Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  What developed next between Grant and Sherman would influence both the military and political aspects of the war, and its results. Sherman had more to learn about Grant, and himself. Through conversations and letters they would, often without realizing it, teach each other about the nature of the war they were experiencing. Between them they would evolve a harsh and efficient philosophy of war that would affect the South’s civilian population as well as its armies, and begin to apply those measures.

  Fifteen months into the war, after Donelson, after Shiloh, at times both men thought it would soon end. Speaking of the Confederacy, Sherman wrote his brother that “the People are as bitter against us as ever, but the Leaders must now admit they are defeated.” A week after Shiloh, Grant told Julia that he expected “one more fight and then easy sailing to the end of the war. I really will feel glad when this thing is over.” Reflecting on the battle, Grant later concluded that “it is possible that the Southern man started in with a little more dash than his Northern brother; but he was correspondingly less enduring.” In midsummer of 1862, both Grant and Sherman still had a lot to learn about Southern endurance, and about each other.

  6

  POLITICAL PROBLEMS, MILITARY CHALLENGES: THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN DEVELOPS

  When Halleck went east to take command of the entire United States Army, Grant inherited a situation in which Halleck had, as Sherman put it, “scattered” eighty thousand men into small garrisons all over northern Mississippi and western Tennessee. This was a time when the aggressive Grant and newly confident Sherman should have been able to take the experienced divisions that had fought at Shiloh and use them to seek out and attack the enemy. Instead, they found themselves inheriting a situation in which Halleck had tasked his forces with the duty of occupying cities and towns and guarding railroad lines, rather than engaging the Confederate generals they had recently defeated.

  Sherman, newly promoted to major general of Volunteers, became the military governor of Memphis, then a city of twenty-three thousand, while his superior Grant made his headquarters at Corinth, a hundred miles to the east. Grant now commanded a military department that was geographically composed of northern Mississippi and the western parts of Tennessee and Kentucky; his spread-out field command consisted of the Army of the Tennessee, which he had commanded at Shiloh, and the army now under the command of Major General William Rosecrans that had been known as the Army of the Mississippi. In this period of flux, Grant was trying to rebuild a central striking force while dealing with Confederate guerrilla raids supported by the population of a large territory loyal to the Confederacy. He encouraged Sherman to send him not only military reports but also to “write freely and fully on all matters of public interest.”

  Memphis, initially paralyzed by the Union victory at Shiloh and the sight of long federal columns marching into the city, quickly provided Sherman with many such “matters of public interest.” Soon after arriving at the city on the Mississippi in late July, he and his staff attended Sunday services at Calvary Episcopal Church. The intention was to appear quietly, in a neutral, peaceful setting. However, Sherman noticed that the clergyman omitted the prayer always said in prewar times for the president of the United States. Instantly, Sherman rose in the midst of the congregation and said the prayer in a loud, authoritative voice. The following day he decreed that the prayer would be offered at the next service, or the church would be closed. The prayer was duly said, and the church remained open.

  That set the tone for Sherman’s conduct of the Union occupation of Memphis and the city’s response. Telling the mayor that “the Military for the time being must be superior to the Civil authority but does not therefore destroy it,” he reorganized the police force, established order, reopened everything from schools to theaters and saloons, and encouraged the resumption of all commercial activity including local riverboat trade in nonmilitary items. The former California banker even organized a real estate department in which his quartermasters opened up buildings vacated due to the war, rented out the space, and held the profits to be paid out later to owners willing to declare their loyalty to the federal government. Even though, as one of his officers wrote home to his mother, “Sherman never utters a word to bring the blush to the cheek of a maiden,” he let the city’s famous bordellos, known as “parlor houses,” continue their activities. Perhaps he learned of the attitudes of the many black prostitutes, who until then had only Southern white men as clients: a Union cavalryman said those women “felt loving towards us because they thought we were bringing them freedom, and they wouldn’t charge us a cent.”

  During this time, Sherman and Grant had to develop ways to implement the evolving federal policies on the treatment of slaves. When the war began, the issue of secession, rather than the abolition of slavery, dominated the minds of most Northerners. Now, with Union armies controlling Southern communities, farms, and plantations, tens of thousands of slaves sought federal protection.

  This reality—masses of slaves, many of them fugitives and all of them desperate for help and needing a new civil status—forced Abraham Lincoln to reconsider the issue. Although he wanted to free the slaves, he saw as his highest duty the preservation of the United States as one nation. At the war’s outset, trying to keep the border states out of the Confederacy, he had skirted the slavery issue to avoid antagonizing the many slaveholding families in those states. As the war progressed, Lincoln still had hopes of negotiating an early end, and he hesitated to put the abolition of slavery foremost—the position of the Radical faction of the Republicans in Congress—while he explored the possibilities of reaching peace at a table with Confederate leaders. Now, however, there were slaves to be cared for, a negotiated peace seemed beyond reach, and yet there was no law protecting the freed slaves. Their status was in such a legal limbo that earlier in the year, in March, Congress had enacted an article of war expressly forbidding the Union Army to return fugitive slaves to their masters.

