I want to express my thanks to you and McPherson as the men to whom, above all others, I feel indebted for whatever I have had of success. How far your advice and suggestions have been of assistance you know. How far your execution of whatever has been given you to do entitles you to the reward I am receiving you cannot know as well as me …
Your friend
U.S. Grant
Maj. Gen.
This produced an effusive response from Sherman, writing from Memphis. Marked “(Private and Confidential),” it said in part:
You are now Washington’s legitimate successor, and occupy a position of almost dangerous elevation, but if you can continue as heretofore to be yourself, simple, honest, and unpretending, you will enjoy through life the respect and love of friends, and the homage of millions of human beings that will award to you a large share in securing to them and their descendants a Government of Law and Stability … You do General McPherson and myself too much honor … The chief characteristic in your nature is the simple faith in success, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in a Savior.
Looking back on their campaigns together, Sherman now expressed his feeling for Grant: “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come if alive.” He continued, with equal candor, “My only points of doubt were in your knowledge of Grand Strategy and of Books of Science and History. But I confess your common sense seems to have supplied all these.”
Closing this warm statement of appreciation and praise, he said, “We have done much, but still much remains to be done.” Then Sherman, a man of the West speaking to another man of the West, urged Grant to leave Halleck in Washington, where Halleck knew how “to stand the buffets of Intrigue and Policy.” Sherman wanted Grant to run the whole war from the Western theater, and in expressing this he showed his willingness to give up his chance to be the man clearly in command in the West. “Come out West, take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley. Let us make it dead sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and Pacific shores will follow its destiny as surely as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk … From the West when our task is done, we will make short work of Charleston, and Richmond, and the … coast of the Atlantic.”
That was not to be. Grant, accompanied by his son Fred, now thirteen, arrived in Washington on March 8. A welcoming committee met the wrong train, so Grant, dressed in a nondescript linen duster that concealed the general’s stars on his uniform, made his own way to the Willard Hotel with Fred and asked the desk clerk for a room. Unimpressed by the appearance of this rumpled traveler, the clerk handed him a key to a small room on the top floor and asked him to register. When he saw the signature, “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois,” he took back the key, and Grant and Fred were escorted to the best suite in the hotel. After dinner at the hotel, during which everyone in the dining room rose and gave “three cheers for Lieutenant General Grant,” he found a note from the White House: President Lincoln was holding his weekly evening reception and would like General Grant to join him. Grant put Fred to bed and was soon shaking hands with the six-foot-four Lincoln, who looked down at his five-eight choice to lead the armies of the Union and said, “Why, here is General Grant! Well, this is a great pleasure, I assure you.” Lincoln then introduced Grant to Secretary of State William H. Seward. It was Seward who presented Grant to Lincoln’s wife, the mentally erratic and unpredictable Mary Todd Lincoln. On this occasion Mrs. Lincoln was calm and friendly, and began making social conversation with Grant.
The hundreds of guests at first tried to restrain themselves from walking over to get a close look at the man in whom the Union now reposed its hopes, but soon Grant found himself surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers; one guest said that Grant “blushed like a schoolgirl” as he tried to shake the scores of outstretched hands. When the room began to rock with cheers of “Grant! Grant! Grant!” he was persuaded to stand on a sofa so more people could see him, which produced louder cheers. A journalist who was present wrote: “It was the only real mob I ever saw in the White House … For once the President of the United States was not the chief figure … The little, scared-looking figure who stood on the crimson-covered sofa was the idol of the hour.”
The next morning, Grant was back in the White House, where Lincoln presented him with his commission as lieutenant general. After the short ceremony, the two men went upstairs to talk. They had a rapid and complete meeting of minds. As Grant remembered it, Lincoln told him that, in military matters, “all he wanted or ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all of the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance.” Grant’s response: “Assuring him that I would do the best I could with the means at hand, and avoid annoying him or the War Department, our first interview ended.”
A British war correspondent who saw Grant during his initial visit to Washington underscored the same qualities that Lincoln liked so much in this general. “I never met a man with so much simplicity, shyness, and decision … He is a soldier to the core, a genuine commoner, commander of a democratic army from a democratic people. From what I learn of him, he is no more afraid to take responsibility of a million men than of a single company.”
