Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  Stanton went on to say that the agreement might require the federal government to pay the debts that had been incurred by the Confederacy—a possibility nowhere mentioned in Sherman’s terms—and indicated that the Confederates would be “relieved” of facing legal action for any kind of crimes they had committed. He included the idea that the captured Confederate weapons might be available to the men of the South “as soon as the armies of the United States were disbanded, and used to conquer and subdue the loyal States.” In his ninth and final objection, Stanton concluded that this agreement left the Confederates “in condition to overthrow the United States Government.” He also quoted selectively from Halleck’s letter to him and added some words in Sherman’s orders to his cavalry, leaving the impression that Sherman might have been bribed with Confederate gold to sign an easy peace and let Jefferson Davis escape the country.

  As Grant continued his trip to Sherman’s headquarters, neither he nor Sherman knew of Stanton’s mixture of fact, speculation, and falsehood, nor did they know that Halleck, apparently on his own initiative, had told generals Meade and Horatio Wright “to disregard any truce or orders of General Sherman suspending hostilities” and had suggested to Stanton that General James H. Wilson, serving directly under Sherman, “obey no orders from Sherman.” Halleck’s letter about this would also make its way into The New York Times. (In a letter to his friend General George W. Cullum, Halleck said of Sherman that he feared “there is some screw loose again.”)

  On April 23, Sherman, who had billeted himself in the recently vacated (and much run-down, despite the name) Governor’s Palace in Raleigh, received a telegram from his aide Major Hitchcock. Sent from Morehead City, on the coast, the major informed him of his arrival the next day but, on Grant’s orders, did not mention that the general in chief was with him. Shortly after six the next morning, Sherman was up but not dressed when Grant walked in. Quietly taking Sherman aside, he told him that his surrender terms had not been approved but gave no indication of the “consternation” they had caused at the cabinet meeting. Grant left Sherman in no doubt as to what he was to do: get in touch with Joseph E. Johnston, tell him that the shooting would start again within forty-eight hours if he did not sign a new agreement based on the terms of the Appomattox surrender, and then go to Johnston and get such a document signed. Sherman accepted this—Grant later said, “like the true and loyal soldier that he was, he carried out the instructions I had given him”—but at that moment, when Grant realized that Sherman was expecting him to come along to the new parley, he told him that quite the opposite was true. He was going to stay quietly in Raleigh and evidently did not want Johnston to know that he was not still in Washington. Sherman’s mission was to get this done as fast as he could, and give the papers to Grant, who would speedily take them back to Washington. With all that had been going on—Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, victory celebrations, the North suddenly plunged into grief by Lincoln’s assassination, and the massively attended funeral ceremonies as Lincoln’s body proceeded home to Illinois—Grant hoped that a distracted public might not realize there was a delay in bringing to a close the long struggle between the forces of Sherman and Johnston.

  Sherman promptly wrote two messages to Johnston, the first telling him that their truce would end within forty-eight hours, and the second saying that, pursuant to instructions he had just received, “I therefore demand the surrender of your army on the same terms as were given General Lee at Appomattox … purely and simply.” (Some of Sherman’s generals soon learned that Grant had slipped into Raleigh. Major General Henry Slocum noted that “Grant is here. He has come to save his friend Sherman from himself.”)

  On this same morning that Grant arrived and Sherman wrote Johnston that he was rescinding his previous terms—Sunday, April 24—The New York Times came out with Stanton’s statement plastered all over the front page. Among a third of a column of subheadlines were: “Sherman’s Action Promptly Repudiated,” “The President and All His Cabinet Rebuke Him,” “Gen. Grant Gone to North Carolina to Direct Our Armies,” and “Possible Escape of Jeff. Davis with His Gold.” In an editorial titled “An Extraordinary Operation,” the Times said that “it looks very much as if this negotiation was a blind to cover the escape of Jeff. Davis and a few of his officials, with the millions of gold they have stolen from the Richmond banks.” On the same day, the Chicago Tribune had this to say: “Sherman has been completely over-reached and outwitted by Joe Johnston … We cannot account for Sherman’s signature on this astounding memorandum, except on the thesis of stark insanity …”—an eerie echo of the Cincinnati Commercial‘s “General William T. Sherman Insane” headline of 1862, when Sherman had been so nervously overestimating the forces opposed to him in Kentucky. The Tribune added that it had information that Sherman intended to lead a proslavery political party composed of unrepentant Confederates and Northern conservatives.

  No word of this sensational release of garbled information reached either Grant or Sherman in Raleigh, but, from talking to Grant, Sherman realized he needed to mend some fences. The next day, knowing only that Johnston had received his messages but still awaiting a response to the changed terms, and unaware of Stanton’s disclosure to the press, Sherman wrote Stanton that “I admit my folly in embracing in a military convention any civil matters, but, unfortunately, such is the nature of our situation that they seem inextricably united.” He added that he would carry out President Johnson’s and the cabinet’s wishes, as conveyed to him by Grant, but that was about as conciliatory as Sherman could bring himself to be: referring to Stanton’s instructions that Grant should “proceed immediately to the headquarters of Major-General Sherman, and direct operations against the enemy,” he said in closing that “I had flattered myself that, by four years of patient, unremitting, and successful labor, I deserved no such … [censure].”

