Grant’s susceptibility to alcohol was the subject of many different stories, during the war and ever after. They ranged from statements by those close to him that he drank not a drop during the war years, to accounts that had him crawling on his hands and knees, vomiting, and being carried to bed unconscious. His staff threw a nearly impenetrable mantle over the subject. There are internal headquarters letters on this subject to Grant from John A. Rawlins, the roughhewn lawyer from Galena who was the chief of Grant’s headquarters staff and a man Grant particularly trusted. A visitor characterized Rawlins as having “very little respect for persons and a rough style of conversation,” even cursing at Grant on occasion, but Rawlins used a respectful, even solemn, tone in his letters reproaching Grant for drinking incidents and warning him of the dangers of repeating them. Many years later, Sherman wrote, “We all knew at the time that Genl Grant would occasionally drink too much—he always encouraged me to talk freely of this & other things and I always noticed that he could with an hour’s sleep wake up perfectly sober & bright—and when any thing was pending, he was invariably abstinent of drink.” (According to a famous story, when Lincoln received a complaint about Grant’s drinking, he told the person making the complaint to find out the brand of liquor Grant drank, so that he could send barrels of it to his other generals. When asked about this, Lincoln, who loved a good story, replied that he wished he’d said it, but hadn’t.)
In other matters, unusual things happened to Julia at Corinth. A day or two before her visit ended, she was sitting near Grant, writing a letter, when she looked up and saw a young man in civilian clothes whom she did not know near the door and peering into the room. When he seemed startled to see her, Julia calmly penned this on the margin of the letter she was writing, and handed it to her husband: “Who is this strange young man? He is much interested in what is going on here. I am sure he must be a spy.” Without a word, Grant wrote his answer on the same piece of paper and handed it back to her. “You are right. He is in our employ.” (It was later discovered that this spy, free to come and go, was in fact a double agent, working at different times for both sides.)
During this same autumn of 1862, Sherman was joined in Memphis by Ellen and their six-year-old son Tommy. She wrote that at the age of forty-two, her husband looked “thin & worn being more wrinkled than most men of sixty,” but found him “cheerful & well.” Tommy had a wonderful time. Occasionally he was allowed to take a blanket and sleep with some of Sherman’s soldiers in their tents. The men liked him, and a company tailor made him a uniform that had corporal’s stripes on its sleeves. Writing a letter that began “My Dear Children,” after Ellen and Tommy left for home with Tommy proudly wearing his uniform, Sherman told them that Tommy “thinks he is a Real soldier with a leave of absence for 7 years until he becomes fourteen when he must join his Company. No body can tell what may happen in the next seven years and therefore Tommy was very prudent in getting a seven years absence.”
Soon after Julia and their children left Grant at Corinth, the relatively quiet and indecisive nature of the post-Shiloh military situation changed. Halleck had given Grant two of the three Union armies operating in the Western theater of war—the names and structure of the Western forces were changed several times—and the third was under the separate command of Don Carlos Buell. With Grant and Sherman’s forces still heavily committed to occupation duty in the Mississippi River area, the same Southern generals whom Grant and Sherman defeated at Shiloh decided to attack Buell. Moving slowly as usual, Buell was well east of the Mississippi, marching his army toward Confederate-held Chattanooga. Braxton Bragg came up with the plan: link up with Edward Kirby Smith’s army of eighteen thousand men who were in eastern Tennessee, smash Buell, recapture Nashville, get back into Kentucky, take Louisville, and move up the Ohio River to Cincinnati. (Beauregard loved the idea, citing the words of the French revolutionary leader Danton’s slogan that translate as, “Audacity, more audacity, always audacity.”)
