The Better Angels of Our Nature (15 page)

“How is it that I am getting through so much paper and stamps these days? And where are my pencils? Do you still write letters for the men in the hospital?”

Jesse’s answering expression was a touching, if somewhat confusing, mix of innocence and guilt, admission and denial.

“Never mind,” Sherman said.

The girl lit his cigar, cupping the flame in her small hands as he sucked.

“I like the way you do everything without a fuss. I’d hardly know you were around, yet you are at my elbow whenever I need you.”

Jesse grinned her delight at such a compliment.

He puffed his cigar; he was in philosophical mood. “Don’t marry too young, my boy, see the world. A man must accept that the condition of matrimony is a natural, if often constraining, state, but he doesn’t have to jump right in. If I hadn’t been married I would have remained in California, roamed the country like a vagabond, only my horse for companionship, slept under the stars, with saddle and blanket, but I had responsibilities, as you no doubt will have one day.” He looked at her, suddenly narrowing his eyes and suspicious. “Why would you insinuate yourself into my camp and want to serve me, I wonder? I hope you’re not expecting any kind of reward?”

Jesse called on every ounce of indignation she could muster. “Captains Van Allen and Jackson take care of you, sir, and Private Holliday, you said yourself he rides at your side, carbine at the ready, to protect you. Would you ask that question of those gentlemen? We serve you merely for the
honor
itself, sir.”

The Ohioan’s steady gaze held her earnest one. There was no hint of obsequiousness about this soldier’s manner or tone, none of the lickspittle toadying often encountered in the flunkies who gravitated toward the high-ranking officers, hoping for a crumb off the table. Some commanders, McClellan came readily to mind, could not have existed without their ever-expanding entourage, which now included half the nation’s newspaper scribblers. “My officers and staff
all
do their duty, Corporal,” he said finally, and changed the subject. “I have written my brother Senator Sherman about recommending you to the United States Military Academy.” He tapped the letter book on his desk with the two fingers that held his cigar. He read aloud from his letter. “‘This boy is bright, handsome, and energetic as a thoroughbred colt. He is transparently honest, reliable, and faithful, exhibiting an unselfish and noble charity toward his fellow soldiers and a courage that is by no means reckless of others. He is correct in his habits, and can carry out an errand promptly and without fuss. He is every inch a real boy, no hint of the crybaby or complainer about him. I’ll warrant this boy has in him the elements of the man and I commend him to the Government as one worthy of the fostering care of one of its most treasured National Institutes—the United States Military Academy at West Point. I know he will grow into a fine young man, and make me proud to have been the instrument of his advancement.’ Well, what do you say to that?”

Jesse didn’t say anything, because Sherman was still talking, which was fortunate since she would not have been able to think of anything to say.

“Well, I expect you’re eager to discover this world of knowledge and instruction, but you’ll have to suppress your natural excitement, soldier, for your application could take months to process. In the meantime, do your duty. I’m sure you will find plenty to occupy you here with me. That’s all.”

7

“What is grand strategy?”

It was already suppertime on Saturday evening, April 5, when Sherman and Lieutenant Colonel James McPherson returned to the division commander’s headquarters in a torrential rainstorm. The two Ohioans had been on a reconnaissance to Second Brigade, camped over a mile and a half away from the rest of the division, as they covered the Hamburg-Savannah Road, the first of the two most important approaches to Pittsburg Landing from the south.

With sweat running down his strained face and still wearing his dripping oilskin, Sherman went to meet an aide from General W. H. L. Wallace, waiting to see him with a report from his chief. Eager to get back to his own camps he refused the offer of a hot drink and there in the pouring rain told Sherman that he had been on the picket line that afternoon and had seen squads of enemy cavalry both in front of Prentiss’s division and farther to the right, in Sherman’s own front. The Ohioan listened intently, the stub of a well-chewed cigar jammed into the left-hand corner of his mouth, bone weary, gaunt-eyed and grim, as befitted a man who had been in the saddle for nearly six hours. Hearing him out Sherman readily agreed there was more than the usual enemy activity, though after scouting the east bank with his usual thoroughness, incredibly, he personally had seen none of it.

