Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  Grant soon had a personally embittering experience involving Jews, in which he felt that his father betrayed him. A year before, when his father had asked him to use his influence in getting an army contract for the manufacture of harnesses, Grant told him firmly in a letter that “I cannot take an active part in securing contracts” and tried to explain to his dyed-in-the-wool businessman father the concept of conflict of interest. Now his father arrived at his headquarters at Holly Springs, Mississippi, to visit him, accompanied by three of his business acquaintances, brothers from Cincinnati named Henry, Harmon, and Simon Mack. The Macks, who were Jewish, had a trading enterprise known as Mack and Brothers, and had entered into some form of partnership with Jesse Grant.

  Grant was happy to see his father, with whom he had always had a difficult relationship, and thought that he had come on a purely personal visit. He soon saw how wrong he was: his father and the Macks wanted him to use his influence to get them one of the prized permits to buy cotton and ship it north. Grant had the three Macks put on the next train going north, and Jesse Grant also left.

  Just how much this confrontation influenced Grant cannot be said, but on December 17, 1862, Grant had published for the guidance of his entire military department his General Orders No. 11.

  The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also [War] Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.

  Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave, and anyone remaining after such notification, will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners unless furnished with permits from these headquarters.

  It took a while for the contents of this order to reach the North, but apparently the first person to act was Cesar J. Kaskel, of Paducah, who led a delegation of Jews to Washington and met with President Lincoln. Hearing what his visitors had to say, Lincoln commented, “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Kaskel replied, “Yes, and that is why we have come to Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.” Lincoln said, “And this protection they shall have at once.”

  Halleck had the duty of informing Grant that the order must be “immediately revoked” and later explained to him that “the President has no objection to your expelling traders and Jew pedlars, which I suppose was the object of your order, but [because] it prescribed an entire class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.” Grant grudgingly complied, but the story reached the press: The New York Times, which previously had praised Grant, now condemned him for issuing an order in “the spirit of the medieval age.” Congress voted along party lines on a measure to censure Grant. The Democrats nearly prevailed in the House, losing by three votes, fifty-three to fifty-six, but the Republican-controlled Senate defeated it thirty to seven.

  This controversy faded; now Grant became involved in a new chapter of the old story of political appointments of military officers. Readying his army for the campaign down the Mississippi toward Vicksburg, with Sherman slated for a vital role in that, Grant learned of the recent activities of Major General John McClernand. It was McClernand’s division that had collapsed and run at Fort Donelson, requiring Grant to restore order in its ranks, and at Shiloh, while McClernand stood his ground, Grant formed an opinion he later expressed that McClernand was “incompetent.”

  As was the case with so many political appointments, McClernand was entirely unqualified to be a general. An influential lawyer and politician from Illinois, he had served three terms in the Illinois legislature and had represented Abraham Lincoln’s congressional district in the House of Representatives. His sole military experience prior to being commissioned as a brigadier general of Illinois Volunteers at the outset of the Civil War had been three months’ service, thirty years before, as a private during the campaign against the Sac and Fox Indians in northern Illinois known as the Black Hawk War. During that conflict, he had displayed courage and resourcefulness in taking a dispatch through a hundred miles of territory held by hostile warriors, but he had never commanded even a squad of soldiers. Although a Democrat, McClernand had been a good friend to Lincoln, who always took care of those from the state in which he rose politically. Second in seniority within Grant’s military department because of his date of rank, in September McClernand had taken a long leave, which Grant was happy to approve. Now Grant learned that McClernand had gone to Washington and talked his friends Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton into letting him go to Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, to recruit a large and entirely separate force of Volunteers, which he would then command, taking over the expedition to capture Vicksburg. McClernand was now successfully raising those many regiments. Grant and Sherman, who were emerging as the two ablest officers in the Western theater and were presumably the leaders who might be able to take Vicksburg if it could be done at all, had been told none of this.

  It had been a stunning lapse on the part of Abraham Lincoln, whose military judgment was frequently better than that of his generals. In this case, politics completely dominated the president’s thinking. Lincoln had needed the support of McClernand and other prominent “War Democrats” to support his Republican administration’s decision to enter the war. In the recent midterm congressional elections, the Republicans had fared badly. As the casualty lists lengthened, the war was becoming increasingly unpopular in just those Democrat-leaning states in which McClernand proposed to enlist many thousands of needed soldiers. The vision that McClernand had presented to Lincoln and Stanton was of himself, a well-known Democrat from Lincoln’s home state, giving a bipartisan flavor to a new Western army that he would lead to an enormously significant victory that would strengthen Lincoln’s position as well as his own.

  Halleck had the most serious reservations about McClernand and the entire scheme, and shared Grant and Sherman’s dismay about it. For a change, Halleck moved swiftly. He saw the thorniest part of the problem: incompetent or not, McClernand was senior to Sherman, and McClernand’s letter from the president authorizing his actions could give him the power to override Grant. If McClernand got down to Memphis with what was in effect a newly raised private army, it would be hard to stop him from wrecking Grant’s plans. He might be able to proceed to Vicksburg and lose every man of his untrained force. The stage was set for a spectacular disaster.

  Having demonstrated after Shiloh that he could hogtie Grant, Halleck now used his bureaucratic skills to stop McClernand. First, he told Grant to set up his headquarters in Memphis, where he was reunited with Sherman. Then, as McClernand’s newly recruited regiments came into being, Halleck ordered each new unit to report to Grant in Memphis. Grant asked Halleck if these troops, and Sherman, were under his command or “reserved for some special service.” The moment that Halleck replied that every soldier now within the boundaries of Grant’s department was his to command, Grant understood the unspoken part of the message: start yourself, Sherman, and all the troops down the river heading for Vicksburg, before McClernand comes down and starts trying to take over.

  Pleased, Grant, then in La Grange, Tennessee, wrote Sherman, “The mysterious rumors of McClernand’s command left me in doubt as to what I should do … I therefore telegraphed Halleck … He replied that all troops sent into the Department would be under my controll [sic]. Fight the enemy in my own way … I think it advisable to move on the enemy as soon as you can leave Memphis.”

  When McClernand eventually did show up along the Mississippi and began using Lincoln’s letter of authorization in an effort to take command of the four divisions under Sherman, Halleck gave Grant the backing he had so often and so conspicuously withheld: “You are hereby authorized to relieve McClernand from command of the expedition against Vicksburg, giving it to the next in rank [Sherman] or taking it yourself.”

  Grant decid
ed to take command himself, working closely with Sherman as he had always planned to do. When McClernand insisted that the matter receive Lincoln’s personal review, Grant agreed. Someone, surely Halleck and perhaps others, must have been talking to Lincoln and Stanton: the president quickly told McClernand to obey the orders given him by his military superiors and to be satisfied with the command of the army corps Grant assigned to him for the expedition.

  During the closing months of 1862, Grant and Sherman had worked their way through a political and administrative labyrinth. Grant had emerged as the undisputed leader in the Western theater and had consolidated the units of his command that Halleck had, as Sherman put it, “scattered” across a wide area. As for Sherman, he had come to Memphis as its military governor, found the city in a chaotic condition, and in four months had brought it to a state of law-abiding prosperity. Placed back in command of troops by Grant, he was relieved of his role as military governor.

  Now, in December, Grant and Sherman began to face the realities of the most formidable military challenge any Union generals had thus far confronted. This was the attempt to capture Vicksburg, the immensely strong bastion located deep in the Confederacy, which was defended by an army of brave and determined men. Sherman was to describe it as the strongest defensive position he ever saw. Grant offered his appraisal of the fortified riverfront city that had a peacetime population of forty-five hundred, the second largest city in Mississippi after Natchez: “Admirable for defense. On the north it is about two hundred feet above the Mississippi River at the highest point and very much cut up with cane and underbrush by the washing rains; the ravines were grown up with cane and underbrush while the sides and tops were covered with a dense forest.”

  It would be suicide to come across the river from the Louisiana side and land directly under the cliffs of this fortress on the east bank of the Mississippi, but simply getting near enough to attack from any other direction presented enormous problems. The approach on land from the north led through marshes, and to approach from the east would extend supply lines already being successfully raided by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  The approach from the south, which was Vicksburg’s least defensible area, presented great advantages, coupled with a possibly insurmountable problem. If an army could get into place on dry land below Vicksburg on the eastern side of the river, it could move north up to the city and begin extending itself around its defenses, to the point where it might be possible to have it encircled on three sides, with the other side being the river. Then there would be no escape for the besieged defenders. The problem was how to get such a large force there. For many more weeks, the entire low-lying Louisiana side of the river opposite Vicksburg would be so inundated with winter and spring rains that Sherman could not march his forces south along that bank. Men on foot and on horseback might possibly struggle through the bayous, but it was impassable for artillery pieces and wagonloads of supplies. That left only the extraordinarily hazardous choice of moving down the river itself. If Grant tried to use ships to move his troops, heavy equipment, and supplies, they would have to pass within range of the Confederate cannon placed on the bluffs above the water.

  In the months to come, Grant would make seven different efforts to reach Vicksburg and surround it. In the first move, Grant led forty thousand men south toward Jackson, Mississippi, east of Vicksburg, in a diversionary maneuver intended to pull Confederate forces out of that stronghold while Sherman brought thirty-two thousand men down the river aboard ships in an amphibious operation and landed them at Chickasaw Bluffs, just north of the city. Grant’s overland approach was thwarted by the movements of thirty-five hundred Confederate cavalrymen under Major General Earl Van Dorn. Sherman’s four divisions were decisively repulsed when enormous rains, at places raising the Mississippi twelve feet above its usual level, literally washed them out of their attacking positions as the defenders inflicted on them casualties of 208 killed, 1,005 wounded, and 563 missing. (Sherman wrote Ellen, “Well we have been to Vicksburg and it was too much for us and we have backed out.”)

