Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  As 1863 came to an end, with the forces under Grant and Sherman temporarily at rest, Grant was having to face the fact that his increasing military fame now had political dimensions. Barnabas Burns, the chairman of the wing of the Democratic Party in Ohio that favored strongly prosecuting the war effort, wrote Grant asking if he would “permit your name to be used” as a candidate for president of the United States at the Democratic National Convention in the coming May of 1864. Grant replied:

  The question astonishes me. I do not know of anything I have ever done or said that would indicate that I could be a candidate for any office …

  Nothing likely to happen would pain me so much as to see my name used in connection with a political office. I am not a candidate for any office nor for favors from any party …

  I … above all things wish to be spared the pain of seeing my name mixed with politics … Wherever, and by whatever party, you hear my name mentioned in connection with the candidacy for any office, say that you know from me direct that I am “not in the field,” and cannot allow my name to be used before any convention.

  Sherman, arriving home in Ohio on December 25 to join his family for a heartbreaking Christmas without their beloved Willy, soon realized the full extent of Grant’s popularity with the Northern public. In Washington, the Senate and House passed a joint resolution praising Grant and his forces for their victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, and instructed that a gold medal be made honoring Grant, to be given him “in the name of the people of the United States.” The New York Herald, which supported the Democratic Party, said that Grant (who had at this time no meaningful party affiliation) should run against Lincoln in the coming year’s presidential election and expressed the belief that he would win. (Lincoln would in fact sound out Grant’s congressman Elihu Washburne concerning what political ambitions Grant might have. Washburne turned to J. Russell Jones, a friend of Grant’s from Galena days who had recently received a letter from Grant saying, “Nothing could induce me to become a presidential candidate, particularly so long as there is a possibility of having Mr. Lincoln re-elected.” When Jones went to Washington at Lincoln’s request and handed him that letter, a relieved Lincoln placed his influence behind a movement for further promotion for Grant.)

  Thinking about the fame that now surrounded his friend—the man the press had so often defamed earlier in the war—on December 29, Sherman wrote a letter to Grant.

  You occupy a position of more power than Halleck or the President. There are similar instances in European history, but none in ours … Your reputation as a general is now far above that of any man living, and partisans will maneuver for your influence; but if you can escape them, as you have hitherto done, you will be more powerful for good than it is possible to measure … Preserve a plain military character, and let others maneuver as they will. You will beat them not only in fame, but in doing good in the closing scenes of this war, when somebody must heal and mend the breaches made by war.

  Although at earlier moments in the conflict both Grant and Sherman had thought the South might soon collapse, Sherman, despite his reference to “the closing scenes of this war,” was not thinking in terms of imminent victory. Before coming home for this bleak family Christmas of 1863, he had written to Ellen that “the next year is going to be the hardest of the war.” At the moment, he did not foresee that his policies and actions were in some ways to be the harshest thing in that hardest year, but he was ready to do whatever he thought must be done.

  More than ever, Sherman believed in what he said in a retort he finally made to a Southern lady at a dinner party in Nashville who “pecked and pounded away” at him about his troops stealing food as they marched through the countryside: “Madam, my soldiers have to subsist themselves … War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” If ever Sherman had hoped to see political arrangements that might shorten the war, he hoped for them no longer. Writing to Ellen’s brother Philemon, he said that he understood his brother-in-law’s pleasure in the results of the Ohio gubernatorial election, a popular endorsement of Lincoln’s war policy, but added, “The only vote that now tells is the cannon & the musket.”

  For Grant, December of 1863 had its lighter moments. Brigadier General Isaac F. Quinby, a West Point classmate on recruiting duty in Rochester, New York, wrote Grant that his wife wanted a lock of Grant’s hair, which would be auctioned off to the highest bidder at a bazaar being held to raise funds for a wartime charity appeal. This was Grant’s reply to his friend’s wife.

  MY DEAR MADAM,

  The letter of my old friend and classmate, your husband, requesting a lock of my hair, if the article is not growing scarse [sic], from age, I presume he means, to be put in an ornament, (by the most delicate of hands no doubt) and sold at the Bazaar for the benefit of disabled soldiers and their families, is just received. I am glad to say that the stock is yet as abundant as ever though time, or other cause, is beginning to intersperse here and there a reminder that Winters have passed.

  The object for which this little request is made is so praiseworthy that I can not refuse it even though I do, by granting it[,] expose to the ladies of Rochester that I am no longer a boy. Hoping that the citizens of your city may spend a happy week commensing [sic] to-morrow, and that their Fair may remunerate most abundantly, I remain,

  Very truly your friend,

  U. S. Grant

  Maj. Gen. U.S.A.

  In the last two days of 1863, it was back to duty. On December 30, Sherman wrote a letter to his brother John in which he said of Grant, “With him I am as a second self. We are personal and official friends.” He added that he was leaving Ohio to return to Memphis to take up his duties as commander of the Army of the Tennessee, the post to which he had succeeded when Grant was given overall command of that army and two others before the Battle of Chattanooga. Grant wrote Halleck on December 31 that he had just arrived at Knoxville and “will go to the front [this] evening or in the morning … Longstreet is at Morristown [Tennessee].”

