Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  The casualty lists came in, with totals higher than the four previous biggest battles of the war combined, and the journalistic hunt was on in earnest. The Confederates had dashed into the Union soldiers’ tents and bayoneted them in their sleep. The Tribune came out with an editorial, “Let Us Have the Facts.” There had been no preparations for anything at Pittsburg Landing. Grant was drunk. Was it a victory at all? A. K. McClure, a nationally prominent Republican supporter from Philadelphia, went to see Lincoln in the White House and urged him to remove this questionable figure Grant from command. Lincoln listened to everything McClure had to say, and thought for a while. Then he shook his head. “No, I can’t do it. I can’t lose this man. He fights.”

  Initially, the criticism focused on Grant. Then a paper in Ohio published an article by Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Stanton (no relation to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton). In a piece of political grandstanding, Stanton had arrived at Pittsburg Landing soon after the battle, bringing with him five thousand dollars to help troops from Ohio. Stanton heard the same inaccurate and exaggerated tales the reporters were getting and, when he met Sherman, the senior officer from Ohio present at Shiloh, never asked him a single question about the battle. Returning home, Stanton wrote a diatribe against the Union generals, not mentioning Sherman by name but referring to “the blundering stupidity and negligence” of Grant.

  An incensed Sherman entered the fray with a letter to Stanton. Early in it he set the tone: “The accusatory part of your statement is all false, false in general, false in every particular, and I repeat, you could not have failed to know it false when you published that statement … Grant just fresh from the victory of Donelson, more rich in fruits than was Saratoga, Yorktown, or any other fought on this Continent, is yet held up to the people of Ohio … as one who in the opinion of intelligent cowards is worthy to be shot … Shame on You!” Sherman added that no colonel of the Ohio regiments had any idea of how Stanton spent the five thousand dollars that was supposed to benefit the soldiers from Ohio.

  Stanton replied to this with another diatribe, this time mentioning Sherman by name, and the fight was on. The Sherman team went to work: Sherman’s brother Senator John Sherman, Sherman’s famous and well-regarded father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, and Ellen’s brother, the influential lawyer Philemon Ewing, all Ohioans, filled newspaper columns with criticism of Stanton, with Stanton responding every time; before the storm ran its course, both sides were printing pamphlets setting forth their views.

  As for Grant, he was heartsick about the slurs on his reputation, writing Julia that he had been “so shockingly abused” by the press, but he preferred to remain silent. Grant’s father decided to go to the support of his son, releasing to the press a brief, entirely personal letter he received from Grant defending his conduct at Shiloh, and a long letter from Captain William S. Hillyer of Grant’s staff that praised Grant’s actions and asked the rhetorical question, “Is success a crime?” Grant complained to Julia that the publication of these letters “should never have occurred.” His father made other efforts, which included two letters in the Cincinnati Commercial signed by a close friend of the elder Grant but possibly written by Jesse Grant himself. Grant’s father also wrote Congressman Washburne to thank him for a speech he made on his son’s behalf, and wrote the governor of Ohio, saying of Lieutenant Governor Stanton, “Shame on such a Demagogue.”

  Realizing that his father was defending him in part by criticizing the performance of other Union commanders, Grant sent him an angry letter saying that there was “not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts in my defense. I Require no defenders and for my sake leave me alone … Do nothing to correct what you have already done but for the future keep quiet on this subject.” He closed the letter with, “My love to all at home. Ulys.”

  Julia, staying with her father-in-law in Covington, Kentucky, at the time Shiloh was fought, was reading a Cincinnati paper a few days after that. She had just finished an article that said Grant was at a “dance house” instead of being on the battlefield, when an unexpected guest arrived.

  A tall, handsome woman, clad in deepest mourning, entered the little parlour … Coming directly up to me, she said, “Mrs. Grant, I am an entire stranger to you, and I have come an entire day’s journey out of my way to tell you this.” She paused a moment, choking down a sob, and said, “I am the widow of Colonel Canfield. I have just lost my husband at Shiloh. I must tell you of your husband’s kindness to me.”