  Apart from the ideal of ending slavery, the North began to see that freeing the slaves, hitherto considered to be their owners’ legal property in the way that a horse or a house was, could be an economic weapon that also produced military advantages. Unpaid labor of slaves was an integral, vital part of the Southern economy, and to take slaves away from their owners would undermine the Confederacy’s infrastructure in ways that would also reduce its ability to continue the fight. On July 17, four days before Sherman arrived to rule Memphis, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act. Motivated by a combination of idealism and practicality, this law freed the slaves of “persons engaged in or assisting the rebellion” and also provided for the seizure and sale of other property belonging to those actively supporting the Southern cause. On September 22, while Sherman still governed Memphis, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This statement declared that unless the Confederate states ceased their rebellion by the end of the year, as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in those states, not just those belonging to Confederate supporters, would be freed. In a continuing effort to keep the border states on the Union side, it did not declare that slaves outside of the seceded states would automatically be freed, but pledged a form of compensation for border states that adopted either immediate or gradual emancipation. (When the Emancipation Proclamation became operative, it also provided for the enlistment of black men in the army.)

  The point came home to the entire white South: the war was now being waged not only on the military front; it would reach right into every part of the Confederacy’s economic life. In addition to their many other duties and concerns, Grant and Sherman started turning law into reality. On August 17, Sherman wrote Grant, concerning the Southern whites’ reaction, “Your orders about property and mine about niggers make them feel they can be hurt,” and in a letter of October 16 he added this thought: “We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their coun
try, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”

  On the one hand, Sherman continued to see things as he had while living in prewar Louisiana. He thought that blacks were inferior beings, and, while regretting that slavery as an institution existed, he had no personal desire to force its abolition. Nonetheless, he was a soldier who intended to carry out his government’s policy: the Southern civilian population must cooperate with federal rule, as most of the people of Memphis were doing. As for Grant, whose wife and Missouri in-laws still owned slaves, he had recently written his strongly antislavery father that “I have no hobby of my own with regard to the negro, either to effect his freedom or continue his bondage. If Congress pass any law and the President approves, I am willing to execute it.” Echoing Sherman’s view that the South was beginning to “hurt” in ways besides suffering militarily, he wrote this to his sister Mary: “Their institution [the slaves] are beginning to have ideas of their own and every time an expedition goes out more or less of them follow in the wake of the army and come into camp. I am using them as teamsters, Hospital attendants &c. thus saving soldiers to carry the musket. I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end but it is weakning [sic] the enemy to take them from them.”

  By November of 1862, following the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Grant began issuing specific orders concerning the treatment of “contrabands,” as fugitive slaves were known. They were to be cared for and the men put to work except for “such men as are not fit for active field duty.” For the first time in their lives, they would be paid. Grant set forth those conditions: “It will be the duty of the Superintendent of Contrabands to organize them into working parties in saving cotton, as pioneers [laborers assisting engineer troops] on railroads and steamboats, and in any way where their service can be made available … The negroes will be clothed, and in every way provided for, out of their earnings as far as practicable … In no case will negroes be forced into the service of the Government, or be enticed away from their homes except when it becomes a military necessity.”

  In addition to implementing federal policies concerning slaves, Sherman had a variety of experiences with white citizens of Memphis who tested Union vigilance. Smuggling became pervasive: military supplies for Confederate forces left the city in coffins and in the carcasses of slaughtered cattle and hogs. Salt, badly needed to preserve and flavor Confederate rations, went out in barrels labeled as being something else. Sherman classified the sending of salt, chloroform, and medicines to the enemy as a treasonable activity punishable by penalties including death, but he used discretion in these cases. When two women, one aged and the other pregnant, tried to sneak out of Memphis together, carrying banned goods as well as a trunk of their clothes and two dresses, Sherman ruled that “the commanding General directs that the goods except the trunk and two dresses be confiscated. The ladies will go home and not attempt this again.”

  Sherman and most of the citizens of Memphis continued on good terms, but outside the city, guerrillas wearing nothing that would identify them as Confederate soldiers fired on the Mississippi riverboats that Sherman allowed to move up and down the river. In late September, one of these vessels, not a Union gunboat or transport but a regular packet boat carrying nonmilitary goods and civilian passengers of both sides, was shot at near the rebellious small town of Randolph, Tennessee. Everyone in and near there got a taste of what Sherman was capable of doing. He had two infantry companies go into the town and burn it down. To make the scene of wreckage more dramatic, Sherman ordered that it be done “leaving one house,” and reported to Grant’s chief of staff John A. Rawlins that “the regiment has returned and Randolph is gone.” (In a letter to Ellen, he disposed of the matter in twenty words: “The Boats coming down are occasionally fired on. I have just sent a party to destroy the town of Randolph.”) Then he decreed that ten families would be expelled from Memphis every time such an attack occurred.

