The Better Angels of Our Nature (16 page)

Evening brought a visit from U. S. Grant. He made the trip upriver on the
Tigress,
every day now apparently deaf to those who whispered that a commander of an army should be
with
that army not in a comfortable two-story dwelling owned by Mr. John Cherry of Savannah, Tennessee, especially when a large Rebel army was only twenty miles down the river.

Maybe it was the presence of the much-admired General Smith in an upstairs bedroom that kept him there, lulling him into a false sense of security. Though others had reasoned that if Grant felt confident enough to remain ten miles away
and
on the opposite side of the riverbank, there was no danger, even with the increased skirmishing, pickets carried off hourly by the enemy, and frequent sightings of Rebel cavalry.

Tonight Grant had a well-padded crutch strapped to his saddle and a very swollen ankle attached to his leg. The previous day his horse had stumbled in the mud, trapping his master’s ankle. The whisper was that this short, slight, slouching little man in crumpled dusty blue blouse and pants, beneath a crumpled dusty frock coat, topped off with a crumpled dusty hat, had been drunk. Though he looked sober enough now being helped off his horse by John Rawlins.

Rawlins wedged the crutch under his commander’s armpit and watched anxiously as he headed off with an awkward limp toward the corral, where Jesse was attending to Sherman’s sorrel mare, tethered to a tree in company with a number of his equine companions.

“Good evening, sir,” Jesse said boldly, though she had never spoken to the tanner’s son before.

“Corporal.” Grant’s gravelly monotone sounded as though even this single word of greeting was too great a burden on a man so comfortable with silence. He placed his cigar in his trapdoor mouth, and used the one free hand to stroke the horse’s neck. “Fine animal.” He spoke with a nostalgic look on his face, as though he was remembering something that had happened long ago, but that was more vivid in his mind than something that had happened five minutes hence.

“Yes sir. The general captured him from a Rebel cavalryman.”

“Give him a good groomin’ there, soldier. Remember to wash his eyes gently—and the mane and the tail should be last to get cleaned and never untangle the tail with a brush, lift the tail away to the side and draw your fingers down in a kind of combing action, like this, always draw the tail downward.” The blue-coated horse lover demonstrated with his one free hand, giving Jesse the distinct impression that this was the most pleasant few moments he had known for many a long, bloody day. Grant watched as the sorrel nuzzled his flaring nostrils into Jesse’s neck while the other horses moved in close around her, pushing and teasing her as though to share the attention this once Rebel-owned interloper was receiving. “You like horses, Corporal?” The detachment in his voice was thawing slightly, but she suspected it had less to do with her and more to do with the subject.

“I love them,” she said simply. “All horses are beautiful.”

Grant smiled, it was nothing much, just a slender thread, but it said he understood and concurred. The smile grew a little, blossoming over a mouth that was all but concealed by the beard. “Horses have better instincts than humans, they know who to trust, who to be wary of.” This was not mere rhetoric speaking, but the stuff of personal experience.

Jesse watched him comb the horse’s mane with his fingers, tipped with broken and grimy nails. He had withdrawn into himself now, and appeared to be reflecting on that old, yet vivid memory again. Slight and not above five foot five, he had a head of thick dark-brown hair, sprinkled with a little gray, and a full beard of the same color that hugged closely to a square jaw. His eyes too were brown, the expression turned inward as though he was listening to some silent voice within him, even when others were speaking, of seeming not to be either physically or mentally present. They were soft and sad, indeed, his tentative demeanor, emphasized by the crutch, belied the tenacity that now underlined his reputation. Congress and Northern newspapers considered Sam Grant the “coming man.” The general who could give them the military successes they had so long craved. Overnight he had been taken up as a national hero, a man with a most unlikely pedigree for such a role. Son of a merchant and with a mother some said was slow in the head, or maybe just slow. Like her son, they said; no great talker and no great thinker, a man more comfortable in the company of his wife and children.

At that moment, Jesse heard him mumble something under his breath.

“When I graduated the military academy I’d hoped to join the cavalry. All I ever wanted, even as a lad, was to be ’round horses. I love to train young colts.” The childlike longing with which he said this belied the popular image of Grant the commander sitting coolly upon his horse at Donelson, chewing a cigar while his bleeding men perished in the snow.

“Perhaps when the war is over, sir, you’ll get your wish.”

The commander in chief drew his introverted gaze from the animal to Jesse’s handsome, grimy face, his expression vague and uncertain, as though he had not been aware of talking his thoughts aloud and therefore had not expected a response.

“Grant!” The small man was startled as Sherman’s loud rasping voice carried easily the distance from his tent to the picket rope, and in a few seconds his rapid walk had carried him just as easily to the army commander’s side.

“I stopped to admire the sorrel,” Grant explained, defensively, a boy caught messing about instead of doing his chores, even testily, as if reluctant to have this welcome connection with horses disrupted by an embodiment of harsh reality called William Tecumseh Sherman.

“Fine animal,” Sherman agreed in his terse way, “grown attached to her.” He touched a gentle hand to the horse’s face and was rewarded with a loud neighing and a tossing of the head. “Yes. I’ve grown mighty fond of you, haven’t I, mighty fond.”

Jesse’s head popped up. Her dirty face wore a saucy white-toothed grin. “Thank you, sir.”

“I was talking to the horse,” the Ohioan said irritably, treating her to one of his looks.

“I was just saying, Sherman, when I get old I’ll ask nothing more from life than to hold a colt’s leading line and watch him run around the training ground.”

“Yes, yes, Grant, admirable ambition, admirable, sir. Any sign of Buell?”

“No, not Buell himself, but Nelson’s advanced units have arrived at Savannah. Nelson says Buell will be here shortly. He wanted to pitch his tents on Pittsburg Landing, but I told him to encamp for the present at Savannah, that it would be impossible to march his division through the swamps of the east bank. I’ll send boats for him Monday or Tuesday or sometime early next week.” As Grant related this, Sherman took his free arm and led him off in the direction of his headquarters tent. A mite too swift, since the younger man, limping badly, was bound to the slower pace of a temporary cripple, dependent upon a crutch and hard-pressed to keep up with the always fast-walking Ohioan, who had two good, strong legs and knew how to use them. “Nelson is worried that Beauregard will attack us. I told him I have more troops here than I did at Fort Donelson and we could hold against anything they have. I took him to see General Smith, who assured him the enemy are all at Corinth, and when our transportation arrives we shall go there and, as General Smith put it, ‘Draw them out, as you would draw a badger out of a hole.’”

Jesse brought tin cups and poured the whiskey. Grant was staring at the whiskey bottle, the way he had stared at the sorrel, a tad longingly.

“No whiskey for General Grant or myself, Corporal,” said Rawlins, the man who was called “Grant’s conscience.” The self-educated Galena lawyer, now Grant’s adjutant, with the feverish eyes and full black beard, let his voice rise loudly like a preacher in a pulpit, reaching the climax of his sermon. He dropped an arm across the table between the bottle and the commander, a zealot rushing to place his own mortal flesh between the temptation and the tempted. It was said only Rawlins or the presence of Mrs. Grant could stop Grant from going on a bender. “The general adheres to a strict policy of abstinence and has done so for the last six years.”

Either the “conscience” had been asleep or was a bold-faced liar.

Not that Sherman was averse to the bottle. At Kentucky he’d drunk too much, it was true, but it was a temporary aberration. He needed no man, nor woman, to keep
him
on a sober path. As for Dr. Cartwright, he could stop drinking any time he wanted to, the trouble was he didn’t want to.

As she was pouring Grant and Rawlins coffee, Sherman said, “Jesse, get some se-gars.”

First she lit Sherman’s “se-gar” and then Grant’s. He looked at her with a vague recognition that quickly passed into oblivion beneath the slightly hooded lids as the conversation turned as usual to recent Rebel sightings in the area.

“Before encamping my division here at Shiloh Church, Mac and I rode out the three miles toward Bethel Station to make a personal reconnaissance,” said Sherman. “We had found the area between there and Pittsburg Landing clear. We then rode out ten miles toward Corinth to Monterey, you recall the Rebels had a cavalry regiment there, Mac,” Sherman placed a hand on the younger man’s broad shoulder as he passed on his usual pace around the tent, “which of course decamped on our approach. Apart from the Rebel cavalry patrols and the two infantry regiments and battery six miles out, my division in front is clear.”

“The locals told us that trains were bringing large masses of men from every direction into Corinth,” McPherson said.

