Looting and burning more than they had in Georgia, Sherman’s columns moved through South Carolina along different routes. Near Barnwell, Mrs. Alfred Proctor Aldrich, mistress of a plantation named The Oaks and a woman who had a husband and two sons in the Confederate Army, braced herself for the arrival of Sherman’s men.
The first of the soldiers who rushed into the house seemed only intent upon procuring food, and … ate like hungry wolves.
So soon, however, as they were satisfied, their tramp through the house began. By this time they were pouring in at every door, and without asking to have bureaus and wardrobes opened, broke with their bayonets every lock, tearing out the contents, in hunting for gold, silver, and jewels, all of which had been sent off weeks before. Finding nothing to satisfy their cupidity so far, they began turning over mattresses, tearing open feather-beds, and scattering the contents in the wildest confusion.
After the troops found and drank some bottles of whiskey, “work of destruction began in earnest. Tables were knocked over, lamps with their contents thrown over carpets and mattings, furniture of all sorts broken, a guitar and violin smashed.” For ten days, as different units of Sherman’s army passed through, camping on her plantation at night, Mrs. Aldrich tried to save her house. Occasionally, Union officers and enlisted men came to her aid, the officers ordering off groups of marauding troops. One night an enlisted man from Ohio named McCloskey appointed himself as a sentry; leaning his rifle against the door, he said to Mrs. Aldrich and one of her young female relatives who had her terrified children with her, “Ladies, it makes my heart sick to see this. I never approved of fighting your people, and would not volunteer for the war, but lately I have been drafted into a new regiment. I have no family of my own, but my mother and sisters are as little in favor of this trip as I am. I can’t bear to see women and children ill used.”
Different efforts were made by individuals or small groups to start putting the house to the torch, but timely interventions by other Union soldiers combined with Mrs. Aldrich’s own steadfast courage to save her house. At times she simply faced down some of the intruders, and at one point she shamed Union General David Hunter, whose tent was pitched on her lawn, into ordering some men to extinguish a fire that had just been set in her corn house. Eventually the corn house was burnt to the ground, as were the plantation’s stables, and the books from the library were carried off. The house survived, but this was the scene that now surrounded it: “My beautiful avenue of oaks had been ruthlessly cut down or killed by camp fires near the gates. The park fence was burned up, the large entrance gate cut down, and the undergrowth scorched as black as midnight.”
After Sherman’s troops moved on, it was a few days before Mrs. Aldrich went into little nearby Barnwell. “I do not remember the day our town was burned, or the division that accomplished it, but I do remember the spectacle presented the first time I beheld its ruins. All the public buildings were destroyed. The fine brick Courthouse, with most of the stores, laid level with the ground, and many private residences, with only the chimneys standing like grim sentinels; the Masonic Hall in ashes.”
Barnwell had been a small place. Soon Sherman’s army would arrive at a bigger one. On February 17, the largest of Sherman’s columns, led by him, came to Columbia, South Carolina’s capital. As he entered the city, accompanied by its mayor, who had ridden out to meet Sherman and assure him that he would encounter no opposition, he came upon an already chaotic scene. The retreating Confederates had burnt down the railroad station and a warehouse, which still had some flames among the ruins. The Southern soldiers had done some looting as they left, and broken furniture and scattered household objects littered the sidewalks and streets. Many bales of cotton had been ripped open, so that their contents would scatter and become useless. There was a high wind, and wisps of cotton were flying about in a way that reminded Sherman of a “Northern snow-storm.” A number of these fragments were catching fire from the smoldering buildings. Soon the streets filled with black people tumultuously greeting the troops, and in a short while many of Sherman’s soldiers had been given liquor or had stolen it, and became increasingly drunk.
