by Bruce Catton
Getting everything in order called for a change in the general command situation, and on April 28 Halleck announced a tentative new organization. His army would consist of a right wing, Grant’s Army of the Tennessee; a center, Buell’s Army of the Ohio, and a left wing, Pope’s Army of the Mississippi, with a general reserve to be formed by detachments from the several corps. Nomenclature was slightly confused; the different forces, or wings, were sometimes referred to as armies, sometimes as army corps. Two days after he had announced this setup, Halleck amplified it with a new order which made a substantial change. George H. Thomas and his division were shifted from Buell’s army to Grant’s and Thomas was named commander of the right wing—under Grant, technically, yet somehow not really under him in actual practice. McClernand, the ambitious Illinois political general, was given charge of the reserve, which was to be composed of his own and two other divisions, one of them taken from Buell. Pope and Buell retained their old places, although Buell’s force was sadly diminished; and Grant, remaining in general command of the District of West Tennessee, would act as second in command to Halleck himself.3
The first officer to be grieved by this order was Buell. A few weeks ago he had been commander of an independent army, and now he had only eighteen thousand men, in three divisions, and he promptly sent Halleck a dignified protest, calling attention to the slight that had been laid upon him and remarking: “You must excuse me for saying that, as it seems to me, you have saved the feelings of others very much to my injury.”4 But the real injury had been suffered by Grant. His announced position as second in command meant nothing, and carried no more real responsibilities than the ones normally borne by a Vice-President of the United States. The right wing and the reserve were technically under his command, but in actual practice they were under Halleck; in an order dated May 1, announcing his assumption of command of “the Army of the Tennessee, including the reserve,” Grant specified that reports would be forwarded “to these headquarters,” but it did not work out that way and Grant was effectively by-passed. One unfortunate result of this new command situation was that it created a coolness between Grant and Thomas. A newspaper correspondent recalled that Grant’s position “was really none at all … and was felt by him to be an insult put upon him (he imagined at the time) at the instigation of General Thomas,” and although Grant got over this feeling he and Thomas never grew really cordial.5
Grant waited for a time, and then sent Halleck a letter of protest:
… As I believe it is generally understood through this army that my position differs but little from that of one in arrest and as this opinion may be much strengthened from the fact that orders to the Right Wing and Reserve, both nominally under my command, are transmitted direct from headquarters, without going through me, I deem it due myself to ask either full restoration to duty, according to rank, or to be relieved entirely from further duty with this Department. I cannot, do not, believe that there is a disposition on the part of yourself to do me any injustice but my suspicions have been aroused that you may be acting under instructions, from higher authority, that I know nothing of. That there has been a studied, persistent opposition to me by persons outside of the army, and it may be by some in it, I am fully aware. This I care nothing for further than it is calculated to weaken confidence in me with those whom it is necessary for me to command.