Bragg completely outmaneuvered Buell, retaking central Tennessee without fighting a battle, and Halleck was forced to strip Grant of nearly half his men and have their commanders rush them north. Grant had no choice but to remain on the defensive, far south of the new and very real Confederate threat to territory that had come under Union control many months before. It seemed entirely possible that, five months after Shiloh, the Confederate Army might take the war right back to, and in some cases beyond, its original boundaries. Buell was falling back toward Louisville, with Bragg marching to the same destination on a parallel route. Kirby Smith rode into Lexington, Kentucky, just 80 miles south of Cincinnati and the Ohio River. In the East, Robert E. Lee won decisively at Second Manassas and crossed the Potomac heading north into Maryland. Days after that, Stonewall Jackson occupied Frederick, Maryland, and went on to take the United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, capturing twelve thousand men and vast stores of weapons and equipment. The North found itself in the worst situation since the war began.
Grant’s contribution to turning the tide came when the Confederate high command underestimated what he could do with the reduced Union forces he still had with him. At the time when Bragg was writing his subordinate Sterling Price that he was sure that Price and Confederate general Earl Van Dorn could “dispose of” Sherman and Union general William Rosecrans, after which they should move north “and we shall confidently meet you on the Ohio,” Grant once again decided to attack first. The result was the battle on September 19 at luka, twenty-five miles east of Corinth. An indecisive engagement in itself, it stopped Price’s move north to reinforce Bragg. At that point Price and Van Dorn threw their twenty-two thousand soldiers at Corinth, where Rosecrans had twenty thousand men waiting for them in the entrenchments Grant had built. In fierce fighting, the Confederates were repulsed. Tears coming down his cheeks, Price watched his torn-to-pieces divisions march away from Corinth: of the twenty-two thousand men who attacked in the morning, by late afternoon five thousand were dead, wounded, or missing.
The Confederate Army’s position also deteriorated in the East, and then in Kentucky. In a tremendous clash at Antietam Creek in Maryland on September 17, Lee, with forty thousand men, outmaneuvered and initially held his own against McClellan’s field army of seventy-five thousand—a force nearly twice that of the Confederates. Although Lee had to withdraw, it was the clearest possible demonstration of his skill as well as the ability and determination of his Army of Northern Virginia, and McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee brought about the end of his military career, but the losses on both sides, totaling 23,500, exceeded those at Shiloh. Despite his performance at Antietam, Lee’s effort to carry the war into the North had failed, with casualties the Confederacy could not afford, and he withdrew his divisions south across the Potomac. (Lincoln had been waiting for some good news to strengthen the Union’s political position and war aims, and, although Lee’s failed offensive was short of the kind of victory he hoped for, he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later.) At Perryville, Kentucky, an outnumbered Braxton Bragg nearly prevailed over Don Carlos Buell, but Bragg’s momentum and strength were spent, and he had to retreat to Tennessee. (A result of the Battle of Antietam was that Ellen Sherman’s brother Hugh, after distinguishing himself there, was promoted to brigadier general and sent west to serve under Sherman.)
Ever since the Confederates’ costly failure at Corinth, Grant had been planning to take the offensive, with Sherman ceasing his role as military governor of Memphis to lead Union forces in battle. It would require many weeks to get the massive and complicated movement organized and under way, but Grant intended to take the immensely strong Southern bastion of Vicksburg, Mississippi, 200 miles down the Mississippi River from Memphis. Across the river from this stronghold was the bayou country of Louisiana. Known as the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” Vicksburg was a small city, but it was surrounded by a lethal defensive network that would make the whole complex singularly hard to capture. One Union observe
r described its combination of natural defenses and fortifications filled with artillery as being part of “an ugly place, with its line of bluffs commanding the channel for fully seven miles, and battery piled above battery all the way.” (Some of those bluffs rose two hundred feet above the river.)
Before making any attack, points near the city would have to be approached through a cleverly defended maze of waterways, many miles of which looped through the flat marshland of the bayous. Grant saw that it would require an entire campaign, fighting a number of battles, simply to reach the places from which to launch a final offensive: as he put it in a letter to Julia, “Heretofore I have had nothing to do but fight the enemy. This time I have to overcome obsticles [sic] to reach him.”