“Yes, yes, it’s true, they have been up on the right, three times, and fired on McDowell. But what does General Wallace want me to do, sir,” he said suddenly, tearing the cigar stub from his mouth and tossing it away. “My hands are tied. Buell and the rest of the Army of the Ohio should have been here ten days ago. Where is Buell? Thank General Wallace for the information, Captain Rumsey, but tell him, sir, I have positive orders from Grant to do nothing that will have a tendency to bring on a ‘general engagement’ until Buell arrives.”

The aide accepted this information with an anxious frown, saluted, remounted, and rode off.

Turning toward the welcome interior of his tent Sherman suddenly stopped to stare at the small figure standing in the steamy rain-soaked shadows. “What are you doing there?” he demanded.

“Waiting for you, sir.”

To McPherson’s utter astonishment, the commander grabbed a handful of the corporal’s jacket and propelled backward into him. “Damn you, boy, don’t you have the sense of a stray dog to come in out of the rain?” He had removed his battered slouch hat and was wiping his wide damp brow on the sleeve of his frock coat as he spoke. “Get out of your wet things, Mac,” he told his young subordinate.

Both men removed their dripping oilskins to find Jesse holding out towels to them, while she stood there dripping. Sherman used the towel to wipe his face then told McPherson, “To think, I believed this soldier smart enough for the military academy.” He dropped his towel over Jesse’s head.

Her big blue eyes gazed out from under the towel as she grinned at both men.

“Impudent wretch,” Sherman said and gave her one of his well-aimed cuffs about the head. He glanced through the opening at the sheet of rain that was driving into any face unlucky or stupid enough to show itself. He looked at McPherson. “Well, Mac, what do you think, should we toss him out in the rain or give him something useful to do?” He winked at the young engineer.

Jesse poured two glasses of whiskey and gave one each to the officers.

“Ah, just what the doctor ordered,” Sherman said.

“Thank you, Corporal,” McPherson said to Jesse.

“You’re very welcome, sir.”

“The boy is too saucy,” Sherman explained. He touched his glass against McPherson’s. “Your good health, Mac.”

“Yours too, sir, and if I may add, to the end of the rebellion.”

“To the end of the rebellion.” Both men smiled.

Jesse hovered.

“If you’re staying in here, make yourself useful,” Sherman told her. “Roll up those maps over there and don’t let me hear a word out of you.”

It was, McPherson observed, as though the commander was speaking not to a young soldier, but to one of his own children allowed to play in his father’s study. He saw the older man wince slightly as he drank his whiskey and pass a hand over his stomach region.

“Is it still the diarrhea, sir?” he asked with genuine concern.

“I can’t shake the damn thing off,” Sherman confessed.

“Did the surgeon’s remedy of blue mass not help you, sir? I hear Mr. Lincoln takes nothing else for his stomach ailments.”

“That’s
why
he still has them.” A voice spoke up from the corner of the tent, a voice that both men ignored.

“The surgeon says, like thousands of others in this army, I have an organic inflammation and must flush out any poisons with this purgative.” Sherman took the bottle from the table and held it up. “When I complained that the medicine had no effect he said I had to increase the dose. But the cramps have gotten worse and I’m still not in control.” If anything was destined to make William T. Sherman mad as hell, it was not being in control.

“Sir—” Jesse stopped rolling maps, took her haversack off the floor beside her, and brought a small phial from the mysterious depths. “—May I suggest something to help you?” Sherman looked at McPherson and then at the girl as she came toward them. “It’s paregoric—powdered opium, anise oil, camphor, glycerine, and alcohol, and taken by mouth it’ll relieve your cramps in a matter of hours, sir. Dr. Cartwright swears by it.” The girl smiled. “And, more importantly, so do his patients.”