After further conferences with Lincoln and Stanton, and an inspection trip to see General George Meade at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac sixty miles southwest of Washington, Grant got on a train to return for a short time to Nashville and close up his headquarters there. He knew what he wanted to do, and now he had the authority to do it. In line with a suggestion from Sherman that he stay out of Washington with all its intrigues and bureaucracy, Grant would leave Halleck to run the detailed administration of the army from the War Department in Washington, while he set up his headquarters as general in chief near those of Meade on the fighting front in Virginia. From that headquarters in the field, he would plan and oversee the overall campaigns of the Union military effort in the Eastern and Western theaters of war. In addition, he would become the de facto commander of the Army of the Potomac, fighting Robert E. Lee and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the broad battlefront area between Washington and Richmond, but he would issue those orders through Meade. (Grant’s worries about Meade’s potential resentment of being superseded vanished at their first meeting. Meade, the greatly famous victor of Gettysburg, immediately told Grant that he would understand if Grant wished to replace him with Sherman or any of the other generals who had served him well in the West. The important thing was to get on with the job, and he pledged, as Grant admiringly remembered it, to “serve to the best of his ability wherever placed.” Grant “assured him that I had no thought of substituting anyone for him.”)
Grant also had a number of ideas about promotions, demotions, and transfers. Although the Navy Department controlled the assignments of Admiral Porter, with whom Grant and Sherman had worked so well during the Vicksburg campaign, Porter would eventually move from the Mississippi theater to take command of what was known as the Northern Blockade Squadron, on the Atlantic coast. Addressing another aspect of the Union’s military posture and practices, Grant decided to end the virtual autonomy of the army departments such as those controlling supplies and commissary matters, and the legal department run by the adjutant general. Nearly half the soldiers in the Union Army were serving in various assignments well behind the fighting fronts, and Grant determined to reduce those positions “to the lowest number of men necessary for the duty to be performed.”
On March 17, thirteen days after receiving the official notification of his promotion, Grant arrived back in Nashville. At Grant’s request, Sherman had come from Memphis to meet him, bringing four other generals, including Grenville Dodge, who had done such remarkable work in building and repairing railway lines and bridges when construction rather than destruction was needed, and in running the Union spy network in the Western theater—the largest one opera
ted by either side during the war. For two days these men conferred, as Grant handed over to Sherman the daily conduct of the war in the West and the Deep South. Adam Badeau, a journalist who had joined Grant’s staff as military secretary, now for the first time saw Grant and Sherman in the same room.
Sherman was tall, angular, and spare, as if his superabundant energy had consumed his flesh. His words were distinct, his ideas clear and rapid, coming, indeed, almost too fast for utterance, in brilliant, dramatic form …
Grant was calmer in manner a hundred-fold. The habitual expression on his face was so quiet as to be almost incomprehensible … In utterance he was slow and sometimes embarrassed, but his words were well-chosen, never leaving the remotest doubt of what he intended to convey … Not a sign about him suggested rank or reputation or power … [but] in battle, the sphinx awoke.
In a hurry to return to Washington, Grant had Sherman and General Dodge accompany him on the train to Cincinnati, with Sherman and Grant smoking cigars as they discussed the campaigns to come. In Cincinnati, Sherman had a brief, bittersweet reunion with Ellen. Her mother, who had raised Sherman from the time he came to live in the Ewings’ house at the age of nine, had died, which brought sorrow to him as well as her. Ellen was pregnant again; they had by letter discussed the idea of naming the baby Willy if it were a boy but decided that it would be too painful a reminder of their son who died the previous summer. Writing Ellen, Sherman had spoken of their feelings in these words: “On reflection I agree with you that his name must remain sacred to us forever [.] He must remain to our memories as though living, and his name must not be taken by any one. Though dead he is still our Willy and we can love him as God only knows we loved him.”
Grant rented a room in a Cincinnati hotel, and for two days he and Sherman pored over maps, as Dodge kept track of all the paperwork involved in their deliberations. The grand strategy was, as Sherman would famously say, “He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston.” In the Confederate military hierarchy, Lee and Johnston were at this time de facto equals under the civilian direction of Jefferson Davis, with Lee leading his Army of Northern Virginia against the Army of the Potomac on the South’s northern front, while Johnston was reorganizing the South’s Army of Tennessee at Atlanta and intending to begin offensive operations. If both men and their armies could be defeated in their separate theaters of war, the South’s ability to fight on would be virtually at an end.
While Grant gave Sherman much latitude in how he was to “go for Joe Johnston,” he stressed certain points. Lee and Johnston had the advantage of operating at relatively short distances from their bases in the interior of the South, while Grant would be attacking from the north and Sherman would have to start his movements from a point 530 miles southwest of Grant and the Army of the Potomac. The danger was that Lee, who had shown immense skill in moving his forces from one critical point to another by railroad, might be able to send reinforcements to Johnston when Johnston needed them, and that Johnston could similarly send large and swift support to Lee. To forestall that, Grant’s and Sherman’s armies had to act in close cooperation, keeping constant pressure on their respective fronts so that there were no quiet moments when either Lee or Johnston could spare troops to send to the other.