That night, as the winds continued, Sherman saw that “the whole air was full of sparks and flying masses of cotton, shingles, etc. some of which were carried by the wind for four or five blocks, and started new fires.” He ordered an entire division of his troops to start fighting the spreading blaze, but while they did this, many blacks and drunken Union soldiers wantonly started other fires. (At least one Union officer said that even many of the sober and disciplined troops, ordered to fight the fire, ceased to do so whenever the officers’ backs were turned. When a particularly disciplined brigade was ordered to round up the drunk and disorderly soldiers on the streets, one of the unit’s officers said that they “very frequently had to use force, and many men would not be arrested, and were shot. Forty of our men were killed this way, many were wounded, and several dead drunk men were burned to death.”) Only at four in the morning, when the wind stopped, could the fire be brought under control. By then, a third of the city was in ashes.
The burning of Columbia became the subject of endless argument and investigation. It entered the Southern psyche as a deliberate, organized effort to burn an entire city to the ground, after its military defenders had left and it had surrendered and was clearly offering no resistance. Many of its residents had certainly seen Sherman’s soldiers setting fires. General William B. Hazen, whose division furnished the brigade that began shooting their drunken fellow Union soldiers who resisted arrest, took the position that “no one ordered it, and no one could have saved it.” Sherman’s attitude seems to have fallen somewhere between callous indifference and vengeance: he later said defiantly, “If I had made up my mind to burn Columbia, I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village, but I did not do it.” Two weeks after the conflagration, a colonel who had not been there heard Sherman say in an informal conversation, “Columbia!—pretty much all burned, and burned good!”
By the time Sherman marched one of his principal columns toward the outskirts of Goldsboro, North Carolina, in the state’s interior, forty-five miles southeast of Raleigh, his men thought that their “Uncle Billy” was nearly superhuman. He felt the same way about them: as he had watched the 104th Illinois stride into Fayetteville after marching through fifteen miles of thick mud in five hours, he said, “It’s the damndest marching I ever saw,” and he noted that fewer men in his army were sick on the march than when they were in relatively permanent camps. As he moved up through North Carolina, Sherman’s confidence grew: in a report that he sent to Grant on March 22 concerning everything his army had done the previous day, he referred to three of his generals: “Our combinations were such that Schofield entered Goldsboro, from New Bern, Terry got Cox’s brigade with pontoons laid and a bridge across [Mill Creek] and Entrenched, and we whipped Joe Johnston on the same day.”
“Whipped” suggests a greater victory than what took place. At the Battle of Bentonville to which Sherman referred, his troops inflicted more casualties than they sustained, but he failed to press home an initially successful attack on Johnston’s left flank, and when Johnston, who had replaced Beauregard, counterattacked and then extricated his forces from the battlefield with his usual defensive skill, Sherman did not pursue him.
Here was a major difference from Grant’s behavior. After every battle, Grant did everything to “keep the ball moving.” Indeed, for Grant, that further effort to pursue, to exploit whatever had been gained, was seemingly a reflex action, a part of the battle itself. Perhaps, despite Sherman’s admiration for Grant, Sherman had been influenced more than he knew by the French military thinker Jomini, whose preference for winning by maneuver rather than frontal attack Halleck emulated. Sherman often said that he wanted to minimize his casualties, and he did, but at Bentonville he missed the opportunity to deal Johnston a blow that might have shortened the war and in the process s
pared both sides suffering yet to be endured.
Nonetheless, Sherman was proving himself a master of maneuver. Moving on after Bentonville, the men with Sherman felt themselves to be part of an irresistible northward march. As they came in sight of the houses of Goldsboro on the afternoon of March 22, they saw, in what seemed a remarkable piece of military choreography, a heartening sight: “A locomotive train came thundering along from the Sea 96 miles distant loaded with shoes, & pants, & clothing as well as food.”
The following day, when they all entered Goldsboro, they found Brigadier General John Schofield waiting for them with his Twenty-third Corps. (At Atlanta, when Sherman wanted to know what to expect from his new opponent John Bell Hood, it was Hood’s West Point classmate Schofield who told him that Hood would attack within forty-eight hours—an estimate that Hood undercut when he attacked the next day.) Here at Goldsboro, within twenty-four hours, eighty thousand men of Sherman’s army, an army that had been moving through North Carolina along several routes, some that included swamps, were reassembled in one gigantic encampment. All of them had marched 330 miles or more since leaving Savannah on their different missions, some of them covering the distance in as little as twenty-one days.