“I have medicine,” Sherman stated, and that, as they say, was that. He turned to McPherson, drank some whiskey, and said, “Sit down, Mac. Kick off your boots, sir, if you feel inclined.”

Jesse returned to the maps. McPherson sat down but kept his boots on and while the commander started to pace, the two men discussed the events of the past week. Among the more general reports from pickets, one said they’d seen Rebel cavalry roaming the area, and there had been a positive sighting of a Rebel brass field gun glinting in the sun southeast of the Widow Howell’s house, not one mile from Shiloh Church. Ten Rebel prisoners taken during a skirmish and kept at the church had been taunting their captors with warnings that they were only one advanced unit of a fearful army that would drive them into the Tennessee.

The following day came and no fearful army appeared to drive them into the river. But overwrought messengers rode in and out of Sherman’s camp from morning ’til night. Colonel Hildebrand had marched his Seventy-seventh Ohio out to investigate why pickets at the Seay House had been driven back by a large number of gray cavalry. Then a party of Rebel horsemen had calmly sat upon their horses and watched the Seventieth Ohio drilling in a field near their camp. Perhaps the same who had rousted Captain Shotwell’s party. Federal riflemen had exchanged brisk fire with a dozen of their opposite number amidst the thistles and cockleburs in Fraley Field and so on.

That very morning, eight pickets on duty at Jack Chamber’s house out on the Corinth Road had gone missing. Colonel Buckland had ordered two companies forward to rescue the pickets. When artillery fire was heard all the way to Sherman’s camp, the Ohioan went himself with a brigade of infantry to investigate. By the time Sherman arrived at the picket line, Buckland’s men were already bringing back their dead and wounded, and finding an angry division commander waiting with a battery and two regiments of infantry drawn up in line of battle. Blue-clad men, muskets glinting in the warm sunshine that had followed hard on the heels of the rain, features set grimly against an enemy that lay beyond the strip of fallen timber, watched over by diligent officers, pistols drawn in anticipation of the order to attack.

Buckland reported he’d met and fought Beauregard’s advance guard. Sherman however had not been pleased. “Damn you, Buckland,” he had shouted, “what
the hell
did you think you were doing? You might have drawn the whole army into a battle before we’re ready.”

When an agitated courier arrived on an overheated, ill-used animal, to report sightings of enemy cavalry at the end of Rhea Field, south of the camp of the Fifty-third Ohio, Sherman really lost his temper. He had told the courier, “Tell your colonel to
take your damn regiment back to Ohio
!”

Whole regiments were spooked, but Sherman refused to be agitated, or perhaps more accurately he refused to show his agitation.

“I think that Beauregard would not be such a fool as to leave his base of operations and attack us in ours, they’re merely reconnaissance in force,” he told McPherson, finally alighting on a chair. “I can’t afford to be panicked by these stories. I’m acting on the supposition that we’re an
invading
army, that our purpose is to move forward in force and repeat the grand tactics of Fort Donelson, by separating the Rebels in the interior from those at Memphis and on the Mississippi River.” Sherman offered his young companion a cigar and then lit it for him.

Unlike Sherman and Grant, McPherson’s attachment to the cigar was not an addiction; he smoked for pleasure, in a social setting, the way he drank. This tall officer in his early thirties was not a conventionally handsome man, but his curly beard, small pleasing features, hair thinning and dark, robust form, bright smile and sunny nature made him popular with everyone. Now he watched with growing amusement as the man whose friendship he had gained five years ago continued his march around the interior of the tent, dropping an inch-long sphere of ash on a vest already soiled and gray.

They had met when both had lodged in the same boardinghouse at 100 Prince Street, New York City. During that difficult, eventful time, William T. Sherman had been a depressed and rudderless man. His wife and father-in-law had forced resignation from the army upon him. Sherman had found employment in a profession wholly unsuited to any man with integrity and moral fiber, that of trying to manage a grossly underfunded bank. In that year of 1857 Sherman’s employers sent him to New York to open yet another branch, a venture that ended in failure. McPherson had been a second lieutenant in the elite corps of engineers, assigned to fortify New York Harbor. Now he was Grant’s chief engineer, and Sherman a brigadier general, and though he was far from rudderless he was still depressed and sick and their beloved nation was now fighting for its life.

