The Man Who Saved the Union (26 page)

Grant did agree with Halleck on the importance of a unified command. “
After the fall of Fort Donelson the way was opened to the National forces all over the Southwest without much resistance,” he wrote later. “If one general who would have taken the responsibility had been in command of all the troops west of the Alleghenies, he could have marched to Chattanooga, Corinth, Memphis and Vicksburg with the troops we then had, and as volunteering was going on rapidly over the North there would soon have been force enough at all these centers to operate offensively against any body of the enemy that might be found near them.”

Grant could envision himself, after Fort Donelson, as that general. “
‘Secesh’ is now about on its last legs in Tennessee,” he wrote Julia. “I want to push on as rapidly as possible to save hard fighting. These terrible battles are very good things to read about for persons who lose no friends, but I am decidedly in favor of having as little of it as possible. The way to avoid it is to push forward as vigorously as possible.”

He assumed Halleck concurred. “
General Halleck is clearly the same way of thinking,” Grant told Julia. Halleck, moreover, recommended Grant for promotion to major general, which the president duly confirmed.

But Halleck thought Grant took excessive risks. “
Don’t be rash,” he had cautioned Grant the day before Donelson fell. “Having the place completely invested, you can afford to have a little patience.” After the victory he didn’t want Grant to get too much credit. His perfunctory congratulation of Grant was pallid next to his praise for Charles Smith, Grant’s subordinate. “
Smith, by his coolness and bravery at Fort Donelson when the battle was against us, turned the tide and carried the enemy’s outworks,” he wrote McClellan. “Make him a major-general. You can’t get a better one. Honor him for this victory and the whole country will applaud.”

The limits of technology didn’t help relations between Grant and Halleck. Grant outran his telegraph line, which connected St. Louis only to Cairo. A second line was being strung from Cairo to Paducah, but the operator at the end of the advancing line neglected to forward certain crucial messages. “
This operator afterwards proved to be a rebel,” Grant
recalled. “He deserted his post after a short time and went south, taking his dispatches with him.” The result was that Halleck thought Grant was ignoring him. “
Why do you not obey my orders to report strength and positions of your command?” he wrote Grant in early March.

H
alleck’s question was accompanied by a shocking order. “You will place Major General C. F. Smith in command of expedition, and remain yourself at
Fort Henry,” Halleck said. There was a second part to the shock. The capture of
Fort Donelson had prompted the Confederates to fall back from the Cumberland, leaving Nashville defenseless. Grant ventured to the Tennessee capital to investigate, only to receive another reprimand on his return to Fort Henry. “
Your going to Nashville without authority, and when your presence with your troops was of the utmost importance, was a matter of very serious concern at Washington,” Halleck wrote. “So much so that I was advised to arrest you on your return.”

Grant was stunned. From being a hero he now found himself subject to arrest. His first reaction was to defend himself against Halleck’s charges. “
I am not aware of ever having disobeyed any order from Head Quarters, certainly never intended such a thing,” he wrote Halleck. “I have reported almost daily the condition of my command and reported every position occupied.… My reports have nearly all been made to
General Cullum, Chief of Staff, and it may be that many of them were not thought of sufficient importance to forward more than a telegraphic synopsis of.”

But the longer he thought things over, the less he believed he should
have
to explain himself. “
I am in a very poor humor for writing,” he wrote Julia. “I was ordered to command a very important expedition up the Tennessee River, and now an order comes directing one of my juniors to take the command whilst I am left behind here with a small garrison. It may be all right, but I don’t now see it.”

To Halleck he grew more defensive. “
I have done my very best to obey orders, and to carry out the interests of the service,” he wrote. “If my course is not satisfactory, remove me at once. I do not wish to impede in any way the success of our arms. I have averaged writing more than once a day since leaving Cairo, to keep you informed of my position; and it is no fault of mine if you have not received my letters. My going to Nashville was strictly intended for the good of the service, and not to gratify any desire of my own. Believing sincerely that I must have
enemies between you and myself who are trying to impair my usefulness, I respectfully ask to be relieved from further duty in the Department.”

