Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (80 page)

But the Federal assaults were uncoordinated and cautious, as if unable to believe that they faced little more than an unlocked door. By the time Grant and Meade were able to sort matters out and throw their full weight against Petersburg on the seventeenth, Lee had frantically moved enough divisions down to Petersburg to make resistance too stiff. Both armies began digging in, and Grant reluctantly conceded that the opportunity for a quick capture of Petersburg and Richmond had been lost.
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Grant continued to experiment with ways of breaking the impasse at Petersburg, but none of them really worked. On July 30, with Grant’s blessing, a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners exploded an immense mine under the center of the Confederate entrenchments. The mine blew what a staff officer, William H. Powell, described as “an enormous hole in the ground about 30 feet deep, 60 feet wide and 170 feet long, filled with dust, great blocks of clay, guns, broken carriages, projecting timbers, and men buried in various ways—some to their necks, others to their waists, and some with only their feet and legs protruding from the earth.” The plan had been for a division of black Federal soldiers to rush into the crater created by the mine, peel back the twisted ends of the Confederate line, and allow the rest of the Army of the Potomac to pour through the gap toward Petersburg. At the last minute, however, the black division was replaced with a white division that had no training or preparation for the assault, and when the new division rushed into the crater, no one had any clear idea what to do next. The stunned Confederates rallied, sealed off the crater, and, after stubborn but disorganized Federal resistance, managed to recapture the crater and most of the Federal soldiers in it. The battle of the Crater became simply one more in the long string of the Army of the Potomac’s missed chances, and Grant admitted to Halleck, “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. … I am constrained to believe that had instructions been promptly obeyed that Petersburg would have been carried with all the artillery and a large number of prisoners without a loss of 300 men.”
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The lack of a dramatic victory, and the prospect of a long and empty siege, fell painfully short of what the country had expected from Grant, and the price for that disappointment was liable to be severe: 1864 was an election year, and if Lincoln had nothing to show for three years of war but Grant besieging Petersburg and Richmond for who knew how long, then it was entirely possible that the North would turn to another president and another solution. But there was still one other voice to be heard from before that decision would be made, and it would belong to a man who was at that moment almost a thousand miles away.

The only piece of Grant’s overall strategic plan in 1864 that actually worked the way he hoped was the move he had outlined from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and the principal reason this part succeeded when so many others miscarried was the simple fact
that he had entrusted it to William Tecumseh Sherman. The war had turned a nodding acquaintance between the two men into one of the most formidable friendships in American history. Part of this mutual admiration grew out of the company misery is supposed to enjoy: the careers of both men before the Civil War had followed much the same dismal course, for in both cases the army proved a poor employer, and a West Point education was a poor preparation for anything but army employment. Sherman veered erratically from the army into banking, then into near destitution when his San Francisco bank failed, and after that into real estate speculation. He arrived at the year 1857 thirty-seven-years old but looking more like a man of sixty, a nervous, fidgety chain smoker with a thin coating of reddish hair and a perpetually scraggly shadow of beard. “I am doomed to be a vagabond,” he wrote. “I look upon myself as a dead cock in the pit, not worthy of future notice.”
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However, in 1859 Sherman successfully applied for the superintendency of the new Louisiana State Military College. There, the transplanted Ohioan spent two of the happiest years of his life, until he gradually came to think of himself as being as much a Louisianan as anything else. He did not particularly like slavery, but he also believed that it was the only condition fit for blacks, and he was perfectly willing to defend Louisiana slavery if necessary, provided that Louisiana did not put herself beyond the pale by attempting to secede from the Union: “I am willing to aid Louisiana in defending herself against her enemies so long as she remains a state in the general confederacy; but should she or any other state act disunion, I am out.”