  Feeling a premonition, this woman had managed somehow to get herself to Pittsburg Landing at the end of the first day of the Shiloh fighting. There at the waterfront she was told that her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Herman Canfield of the Seventy-second Ohio, had been wounded and was in a hospital down the river at a place she had passed on her way up to the battle. At that moment she saw Grant and his staff ride onto the pier and watched him being assisted off his horse because of his injured ankle and helped aboard his headquarters riverboat the Tigress , where he began writing dispatches. Warned by the sentries that she could not come aboard, she swept by them, found Grant, and explained her plight. Grant told her that she could stay on the Tigress, which would soon be taking the report he was writing downriver, and made out the appropriate passes to get her ashore and into the hospital where her husband lay.

  Julia asked her, “Did you reach your husband in time, Mrs. Canfield?”

  “Oh, no,” she sobbed. “I was late, too late. I was conducted down the aisle between the cots in the hospital, and my escort paused and pointed to a cot, the blanket drawn up so as to cover the face. I knelt beside it and drew the covering down.

  “He was dead—my husband, my beloved, my noble husband. I thrust my hand into his bosom. It was still warm, but his great heart had ceased beating.

  “The blood was clotted on his beard and breast. I think he might have lived if I had been near,” she sobbed. “I have determined to devote my time to the wounded soldiers during the war. My husband needed only the services of a kind nurse.”

  The ladies parted. Mrs. Canfield did indeed throw herself into nursing wounded soldiers, and Julia would see her next in three years, under supremely dramatic circumstances.

  On April 11, four days after the large-scale fighting at Shiloh finished, Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing. Being senior, according to plan he took over Grant’s field army and placed Grant in a meaningless role as his assistant commander of the armies of the West. It was in effect a demotion for Grant. At a time when Grant and Sherman felt that their army was sufficiently recovered from the battle to march the twenty miles to Corinth and finish the destruction of Beauregard’s remaining force, Halleck began to plan his version of how to proceed. No one was going to catch Halleck by surprise or undermanned. Learning that Beauregard had received reinforcements at Corinth that brought the Confederate strength back up to sixty-six thousand, he did not begin his march until he had one hundred thousand men and two hundred cannon assembled at Pittsburg Landing. Then Halleck started the twenty-mile trek. He would march the army two or three miles in a day, stop and construct elaborate earthworks, camp there two or three days, and move on another few miles and do the same thing.

  Although Sherman admired Halleck at this time, he recalled that his division “constructed seven distinct entrenched camps” in this astonishingly slow movement toward Corinth; a newspaper reporter who accompanied the Union force said that “Halleck crept forward at the rate of about three-quarters of a mile per day.” (Grant, watching this without the authority to change a single detail, referred to it as a siege on the move.)

  Halleck finally reached Corinth on May 28—seven and a half weeks after the last day of fighting at Shiloh—and the next day began a massive artillery bombardment of the town. From time to time trains moved in and out of Corinth, to the sounds of cheering, and Halleck saw this as proof of the arrival of more and more enemy troops and the Confederate determination to hold that essential transportation c
rossroads at all costs. In fact, Beauregard was evacuating his last units from Corinth, having the trains come back empty and ordering everyone left in the town to shout as they arrived. When Halleck finally sent foot soldiers into Corinth on May 30, they found not a single enemy soldier. (In a final touch, when Halleck rode in himself, his horse tripped over a telegraph wire hanging just above the ground.)

  During this time, Grant remained with the army, doing nothing because as Halleck’s second in command there was nothing for him to do. In addition to his feelings about the press controversy over his leadership at Shiloh, Grant was dismayed by the way Halleck so signally failed to exploit the battle in which so many men suffered and gave their lives. At one point during the ponderous march to Corinth, he wrote a formal request to Halleck, whose tent was only two hundred yards from his, asking that he be given a field command, or be relieved from further duty. Halleck, who recently had sent out a petulant order emphasizing that all letters on military matters “should relate to one matter only, and be properly folded,” refused to do either.