  At about the same time Sherman was writing this, Grant, probably sitting a few yards from Sherman in the mansion of the departed governor of North Carolina, penned a letter to Julia. He told her that Raleigh was virtually untouched by the war, but added, “The suffering that must exist in the South the next year, even with the war ending now, will be beyond conception. People who talk now of further retaliation and punishment, except of the political leaders, either do not conceive of the suffering endured already or they are heartless and unfeeling and wish to stay at home, out of danger, whilst the punishment is being inflicted.”

  The next day, Sherman and Johnston met again, in the same place. Johnston began trying for somewhat easier terms but quickly sensed that he could either sign or hear the Union cannon fire resume. He signed terms virtually identical to those Grant had offered Lee. As soon as he did, Sherman began a humane policy similar to the one Grant had begun at Appomattox: there would be ten days’ rations for every surrendered Confederate soldier, and his army would even lend them enough horses and mules “to insure a crop.” Sherman would go farther than that, having his quartermasters issue thousands of bushels of corn and tons of meal and flour to hungry civilians throughout the South. This would soon bring from Johnston a letter praising Sherman’s “enlightened and humane policy,” and stating, “The enlarged patriotism exhibited in your orders reconciles me to what I had previously regarded as the misfortune of my life, that of having to encounter you in the field.”

  When Sherman returned to Raleigh on the evening of April 26, Grant immediately read and approved the new document he brought with him. (Throughout the meeting with Sherman earlier in the day, Johnston had no idea that Grant was in North Carolina and was startled when his copy was quickly returned to him with Grant’s written endorsement on it.) At ten that night, Grant sent Stanton a telegram saying that the surrender had been signed, “on the basis agreed upon between Lee and myself for the Army of Northern Virginia.”

  From a standing start five days before in Washington, Grant had called for a cabinet meeting, traveled 380 miles by combinations of ship and train, caused the resumption of di
sastrously conducted surrender arrangements, brought about a successful conclusion to the matter, and done it in a manner that, thus far, left his and Sherman’s friendship intact. As Grant boarded the train for the coast on the morning of April 27, both men had reason to feel they had put a most unfortunate episode behind them. Back in Washington on the 29th, he wrote Julia that “I have just returned after a pleasant trip to Raleigh N.C. where Gn. Sherman succeeded in bringing Johnston to terms that are perfectly satisfactory to me and I hope will be well received by the country. I have not yet been able to look over the [news]papers and see what has transpired in my absence.”

  When Grant did “look over the papers,” he saw that The New York Times, after its first criticism of Sherman, was now characterizing the original surrender agreement as “Sherman’s surrender to Johnston.” The New York Herald told its readers that “Sherman’s splendid military career is ended, he will retire under a cloud … Sherman has fatally blundered.” The Washington Star characterized his dealings with Johnston as “calamitous mischief.” In New York, when Lincoln’s body was halted there to receive the city’s homage, the historian George Bancroft said in a funeral oration that Sherman had “unsurped more than the power of the executive, and has revived slavery and given security and political power to traitors from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande.” Radical Republicans, who had long worried that the sacrifices of war might be undercut by too generous a peace, leapt into the situation: Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island telegraphed Stanton that “loyal men deplore and are outraged by Sherman’s action. He should be promptly removed.” Two days before Grant read the newspapers from the week while he was gone and out of touch, the New Haven Journal carried a story suggesting that Sherman had played a part in the plot to kill Lincoln. (One historian concluded that, apart from major Union victories and Lincoln’s assassination, Sherman’s supposed treason received more newspaper attention throughout the North than any other event of the war.)

  Grant described his reaction to the uproar. “I knew that Sherman must see these papers, and I fully realized what great indignation they would cause him, though I do not think his feelings could have been more excited than were my own.” In this last, Grant was mistaken. As he had prepared to leave Washington for North Carolina, Grant burst out to Sherman’s aide Hitchcock with this indictment of what he had heard said of Sherman’s suspected treason: “It is infamous—infamous! After four years of such service as Sherman has done—that he should be used like this!” Indignant as Grant was, his anger did not match the fury of his friend. On the day after Grant left Raleigh, Sherman saw The New York Times of April 24 that carried Stanton’s de facto indictment of him. An officer came upon Sherman in his headquarters, surrounded by a dozen generals, acting “like a caged lion, talking to the whole room with a furious invective which made us all stare. He lashed Stanton as a mean, scheming, vindictive politician who made it his business to rob military men of their credit earned by exposing their lives.” As for his old enemy, the press, “the fellows that wielded too loose a pen” should be put in prison. (Sherman’s rank and file had a similar view of what the press was doing to their “Uncle Billy”; when General Henry Slocum saw a crowd of soldiers standing around a blazing cart on a street in Raleigh and sent a staff officer to investigate, the man returned with the message, “Tell General Slocum that cart is loaded with New York papers for sale to the soldiers … We have followed Sherman through a score of battles and nearly two thousand miles of the enemy’s country, and we don’t intend to allow these slanders against him to be circulated among his men.”)

