Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  Grant’s emotions are clear enough, and his idea about the best way to handle the cotton traffic was excellent, but his language was confused. He wanted to get the traffic under decent control so that he could get on with the war, and like many other officers at that time and place he was using the words “Jews” and “cotton traders” interchangeably. In the same way, Dana had been warning Stanton about the get-rich-quick mania that had infected “a vast population of Jews and Yankees,” and Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey, complaining about the bargain-hunting that was going on, was denouncing unprincipled sharpers, Yankees, bloodhounds of commerce, and Jews all in one sentence, making all of the words mean the same thing.11 Grant himself, later on, seemed honestly puzzled by the furore his order had raised. Talking with a rabbi after the war, he tried to explain what he had done: “You know, during war times these nice distinctions were disregarded. We had no time to handle things with kid gloves. But it was no ill-feeling or a want of good-feeling towards the Jews. If such complaints”—that is, complaints about extortionate practices in the cotton trade—“would have been lodged against a dozen men each of whom wore a white cravat, a black broadcloth suit, beaver, or gold spectacles, I should probably have issued a similar order against men so dressed.”12

  There were some odd aspects to the whole business. A week before Grant issued his order, the Commanding Officer at Holly Springs, Colonel John V. Dubois, announced that “all cotton speculators, Jews and other vagrants having no honest means of support except trading on the miseries of their country” must leave town within twenty-four hours or be conscripted into the Army; Grant revoked this order and Dubois was transferred to other duty—an unfortunate shift, perhaps, since he was replaced by the Colonel Murphy who would surrender so meekly when Van Dorn demanded it. There was also persistent gossip to the effect that Grant himself did not devise General Orders Number 11. Old Jesse told Congressman Washburne that the order was issued on instructions from Washington; several newspaper stories said the same thing; and one witness asserted that one of Grant’s subordinates prepared and issued the order without Grant’s knowledge.13 But, however all of this may have been, the order did come out—to stand as a melancholy example of the kind of prejudice which was taken for granted in the 1860’s.

  It remains to be said that it did not stand very long. Within two weeks Grant received instructions to revoke the offending order, which he promptly did. Shortly afterward, Halleck sent an oddly worded note of explanation: “The President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose, was the object of your order; but, as it is in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”14 As a footnote, there is the fact that Congressman Washburne sent a hurried letter to President Lincoln, saying he believed Grant’s original order “the wisest order yet made by a military commander,” and urging: “As the friend of that distinguished soldier Gen. Grant I want to be heard before the final order of revocation goes out if it be contemplated to issue such an order. There are two sides to this question.”15 If Washburne was heard he changed nobody’s mind. General Orders Number 11 died, and no more was heard about it. The whole affair created much more of a stir in later years than it did at the time. Examination of contemporary newspapers indicates that neither the order nor the act of revocation drew very extensive newspaper headlines or coverage.

  Cotton was one distraction. Curiously allied was another distraction—Negro slavery. What was happening to Grant in this respect was much like what was happening to the government in Washington. The attempt to fight the war without taking a positive stand on slavery was collapsing, for the peculiar institution was central to the whole military problem. No matter where the Union Armies went and no matter what they did, they met the Negro slave, and they had to do something about him simply because he was there. He represented a problem that could not possibly be postponed, and the inner sympathies of the men on whom the problem was being thrust made no difference at all. Generals might hopefully announce that the Army would have nothing to do with the Negro, but that was like saying that it would have nothing to do with the weather. An invading army that did not work out some policy for dealing with the Negro would inevitably be swamped in a rising sea of black folk.

  Grant’s army was operating in an area where a good many plantations had been hastily abandoned, and the slaves who remained—people who had been left to their own resources, and who had none—were clogging the roads and the lanes, and overflowing into the Army camps, joined in even greater numbers by slaves who had drifted away from bondage in unoccupied areas and were wandering the countryside, pulled by an ignorant, formless hope for they did not quite know what—a people utterly rootless and helpless. The Army might not want to do anything for them, but if it did not do something about them it would quickly be smothered. The sheer weight of the slave population compelled attention.

  Whenever a body of troops was on the march, slaves would line the road to watch, idly expectant. Some of these would be grabbed by officers, to act as servants. A newspaper correspondent believed that even more were pressed into temporary service by weary soldiers, who, “seeing a stout nigger by the roadside, cannot well resist the temptation of loading their knapsacks and guns upon him and trotting him along as a pack horse”; the correspondent said that at the end of the day’s march none of the slaves thus put to work would try to get back to their homes. A soldier in northern Alabama wrote that every camp was surrounded by Negroes who were delighted to be given something to do; all of them, he said, were anxious to “go wid yer and wait on you folks,” and he asserted that there were not fifty Negroes in the South who were not ready to risk their lives to get away from the plantation. Chaplain John Eaton of the 27th Ohio said that the flood of colored people brimming about each camp “was like the oncoming of cities,” and he wrote that the tide was irresistible and frightening: “There was no plan in this exodus, no Moses to lead it. Unlettered reason or the more inarticulate decision of instinct brought them to us. Often the slaves met prejudices against their own color more bitter than any they had left behind. But their own interests were identical, they felt, with the objects of our armies; a blind terror stung them, an equally blind hope allured them, and to us they came.”