“Well, there’s no doubting that A. S. Johnston has a large army at Corinth.” As usual Grant’s tired voice belied the tenacity of its owner. “None of us have ever doubted that fact. Even if reports are exaggerating, I have to take the threat seriously. My concern is not for Pittsburg Landing, but for our base of supplies at Crumps Landing.”

The five men continued their discussion, Sherman’s hoarse tones dominating the conversation, while Grant and Rawlins spoke as one man. McPherson inclined his view toward his superiors. He reminded them that though he had been ordered by Grant to lay out a fortified line, he’d found that it would have to be placed in the rear of the line of encampments, which certainly appeared to undermine the point of the exercise, which was to attack. Grant repeatedly quoted General C. F. Smith. The venerable old soldier, forced to give up his division of Grant’s army because he had scraped his shin on a rowboat coming ashore at the Landing, was laid up with gangrene and dysentery at the Cherry Mansion, but still offering advice to his old West Point cadet.

Sherman, as always, was restless, unable to remain seated for more than a few minutes. He tapped with his fingernails on the table and spoke somewhat disjointedly of the increased “sauciness” of the Rebel cavalry in their front as he paced back and forth behind his companions’ chairs, his vest flying open, his hair standing on end. He looked like a man on a precipice unable to decide whether to stay put and chance being rescued, or jump. When he asked Grant if he’d questioned the Alabama prisoners sent up some days ago by him the tanner’s son admitted that he hadn’t yet got around to it. If Grant appeared too eager to follow the ailing General Smith, Sherman appeared, for reasons already stated most forcefully to James McPherson, gratefully willing to accept Grant’s view that Beauregard would have to be flushed out of Corinth if there was to be any battle. Though the continued absence of Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio evidently made him more nervous than he cared to admit, even to himself. However, at the end, all agreed, theirs was to be the offensive move.

Grant, bolstered up on both sides by a crutch, one wooden, the other flesh, departed with words that might have lulled an entire army, but brought only a sharp inclination of Sherman’s large red head before the tent flap dropped.

“Sherman, I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack being made upon us. Good night.”

The Ohioan may have exuded an air of certainty during the discussion, repeating what he had told his officers that morning, but the persuasive manner, the forceful voice, the assertive gestures of those heavily veined hands, masked a genuine fear, that, as he had told McPherson, if he expressed his true feelings they would again call him crazy.

Sherman stood in his tent and removed the stopper from the bottle of medicine his own surgeon had given him. Before he could swallow any of the contents, a voice said, “For a man who professes
never
to make the same mistake twice, you are, sir, about to do just that.” Jesse stepped out of the shadows.

The Ohioan stared at her. “How
dare
you talk to me that way? What are you doing in my quarters?”

“Making sure you take Dr. Cartwright’s medicine, not that rubbish.”

To Sherman’s speechless amazement she took the bottle from his hand and poured the liquid between the duckboards.

“What your surgeon has given you is a purgative, a cathartic, to cause evacuation of the bowels. It’s for treating constipation, sir, not diarrhea. I’ve seen what can happen when you dose a diarrhea sufferer with laxatives. The more you complain to your surgeon that his purgatives are not working the more he’ll increase the dosage until you will become so sick you’ll have to go to the hospital. You need something to calm your stomach lining,
not inflame
it still further, which is precisely what a purgative will do. The bottle should have a skull and crossbones painted on the label.” She tossed it out of the tent. “As for blue mass, that contains, among other things,
mercury,
which I’m sure you know is a metal poison. I shudder to think what those pills are doing to Mr. Lincoln’s poor stomach.” She took Sherman’s hand and put the other bottle on the palm. “Dr. Cartwright has treated dozens of suffering soldiers with this, and within three days, sir, they were back on their feet, ready to fight for the Union. Paregoric is just a tincture of opium and therefore not as strong or sedating as pure opium. Dr. Cartwright says that the origin of the term ‘paregoric’ comes from the Greek word
paregorkos,
which means ‘soothing.’” She moved closer to him and stared up into his eyes; her expression so appealing, so steadfast, that Sherman swallowed a dose of her medicine without another word. She replaced the stopper for him. He rubbed his left shoulder with his right hand. He looked exhausted. While the commander of the Army of the Tennessee may have been enjoying the luxurious surroundings of the Cherry Mansion, the man actually taking care of that army was here at Pittsburg Landing.