Sherman’s entire army had become men whose marches rivaled those of the Roman legions. From the time they had left Meridian, Mississippi, after the Vicksburg campaign, his forces had traveled more than two thousand miles. Coming into Goldsboro, more than half the men had worn out their shoes and were walking on calloused bare feet, and the uniforms of most of the soldiers who proudly swung past Sherman had rotted into rags. When a Union general who was beside him said of the passing troops, “Look at those poor fellows with bare legs,” Sherman, whose own uniform was in little better condition, shot back with, “Splendid legs! Splendid legs! I’d give both of mine for any one of ’em.”
As the army paused briefly at Goldsboro to rest, even some Southerners were ready to give Sherman credit for the unconventional strategy that had brought his army so far. At this point, after nearly four years of war, The Richmond Whig said, “Sherman is simply a great raider. His course is that of a bird in the air. He is conducting a novel military experiment and is testing the problem whether or not a great country can be conquered by raids.”
Despite Sherman’s failure to pursue after Bentonville, in a recent letter to Grant he had appropriated Grant’s own phrase, “keep the ball moving,” and was thinking hard about his role in what he had no doubt was the impending end of the war. He wanted to be in at the kill, not only defeating Johnston but also sharing in the defeat of Lee. (His soldiers shared the same feeling: a sergeant from Iowa wrote home that “it is the talk of the Boys now that our next moove [sic] will be in the direction of Richmond, but the boys say it is hard to tell which way Crazy Bill will go for he goes wherever he wants and the rebs can[’]t help themselves.”)
Sherman had no way of knowing that Grant, also certain that the end was near, had come to think that it would be better for the postwar political situation if his Eastern forces defeated their old adversary Lee by themselves. Even though he was a man of the West himself, Grant felt that if Sherman’s men completed their remarkable series of campaigns by coming up from North Carolina into Virginia to take a large part in defeating Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, “It might lead to disagreeable bickering between members of Congress of the East and those of the West” as to which area of the nation deserved credit for winning the war. (Grant was to say that when he spoke of his concern about this to Lincoln, the president considered it valid but told Grant that he “had never thought of it before, because his anxiety was so great that he did not care where the aid came from so [long as] the work was done.”)
With the subject of the war’s final strategic moves on his mind, Sherman wrote Grant on March 23 that “if I get the troops all well placed, and the supplies working well, I might run up to see you for a day or two, before diving into the bowels of the Country again.” The following day he added in another letter that “I think I see pretty clearly how in one more move we can checkmate Lee, forcing him to unite Johnston with him in the defense of Richmond, or by leaving Richmond to abandon the cause. I feel certain that if he leaves Richmond[,] Virginia leaves the Confederacy.”
There is no record of Grant’s response to Sherman’s “I might run up to see you for a day or too,” but on March 25, when his engineering troops finished repairing the torn-up rail line from Goldsboro to New Bern, Sherman left his army under the command of General Schofield and started for Morehead City, a port on the North Carolina coast nearly a hundred miles away. According to a reporter from The New York Herald, when Sherman stopped overnight at New Bern, sixty miles southeast of Goldsboro, some of his off-duty soldiers saw him walking down the street and enthusiastically “rushed around him as if they were going to tear him to pieces and all the while calling for a speech.” Sherman said only this to them: “I’m going up to see Grant and have it all chalked out for me and then come back and pitch in. I only want to see him for five minutes and won’t be gone but two or three days.” At Morehead City the following day, Sherman embarked on the swift steamer Russia, a captured Confederate blockade-runner. Writing Ellen from the ship as it moved north, he told her, “There is no doubt we have got the Rebels in a tight place and must not let them have time enough to make new plans … I will now concoct with Grant another plan.” In closing he said, “The ship is pitching a good bit, we are just off Hatteras, and I cannot write more.”