Halleck realized he had gone too far. He couldn’t afford to lose the country’s new hero. “
You are mistaken,” he wrote back. “There is no enemy between you and me.” He nonetheless reiterated his earlier complaint. “There is no letter of yours stating the number and position of your command since the capture of Fort Donelson.”

Grant supplied the information in great detail. Yet he too held his ground. “
I renew my application to be relieved from further duty.”

Halleck recognized that Grant had outmaneuvered him. The press would have his head, and Lincoln too, most likely, if Grant were let go. “
You cannot be relieved from your command,” he wrote Grant on March 13. “There is no good reason for it.” He completed the surrender by dispatching fresh troops. “I wish you as soon as your new army is in the field to assume the immediate command and lead it on to new victories.”

24

W
ILLIAM
S
HERMAN WATCHED
G
RANT DURING THE CAMPAIGN FOR
Donelson and offered what encouragement he could from the banks of the Ohio. “
I should like to hear from you, and will do everything in my power to hurry forward to you reinforcements and supplies, and if I could be of service myself would gladly come, without making any question of rank,”
Sherman wrote.

He was senior to Grant at this point, but he had particular cause for eschewing rank. He hadn’t sought advancement to command, indeed had shunned it from the start of the war. Yet his obvious talent prompted his superiors to put him at the right hand of commanders, and when
Robert Anderson, who had found his way from
Fort Sumter to his native
Kentucky, pleaded failing nerves as reason for resigning command of the central front of the war, Sherman reluctantly took his place.

Events and Sherman’s own missteps soon reinforced his reluctance. His strategist’s eye informed him that Kentucky was peculiarly vulnerable, and he said as much to Simon Cameron when the secretary of war passed through Louisville. Cameron was traveling with a sizable entourage, and Sherman hesitated to be candid in front of so many strangers. Cameron reassured him. “
They are all friends, all members of my family,” Cameron said. “You may speak your mind freely and without restraint.” Sherman nonetheless locked the door of the meeting room before turning to the matter at hand.

“I remember taking a large map of the United States,” he wrote later, “and assuming the people of the whole South to be in rebellion, and that our task was to subdue them, showed that McClellan was on the left, having a frontage of less than a hundred miles, Fremont the right, about
the same; whereas I, the center, had from the Big Sandy to Paducah, over three hundred miles of frontier; that McClellan had a hundred thousand men, Fremont sixty thousand, whereas to me had only been allotted about eighteen thousand.” Sherman asserted that for defense he should have sixty thousand troops immediately. For offense—for subduing the South and crushing the rebellion—two hundred thousand troops would ultimately be necessary.

Cameron was propped up on a bed, resting from the travel. Sherman’s comments knocked him flat. “Great God!” he said, gradually rising again. “Where are they to come from?”

Sherman responded that there were plenty of men in the North if the government would pay to enlist and equip them. But that was the government’s job, not his. “We discussed all these matters fully,” Sherman remembered. “And I thought I had aroused Mr. Cameron to a realization of the great war that was before us, and was in fact upon us. I heard him tell General Thomas to make a note of our conversation, that he might attend to my requests on reaching Washington.”

Cameron did attend to Sherman’s requests, arranging for additional men and arms to be sent to Kentucky. But he also registered his concern that Sherman appeared agitated and too easily alarmed. In the halls of the War Department—the same halls that still echoed the tales of Grant’s drunkenness—Sherman developed a reputation for instability and defeatism. He fought a losing battle against the reputation. “
I know that others than yourself think I take a gloomy view of affairs without cause,” he wrote his brother John. “I hope to God ’tis so. All I know is the fact that all over Kentucky the people are allied by birth, interest, and preference to the South.” The arms he had requested were slow in arriving. “Troops come from Wisconsin and Minnesota without arms and receive such as we have here for the first time, and I cannot but look upon it as absolutely sacrificing them.… Some terrible disaster is inevitable.”