  The year 1864, which Sherman had told Ellen would be “the hardest of the war,” began badly for the Grants. In the third week of January, their son Fred suddenly fell ill in St. Louis with what Julia said was “camp dysentery and typhoid fever,” the combination of diseases that carried off Willy Sherman. Julia rushed to St. Louis from Nashville, where she had been with Grant, and found that Fred was already beginning to recover.

  Leaving his military duties, Grant hurried to see Fred soon after Julia arrived, and the relieved Grants were briefly reunited in St. Louis, near her family’s farm where they had met. (From St. Louis, Grant wrote Sherman that “I come here to see my oldest boy who has been dangerously ill of Typhoid Pneumonia. He is now regarded by his physician as Out of danger.”) The crisis involving Fred had passed, but Julia received news concerning a less serious medical matter. She was now thirty-seven. All her life she had been conscious of her strabismus, the condition that made one of her eyes go out of focus and squint. When she was younger, an eye specialist in St. Louis had told her several times that he could perform a simple operation that would correct the condition. Julia said of that, “I had never had the courage to consent, but now that my husband had become so famous I thought it behooved me to look as well as possible.” Now, with Fred recovering, she had time to consult with the specialist, and he told her that it was, as she wrote of it, “too late, too late.” Unhappy, she shared this with Grant.

  I told the General and expressed my regret.

  He replied: “What in the world put such a thought in your head, Julia?” I said: “Why, you are getting to be such a great man and I am such a plain little wife. I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain, Ulys; who knows?” He drew me to him and said: “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant,
you had not better make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”

  Returning quickly to his headquarters at Nashville, Grant plunged back into the problems awaiting him. He referred to the immediate military situation in a typically direct letter to General Thomas: “Longstreet has also been reenforced by troops from the East. This makes it evident the enemy intend to secure East Tennessee if they can, and I intend to drive them out or get whipped this month.”

  While making plans that resulted in his forces successfully keeping Longstreet away from his objectives, Grant also gave his attention to the many and varied other matters that inevitably came to his desk. He wrote Halleck of the results of an investigation he had ordered as a result of his suspicions “that there was much useless extravigance [sic] in the Quartermaster’s Dept.” His conclusion: “The result has been already to find that Govt. is being constantly defrauded by those whos [sic] duty it is to protect and guard the public interest. The guilty parties will be relieved and brought to trial.” In addition, his headquarters in Nashville was being besieged by the wives of Confederate soldiers who wanted to go farther south to see their husbands. Deciding that these requests should no longer be dealt with on an individual basis, Grant informed General Thomas of his solution to the problem. “As it is rather desirable that all such should be where their affections are set, I propose giving notice through the papers setting a day when all who wish will be permitted to go[,] and fix the point where they will be allowed to pass through our lines. Let me know where and when they should be allowed to go.”

  Grant had not forgotten the most southerly area of his widespread command and wanted to continue putting pressure on the overall Confederate military effort. Four days after Longstreet broke off his unsuccessful attacks on Knoxville, Grant had written Halleck that he would like to try a previously considered movement to capture the port of Mobile, Alabama. As Grant saw it, whether Mobile fell or not, this would open the prospect of a campaign that would move his forces east from the Mississippi River into Alabama, with a further thrust that might take a Union offensive on into Georgia. This would not only “secure the entire states of Alabama & Mississippi,” but also, as Grant saw it, force Robert E. Lee to give up his positions in Virginia, in order to save the Deep South.

  This was imaginative strategic thinking, but it received little support in Washington, where there was doubt that anything could pull Lee out of Virginia. Both Halleck and Lincoln felt that a higher priority should be given to following up against Longstreet in east Tennessee—an idea with which Grant did not disagree, but he felt it could not be implemented during winter weather in the mountains north of Knoxville.

  Still wanting to keep the ball moving somewhere, Grant approved Sherman’s idea of making a massive raid on the Confederate railroad center at Meridian, Mississippi, a hundred miles east of Vicksburg. Here, again, Grant was demonstrating his complete confidence in Sherman, and Sherman responded with a successful performance that could have gone badly wrong. He left Vicksburg on February 3 with twenty thousand men, moving under orders that showed that he had learned from Grant’s move against the city of Jackson ten months before. Prefiguring larger moves that he would make, Sherman’s orders stressed the need to move swiftly and to carry only essential equipment. Within days, just the news of Sherman’s advance, which was blasting aside every enemy in its way, convinced Confederate general Leonidas Polk to give up Meridian without defending it. Reaching Meridian, Sherman’s men spent nearly a week destroying everything in the area: 115 miles of railroad track, sixty-one bridges, and twenty-one locomotives, in addition to arsenals, warehouses, and workshops. They returned to Vicksburg, herding along five thousand slaves they had freed, along with another, newer category of refugee—a thousand white Southerners who wanted to place themselves under Union control. The destruction of the Confederate warmaking capacity was the greatly successful side of the military ledger, but on his way to Jackson, Sherman was nearly captured. Another part of the effort, in which seven thousand horsemen under Grant’s cavalry chief General William Sooy Smith were to defeat the four thousand cavalrymen led by the mercurial Nathan Bedford Forrest, failed when Smith did not coordinate successfully with Sherman, and Forrest’s lesser numbers outmaneuvered and occasionally routed the federal troopers. (On the day he got back to Vicksburg, Sherman wrote Ellen, “Somehow our cavalry is not good. The Secech with poor mean horses make 40 & 50 miles a day, whereas our fat & costly horses won[’]t average 10. In every march I have ever made our Infantry beats the Cavalry & I am ashamed of them.”)