Even more than before, Grant needed the men and ships of the United States Navy to work with him, as they had at Belmont, Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh. The senior Union naval officer in the area, Acting Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter, had recently taken command of the Mississippi Squadron. Once again, Grant had an exceptionally able naval officer ready to support him, a man eager to play his part in amphibious operations. The forty-nine-year-old Porter was the son of a United States Navy commander who had been a hero in the War of 1812; the elder Porter had also adopted a boy named David Farragut. In 1826, Porter’s father resigned from the United States Navy to become commander in chief of the Mexican Navy. At the age of fourteen, young Porter went to sea aboard his father’s flagship; after training he was transferred to other vessels, and before his fifteenth birthday was captured in a battle with a Spanish warship and spent six months as a prisoner of war in a prison ship in Havana Harbor. Making his way back to the United States when he was sixteen, he became a midshipman aboard the famous American man-o’-war Constellation, and in the next twenty years he rose to command his own ship, the USS Spitfire, during the Mexican War.
Now, in the Civil War, Porter was coming into his own. In the capture of New Orleans, which took place in the weeks just after Shiloh, he had served with distinction under his foster brother David Farragut, but it was Porter who conceived of the amphibious operation that seized the city. (Farragut would become immortal with his “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” uttered at Mobile Bay, but Porter endeared himself to many with his remark, “A ship without Marines is like a garment without buttons.”) Five feet six inches in height, Porter was an outspoken, ambitious officer with a considerable ego. He lived well. A man who loved to ride when he was ashore, Porter maintained two fine horses aboard his side-wheeler flag boat Blackhawk, along with cows to supply milk and butter for his highly regarded officer’s mess.
Porter described in his diary his awkward first meeting with Grant. On an evening in early December of 1862, the nattily uniformed Porter was at a dinner party aboard an army quartermaster’s riverboat at Cairo, Illinois, feasting on roast duck and champagne. His army host was called away from the table and returned with an unexpected guest, a travel-stained man wearing a wrinkled brown civilian coat and gray trousers. “Admiral Porter,” the army quartermaster said, “meet General Grant.”
Possessing a measure of the mistrust that often existed between the navy and army, and worried that Grant might think of him more as a bon vivant than the fighting sailor he was, Porter soon found that the plainspoken Grant had only one thing on his mind: Vicksburg, and how to take it. As if the roast duck and champagne did not exist, for twenty minutes Grant spoke earnestly with Porter, indicating his need for all the help Porter and his ships could give him in the forthcoming campaign and telling him something of his plans. Impressed by Grant’s “determination” and “calm, imperturbable face,” Porter pledged him his fullest cooperation, and Grant walked off the ship.
In his journal, Porter also recorded the details of his first meeting with Sherman, some days later in Memphis. He first described Sherman’s headquarters in the Gayoso House, the best hotel in town. Struck by the sparse furnishings and the intense concentration displayed by the men at every desk, he noted that the officers were “bronzed and weather-beaten,” and dressed in the simplest of uniforms. Despite the air of efficiency, this naval officer on whom much depended had to wait an hour before Sherman appeared from an inner room. “He seemed surprised to see me, when I introduced myself, and informed me that he did not know I was there.” Having said that, Sherman began conferring with one of his quartermasters as if Porter were not present. “I was not, I must confess, much impressed with Gen’l Sherman’s courtesy.” Then Sherman finished his conversation. “He turned to me in the most pleasant way, poked up the fire, and talked as if he had known me all his life … He told me all he had done, what he was doing, and what he intended to do, jumping up every three minutes to send a message to someone.” Porter walked out of the Gayoso House liking Sherman and feeling confident that they would work well together. (They remained friends for the rest of their lives and died in the same month in 1891.)
As 1862 ended, Grant continued preparing for the Vicksburg campaign. More than ever, he came to rely on Sherman, and the tone of his letters differed from those he sent his other generals. Writing Sherman at a time when their headquarters were only ten miles apart, he enclosed a letter from Halleck, in which the general in chief, mistakenly informed that Grenada, Mississippi, had been captured by Union forces, told Grant that this “may change our plans in regard to Vicksburg.” Grant, thinking that the report was accurate, said to Sherman, “I wish you would come over this evening and stay to-night, or come over in the morning. I would like to talk with you about this matter.” Grant described two courses of action and added, “Of the two plans I look most favorably on the former.” He closed with, “Come over and we will talk this matter over.”
