Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  As aggressive a general as the Civil War produced, Grant nevertheless realized that more frontal attacks would be futile. “I now determined upon a regular siege—to ‘out-camp the enemy,’ as it were, and to incur no more losses. The experience of the 22d convinced officers and men that this was best, and they went to work on the defenses and approaches with a will. With the navy holding the river, the investment of Vicksburg was complete. As long as we could hold our position the enemy was limited in supplies of food, men and munitions of war to what they had on hand. These could not last always.”

  While Grant’s army began its various entrenchments, building earthworks to house the artillery that would ceaselessly slam away at the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” visitors, some of them coming down the river on ships that disembarked them above the city, arrived to visit their family members who were soldiers and to see where the next act of the long Vicksburg drama would take place. Grant found himself amused by the sight of families of soldiers bringing the men “a dozen or two of poultry.” Unaware that in living off the land, Grant’s troops had wrung the necks of any number of chickens, ducks, and turkeys, hastily cooking them and often eating them while they marched, “They did not know how little the gift would be appreciated … the sight of poultry … almost took away their appetite. But the intention was good.”

  Not only the families of soldiers came to see besieged Vicksburg. Grant described one of the most important visitors and how Sherman refused to take any credit for the success of the campaign to date and directed it all toward Grant.

  Among the earliest arrivals was the Governor of Illinois, with most of the State officers. I … took them to Sherman’s headquarters and presented them. [Fifteen of Sherman’s fifty regiments were from Illinois.] Before starting out to look at the lines—possibly while Sherman’s horse was being saddled—there were many questions asked about the late campaign … There was a little knot around Sherman and another around me, and I heard Sherman repeating, in the most animated manner, what he had said to me when we first looked down … upon the land below on the 18th of May, adding: “Grant is entitled to every bit of the credit for the campaign; I opposed it …”

  But for this speech it is not likely that Sherman’s opposition would ever have been heard of. His untiring energy and great efficiency during the campaign entitle him to a full share of all the credit due for its success. He could not have done more if the plan were his own.

  The siege began. From out in the river, the 100 cannon aboard Admiral Porter’s gunboats began firing shells into the fortified city at all hours, and Grant’s 220 cannon and mortars opened up on the inland side. The Confederate defenders responded with artillery fire from more than 170 guns, and sharpshooters from both armies began firing at anything that moved. As the siege continued, Grant received reinforcements from Memphis; eventually he had between seventy and eighty thousand men, and used half of them to guard his rear against Joseph E. Johnston, who at times had thirty thousand men under his command in the area east of the city but had almost no artillery with him and little in the way of a supply line. (On May 29, Johnston tried to get a letter through the lines to Pemberton. In it he said, “I am too weak to save Vicksburg,” and held out only the hope that he might be able to “save you and your garrison” if Pemberton could “cooperate” in an effort to break out of the city and link up with him. The impossibility of that was shown by the fact that the Union lines were so closely drawn around the city that the letter could not be sneaked through to Pemberton until sixteen days later.)

  As the daily bombardments and sniping continued, attackers and defenders had an enormous variety of experiences. Within the besieged area, Henry Ginder, a civilian construction engineer who was continuing to improve the already-formidable Confederate fortifications, wrote an account of the dangers he faced and of a shell that was a dud and did not explode.

  Not a day passed but in riding back and forth from my labors the shells burst around my path and minié balls whiz past my ears. Last night I was on foot returning from the scene of my labors, and I heard a 13-inch shell coming but couldn’t see it; it came nearer and nearer until I thought it would light on my head, when splosh! it went into the earth a few feet to my left, throwing the dirt into my face with such force as to sting me for some time afterwards. The Lord kept it from exploding … Otherwise it would have singed the hair off my head and blown me to pieces into the bargain.

  Many of the civilians inside Vicksburg began spending much of their time in caves, to avoid being hurt in the bombardment. What could happen to a house was recorded in her diary by Dora Richards, the young wife of a lawyer: “I was just within the door when the crash came that threw me to the floor … Shaken and deafened I picked myself up … The candles were useless in the dense smoke, and it was many minutes before we could see. Then we found the entire side of the room torn out.” The defenders started to cope with shortages: running out of newsprint, the defiant Vicksburg Citizen and the Vicksburg Whig, both assuring their readers that Joseph E. Johnston was on his way to break the siege and save the city, put out their editions in a small format printed on one side of cut-up wallpaper.

  Among the besiegers, various unlooked-for things occurred. “Old Abe,” the American bald eagle that accompanied the Eighth Wisconsin as its mascot, was wounded by the defenders’ fire but survived. Captain J. J. Kellogg of the 113th Illinois, a company commander in the brigade led by Ellen Sherman’s brother Hugh Ewing, a few days earlier had seen Grant and Sherman looking at him through their field glasses as he led a charge up to the parapet on which a Union battle flag was finally planted. Now, redeployed with his company to a seemingly far safer position beside a bayou on an approach to Vicksburg, he started to put up a sleeping tent and encountered a surprise.

  When I was driving stakes for my new home, a great green-headed alligator poked his nozzle above the surface of the bayou waters and smiled at me.

  Upon examination of the ground along the bayou shore, I discovered alligator tracks where they had waltzed around under the beautiful light of the moon on a very recent occasion, so I built my bunk high enough to enable me to roost out of reach of these hideous creatures.

  Though I had built high enough to escape the prowling alligators I had not built high enough to get above the deadly malaria distilled by that cantankerous bayou.

  On one of the early days of the siege, a private of the Fourth Minnesota saw an older Union soldier in a rumpled uniform standing at the top of an observation tower near the front, looking toward the entrenchments on the enemy-held slopes, and shouted, “Say! You old bastard, you better keep down from there or you will get shot!”

  The man paid no attention, but when the Minnesotan started to shout again, his captain grabbed him and said, “That’s General Grant!”

  While he was stationed on the northern end of besieged Vicksburg, Sherman kept up with developments in Washington. He learned that the federal government, needing ever-greater numbers of soldiers to add to the dwindling number of volunteers for the Union Army, intended to introduce conscription and draft three hundred thousand men into the service. Sherman saw that as necessity, but the plan for how these new troops were to be used shocked him. One hundred thousand would be trained and sent forward to fill up the ranks of the existing regiments, many of which by now had an excellent level of combat experience shared by veteran officers and men, but the remaining two hundred thousand were to be formed into entirely new regiments. This was to be 1861 all over again: new colonels would be commissioned from civilian life by political appointment, and recruits with a few weeks’ training would march to unnecessary deaths in a military version of the blind leading the blind. Any of the experienced, proud old regiments whose casualties had caused their numbers to fall below three hundred were arbitrarily to be consolidated with other old regiments, instead of receiving recruits who could fill their ranks and immediately profit from the experience to be gained by serving with combat veterans.

>   As a man with a penchant for order who frequently found the workings of a democracy incompatible with the realities of raising an efficient army and fighting successful campaigns, Sherman was appalled by the prospect of having more “political colonels” and sending into battle more than a hundred untried regiments. On June 2, he wrote Grant a letter on the subject.

  Dear General:

  I would most respectfully suggest that you use your personal influence with President Lincoln to accomplish a result on which it may be, the Ultimate Peace and Security of our Country depends.

  … All who deal with troops in fact instead of theory, know that the knowledge of the little details of Camp Life is absolutely necessary to keep men alive. New Regiments for want of this knowledge have measles, mumps, Diarrhea and the whole Catalogue of Infantile diseases, whereas the same number of men distributed among the older Regiments would learn from the Sergeants, and Corporals and Privates the art of taking care of themselves … Also recruits distributed among older Companies catch up, from close and intimate contact, a knowledge of drill, the care and use of arms, and all the instructions which otherwise it would take months to impart.

  … I am assured by many that the President does actually wish to support & sustain the Army, and that he desires to know the wishes and opinions of the officers who serve in the woods instead of the “Salon.” If so you would be listened to … I have several Regiments who have lost … more than half their original men … Fill up our present ranks, and there is not an Officer or man of this Army, but would feel renewed hope and courage to meet the struggles before us.

  I regard this matter as more important, than any other that could possibly arrest the attention of President Lincoln and it is for this reason, that I ask you to urge it upon him at the auspicious time.

  Grant forwarded Sherman’s letter to Lincoln, along with his own letter endorsing Sherman’s facts and reasoning, and told the president, “I would add that our old regiments, all that remains of them, are veterans equaling regulars in discipline … A recruit added to them would become an old soldier, from the very contact, before he was aware of it.” He went on to point out that the existing regiments already had their encampments, garrison equipment, and supply trains, and that in addition to considerations of military efficiency and morale, it would cost the government far less to put new recruits into existing regiments than to buy and construct everything necessary to organize new ones. What he and Sherman got for their trouble was a letter to Grant from Halleck, saying that, as planned, two hundred thousand men would go into new regiments. Lincoln was still making military appointments as political favors.

  As the siege went on, new developments in other matters continued to occur. On June 7, an unusual battle took place at Milliken’s Bend. Four understrength and outnumbered regiments of virtually untrained black Union Army soldiers, newly freed slaves from Louisiana and Mississippi who had volunteered only since the siege began, using obsolete Belgian muskets and supported by one of Admiral Porter’s gunboats, drove off a Confederate brigade that was trying to raid a Union supply line. There were reports that the Confederates murdered some of the black soldiers they captured, and two of the white Union officers who led the men were apparently also executed.