  Grant and Sherman were to be remembered for their dramatic campaigns, but both men valued the clandestine side of warfare represented by military intelligence. As he was leaving Vicksburg aboard the naval gunboat Silver Cloud to return to his headquarters in Memphis, Sherman wrote Grant concerning Confederate troop strength remaining in Mississippi; as for the information he did not yet have, Sherman said, “I have one of my best Memphis female spies out, who will be back in time to let me know all we want.” The Meridian campaign had given Sherman added confidence: a few days after he sent Grant his letter about the female spy, he telegraphed Grant from Memphis, regarding another thrust he intended to make: “Enemy is scattered all over Mississippi and I think the movement indicated will clean them out.”

  During the time that Sherman was conducting what became known as the Meridian Campaign, Grant wrote a brief letter to Julia. In it he said, “It now looks as if the Lieut. Generalcy bill was [sic] going to become a law. If it does and is given to me, it will help my finances so much that I will be able to be much more generous in my expenditures.”

  This was Ulysses S. Grant’s way of telling his wife that Congress was going to name him as the first lieutenant general since George Washington received that rank. The promotion would automatically make him general in chief, placing him above Halleck, who under General Orders 98 ceased to hold that position and was “assigned to duty in Washington as Chief of Staff of the Army, under the direction of the Secretary of War [Stanton] and the lieutenant general commanding [Grant].” Ulysses S. Grant would command all the Union armies. He could therefore stay in the West or go east, but he decided to leave his vast Western theater of war, which he intended to turn over to Sherman, and base himself in or near Washington, ready to face Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

  There were things that Grant already knew he wanted to do. The man who had grown up with horses was to say that, until now, the campaigns of the armies of the Union had reminded him of draft horses that were pulling the same wagon, but doing it in an awkward and inefficient way. To this point in the war, despite individual Union victories such as Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Gettysburg, the Union Army was divided into nineteen geographical military departments, with the Army of the Potomac an entity unto itself. Generals in all those sectors had been acting, when they did, on their own initiative, often without consultation or coordination with their peers in adjoining departments. This had resulted in sporadic, uncoordinated attacks and campaigns: the South, often given time to recover after a limited Union offensive ground to a halt in one area, was able to move its troops considerable distances and consolidate its forces to counter a new Union threat.

  Grant intended to impose a cohesive Union strategy. He was going to be one of the two major figures in implementing that—the other was Sherman. As usual, any officer talking to Grant about a military matter was left in no doubt as to what he wanted and was left with great latitude in accomplishing the objective. Soon, Grant and Sherman would be conferring face-to-face, and Sherman would always remember the overriding concept: “He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston.”

  There was no date on the letter in which Grant told Julia the news of his promotion—Sherman would be informed of it as soon as the promotion became official, and a warm exchange of letters between the two men would ensue—but Grant’s letter to Julia was written about February 10, 1864. On th
at date three years before, Ulysses S. Grant was sitting in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, bored and doing poorly at the job his father had created for him—a retired army captain who had resigned from the service rather than face a court-martial on charges of drinking while on duty. Now he commanded a continually growing army of seven hundred thousand men—seven hundred times the size of the Twenty-first Illinois, the regiment he began to lead thirty-one months before—in the struggle that would decide whether the United States would be two nations or one.

  10

  GRANT AND SHERMAN BEGIN TO DEVELOP THE WINNING STRATEGY

  On March 2, 1864, Grant learned of Sherman’s success in the Meridian Campaign—the march through Mississippi that demonstrated Sherman’s ability to operate independently deep in enemy territory, far from Grant’s headquarters in Nashville, destroying more of the Confederate capacity to make war. Despite the failure of Sooy Smith and his cavalry to carry out their role in the campaign, Sherman’s execution of the large-scale raid, going to and from Meridian, fully justified Grant’s belief in him and foreshadowed the far greater movements that Sherman would soon be making. Grant said of that moment in March, “I was ordered to Washington on the 3rd to receive my commission.”

  Grant’s promotion to lieutenant general and commander of all the Union armies was now official. On the same day, he wrote Sherman before he was to leave Nashville for Washington the following morning. In his letter, which he marked “Private” and began with, “Dear Sherman,” he included the name of the gifted and enterprising thirty-five-year-old Major General James B. McPherson, of whom they were both fond, and said: