The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (168 page)

Elated by this private assurance from the general-in-chief (and flattered by Lincoln, who told him later that morning, in the course of a boatride down the James: “General Sheridan, when this peculiar war began I thought a cavalryman should be at least six feet four inches high, but I have changed my mind. Five feet four will do in a pinch”) he was alarmed the following afternoon by news that Sherman was expected at City Point that evening. His concern proceeded from
awareness that his fellow Ohioan was not only badly in need of mounted reinforcements, still having only Kilpatrick’s frazzled division on hand at Goldsboro, but was also an accomplished talker, possessed of considerable “zeal and powers of emphasis,” which might well enable him to persuade his friend Grant to revise his plan for keeping Sheridan and all three of his divisions in Virginia. Disturbed by the threat, he got the last of his troopers over the James by nightfall — one month, to the day, since they left Winchester — then boarded a train and set out for headquarters. Breakdowns delayed his arrival till nearly midnight, just as Grant and Sherman were ending the conference that followed their meeting with Lincoln aboard the
River Queen
. So far as he could tell, the interloper had not changed their chief’s mind about the use of cavalry in the pending operation against Lee, if indeed the subject had come up. Still the danger remained, and Sheridan continued to fret about it, even after all three of them had turned in for the night. His alarm increased next morning, March 28, when the red-head came to his room and woke him up, talking earnestly of “how he would come up through the Carolinas and hinting that I could join him.” Sheridan responded so angrily, however, that Sherman dropped the subject and retired.

There was by now little time for argument, even if Sherman had thought it would do any good. He and Grant were scheduled to see Lincoln again this morning, and the President’s concern for the safety of his army in his absence had led him to promise that he would start back for Goldsboro as soon as this second meeting aboard the
Queen
was over; in which connection David Porter, who was there to give advice on naval matters, had volunteered to substitute the converted blockade-runner
Bat
for the sluggish
Russia
, thus assuring the western general a faster voyage down the coast. This time, coming aboard the presidential yacht, Grant remembered to tender his and Sherman’s respects to the First Lady, but when her husband went to her stateroom she sent word that she hoped they would excuse her; she was unwell. Whereupon the four men — Grant and Sherman, Porter and Lincoln — took their seats in the saloon, and the high-level conference began.

It was not, properly speaking, a council of war; “Grant never held one in his life,” a staffer was to note; but it did begin with a discussion of the military situation here and in North Carolina. In regard to the former, Grant explained that Sheridan’s horsemen had crossed the James in preparation for a strike at Lee’s rail supply lines, which, if successful, would leave the old fox no choice except to surrender or (as he had done on a lesser scale three days ago at Fort Stedman, no doubt to his regret) come out and fight: unless, that is, he managed to slip away beforehand, in which case Meade and Ord would be close on his heels in pursuit. As for the danger to Sherman, in the event that Lee made it south to combine with Johnston, the red-head assured Lincoln that
his army at Goldsboro was strong enough to hold its own against both rebel forces, “provided Grant could come up within a day or so.” As for a matching attempt by Johnston to give him the slip, either on foot or by rail, he saw little chance of that; “I have him where he cannot move without breaking up his army, which, once disbanded, can never be got together.”

Tactically, the Commander in Chief was satisfied that victory was at last within reach. But it seemed to him, from what had just been pointed out, that all this squeezing and maneuvering was leading to a high-loss confrontation, an Armageddon that would serve no purpose on either side except to set the seal on a foregone conclusion. “Must more blood be shed?” he asked. “Cannot this last bloody battle be avoided?” Both generals thought not. In any case, that was up to the enemy; Lee being Lee, there was likely to be “one more desperate and bloody battle.” Lincoln groaned. “My God, my God,” he said. “Can’t you spare more effusions of blood? We have had so much of it.”

In the pause that followed — for they had no answer, except to repeat that the choice was not with them — Sherman observed again, as he had done the night before, the effect four years of war had had on the leader charged with its conduct all that time. “When in lively conversation, his face brightened wonderfully, but if the conversation flagged his face assumed a sad and sorrowful expression.” Presuming somewhat on his feeling of sympathy, and wanting to be prepared for what was coming, he then “inquired of the President if he was all ready for the end of the war” and, more specifically, “What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated?” That was the question, as he recalled it a decade later, when he also set down Lincoln’s answer. “He said he was all ready; all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.” Warming to the subject, Lincoln went on to expand it. He was also ready, he declared, “for the civil reorganization of affairs in the South as soon as the war was over.” In this connection, the general would remember, “he distinctly authorized me to assure Governor Vance and the people of North Carolina that, as soon as the rebel armies laid down their arms, and resumed their civil pursuits, they would at once be guaranteed all their rights as citizens of a common country,” and he added that in order to avoid anarchy in the region, “the state governments then in existence, with their civil functionaries, would be recognized by him as the government
de facto
till Congress could provide others.”

Sherman, “more than ever impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy with the afflictions of the whole people, resulting from the war and the march of hostile armies through the South,” perceived (or gathered) from these remarks, uttered offhand and in private, that Lincoln’s “earnest desire seemed to be to end the war
speedily, without more bloodshed or devastation, and to restore all the men of both sections to their homes.”
All
, he said; but did he mean it? Did that apply to the fire-eaters who had engineered secession; to the stalwarts, in and out of uniform, who sustained the rebellion after the fire-eaters fell by the wayside? Coming down to the most extreme example, Sherman wanted to know: Did the hope for such restoration apply to Jefferson Davis?