Disunion and Civil War are synonymous terms. The Mississippi, source and mouth, must be controlled by one government. … Louisiana occupies the mouth of a river whose heads go far north, and does not admit of a “cut off.” Therefore a peaceable disunion which men here think possible is absurd. It would be war eternal until one or the other were conquered. … I always laughed when I heard disunion talked of, but I now begin to fear it may be attempted.
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Disunion was exactly what Louisiana proposed in 1861, and one week before Louisiana adopted its secession ordinance, Sherman resigned from the military college and headed north. After a wait of five months, he was summoned to Washington and commissioned as colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry.
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Sherman’s first round of Civil War service nearly finished him. He commanded a brigade of infantry at First Bull Run, and then was promoted and transferred to
the Department of the Ohio. Unfortunately for Sherman, the department commander resigned, and until the new commander could be appointed and arrive on the scene, Sherman had to assume responsibility for organizing and administering the entire department. The nervous excitement was too great for a man of Sherman’s high-strung temperament—he quarreled with the press, declared that it would require 200,000 reinforcements to subdue the Confederates, and insisted on returning runaway slaves to their owners. Finally, on November 15, Don Carlos Buell showed up to take charge of the Department of the Ohio, and Sherman was moved over to Henry Wager Halleck’s department in St. Louis. Vengeful newspaper reporters circulated stories that Sherman had actually gone insane, and it looked as though his second military career had gone broke even faster than his bank.
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In a rare display of perspicacity, Halleck discounted the newspaper stories, and when Halleck began moving up the Tennessee River in March 1862, he gave Sherman command of a division and sent him to Pittsburg Landing to reinforce Grant. There, on April 6, Sherman’s division, posted around the little Shiloh Baptist Church, was the first in the way of the Confederate wave that rolled over the Grant’s army. To the surprise of his quondam critics back in Ohio, Sherman displayed an unexpectedly cool head in the midst of the Confederate onslaught. The peculiar geography of battle transformed Sherman: he personally rallied shattered regiments, plugged up holes in the Federal lines, and had four horses shot from under him. Under his direction, the right flank of Grant’s army managed to perform the most difficult maneuver in the military textbooks, an orderly retreat under fire. “All around him were excited orderlies and officers,” wrote one observer after Shiloh, “but though his face was besmeared with powder and blood, battle seemed to have cooled his usually hot nerves.” Halleck obtained Sherman’s promotion to major general, and when Grant finally began his great move on Vicksburg at the end of 1862, it was Sherman whom Grant asked Halleck for as a division commander.
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Sherman eventually became as indispensable to Grant as “Stonewall” Jackson had been to Robert E. Lee. And Sherman was as unabashed in his admiration for Grant as any Confederate for Marse Robert: “I believe you are as brave, patriotic and just as the great prototype, Washington—as unselfish, kind-hearted, and honest as a man should be—but the chief characteristic is the simple faith in success you have always
manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in the Saviour.” Like Grant, Sherman made a deep and favorable impression on Charles Dana. “On the whole, General Sherman has a very small and very efficient staff; but the efficiency comes mainly from him,” Dana wrote to his chief, Secretary of War Stanton, in July 1863. “What a splendid soldier he is!”
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When Grant went east at the end of 1863 to supervise operations in the Virginia theater, there was no question but that Sherman would take command in the west and conduct the operations Grant had planned against Atlanta. He shared Grant’s notion of the primary importance of the western theater. “From the West, when our task is done,” Sherman prophesied, “we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond, and the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.” Gone was the paranoid behavior Sherman had manifested in Kentucky. Under Grant’s tutelage, he had developed into an energetic field commander, capable of quick decisions and even quicker movement. Instead of waging war by the defensive book, carefully preserving Southern property as the armies tiptoed past it, Sherman now began to talk about bringing it all crashing to the earth, about putting the thumbscrews to the South. In September 1863, he urged Halleck and Lincoln to turn the war into a campaign of desolation, since desolation was the only language the Confederates would understand.

