. For the moment, Halleck’s envious instincts were appeased by success. As a result, he replied to Lorenzo Thomas in a sweetly reasonable tone, stating that Grant had never been insubordinate and that all “irregularities have now been remedied.”86 Without admitting to having instigated the trouble, Halleck informed Grant: “Instead of relieving you, I wish you, as soon as your new army is in the field, to assume immediate command, & lead it onto new victories.”87 Unlike his suspicious staff, Grant had been blind to Halleck’s machinations. He was still a newcomer to bureaucratic games, never having occupied a significant organizational position before the war. He naively assumed that Halleck had been his champion and did not learn the truth about his duplicitous drinking insinuations to McClellan until after the war. For the moment, still unaware of the true situation, Grant told Julia that he regarded Halleck as “one of the greatest men of the age and there are not two men in the United States who I would prefer serving under to McClellan & Halleck. They would be my own choice for the positions they fill if left to me to make.”88
CHAPTER TEN
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A Glittering Lie
WITH THE FALL OF FORTS HENRY and Donelson, the next logical step for the Union army was to sail up the Tennessee River and take Corinth in northern Mississippi, near the Tennessee border. The town served as a crossroads for two major railroads that connected the Mississippi River with the Atlantic Ocean, and its capture would pave the way for vanquishing Memphis, Vicksburg, and broad swaths of the Deep South.1 “What you are to look out for I cannot tell you but . . . your husband will never disgrace you nor leave a defeated field,” Grant assured Julia. “We have such an inside track of the enemy that by following up our success we can go anywhere.”2 Now fully restored to action, he scented “a big fight” in the offing. “I have already been in so many [battles] that it begins to feel like home to me.”3 In northeast Mississippi, Albert Sidney Johnston was consolidating a giant force of fifty to sixty thousand troops. To counter this, Henry Halleck fashioned a strategy that would merge Grant’s army with that of Don Carlos Buell in a race to see which army could first attain critical strength and assault the other.
On March 17, 1862, Grant resumed his command in Savannah, Tennessee, and awaited the arrival of Buell’s forces from Nashville. His old West Point commandant, General Charles F. Smith, had preceded him, locating his headquarters in a roomy brick mansion atop a bluff, owned by Union sympathizer William H. Cherry. Although Halleck had assigned credit for the Fort Donelson victory to Smith and plotted to advance him ahead of Grant, Smith knew nothing of his wiles and retained an abiding respect for his former pupil. He was a big enough man that he did not care to be promoted over Grant’s head through any injustice. “General Smith was delighted to see me and was unhesitating in his denunciation of the treatment I had received,” wrote Grant, who was protective of Smith.4 When the seasoned commander was accused of drinking during the Fort Donelson campaign, “Grant did not hesitate to resort to the most arbitrary measures to prevent the spread of such reports,” wrote an officer, declaring such stories a lie.5 In a freakish accident, Smith had scraped his leg while stepping into
a boat and it became dangerously swollen and infected. When Grant arrived, the older man had been confined to an upstairs bedroom and limped about, unable to mount a horse or slide on a boot.
Grant had begun to move his men into position at an old steamboat stop on the Tennessee River known as Pittsburg Landing that lay twenty miles from Corinth and stood near a tiny Methodist meetinghouse, crafted from rough-hewn logs, called Shiloh. (An Old Testament name meaning “place of peace,” Shiloh was the place of Jewish worship before the First Temple.) The other staging area for the proposed thrust into Mississippi was Crump’s Landing. Grant was powerfully attached to his Army of the Tennessee, which he now thought capable of wonders. It was created in his own image: sturdy, earthy, and gritty with men who reciprocated his affection. Colonel Walter Gresham of Indiana wrote admiringly of Grant: “The grasp General Grant then exhibited in the teeth of the incompetency of Halleck and the inefficiency in the War Department stamped him, at least in the eyes of his subordinates, as a man of force and genius.”6
To keep his men tough and nimble, Grant again made a fateful decision not to have them grab spades and dig entrenchments. He did not expect to stay long in the area, hoping to march south when Buell arrived. Colonel James B. McPherson defended Grant’s decision, citing the many creeks and ravines that wound through the thick woods and meadows, providing natural defenses. Early in the war, generals tended to resort to fortifications infrequently; as casualty counts soared to horrifying levels, they turned more to earthworks. Each day, as new soldiers disembarked from steamers in cold, damp weather, they were hastily assembled into companies and regiments. Under such circumstances, Grant argued, “the troops with me, officers and men, needed discipline and drill more than they did experience with the pick, shovel and axe.”7