  Sherman, whom Grant had praised and commended during and after the battle, stumbled upon the chance to save Grant for the Union cause. When Sherman paid a call on Halleck before leaving Corinth to see if it was possible to salvage some locomotives and railroad cars that had been abandoned in the swamps west of Chewalla, Tennessee, Halleck “casually mentioned to me that Grant was going away the next morning.” When Sherman asked why, Halleck said that he did not know, but Grant had asked him for a thirty-day leave, and he had agreed.

  Sherman knew why. For himself, he had reason to be grateful to Halleck, who had given him the division he led so well at Shiloh that he was now being promoted to major general, but he had seen Grant “chafing under the slights of his anomalous position” and decided to go and see him before he left for Chewalla. Arriving at Grant’s headquarters, which “consisted of four or five tents, with a sapling railing around the front,” he saw packing going on that indicated Grant was not simply going on leave, but leaving the army. Shown into Grant’s tent, he found him “seated on a camp-stool, with papers on a rude camp-table,” methodically sorting out letters and putting bundles of them aside.

  After passing the usual compliments, I inquired if it were true that he was going away. He said, “Yes.” I then inquired the reason, and he said, “Sherman, you know. You know that I am in the way here. I have stood it as long as I can, and can endure it no longer.” I inquired where he was going to, and he said, “St. Louis.” I then asked him if he had any business there, and he said, “Not a bit.” I then begged him to stay, illustrating his case by my own.

  Before the battle of Shiloh, I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of “crazy,” but that single battle had given me new life, and I was now in high feather; and I argued with him that, if he went away, events would go right along, and he would be left out; whereas, if he remained, some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place.

  He certainly appreciated my friendly advice, and promised to wait awhile; at all events, not to go without seeing me again, or communicating with me.

  That very evening, Grant wrote Julia that “Necessity however changes my plans, or the public service does, and I must yeald [sic].” The next day he wrote to Sherman at Chewalla, saying, as Sherman put it, “that he had reconsidered his intention and would remain.” Later, Sherman could not find that note from Grant, but to the end of his life he kept a copy of the reply he sent Grant the same day. In it he went on to rail against the treatment they both had received from the press, but the part he chose to make public in his memoirs was this:

  Chewalla, June 6, 1862

  Major-General GRANT.

  MY DEAR SIR: I have just received your note, and am rejoiced at your conclusion to remain; for you could not be quiet at home for a week when armies are moving, and rest could not relieve your mind of the gnawing sensation that injustice had been done you.

  A letter from Grant that did survive is one he sent soon after that, not to Sherman but in reply to a letter from Ellen Sherman. Writing her from Memphis while Sherman was in another area, Grant tried to soothe the worries Ellen expressed concerning what Sherman described as “a touch of malarial fever” that he contracted during his inspection of the locomotives abandoned in the Tennessee swamps. In it he praised Sherman’s “indefatigable zeal and energy” and assured Ellen that he had suggested Sherman take a leave to recover fully, but that “he would not listen to it.” Grant said that “although Gen. Sherman’s place would be hard to fill,” he would again see “if he will consent to a leave,” and went on to say, “There is nothing that he, or his friends for him, could do that I would not do [for him] if it were in my power. It is to him and some other brave men like himself that I have gained the little credit awarded me, and that our cause has triumphed to the extent it has.”

  The “happy accident” that Sherman hoped would happen for Grant occurred five weeks later: on July 11, after McClellan was completely outgeneralled by Robert E. Lee in the Seven Days’ Battles in northern Virginia, Lincoln ordered Halleck to Washington to serve in the reconstituted post of general in chief. Henry Halleck now commanded the entire United States Army. There would eventually be questions of how wise a promotion that was for the Union cause as a whole, but Ulysses S. Grant took over from Halleck more or less by default, becoming the commander of two of the three Western armies. He thought that he could finally begin to fight the war in the Mississippi theater of operations the way he wanted to do it. Halleck was still Grant’s superior, but he would be a thousand miles away, with much else on his mind.