In conclusion then General, I respectfully ask either to be relieved from duty entirely or to have my position defined so that there can be no mistaking it. I address you direct instead of through the Adjt. Genl. because this is more of a private matter, and one in which I may possibly be wrong, than public.6
Halleck was unresponsive. On the following day he wrote Grant insisting that orders from headquarters would, if headquarters thought it necessary, go direct to commanders of “army corps, divisions, brigades or even regiments,” and expressing surprise that Grant should find any ground for complaint: “You have precisely the position to which your rank entitles you.” He went on to say that his own feelings toward Grant were friendly, adding: “For the last three months I have done everything in my power to ward off the attacks which were made upon you. If you believe me your friend you will not require explanations; if not, explanations on my part would be of little avail.”7
With this Grant had to be content. The army slowly moved south, digging innumerable entrenchments, corduroying miles of road, fighting small front-line skirmish actions (which, Grant observed caustically, later, “ought to have served to encourage the enemy”)8 and covering itself against any possible counterblow from Beauregard. Headquarters got fantastic reports about Beau-regard’s strength. Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott, who was with Halleck at this time, wrote to Stanton early in May that Beauregard would presently have an increase in strength of at least 60,000 men and that the Confederate government, in addition, would probably detach men from in front of Richmond to add further strength, and he urged that “it becomes a grave question for you to consider as to whether a column of 40,000 or 50,000 men should not be sent from the East.” McClernand notified Grant that an Illinois army surgeon, captured at Belmont and just released, had learned during his captivity that the Rebels had 140,000 men at Corinth; a little earlier, Halleck was informed that there were at least 100,000 men in Beauregard’s army, with additional reinforcements coming in every day.9 Actually, although Beauregard was reinforced after Shiloh, he was never able to muster more than 52,000 effectives at Corinth, and in the early part of the campaign his strength was much weaker than that. In April he sent an impassioned appeal to Richmond, pointing out that he had but 35,000 men and that he would be badly outnumbered even when the 15,000 fresh troops which had been promised should reach him. “If defeated here,” he wrote, “we lose the Mississippi Valley and probably our cause.” The Federals got and deciphered this message, it was printed in the New York Herald on April 21, and it was in Buell’s hands before the end of the month, but it seems to have been ignored; its only effect was to bring Beauregard a sharp warning from Lee to change his cipher.10
The soldiers themselves found the slow advance laborious, but conditions in the camps around Pittsburg Landing were so unpleasant they were glad to be moving. Camp diarrhea was extremely prevalent, brought on by bad water and by the indigestible messes which untrained cooks concocted from flour, rice and beans. Many sutlers had come on the scene, selling whisky at a dollar a pint—they were supposed to sell this only to officers, but in this informal army most privates could easily find a lieutenant to buy for them—and charging fifteen cents each for lemons and forty cents a pound for cheese. (The 41st Ohio remembered how one man borrowed an officer’s coat, collected an armful of bottles at one sutler’s tent, and told the sutler to charge it to the brigade commander.) Camps were overrun by sight-seers, looking for souvenirs; roving merchants opened restaurants and bakeries, and there was an influx of professional gamblers who played at long wooden tables with stacks of silver dollars in front of them, each gambler armed with navy revolvers. With the gamblers came prostitutes, who were presently rounded up by army authorities and unceremoniously shipped off down the river.
The march at least provided movement in a new and rather strange country. Men tried to kill squirrels and wild turkeys for camp messes; forbidden to shoot them, they went on forays armed with sticks and stones. In the swamps, they said, there were frogs so big that they bleated like lambs. The rich lushness of Southern spring was on the land, and Midwestern boys goggled at blossoming magnolias, at evergreen hedges formally trimmed in the yards of town houses, at crepe myrtle and mimosa and more familiar flowers like dahlias and verbena. Colored folk in the fields seemed overjoyed to see the Federal soldiers, but the whites were sullen and unmistakably hostile, and an Illinois officer noted darkly: “As for the Union sentiment that was to be developed by the presence of our army it is all nonsense.” Corduroying roads through the endless swamps was hard work, with parties of six or eight men lugging ten-foot logs, hour a