Even after their lengthy session in Cincinnati, when Grant got to Washington he reinforced his priorities in a letter to Sherman in which he said, “You I propose to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” Sherman responded by saying, “Like yourself you take the biggest load and from me you shall have thorough and hearty cooperation.” To reassure Grant that he really understood what was wanted of him, he added, “I will not let side issues draw me off from your main plan in which I am to Knock Joe Johnston, and do as much damage to the resources of the Enemy as possible.” (Sherman was to characterize all this as being a policy of “Enlightened War.”)
Using this strategy, Grant hoped to close out the war in 1864. To strengthen this military policy and objective, he intended to issue orders that would bring back to the main Eastern and Western Union armies the smaller forces then operating in such places as Florida and Arkansas. If he and Sherman could accomplish what he hoped—smash and wear down the main Confederate armies in a two-pronged, coordinated effort—the enemy’s out-of-the-way outposts would wither on the vine.
As Sherman prepared to go on the offensive, Grant returned to Washington, took up his headquarters near Meade’s Army of the Potomac, and reiterated the pertinent part of this philosophy to General Meade. On April 9, he told Meade, “Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” Although the capture of Richmond, the Confederate capital, remained an inevitable goal, the emphasis was going to be less on control of territory and more on destroying the Confederate armies and the South’s means of waging war. (In this latter area, that of drying up the South’s source of men and of supplies ranging from weapons to food, both Grant and Sherman had increasingly come to realize that the South was indeed a nation in arms and that the common European practice of having standing armies engage each other in set-piece battles to determine the outcome of a war was not enough to win this struggle. When Grant had told Sherman right after Vicksburg to set out after Joseph E. Johnston “and inflict on the enemy all the punishment you can,” he had already demonstrated at Jackson that he regarded all kinds of supplies as legitimate military targets, and Sherman’s burning of Randolph, Tennessee, and his Meridian Campaign had shown that he too was ready to lay waste anything and anyplace that could sustain the enemy’s ability and will to resist. Both men were ready to engage in what became known as total war.)
Bold as Grant was, he did not at that moment realize that Sherman was thinking even more boldly than he, in terms of getting “into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can.” By the end of April, Sherman had assembled ninety-eight thousand men in Chattanooga, ready to march southeast in an attempt to take Atlanta, a hundred miles away. This was not going to be a massive raid like the Meridian Campaign, in which he left Memphis, marched a hundred miles, struck, and then returned to Memphis. This was going to be straight-ahead fighting, with no intention of turning back.
Ulysses S. Grant. One of the finest horsemen ever to graduate from West Point, Grant was the most aggressive and resolute general in the Union Army. (Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library)
Grant’s wife, Julia. Highly intelligent and charming, always believing in her husband’s destiny despite his prewar failures, she and Grant lived one of the great American love stories. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
This receipt shows that on December 23, 1857, at a time when he was down and out, Grant pawned his gold watch for twenty-two dollars so that he could buy Christmas presents for his family. Eleven years later, he was elected President of the United States. (courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library)
During the war, numerous photographs were made of Grant by himself and with his higher-ranking officers, but this is the only one showing him against a background of his troops in the field. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
William Tecumseh Sherman. He said of his immensely successful military partnership with Grant during which they constantly supported each other’s effort. “We were as brothers, I the older man in years, he the higher in rank.” (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Sherman’s wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman. Their marriage was a difficult one, but it was impossible to imagine either of them being married to anyone else. (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. /Art Resource. N.Y.)
Sherman’s devoted younger brother John. Already a United States senator when the Civil War began, John Sherman served in the Senate for thirty-two years, and is best known as the author of the legislation known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. (University of Notre Dame Archives)
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nbsp; General Henry Halleck, sometimes wise and sometimes duplicitous. At various times he commanded both Grant and Sherman. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Admiral David Dixon Porter of the United States Navy, who worked effectively with Grant during amphibious operations such as those on the Mississippi that led to the great Union victory at Vicksburg. (National Archives at College Park)
One of the Navy’s “mud turtles.” flat-bottomed gunboats that furnished vital support for Grant and Sherman’s campaigns along the rivers of the South. (Collection of Hit New-York Historical Society)
Confederate general James Longstreet. Grant’s West Point classmate, he was a cousin of Grant’s wife, Julia, and best man at their wedding. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
General Joseph E. Johnston. Robert E. Lee’s West Point classmate and friend, Johnston was the Confederacy’s master of defensive and evasive maneuvers. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
During Grant’s attack on Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga., the weather deteriorated so rapidly that the upper part of the mountain disappeared from view. The ensuing fight became known as “The Battle Above the Clouds.” (U.S. Army Center of Military History, Army Art Collection, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.)
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 30