  This battle, though brief and small in size, changed the minds of many Union Army commanders concerning blacks’ willingness and ability to fight. Charles Dana, still with Grant’s army, had this to say:

  A force of some two thousand Confederates engaged about a thousand negro troops defending Milliken’s Bend. This engagement at Milliken’s Bend became famous from the conduct of the colored troops. General E. S. Dennis, who saw the battle, told me that it was the hardest fought engagement he had ever seen. It was fought mainly hand to hand. After it was over many men were found dead with bayonet stabs, and others with their skulls broken open by the butts of muskets. “It is impossible,” said General Dennis, “for men to show greater gallantry than the negro troops in that fight.”

  The bravery of the blacks at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.

  Grant was among those persuaded. In a letter to Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, he made this comment on a reorganization of the black regiments that were coming into existence: “I am anxious to get as many of these negro regiments as possible and to have them full and completely equipped.” In a letter to Halleck he said, “The negro troops are easier to preserve discipline among than our White troops and I doubt not will prove equally good for garrison duty. All that have been tried have fought bravely.”

  Sherman had a different attitude. Months after Milliken’s Bend, he was still expressing his mistrust of the abilities of black troops. In a letter to Ellen he told her, “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed, but we are in revolution and I must not pretend to judge. With my opinions of negroes and my experience, yes, prejudice, I cannot trust them yet.”

  At this point in the siege, Grant’s nemesis, alcohol, reentered the picture. The evidence on the point is an in-headquarters letter to Grant from his chief of staff Rawlins. Saying that his motivation was “the great solicitude I feel for the safety of this army,” Rawlins made reference to a report that Grant had been drinking with a military surgeon at Sherman’s headquarters “a few days ago,” but concentrated on this: “Tonight when you should, because of the condition of your health if nothing else, have been in bed, I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company with those who drink and urge you to do likewise, and the lack of your usual promptness and clearness in expressing yourself in writing tended to confirm my suspicions.”

  Years later, Charles Dana said that he had been present when Rawlins “delivered that admirable communication. It was a dull period in the campaign. The siege of Vicksburg was progressing with regularity. No surprise from within the city or from without was to be apprehended; and when Grant started out in drinking, the fact could not imperil the situation of the army or any member of it except himself.” At the time, Dana clearly maintained the policy he had adopted: this incident was just what he was supposed to report to Washington in the special telegraphic code devised for him to use, but he believed in Grant and intended to tell Lincoln and Stanton about Grant’s drinking only after the critical situation at Vicksburg came to its end.

  As if Grant did not have problems enough, his ambitious, fractious subordinate McClernand now sought to further his own reputation with the public in a way that broke army regulations and was guaranteed to anger Grant and Sherman, both of whom had suffered at the hands of the press. McClernand was already on the thinnest of ice: through Dana, Secretary of War Stanton had recently passed the word to Grant that he was free to relieve McClernand at any time and send him north for reassignment. Unbeknownst to Grant, on May 30 McClernand had written what he called his “General Orders 72.” Ostensibly a document congratulating his troops for their bravery, it was in fact an astonishing piece of self promotion, which, in addition to being circulated among his units, McClernand had sent to St. Louis to be published in the Missouri Democrat. He presented himself as the hero of the failed attacks on May 22 that he had in fact made worse by urging an additional attack—the one that Grant said “only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit whatever.” The text of McClernand’s order implied that Sherman, on his right, and McPherson, on his left, had failed to support him, and that Grant, by not sending him reinforcements, had lost the opportunity to take Vicksburg that day.

  The piece appeared in St. Louis on June 10, and a copy arrived at Grant’s headquarters three days later, where its effect was symbolically like that of an incoming Confederate salvo. Not only did it misrepresent the costly support McClernand had received—Grant said that it “did gr
eat injustice to the other troops engaged in the campaign”—but its publication violated the rules of both the War Department and Grant’s military department, which required that no document of this sort could appear in the press without the permission of the departmental commander, i.e., Grant.

  Even now, Grant postponed action on the matter; a letter he sent to McClernand two days later speaks only of troop movements. On June 17, Sherman saw a copy of the Memphis Evening Bulletin reprinting McClernand’s orders and sent a blazing letter to Rawlins. Sherman said that on May 22 McClernand had lied about the extent of his advance in order to convince Grant to support a further effort, and when that effort was made, swiftly and fully, “we lost, needlessly, many of our best officers and men.” One account had it that Sherman also appeared at Grant’s headquarters, holding the Memphis newspaper and so angry that he could not speak for several minutes. On that day, Grant wrote a peremptory note to McClernand demanding that he either confirm or deny that Orders 72 was his work. The following day, McClernand telegraphed that he had written it, and stood by it, but thought it had been sent to Grant before being published. Within hours, Grant relieved McClernand of command; in a telegram to Halleck telling him of his action, Grant said, “I should have relieved him long ago for general unfitness for his position.” The next day, Dana wired Stanton that Grant’s most pressing reason for removing McClernand was that, if Grant were incapacitated, McClernand would outrank both Sherman and McPherson, which would have “most pernicious consequences to the cause.”