fter hour; the roads that were built in this way were bumpy and slippery, and loaded wagons often slid off and were hopelessly mired, the horses sometimes sinking entirely out of sight. Imperfectly disciplined soldiers looted houses on the march, and some regiments became notorious for this habit; one planter who complained that he had been robbed of “everything except my hope of eternal salvation,” was told, “Just wait until the 8th Missouri comes along.” Most soldiers suffered from an infestation of chiggers, and men in an Ohio brigade complained that for twenty-eight days they were not able to get their clothes off.11
Without especially noticing it at the time the army had acquired one new member who would occupy a large place in the story of the war: a swarthy, undersized, irritable little captain of infantry, who came up to Pittsburg Landing as a quartermaster officer on Halleck’s staff and who was promoted, at about this time, to a colonelcy commanding the 2nd Michigan Cavalry—Phil Sheridan, who wrote that this advance to Corinth was uncommonly leisurely and spiritless. “The desultory affairs between rear and advance guards,” he recorded, “seemed as a general thing to have no purpose in view beyond finding out where the enemy was, and when he was found, since no supporting columns were at hand and no one in supreme command was present to give directions, our skirmishing was of little avail and brought but small reward.”12 So dilatory was the movement that a modern historian of Beauregard’s army contemptuously referred to the Federal move as “doubtless the very slowest uncontested advance ever recorded of any army”; he added that if Halleck had been as fast and as confident as his superior force justified he might have surrounded and captured Beauregard’s entire force.13
Once, as the army drew close to Corinth, Grant believed he saw an opening. The right wing was within four miles of the Rebel entrenchments, Sherman had carried an advanced position, and Grant suggested to Halleck that Pope’s force, which was off on the left, be brought around behind the army and sent in past Sherman’s right in a dawn attack; the advance would be along dry, elevated ground, and a network of streams and swamps would make it easy for the Federals to hold the rest of the line with a reduced force while the attack was made, and Grant believed that the offensive could move straight into Corinth. He recalled ruefully, later, that “I was silenced so quickly that I felt that possibly I had suggested an unmilitary movement,” and Colonel Webster said that Halleck pooh-poohed the proposal “in the most insulting and indignant manner.” Webster added that this was one of the very few times he ever saw Grant have to struggle to keep his temper; afterward, he said, Grant “was depressed for hours.”14
One duty Grant did have to perform, during this period. Just before the army moved away from Pittsburg Landing he had to make formal announcement of the death of General C. F. Smith. The infection that had set in when the old soldier scraped his leg getting into a rowboat a fortnight before the battle had been beyond remedy, and on April 25 he died. In a letter to Mrs. Smith, Grant wrote that the nation had lost “one of its most gallant and most able defenders,” and he added a few words to express his own sense of loss: “It was my fortune to have gone through West Point with the general (then captain and commander of cadets) and to have served with him in all his battles in Mexico and in this rebellion, and I can bear honest testimony to his great worth as a soldier and a friend. Where an entire nation condoles with you in your bereavement no one can do so with more heartfelt grief than myself.” Old Smith would in truth be missed. Long after the war, Sherman wrote: “Had C. F. Smith lived, Grant would have disappeared to history after Fort Donelson.” It was only because Smith’s injury incapacitated him, Sherman said, that Halleck consented to let Grant have have charge of the army in the period leading up to Shiloh.15
Grant made the rounds of his troops, issued occasional orders and tried to keep busy, but in truth there was little of importance to occupy his time. A newspaperman who was with the army said that Grant spent much time by his own campfire, silently smoking, pacing restlessly back and forth, or looking on while others played cards—breaking in, once in a while, in the manner of card-table onlookers everywhere, to make some suggestion about the play. Newspaper attacks on him were still being printed, but he rarely complained about them; it was remembered that he did say, to a correspondent whose paper had been especially venomous in its criticism: “Your paper is very unjust to me, but time will make it all right. I want to be judged only by my acts.”16 Major Belknap of the 15th Iowa, to whom Grant had addressed words of reminiscence during the heat of the first day’s action at Shiloh, felt that Grant at this time had no real position—he “was apparently neither private nor general.” One evening, after several days of rain, Belknap saw Grant riding up, water streaming from his clothing; when Grant greeted him, Belknap burst out that the army was in a very bad situation. Grant asked why he thought so, and Belknap replied that the rain had turned fields and roads into bottomless mud; movement was impossible, the enemy was only a short distance away, and if the Rebels should attack the army would be helpless.
“Young man,” said Grant, “don’t you know that the enemy is stuck in the mud, too?”