  When a Confederate general sent him a letter under a flag of truce criticizing these actions, Sherman, never at a loss for words, replied that the general’s protest “excites a smile” because he knew full well that the general himself would not countenance men “without uniform, without organization except on paper, wandering about the country pillaging friend and foe, firing on unarmed boats filled with women and children … always from ambush or where they have every advantage.” The Confederate general persisted in the exchange, threatening to hang a captured Union officer. Sherman responded that when the guerrillas “fire on any boat, they are firing on their [own] Southern people, for such travel on every boat” and added that if a Union officer were hanged, “You initiate the game, and my word for it your people will regret it long after you pass from the earth.” To Grant, Sherman wrote, “They cannot be made to love us, but may be made to fear us.”

  Other Northerners also were seeing the conflict in a harsher light. Senator John Sherman concurred with his brother, stating that “it is about time the North understood the truth, that the entire South, man woman & child is against us, armed and determined.” Ellen’s anger at the South took her even further than that. Two of her four brothers, Hugh and Charles, were now in the Union Army, with Charles serving as a lieutenant in one of Sherman’s infantry regiments and Hugh a colonel of an infantry regiment in the Eastern theater of war. Worried about her husband and two brothers, she apparently began to see Southern whites as doing the work of the devil. Ellen wrote Sherman that “I hope this may be not only a war of emancipation but of extermination & that all under the influence of the foul fiend may be driven like the Swine into the Sea. May we carry fire & sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.”

  While Sherman spent these months dealing with the complicated situation in and near Memphis, Grant remained at his headquarters in Corinth. Still without sufficient force to take the offensive while he tried to consolidate his units that had been “scattered” by Halleck, he was fortifying that railroad hub against an expected Confederate attack. None came, for the time being, and he sent for Julia and their four children to join him. She wrote of their arrival by train, at dusk.

  We found the General’s ambulance awaiting us at the depot. The General and two or three of his staff officers accompanied us on horseback to headquarters. The General was so glad to see us and rode close beside the ambulance, stooping near and asking me if I was as glad to see him as he was to see me. He reached out and took my hand and gave it another and another warm pressure …

  As we entered the encampment, which extended from near the depot to beyond the headquarters, the campfires were lighted, and I do not think I exaggerate when I say they numbered thousands. So it seemed to me. The men were singing “John Brown.” It seemed as though a hundred or so sang the words and the whole army joined in the chorus [“Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!”]. Oh, how grand it was! And now when I hear “John Brown” sung, that weird night with its campfires and glorious anthem and my escort all come back to me.

  For six weeks, Ulysses and Julia Grant and their children had an idyllic reunion. They all lived at his headquarters, which Julia described as being “in a handsome and very comfortable country house, situated in a magnificent oak grove of great extent. The house was a frame one, surrounded by wide piazzas, sheltered by some sweet odor-giving vine —Madeira vine, I think. On the grounds were plantain, mimosa, and magnolia trees.”

  A wide dirt walk surrounded the house and was kept neatly raked and sprinkled with water twice a day. The two youngest children, Nellie, seven, and Jess, four, loved to “make footprints with their little rosy feet in this freshly-raked earth.” This led to an evening ritual.

  Each day, as they were being bathed and dressed for the evening, the same petition came.

  “Mamma, please let us make footprints. It is so cool and pleasant. Do, Mamma; it is such clean dirt. Let us, please.” The General would answer, “Yes, you can. Why do you not ask me? I would always let you. It will
not hurt you at all.” The staff officers joined in the petition, so the little ones made the footprints and enjoyed it too.

  Grant had much paperwork to attend to every day and worried about the amount of time the Confederate armies were being given to reorganize, but he thrived on Julia’s attentions. Gaunt after Shiloh, he gained fifteen pounds during the weeks she was with him. She knew his tastes: Grant liked to eat small portions of plain food, unadorned by sauces or dressings. He enjoyed nibbling on fruit, and liked corn, pork, beans, and buckwheat cakes. Grant had a taste for oysters and clams; for breakfast he sometimes ate cucumbers with his coffee. (Once, when Julia remonstrated with him for mixing several of these different foods, a pickle among them, at one sitting, he said, “Let ’em fight it out down there,” and continued to eat.)

  Julia was at this time thirty-six, becoming stout but still with the lively personality and outgoing conversational manners of a Southern belle, a general’s wife who was happy to sew on buttons for the officers working at headquarters, a woman who walked with a businesslike stride to visit officers and enlisted men in the hospital. Grant’s staff, most of them younger than she, enjoyed her company and were devoted to her. Not only did Julia and the children bring with them a taste of the family life they missed, but she accomplished something far more important: when she was with her husband, he never drank.