  The condition of these refugees, said Eaton, was appalling:

  There were men, women and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude, often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escapes. Sometimes they were intelligent and eager to help themselves; often they were bewildered or stupid or possessed by the wildest notions of what liberty might mean—expecting to exchange labor, and obedience to the will of another, for idleness and freedom from restraint. Such ignorance and perverted notions produced a veritable moral chaos. Cringing deceit, theft, licentiousness—all the vices which slavery inevitably fosters—were the hideous companions of nakedness, famine and disease. A few had profited by the misfortunes of the master and were jubilant in their unwonted ease and luxury, but these stood in lurid contrast to the grimmer aspects of the tragedy—the women in travail, the helplessness of childhood and of old age, the horrors of sickness and of frequent death. Small wonder that men paused in bewilderment and panic, foreseeing the demoralization and infection of the Union soldier and the downfall of the Union cause.16

  This problem had been on Grant’s mind all fall, and at first he tried to cope with it by getting the most helpless cases sent North for attention. In September he started sending groups of Negro women and children to the base at Cairo, Illinois, with the understanding that charitable committees of Northerners would make arrangements for their care, and later on he wired from Holly Springs to Halleck: “Contraband question becoming a serious one. What will I do with surplus Negroes? I authorized an Ohio philanthropist a few days ago to take all that were at Columbus”—Columbus, Kentucky, that is: the northern terminus of the Mobile and Ohio—“to
his state at government expense. Would like to dispose of more the same way.” Halleck wired that this expedient would have to be abandoned.17 Whatever was to be done with the frightening crowd of displaced Negroes, the Army Commander on the spot would have to do it.

  In the end, Grant handed the problem to Chaplain Eaton, who turned out to be a good man for the job.

  In giving the job to Eaton, Grant was doing what he usually did—meeting a complicated problem by taking the first, most obvious step, and letting future developments grow out of that. All about his army were abandoned farms and plantations, full of cotton waiting to be picked; everywhere there were idle slaves with whom something simply had to be done; the North wanted cotton very badly, the supply and the labor force were at hand—why not get the cotton, use the labor, and as a by-product relieve the chaotic destitution of the immense mob of fugitives? On November 11, Eaton received an order from Rawlins:

  Chaplain Eaton, of the 27th Ohio Infantry Volunteers, is hereby appointed to take charge of the contrabands that come into camp in the vicinity of the post, organizing them into suitable companies for working, see that they are properly cared for, and set them to work picking, ginning and baling all cotton now out and ungathered in the field.

  Eaton was dumbfounded. He had no idea what this job would involve, except that on the surface it looked impossible. He had never set eyes on Grant himself, but what he had heard about him was disturbing; as far as Eaton could see, “the order required me to report to an incompetent and disagreeable man … to fulfil a most arduous and unpleasant duty.” He hastened off to Grant’s headquarters, next day, to see if he could not talk the General out of it.18

  Headquarters, then, were at LaGrange, Tennessee. Eaton found the house Grant was occupying, and was told by an aide to go down a passage and knock on a closed door. He did so, was invited to enter, and found Grant in the middle of a conference with other generals. Grant told him to sit down, and when Eaton gave his name Grant remarked: “Oh—you are the man who has all these darkies on his shoulders.”

  Eaton sat there while the conference continued, and took his first look at the Major General commanding. He had heard tall tales about Grant’s dissipation, and he studied his face carefully and, to his relief, saw no signs to indicate that these tales were true—“Everything about him betokened moderation and simplicity”—and the generals at the conference clearly respected him. The meeting broke up at last, and as the officers left Grant asked Eaton to pull his chair over to the table: “Sit up and we’ll talk.” Eaton at once began to ask that he be excused from the unwelcome new assignment. He pointed out that he was usefully employed where he was, that he had no military rank to speak of, that to pull the Negroes out of camp would bring him into conflict with all of the officers who were now using escaped slaves as servants, and that all in all he just did not feel up to the job. Grant listened attentively without being in the least impressed, and said finally: “Mr. Eaton, I have ordered you to report to me in person, and I will take care of you.” Then he began to explain just what Eaton was to do.

  It was necessary to set up a special camp for the fugitive slaves, Grant explained, for two reasons—sheer military necessity, to protect the troops against disease and demoralization, and common humanity, to keep the Negroes themselves from misery and death. The contrabands would not be a dead weight on the army, because there were many things they could do. About the army camps they could relieve soldiers of fatigue duties for the surgeon general, the quartermaster and the commissary, and they could work for the engineers on the building of roads and bridges and fortifications. Some women could help in camp kitchens and in hospitals, and a great many could help to pick, bale and ship the waiting cotton. Those who picked cotton would be paid for their work, and the baled cotton would be sent North and sold for government account. Citizens who had not left their plantations could use the contraband labor to gather their crops if they paid for it.