Now it was Lincoln’s turn to pause, though not for long. As Chief Executive, the possible reviewing authority for any future legal action taken in the matter, he was “hardly at liberty to speak his mind fully,” he declared, yet he was willing to reply, as he had done so often down the years, with a story. “A man once had taken the total-abstinence pledge. When visiting a friend he was invited to take a drink, but declined, on the score of his pledge; when his friend suggested lemonade, which was accepted. In preparing the lemonade, the friend pointed to the brandy bottle, and said the lemonade would be more palatable if he were to pour in a little brandy; when his guest said, if he could do so ‘unbeknown’ to him, he would not object.” Thus Sherman retold the story, no doubt tightening it up a bit in the transcription, from which he inferred that the northern President hoped his southern counterpart would “escape, ‘unbeknown’ to him” — clear out, leave the country — “only it would not do for him to say so openly.”

By then it was close to leaving time; Barnes had steam up on the
Bat
, waiting for Sherman to come aboard, and Lincoln was no less anxious for him to get started down the coast, where he could look to the security of his army and prepare for the movement scheduled to begin on April 10, first on Raleigh to dispose of Johnston, then north across the Virginia line to Burkeville, chosen as his objective because it was there that the Southside and Danville railroads crossed, fifty miles west of Petersburg; which meant that, once he reached that point, he would not only have cut Lee’s two remaining all-weather supply lines — if, indeed, they survived till then — but would also be in position to intercept him if he retreated in that direction. Before he left, however, he and Grant and the President took a walk along the river bank, glad of a chance to stretch their legs after confinement in cramped quarters on the
Queen
for the past three hours. A reporter saw and described them as they strolled. “Lincoln, tall, round-shouldered, loose-jointed, large-featured, deep-eyed, with a smile upon his face, is dressed in black and wears a fashionable silk hat. Grant is at Lincoln’s right, shorter, stouter, more compact; wears a military hat with a stiff, broad brim, has his hands in his pantaloon pockets, and is puffing away at a cigar. Sherman, tall, with a high, commanding forehead, is almost as loosely built as Lincoln; has sandy whiskers, closely cropped, and sharp, twinkling eyes, long arms and legs, shabby coat, slouched hat, his pantaloons tucked into his boots.” As usual, the red-head did most of the talking —“gesticulating
now to Lincoln, now to Grant,” the newsman noted, “his eyes wandering everywhere” — but at one point the President broke in to ask: “Sherman, do you know why I took a shine to Grant and you?”

“I don’t know, Mr Lincoln,” he replied. “You have been extremely kind to me, far more than my deserts.”

“Well, you never found fault with me,” Lincoln said.

This was not true. Sherman had found a good deal of fault with the President over the past four years, beginning with the day he heard him say, almost blithely, “Oh, well, I guess we’ll manage to keep house.” But it was true from this day forward. For one thing, Lincoln had in fact managed to “keep house,” though sometimes only by the hardest, and for another, now that Sherman knew him he admired him, perhaps beyond all the men he had ever known. Again at the wharf, he boarded the
Bat
and set out down the James. Afterwards, looking back, he said of Lincoln, who had walked him to the gangplank: “I never saw him again. Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”

3

Grant began his close-out sidle in earnest the following day. Ord’s four divisions, after crossing the James in the wake of Sheridan’s troopers, had replaced the six under Humphreys and Warren at the far end of the line the night before, freeing them to move in support of the cavalry strike around Lee’s right, and Grant was leapfrogging his headquarters twenty miles southwest down the Vaughan Road, beyond the western limit of his intrenchments at Hatcher’s Run, so he could watch the progress of events and make, first hand, such last-minute adjustments as might be needed in that direction. After breakfast, around 8.30, while he and his staff waited beside the tracks at City Point for their horses and gear to be loaded onto boxcars, Lincoln joined them and stood talking with the general for a time. Finally, after handshakes with the President all round — including one for Robert, about to take the field in his first campaign — Grant and his military family got aboard the cars. As the engine began to strain they raised their hats in salute to Lincoln, who lifted his in turn to them, and the train chuffed off, south then west, behind the long slow curve of trenches the army had dug in the course of the past nine months of stalemate here in front of Petersburg, a type of warfare the present shift had been designed to end.

In Richmond, that same March 29, Brigadier General Josiah Gorgas received at his office in the Ordnance Department, which he headed, a hastily written note signed Jefferson Davis. “Will you do me the favor to have some cartridges prepared for a small Colt pistol, of which
I send the moulds?” Gorgas, a Pennsylvania-born West Pointer who had married south — and who, starting with next to nothing in the way of machinery, skilled labor, raw materials, or the means of producing them, in the past four years had turned out seventy million rounds of small-arms ammunition, along with so much else, including weapons, that no Confederate army, whatever it suffered from being deprived of food and clothing, ever lost a battle for lack of ordnance equipment or supplies — filled the requisition overnight. The cartridges were not for Davis himself, but for his wife. He gave her the pistol and showed her how to load, aim, and fire it, saying: “You can at least, if reduced to the last extremity, force your assailants to kill you.”