Sherman was satisfied to be replaced by
Don Carlos Buell, but he carried his forebodings to Missouri, where he frightened his fellow officers. Henry Halleck got unsettling reports from the field, which he relayed to Washington. “
General Sherman was completely ‘stampeded’ and was ‘stampeding’ the army,” Halleck wrote McClellan. He summoned Sherman to St. Louis and made a personal determination. “General Sherman’s physical and mental system is so completely broken by labor and care as to render him for the present entirely unfit for duty,” Halleck recorded. “Perhaps a few weeks rest may restore him. I am satisfied that
in his present condition it would be dangerous to give him a command.” Halleck sent Sherman home to Ohio for twenty days to gather his wits.

The leave started badly. A journalist Sherman had jailed in Kentucky for snooping where he wasn’t authorized wrote an article calling Sherman “
insane.” Sherman bitterly bemoaned his fate to Halleck. “
These newspapers have us in their power, and can destroy us as they please,” he wrote. Halleck tried to reassure him. “
The newspaper attacks are certainly shameless and scandalous,” Halleck said, “but I cannot agree with you that they have us in their power ‘to destroy us as they please.’ ”

The time off did its work, though, calming Sherman and, more importantly, persuading him to keep his worries to himself. When he returned to St. Louis he received a temporary assignment drilling new enlistees; after two months of good service, he was given renewed command responsibilities. “
As evidence that I have every confidence in General Sherman,” Halleck wrote, “I have placed him in command of Western Kentucky—a command only second in importance in this department. As soon as divisions and columns can be organized, I propose to send him into the field where he can render most efficient service.”

A
lbert Sidney Johnston had his own problems with the press. Grant’s victories at Forts Henry and
Donelson had compelled the Confederate commander to pull his armies south in what looked to much of the Confederacy like an ignominious retreat. Yielding Nashville without a fight appeared to the generals of the fourth estate an act of cowardice, perhaps treachery. Tennesseans especially complained that they were being abandoned. The Tennessee delegation in the Confederate congress visited
Jefferson Davis to demand a change of leadership in the West. The Confederate president knew Johnston, a distinguished officer in the United States Army during the period when Davis had been secretary of war, and considered him to be “
one of the noblest men with whom I had ever been associated, and one of the ablest soldiers I had ever seen in the field.” Yet the Tennesseans had grounds for their fears, and Davis heard them out. “I paused under conflicting emotions,” he remembered, “and after a time merely answered, ‘If Sidney Johnston is not a general, the Confederacy has none to give you.’ ”

Shortly, though, Davis wrote to Johnston. “
We have suffered great anxiety because of recent events in Kentucky and Tennessee, and I have been not a little disturbed by the repetition of reflections upon yourself,”
he said. “I made for you such defense as friendship prompted and many years of acquaintance justified, but I needed facts to rebut the wholesale assertions made against you to cover others and to condemn my administration. The public, as you are aware, have no correct measure for military operations, and the journals are very reckless in their statements.” Davis, as a former war secretary, claimed a certain strategic expertise, and now he offered a recommendation. “The audacity which the enemy exhibits would no doubt give you the opportunity to cut some of his lines of communication, to break up his plan of campaign, and, defeating some of his columns, to drive him from the soil as well of Tennessee as of Kentucky.”

Johnston was a proud man and had already been stung by the public criticism; the letter from Davis was another lash. “
The test of merit in my profession, with the people, is success,” he acknowledged in reply. “It is a hard rule, but I think it right.” He said he was already at work on a plan that would make good use of P. G. T. Beauregard. “If I join this corps to the forces of Beauregard (I confess a hazardous experiment), then those who are now declaiming against me will be without an argument.”

J
ohnston’s hazardous experiment unfolded around a log meetinghouse called Shiloh near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River just above Tennessee’s border with northeastern Mississippi. Grant was aiming to capture the town of Corinth, Mississippi, a junction of two critical rail lines, one tying Tennessee to the cotton states farther south and the other connecting the Atlantic seaboard to Memphis and the Mississippi. “
If we obtained possession of Corinth the enemy would have no railroad for the transportation of armies or supplies until that running east from Vicksburg was reached,” Grant recalled. “It was the great strategic position at the West between the Tennessee and the Mississippi rivers and between Nashville and Vicksburg.”