  As Grant went on, Eaton began to see that this General had given the problem a great deal of thought. The Negro at the moment had a peculiar status, somewhere between slavery and freedom; Grant believed that if the Negro could show his worth as an independent laborer he could later be given a musket and could be used as a soldier, and eventually, if this worked out well, he could even become a citizen and have the right to vote. “Never before,” wrote Eaton, “had I heard the problem of the future of the Negro attacked so vigorously and with such humanity combined with practical good sense.” Reconciled to the task which he had been given, and greatly encouraged as to the capacity of Grant himself, Eaton went off to tackle the new job.

  It was not easy. The first contraband camp was set up near Grand Junction, Tennessee, several miles from the nearest army camp, and the bewildered contrabands from all around were brought to it. An improvised hospital, with an Army surgeon in charge, was set up for the innumerable sick, and an abandoned house was taken over for a pesthouse—the first combing-out of the Army camps brought in eight Negroes suffering from smallpox. Grant ordered the quartermaster corps to meet Eaton’s requisitions for condemned tents and surplus clothing, as well as for axes, spades and other tools, ordered the commissary department to honor requisitions for rations, and detailed a regiment to act as camp guards. He did this, as a matter of fact, without authority, and if Washington had overruled him he might eventually have been personally liable for enormous sums; long afterward, talking to Eaton, Grant touched on this point, asking lightly: “I wonder if you ever realized how easily they could have had our heads?” However, authorization of a sort was presently received from Halleck, and the work went forward.

  Problems were immense. Among the refugees, “want and destitution were appalling,” and although Grant consistently gave Eaton full support the means to deal with the suffering never seemed quite adequate. It was nearly impossible for Eaton to get assistants; almost to a man, the soldiers of this army hated to do anything which seemed to resemble serving Negroes, and just about the only helpers Eaton could get were reluctant enlisted men formally detailed for the job. (He got these, he recalled, in the ratio of one helper for each thousand of contrabands.) Provost marshals objected when Eaton tried to take fugitives away from them—they did not especially want the Negroes, but they did not like to see their own authority cut down—and on at least one occasion Eaton had to go to Grant himself to make a refractory provost understand who was boss. The citizens of the neighborhood were bitterly opposed to anything the Yankees might do, especially to anything which involved turning slaves into free men, and their antagonism was a constant pressure—particularly so when Eaton began to send out foraging details to impress foodstuffs for his charges. After a few weeks of it, Eaton had to take an intricate bundle of problems off to Grant for settlement. Grant then was far down the railroad, at Oxford, and so to Oxford Eaton went. He got there just as the campaign of invasion was reaching its worst moment.

  Grant gave him plenty of time, shelving for the moment the heavy problems arising from Forrest’s raid, McClernand’s anticipated arrival at Memphis and the down-river movement of Sherman’s troops, and Eaton was able to explain his difficulties. He had just finished doing this, and was sitting beside Grant in front of headquarters, when a courier gave Grant the message which signified the final collapse of Grant’s campaign: the news that Colonel Murphy had surrendered the vast Holly Springs base to Van Dorn’s cavalry.

  Grant read it impassively. Eaton said that the General did not change expression, except that his mustache twitched a little. Then Grant told Eaton what the message said and what it meant: he would have to withdraw his army and work out a completely new plan of campaign. He explained that he had given plenty of warning of Van Dorn’s approach, and that with ordinary diligence Murphy should have been able to save the depot, and he added: “People will believe that I was taken unawares and did nothing to protect my supplies, whereas I did all that was possible.”

  Then Grant returned to Eaton’s problems and wrote out
the comprehensive order which Eaton had requested. He also told Eaton that it would probably be necessary, in view of what Van Dorn had done, to move the whole Grand Junction camp bodily off to Memphis.

  Returning to Grand Junction, Eaton rode on the train with Jesse Grant and with Julia. Jesse, he remembered, kept calling his attention to the enormous waste of hides at the slaughterhouses where the Army butchered its beef cattle. As an old tanner, Jesse could see that these would be very valuable, if he could just get them North, but he confessed that his son would not let him do anything at all about them. General Grant would not permit a profit to be made for anyone connected with the Grant family.

  Moving the contrabands off to Memphis was something. The camp near Grand Junction had hardly got into operation; now every man, woman and child—most of them completely helpless, and all of them scared and bewildered—had to be taken cross-country to a city that did not want them, and the railroad which was to take them, the war-wracked line of the Memphis and Charleston, was swamped with the movement of troops. Such trains as were made available were hopelessly crowded, but the frantic Negroes refused to be left behind. They jammed passenger and freight cars, clinging to platforms and roofs, so that the trains had to go very slowly to keep from dislodging the refugees. At Memphis, accommodations were inadequate, and all over the city for a night or two little groups of hopeless people built bonfires on street corners and huddled around them while an early snowfall came down. Somehow, the first few nights and days were survived—by most of the Negroes, at any rate—and Eaton set up a new camp for his charges. Except in his capacity as a willing unpaid servant who would do anything at all which his new masters asked of him, the Negro was wanted by nobody. The townspeople disliked him, and so did the army, and merely to keep him from starving, freezing or dying of disease or of plain, unvarnished discouragement was the most anyone could hope for.