“Thank you, sir,” McPherson said, taking the seat that Sherman had belatedly offered him. The commander was neither a rude man nor a neglectful host, just so preoccupied by more weighty matters that he forgot social graces.

Yes, much had happened to both men in the past five years. However, the young Ohioan was gratified to see that the wild-eyed, disheveled figure he had seen pace, smoke, and talk incessantly of every subject under God’s sun, through long nights in the parlor of that boardinghouse, was the very same man he had grown to love and admire. Only now, he was back where he belonged, in the army of the United States. Sherman suddenly looked at his young friend.

“Forgive me, Mac, I should have asked. How is your fiancée?”

“In low spirits, I fear, sir. My friend Lieutenant Elliott wrote that Emily hardly smiles at all. He said Emily told him that all her family in Baltimore are opposed to us marrying, despite my promotion. They are insisting that Emily leave San Francisco and go home while the war lasts, but her sister Sophie wrote their mother that she still needs Emily, in order to keep her there. Elliott blames me for Emily’s present disposition. He says my dispirited letters have a depressing affect on her.” McPherson smiled wanly. “He says that while I pour out my sadness in letters to her, Emily refrains from telling me all that assails her heart. But I am not to mention any word of what he has confided to me.”

“Well, now, Mac, sounds as if I should have Grant send
you
home and request Miss Emily join us in your place? This young lady sounds as true and strong as our bravest soldier.” Sherman slapped the younger man on the back. Poor McPherson, Miss Hoffman’s parents were devout Secessionists. Before states rights had gripped the South they had wholeheartedly approved their daughter’s engagement to a United States officer of so much promise, but now they had cruelly withdrawn it again. “Come along, bear up, be patient, I have no doubt that Miss Emily’s parents will soon come to their senses. In the meantime the staunch young lady flies the flag of affection in her heart for her gallant soldier.”

“Thank you for your reassurance, sir, I shall try to do as you say, bear up and be patient.”

“Splendid,” Sherman said. That aside he now returned to the subject uppermost in his mind. “The talk around the camps has been the same since we embarked here. When General Buell gets here…when General Halleck arrives…the men are as fed up of hearing this as I am. They’re ready to leave at General Grant’s command and can’t understand why we’re still here, still waiting. When men are on the edge this way we jump at the slightest shadows.” Sherman made a noise of disgust. “I’m not sure if the men have infected the officers or the other way around. I do know I’m sick to death of listening to timid officers whose nerves are being worn down by pickets rushing around my camps repeating wild stories of legions of Rebels out there.” He indicated the failing light beyond the canvas wall with his glass. “Every time we search out these ghost legions we find
nothing
or we find small parties of enemy cavalry who flee at our approach. I had enough of these camp rumors at Kentucky, rumors that almost finished my career—finished
me.
” After a few seconds of fingering the buttons on his vest, he was up again, his long, thin legs covering the distance of the tent in an erratic circle, compulsively smoking his cigar. “Tell me, Mac, what do you suppose would happen if I suddenly started to endorse these rumors to Grant or to Halleck? What do you think would happen if the newspaper hounds learned that I could be unnerved by the sight of a few enemy field guns in our front?” He swept his arm up in a gesture of dismissal. “I’ll tell you what would happen,” he said as McPherson opened his mouth to speak. “They’d say old Sherman is scaremongering again like he did in Kentucky—gone in the head again—predicting the demise of the entire Tennessee army—allowing his own fears to get the better of his good sense. No, Mac, damn it all.” He waved the glass in the air. “
Never again.
I permit myself mistakes, but I do not permit myself to make the same mistake twice.”