I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that a nation has the right, and also the physical power to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it—that we will do it in our time and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be one year or two, or ten or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land… that we will not cease till the end is attained. … I would not coax them or even meet them half way but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it. … The people of this country have forfeited all right to a voice in the councils of the nation. They know it and feel it and in after-years they will be better citizens from the dear-bought experience. …
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To a Tennessee woman who objected to manners so cruel, Sherman replied with a shrug: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
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There was one point on which Sherman had not changed his opinions, and that was the future of the black slaves his soldiers encountered in Tennessee and
Mississippi. “Do you really think we worship Negroes?” Sherman asked sarcastically when a Southerner pressed him about the future of the slaves. He bowed to the Emancipation Proclamation as a military necessity, but he consistently declined to use black Union soldiers in combat (though later he conceded to assigning them garrison duties), and he publicly doubted whether freed slaves could be “manufactured into voters, equal to all others, politically and socially.”
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Notions such as that had destroyed the career of many an officer in the Army of the Potomac. But the eastern army was Lincoln’s and Stanton’s, an army so close to the politicians that it could hardly help but endure close political scrutiny. The western armies were something else: their uniforms were sloppier, their drill was slouchier, and their overall opinion of themselves was boundlessly higher. Away over the Appalachians, Sherman’s politics were less noticeable, and less of a liability so long as Grant continued to sponsor him and Sherman kept on winning battles. The time would come when politics would catch up with Sherman, and then they would nearly destroy him.
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For now, it was the soldiers in Chattanooga who were Sherman’s chief concern. The force that Grant left Sherman was something of a hodgepodge. The heart of it was George H. Thomas’s 61,000-man Army of the Cumberland (comprising the 14th and 20th Corps). Beside them were two smaller commands Grant had amalgamated for Sherman, the old 24,000-man Army of the Tennessee (comprising the 15th Corps and units of the 16th and 17th Corps) under a marvelous young engineer named James B. McPherson, and the 13,500 men of the Army of the Ohio under John M. Schofield (4th and 23rd Corps). Together with his cavalry, Sherman had more than 98,000 men at his disposal, along with 254 guns in his artillery train, and at the beginning of May (just as Grant was crossing his wagons over the Rapidan and into the Wilderness), he moved out of Chattanooga, pointed like a dagger at Atlanta.
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Opposing him was what was left of the beaten and demoralized Confederate Army of Tennessee. The disaster at Missionary Ridge ought to have spelled the end for this luckless army, had not the individual corps commanders taken over and managed to patch the army back together in northern Georgia. At least Braxton Bragg was gone now, and in his place Jefferson Davis appointed the onetime victor of First Bull Run, General Joseph E. Johnston. Douglas Cater of the
19th Louisiana glowingly described Johnston as “possessed of a magnetism which held such sway over his army that there was a feeling of security pervading every part of it.” Cater found that “the faith our soldiers had in their commander” was so great that “they feared no surprise nor wrong movement.”
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Unfortunately for Johnston, that admiration was not shared by Jefferson Davis, who appointed Johnston to general command in the West in 1863 and watched Johnston allow Vicksburg to fall into Grant’s hands with but little interference. That was not the kind of security the Confederacy could afford, and not until Braxton Bragg had nearly destroyed the Army of Tennessee would Davis relent and put it directly under Johnston’s direction.

Johnston arrived at the army’s winter encampments around Dalton, Georgia, on December 27, 1863, and what he found there was not encouraging. The Army of Tennessee had 70,000 men on its rolls, but only 36,000 actually present for duty, and a critical shortage of horses hobbled the cavalry, artillery, and wagons. By the end of April, however, Johnston had successfully reorganized the army, called in furloughs, distributed amnesties to deserters, and scraped together enough reinforcements to swell the Army of Tennessee back up to 53,000 men, with calls out for another 14,000 from Georgia’s coastal garrisons and local militia. This still gave Sherman a three-to-two edge over Johnston, and so Johnston decided that the best campaign would be a defensive one, using the mountains, ridges, streams, and gaps of northern Georgia to stymie Sherman’s advance at every step and forcing him to waste time and thin out his supply line. It escaped Johnston’s notice that this was a formula largely designed to lose, even if the loss was a slow one.
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