At a time when Grant needed to concentrate on military plans, more problems with “matters of public interest” arose. The first involved illegal trading in cotton, the South’s great export crop and the one so widely grown in the area of Grant’s and Sherman’s responsibility. Before the war, Southern cotton had flowed in constant great quantities to Northern textile mills and to those in England. Now, a year and a half into the war, that trade was disrupted. Not only did the Union naval blockade of the Southern ports and the seizure of New Orleans the past April deprive the English mills of virtually all of the commodity on which their production depended, but the war produced a similar crisis on the American scene. With armies fighting in the areas between the Northern mills and their source of supply, Northern textile operators were themselves desperate for cotton. The North needed cotton, and the South needed Northern-manufactured goods, as well as cash that was not in the form of the already depreciated Confederate dollar. Some patriotic Southern planters burnt their cotton to deny it to the North, but others stored hundreds of thousands of bales and waited to see what would happen.
A lot did. For months, speculators had been coming south, offering the highest prices for cotton that the South had seen in sixty years. In Washington, the Treasury Department thought that restoring the cotton trade would in effect bribe many Southerners back into loyalty to the Union, and indeed the case could be made that the Union Army itself needed shirts, bandages, tents, and other items made from cotton. The War Department, however, felt that these Northern dollars would end up financing the Confederate Army and took a negative view of this trade between enemies. A compromise reached within the federal government produced instructions to Grant. He was to permit the activities of these Northern traders, as long as they held permits, did not go into enemy territory, and did not offer gold to the cotton sellers. This became meaningless: the speculators attached themselves to Union army regiments, avoided any kind of regulation, and handsomely bribed federal officers and men to look the other way while they dealt with anyone they chose, in any way that suited them.
Both Grant and Sherman found the situation infuriating: as they saw it, while brave Northern boys died, profiteers poured into the South to trade with the enemy, ruining discipline in Union Army camps and creating bad f
eeling among the men, some of whom were making little fortunes working with the speculators, while others were not. (In Memphis, Sherman believed there was even some treasonous barter in which cotton was traded for Northern pistols and chemicals that were used for explosives.) Sherman tried to have Northern cotton buyers pay in such a way that the profits would be held by his quartermasters until the rebellion was over, thus guaranteeing that no Northern money could aid the Confederate military, but Halleck sent on to him a federal government order to desist. Sherman grudgingly obeyed, but he wrote: “Commerce must follow the flag, but in truth commerce supplies our enemy with the means to follow the [enemy] flag and the Government whose emblem it is.”
Grant wanted the speculators banned from his army’s camps and decided that the only way to accomplish that was to ban them from the entire area of his military department. Most of the speculators were not Jews, but a good number were, and both Grant and Sherman began to characterize them all as being Jewish. Sherman’s position on the “cotton order” was that he had tried to regulate the Memphis economy by forcing all Southerners to trade with one another in Confederate dollars, but this speculation in cotton with freelance Northern brokers was a different matter. He had already written Ellen that Memphis was “full of Jews & speculators buying cotton for gold & [federal] treasury notes, the very things the Confederates wanted, money. I am satisfied the [Confederate] army got enough money & supplies from this Quarter to last a year.” He also wrote an angry letter to the army’s adjutant general Lorenzo Thomas, who a year before had characterized Sherman’s attitude while in Louisville as being “insane” but now treated carefully the man who had done so much at Shiloh and been promoted to major general. In it, Sherman said: “If the policy of this government demands cotton, order us to seize it … This cotton order is worse to us than a defeat. The [surrounding] country will swarm with dishonest Jews who will smuggle powder, pistols, percussion caps, etc. in spite of all the guards and precautions we can give.”
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 18