  That same day, April 28, Sherman wrote Grant an anguished letter. He began by saying that “I do think that my Rank, if not past services, entitled me at least to the respect of Keeping secret what was known to none but the Cabinet, until further inquiry could have been made,” and went on to say, accurately, that Stanton was “in deep error” in his portrayal of Sherman’s orders to his cavalry as aiding Jefferson Davis’s continuing flight. He told Grant that the idea that he was insubordinate and “have brought discredit on our Government” would cause “pain and amazement” to his generals. He put it to Grant that he had “brought an army of seventy thousand men in magnificent condition across a country deemed impossible, and placed it just where it was wanted almost on the day appointed,” and said he felt that alone “entitled me to the courtesy of being consulted before publishing to the world a proposition [Sherman’s first agreement with Johnston] rightfully submitted to higher authority for proper adjudication.” He inveighed against Stanton’s “other statements which invited the Press to be let loose upon me,” and in his postscript added, “As Mr. Stanton’s singular paper has been published, I demand that this also be made public.”

  The following day, in Goldsboro on his way to Charleston to reposition his forces in the South for the postwar duty that would soon be theirs, Sherman wrote Grant’s chief of staff Rawlins at some length, enclosing a copy of his previous day’s letter to Grant and asking him to “send a copy to Mr. Stanton, and say to him I want it published.” He characterized Stanton’s criticism of him as “untrue, unfair, and unkind to me, and I will say undeserved.” Sherman went on to point out, correctly, that “there has been at no time any trouble about Joe Johnston’s army,” and told Rawlins that “the South is broken and ruined, and deserves our pity. To ride the people down with persecutions and exactions would be like slashing away at the crew of a sinking ship.” On another point, he commented that “the idea of Jeff. Davis running around the country with tons of gold is ridiculous.” (Sherman calculated that if the fleeing Davis had with him as much as six million dollars in bars of gold bullion—Stanton and Halleck were now saying he might be trying to escape with more than twice that—it would take fifteen slow-moving teams of six mules apiece to move it through the South. When Davis was captured, disguised as a woman while wearing his wife’s raincoat and shawl, the figure was found to be half a million, all of which was speedily confiscated.)

  In something of an undertone running through this letter to Rawlins, Sherman revealed what else was on his mind, in addition to justifying himself to the world. He had not seen Grant since they parted at Raleigh two days before, and he was worried about him, about their friendship, and about Grant’s overall reaction to this avalanche of criticism.

  I doubt not efforts will be made to sow dissension between Grant and myself, on a false supposition that we have political aspirations, or, after Killing me off by libels, he will next be assailed. I can keep away from Washington, and I confide in his good sense to save him from the influences that will surround him there …

  If, however, Gen. Grant thinks that I have been outwitted by Joe Johnston, or that I have made undue concession to the rebels to save them from anarchy and us the needless expense of military occupation, I will take good care not to embarrass him.

  In short, Sherman wanted Grant to know that he had learned his lesson, but that, while moving right along with the duties of commanding his army, he still had unfinished business with Stanton: using the word “resent” in its meaning of an aggressive reaction to an affront, he told Rawlins that “I have no hesitation in pronouncing Mr. Stanton’s compilation of April 22 a gross outrage upon me, which I will resent in time.”

  By mistake, this letter to Rawlins, asking him to forward on to Stanton a copy of his relatively restrained letter to Grant, was sent on to Stanton. The letter to Grant had said nothing about repaying Stanton for “a gross outrage,” or linking Stanton with an effort to drive a wedge between Grant and Sherman; now it was all there, in Sherman’s handwriting, for Secretary of War Stanton to see.

  Angry as Sherman was at Stanton, a different mixture of emotions swept over him a few days later. Stopping at Hilton Head, South Carolina, as he headed north after inspecting forces at Savannah, on May 2 he read in The New York Times the text of Halleck’s letter to Stanton, stating that Halleck had recently ordered Union generals not to obey Sherman’s orders. As
would remain true for another two weeks, there would be delays and crossed communications between Grant and Sherman. Back in Washington, Grant had already made these orders “not to obey” Sherman inoperative, but Sherman did not know that, and the fact that Halleck had countermanded his orders struck Sherman as a betrayal that he would soon publicly characterize as “an act of Perfidy.” Despite Ellen Sherman’s warnings to him earlier in the war about Halleck’s “lawyerly ambiguities,” Sherman saw him as the man who had saved his career at a time when many judged him to be insane. That had been in good part true, although Halleck, aware of Sherman’s political connections in Washington, had wished to curry favor with men like Sherman’s father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, and his brother Senator John Sherman, while at the same time writing cautionary internal reports that would protect him from any consequences of Sherman’s actions. Again, after Shiloh, Sherman had seen Halleck sideline Grant to the point that only Sherman’s intervention persuaded Grant not to leave the army and go home, but his own gratitude to Halleck, who to this moment he had thought of as a friend, had led him for a time to see Halleck as being a better commander than Grant.