  The growing personal and military relationship between Grant and Sherman had reached a somewhat paradoxical moment. From the time of Shiloh, Grant strongly praised Sherman. Writing his official report of the battle two days after it occurred, Grant singled out Sherman for his highest commendation: “I feel it a duty however to a gallant and able officer Brig Genl W T Sherman to make special mention. He not only was with his Command during the entire two days action, but displayed great judgment and skill in the management of his men. Altho severely wounded in the hand the first day, his place was never vacant. He was again wounded and had three horses killed under him.”

  Three weeks later he wrote to Julia, “In Gen. Sherman the country has an able and gallant defender and your husband a true friend,” and in a later letter to her said, understating his role in Sherman’s rise, “Although Gen. Sherman has been made a Maj. Gen. by the battle of Shiloh I have never done half justice by him. With green troops he was my standby during that trying day of Sunday, (there has been nothing like it on this continent—nor in history.) He kept his Division in place all day, and aided materially in keeping those to his right and left in place—He saw me frequently and received, and obeyed, my directions during that day.”

  In these five months that had brought them together, Sherman made varying estimates of Grant. After Fort Donelson, he wrote his brother John that “Grant’s victory was most extraordinary and brilliant.” After Shiloh, preferring to speak of Grant’s earlier victory at Fort Donelson while controversy surrounded the recent battle, Sherman told Grant in a letter that “you obtained a just celebrity at Donelson, by a stroke of war more rich in consequences than was the battle of Saratoga.” On the same day, he wrote Ellen that “he is brave as any man should be, has won several victories such as Donelson which ought to entitle him to universal praise …” but added, “He is not a brilliant man … but he is a good & brave soldier tried for years, is sober, very industrious, and as kind as a child.”

  By comparison, when Sherman learned that Halleck was ordered east as general in chief, with Grant to be his successor in the West, he wrote Halleck this:

  I cannot express my heartfelt pain at hearing of your orders and intended departure … That success will attend you wherever you go I feel no doubt … I attach more importance to the West than the East … The man who at the end of this war holds the mili
tary control of the Valley of the Mississippi will be the man. You should not be removed. I fear the consequences …

  Instead of that calm, steady progress which has dismayed our enemy, I now fear alarms, hesitation, and doubt. You cannot be replaced out here.

  This letter, written by Sherman to the man who gave him the chance to come back from disgrace to prominence and promotion, combined genuine admiration with flattery and perhaps a measure of duplicity. Telling Halleck, “You should not be removed” and “You cannot be replaced,” indicated a preference for his leadership over that of Grant. To characterize Halleck’s glacial military movements as “calm, steady progress” flew in the face of the squandered opportunities Sherman had witnessed. For Sherman to add that, with Halleck gone, he feared there would now be “hesitation, and doubt” was astonishing: those characteristics had marked all of Halleck’s command in the West and were the antithesis of Grant’s approach to war.

  And yet it appeared, from other letters Sherman wrote, that he was not only grateful to Halleck but truly admired him, perhaps because of his orderly, methodical approach to so many matters. (Sherman was not alone in praising Halleck: many of Halleck’s officers and men saw the fall of Corinth as an intelligently planned bloodless taking of an important strategic point and gave Halleck the nickname “Old Brains.”) No one ever doubted that Sherman had a complicated personality: those words of praise for Halleck came from the same man who had supported Grant in every way since the war had brought them together. First, Sherman had done an outstanding job in forwarding men and supplies to Grant at Fort Donelson and in handling the movement of wounded and prisoners resulting from that battle. At Shiloh he outperformed Grant’s other generals. Then Sherman, who had reason to avoid the attention of newspapers that could quickly remind their readers of his earlier failure of nerve in Kentucky, threw himself into defending Grant in his replies to an attack in which he himself was not initially named. Finally, as a newly promoted major general who could have regarded the departure from the army of another man of the same rank as an opportunity to advance himself, Sherman had talked Grant out of leaving the army.