To this the abashed major could only reply: “No, I did not, General, but I do now.”17
A New York World correspondent found Grant something of a puzzle, and in his attempt to describe him stumbled upon a fortunate phrase. Grant, he wrote, “has none of the soldier’s bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He has no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks.… A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and square forehead, of short stature and thick-set. He is we would say a good liver, and altogether an unpronounceable man; he is so like hundreds of others as to be only described in general terms.”18
Grant wanted to get away. Halleck had turned down his request for a transfer, but toward the end of May the attempt to get duty in some other field was renewed through other channels. Major General David Hunter, who had had charge of things in St. Louis in the brief interim between Frémont and Halleck, and who later had served in Kansas, was this spring in charge of Federal troops along the Carolina coast. Camp rumor said that Hunter was about to be sent somewhere else, and Grant’s staff angled to get the coastal command for Grant.
On May 24, Captain Rowley wrote to Washburne about it: “There is a matter which has just suggested itself to us. From certain articles in the few newspapers we get hold of it seems probable that Gen. Hunter may be superseded by some one. If such is to be the case I am certain that Gen. Grant would like extremely well to be assigned to the command that he now holds. And all things considered I think it would also be for the good of the service. We have now quite a number of their eastern generals in this department and have given them a fair start. Now let us do something for the Coast. Let us hear from you.” In a brief note mailed the same day, Rowley added: “Gen. Grant would be very much pleased to be transferred to a command on the coast as I have just heard him conversing upon the subject.”
On the same day Colonel Clark Lagow of Grant’s staff wrote to Washburne on the same topic. He reported the general impression that Hunter was about to be relieved and urged that Hunter’s position be given to Grant: “I am satisfied that the command would please him. I have heard him say as much (although he knows nothing of my writing this).”19
Nothing came of this, and a few weeks later Rowley wrote to Washburne saying: “I am sorry there is no chance to get Genl. Grant into a wider field but am pleased to observe that public opinion is again beginning to set strongly in his favor.” Grant himself seems to have had no part in the wire pulling. On May 24 he wrote to a friend in the North, the Rev. J. M. Vincent of Galena, remarking that he was “quite unwell,” was presently confined to his bed, and feared that he might be in for a spell of sickness. He then went on to sum up his position at that moment:
I never asked for any position or any rank but entered with my whole soul in the cause of the Union, wi
lling to sacrifice everything in the cause, even my life if needs be, for its preservation. It has been my good fortune to render some service to the cause and my very bad luck to have attracted the attention of newspaper scriblers. It certainly never was my desire to attract public attention but has been my desire to do my whole duty in this just cause.20
Nevertheless, by the end of May Grant was about ready to leave. Sherman one morning rode over to visit with him, and found trunks and boxes packed and stacked up as if for some movement. Grant was sitting in his tent, at a rough table made of boards fastened to planks that had been driven into the ground, sorting letters and tying them into bundles with red tape. As Sherman recalled the matter, long afterward, Grant explained that he had leave to go home and was going to take advantage of it; he was simply in the way, here in Halleck’s army, and he could not endure it any longer. Sherman argued with him, pointing out that he himself had almost left the Army, a few months earlier, when all the newspapers were proclaiming him a lunatic; he finally made up his mind to stick it out, he won advancement, and “now I am in high feather.” As Sherman told it later, Grant thanked him for this and agreed to stay for a while; and Sherman always believed that it was his own argument that kept Grant from dropping out of the Army altogether.21
When he wrote his Memoirs Grant gave this account a rather casual confirmation, saying that he had obtained permission to leave the department and that Sherman, calling on him just as he was about to leave, had talked him out of it. What he wrote at the time, however, provides a substantially different version. According to Sherman’s story, the leave of absence which Grant had been about to take would, in effect, have taken him out of the Army and out of the war; Grant’s contemporary letters make it look much more like a routine matter, and—surprisingly enough—indicate that it was Halleck himself who persuaded him to stay with the Army. Sherman may have been influential in the case, but Grant failed to mention him when he described the episode to Congressman Washburne.