Heading north at sea, moving toward his friend and military superior, Sherman was coming to an almost symmetrically placed point in the plans that he and Grant had made in that hotel room in Cincinnati a year before. They had not seen each other since, but in the meantime they had indeed lived Grant’s dictum, which Sherman expressed as, “He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston.” They had done that. The remaining question was still the one Lincoln had asked after the capture of Savannah: “But what next?”
14
GRANT, SHERMAN, AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN HOLD A COUNCIL OF WAR—AND PEACE
Sherman’s destination, Grant’s busy headquarters at City Point, was on the same side of the Appomattox River as besieged Petersburg, nine miles away. It was at just that time a particularly interesting and dramatic place to be. President Lincoln enjoyed getting out of Washington and being with the troops, and his son Robert, who had graduated from Harvard the year before, was now serving as a captain on Grant’s staff. Lincoln and his wife had recently arrived for an extended stay. On the same day that Sherman left his men at their inland encampment at Goldsboro in North Carolina, Lincoln at City Point had been taken to a hill near the Petersburg front to watch the battle for Fort Stedman, an effort by Lee to break and weaken Grant’s line that cost the Confederacy more than four thousand casualties in one day.
During this presidential visit, it was Julia Grant’s misfortune to have to deal with Lincoln’s mentally unstable wife, who frequently had the idea that every woman was trying to steal her husband. In addition, Mary Todd Lincoln insisted on having every kind of privilege accorded her and often saw slights where none were intended. The Lincolns stayed aboard a handsome ship, the River Queen, which brought them down from Washington and was anchored in the river. Grant had at his disposal a smaller vessel, the Mary Martin, a fast little steamship that was frequently tied up at a dock near headquarters. The first time the Lincolns came ashore, the River Queen was brought alongside Grant’s Mary Martin, and the Lincolns walked across the Mary Martin’s decks to the dock, where they were greeted by Grant and Julia. That happened only once: Mrs. Lincoln let it be known that she did not want to have to cross another ship’s deck to come ashore, and while soldiers were dying some miles away, Grant’s vessel was moved out into the river every time she wanted to come ashore, so that she could step straight ashore from the presidential ship. A most unfortunate outburst occurred when, sitting beside Julia in an ambulance being used as a carriage at a large milita
ry review, she saw the beautiful wife of General Edward Ord, a stylish woman who was a superb equestrienne, riding her horse in a party of generals and other notables that included Lincoln. When Mrs. Ord was brought alongside the makeshift carriage to be presented to Mrs. Lincoln, her horse wheeled and carried her off in pursuit of the group that included Lincoln. An officer tried to explain to the jealous Mrs. Lincoln that Mrs. Ord’s horse was trained to stay near General Ord. The man added, trying to be helpful and pleasant, that the horse “will not let the lady leave her husband’s side. I would recommend that you get one just like it. If you would like … I will try to get him for you; he is just what you want.” Mary Todd Lincoln took this as a warning that Mrs. Ord might steal Abraham Lincoln from her if she did not get a horse and ride right beside him and angrily cried out, “What do you mean, Sir?” It took all of Julia’s tact and good sense to soothe her, and even then Mrs. Lincoln struck out at Julia with, “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?”
Lincoln, on the other hand, seemed to be calmer, even within the sound of the cannon firing back and forth at besieged Petersburg, than in Washington. He enjoyed riding Grant’s big horse Cincinnati—Grant let no one else ride his favorite mount—but Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter of Grant’s staff remarked that he seemed sad and tired, and described something that happened in one of the headquarters tents.
Three tiny kittens were crawling about the tent at the time. The mother had died, and the little wanderers were expressing their grief by mewing piteously. Lincoln picked them up, took them on his lap, stroked their soft fur and murmured: “Poor little creatures, don’t cry; you’ll be taken good care of,” and turning to Bowers [a colonel of Grant’s staff], said: “Colonel, I hope that you will see that these motherless little waifs are given plenty of milk and treated kindly.” Bowers replied: “I will see, Mr. President, that they are taken in charge by the cook of our mess, and are well cared for.”
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 37