  Immediately after his withdrawal, Sherman told Grant that “I assume responsibility and attach fault to no one.” Then he saw an article written by Thomas W. Knox, the leading war correspondent of The New York Herald. Ignoring Sherman’s order that no journalists could accompany the recent failed expedition, Knox had been aboard a transport. Relying on interviews he conducted more or less at random with some of the participants immediately after the retreat, Knox wrote that Sherman had bungled the attack and failed to take adequate care of his wounded. He termed Sherman’s behavior “unaccountable”—a word that echoed the reports by journalists a year before that Sherman was insane.

  Learning of Sherman’s anger about his article and the way the information was obtained, Knox wrote a conciliatory note to Sherman, telling him that he had since learned from the battle reports many mitigating facts about the recent failure at Chickasaw and offering to retract his story. In no way mollified, Sherman had him arrested and held for trial by a court-martial. When they met face-to-face, Knox managed to worsen the situation. Clearly referring to the manner in which Sherman had banned reporters from his camps as long ago as his time in Kentucky, he said, “Of course, General Sherman, I have no feeling against you personally, but you are regarded as the enemy of our set [the press] and we must in self-defense write you down.” Sherman had Knox charged with violating his order excluding nonmilitary personnel from the recent expedition and of breaking a War Department rule that no information concerning military activities could be printed without permission from the commanding officer of the area in which they took place.

  The matter quickly became a cause célèbre, It was the first time in American history that a journalist had faced a military court. While Sherman went on to win an engagement at Arkansas Post, up the river from Vicksburg, and then to save Admiral Porter’s fleet from destruction when it was surrounded by enemy forces in the swamps at Steele’s Bayou, much of the press concentrated on condemning him both as a commander and as an enemy of free speech. Sherman remained resolute, informing the court-martial judges that he considered Knox to be in effect a spy who gave the enemy information about Union movements and losses that Knox had broken a specific ban to acquire. As the trial continued for several weeks, Sherman gathered statements from officers who had been at Chickasaw, including Porter: the naval leader observed that two of Sherman’s generals had handled their divisions in a deficient manner but said of Sherman’s leadership of the force as a whole, “Sherman managed his men most beautifully … He did nobly until the rain drowned his army out of the swamps.” Sherman had all this copied and sent to his senator brother in Washington, to his wife and her lawyer brother Philemon, and to Grant. He wrote Ellen that if the press was running the war, he might as well resign from the army.

  Grant, who was trying to conduct an extraordinarily complex military campaign, had through his own experience come to dislike and mistrust the press, although his overall handling of journalists was far better than Sherman’s. When the verdict came down, ordering that Knox be banished from Grant’s military department and would be arrested if he returned, Grant knew that President Lincoln was under intense pressure to use his discretionary power to overturn the decision. Knox went to Washington and saw the president, who needed the goodwill of the Northern press. Lincoln told him that he would revoke the sentence if the commanding general of the department, Grant, would agree to that.

  Grant had no doubt as to what his commander in chief wanted him to do. He made his decision in the form of a letter to Knox. Grant told the reporter that he had in fact violated Sherman’s order against traveling with the amphibious force, that he had attacked Sherman’s reputation and had suggested that Sherman was insane. He went on to say that “General Sherman is one of the ablest soldiers and purest men in this country … Whilst I would conform to the slightest wish of the President where it is formed upon a fair representation of both sides of any que
stion, my respect for General Sherman is such that in this case I must decline, unless General Sherman first gives his consent to your remaining.”

  Sherman had the last word. He wrote Knox, “Come with a sword or musket in your hand, prepared to share with us our fate in sunshine and storm, in prosperity and adversity, in plenty and scarcity, and I will welcome you as a brother and associate; but come as you do now, expecting me to ally the reputation and honor of my country and my fellow-soldiers with you as the representative of the press which you yourself say makes so slight a difference between truth and falsehood and my answer is Never!”

  Grant had risked his standing in Washington for Sherman; later in the campaign, Sherman would demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice his military reputation for Grant. When Grant considered having Sherman distract the enemy’s attention by making a large and deceptive thrust toward Hayne’s Bluff, up the river from Vicksburg, he wrote Sherman that he thought the feint would be “good,” but added that he was “loth” to order it, in effect because the public might consider it to be another defeat such as Sherman had suffered at Chickasaw Bluffs. Sherman stoutly replied that Grant had “good reason to divert attention … That is sufficient for me and it shall be done.” Recognizing that there were journalists who were after both of them (as the unsuccessful efforts to approach Vicksburg dragged on, one editor characterized Grant as a “foolish, drunken, stupid … ass”), Sherman added, “As to the Reports in newspapers we must scorn them, else they will ruin us and the country. They are as much enemies to Good Government as the sesech [secessionists] and between the two I like the sesech best, because they are a brave open enemy & not a set of sneaking croaking scoundrels. I believe a diversion at Haines [sic] Bluff is proper right and will make it, let whatever reports of Repulse be made.”