Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (3 page)

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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction

BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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An excellent rider, Julia had a spirited Kentucky mare. According to Emma, “Lieutenant Grant was one of the best horsemen I ever saw, and he rode a fine blooded animal … Many a sharp race they used to have in the fine mornings before breakfast or through the sunset and twilight after supper.”
White-haired Colonel Dent—a courtesy title by which many men of his station in life were then known in the South, regardless of military experience—could be a peevish man, given to sitting by himself on the porch reading a newspaper and puffing on a long reed-stemmed pipe, but he, like his wife, believed in having many young guests. Grant was encouraged to bring his brother officers with him. There were picnics and dances around the countryside; one of the young officers always included was a handsome giant named James Longstreet, a cousin of Colonel Dent’s who had been known at West Point as Pete.
When Julia’s pet canary died, Grant organized a funeral for the bird. Julia remembered that “he was kind enough to make a little coffin for my canary bird and he painted it yellow. About eight officers attended the funeral of my little pet.”
It seemed not to occur to this young couple that they were falling in love. At a time when Grant was home on leave visiting his family in Ohio, his regiment was ordered to Louisiana to become part of the Army of Observation during the annexation of Texas, in the confrontation that would lead to the Mexican War. An officer friend told Julia that if Grant did not appear at White Haven by the following Saturday, it would mean that he had gone straight on down the Mississippi from Ohio to catch up to his regiment and “would not be at the Barracks again.” Julia later wrote: “Saturday came and no Lieutenant. I felt very restless and, ordering my horse, rode alone towards the Barracks … I halted my horse and waited and listened, but he did not come. The beating of my own heart was the only sound I heard. So I rode slowly and sadly home.”
Grant was in fact hastening toward St. Louis from Ohio, where, on learning that he was about to be sent far from Julia for a long time, he discovered that there was something “serious the matter with me.” When he arrived at Jefferson Barracks, the post was virtually deserted, with his friend Lieutenant Richard Ewell finishing the last of the departed regiment’s paperwork before following the unit down the Mississippi. Ewell readily wrote out a few days’ extension of Grant’s leave, and Grant found a horse and set out for White Haven that evening. Normally the Gravois Creek was shallow, but a placid stream was not what he encountered that night: “On this occasion it had been raining heavily, and when the creek was reached, I found the banks full to overflowing, and the current rapid. I looked at it a moment to consider what to do. One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished … So I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I being carried down by the current.” With Grant hanging on to the horse’s mane as the animal swam through the foaming water in the darkness, both horse and man reached the opposite bank. When he arrived at White Haven, drenched and dripping, little sister Emma was right there, and her memory for such matters later enabled her to render this account of that moment:
We all enjoyed heartily the sight of his ridiculous figure with his clothes flopping like wet rags around his limbs, and none laughed more heartily than my sister Julia. Lieutenant Grant took it all good humoredly enough, but there was a sturdy seriousness in his usually twinkling eyes that must have suggested, perhaps, to Julia that he had come on more serious business, for the teasing did not last long. [Older brother] John carried him off to find some dry clothes, and when he returned the usually natty soldier looked scarcely more like himself … John was taller and larger than Grant, and his clothes did not fit the Lieutenant “soonenough.”Of course, this roused more laughter, which the soldier took in the same good part, but those rosy telltale cheeks of his reddened, as usual with him when the inward state of his feelings did not agree with his outward composure.
 
Grant held his fire until a day soon thereafter when several of the Dents set off to attend a friend’s wedding, with Grant included in the group. He arranged matters so that he and Julia were alone in a buggy, with him at the reins. As they approached a little wooden bridge across the still-turbulent Gravois, which had a torrent of water roaring just beneath the wooden planks, Julia began to worry about the safety of crossing.
I noticed, too, that Lieutenant Grant was very quiet, and that and the high water bothered me … He assured me, in his brief way, that it was perfectly safe, and in my heart I relied upon him. Just as we reached the old bridge I said, “Now, if anything happens, remember I shall cling to you, no matter what you say to the contrary.” He simply said “All right” and we were over the planks in less than a minute. Then his mood changed.
 
As Julia put it, he used her statement about clinging to him to ask her to cling to him forever. Grant’s only recorded comment on his proposal was, “Before I returned I mustered up the courage to make known, in the most awkward manner imaginable, the discovery I had made on learning that the 4th infantry had been ordered away from Jefferson Barracks … Before separating it was definitely understood that at a convenient time we would join our fortunes, and not let the removal of a regiment trouble us.” Julia told her “Ulys,” as she had taken to calling him, not to ask her father for her hand in marriage just then; she was his, but she did not want an engagement to be announced.
 
During the next four years, the couple saw each other only once, when he returned from Louisiana on a brief leave before his regiment was sent into the Mexican War. On that visit, he received Colonel Dent’s permission to marry his daughter, despite the colonel’s dislike of what he knew of the conditions that army wives often encountered. From Mexico, Grant sent Julia letters that expressed great longing for her. Telling her of the American victory at Matamoros early in the war, he wrote, “In the thickest of it I thought of Julia. How much I should love to see you.” His short, clear descriptions of the battles in which he fought mentioned little of his own part in them. In fact, young Lieutenant Grant participated in most of the major engagements. At the Battle of Monterrey, as his regiment advanced through city streets in house-to-house fighting, Grant’s commander realized that his men were running out of ammunition. Someone had to ride back through streets swept from one side by enemy fire with the order that more ammunition be brought forward immediately. Believing that whoever tried to carry this message would probably be killed, the colonel asked for a volunteer. Grant swung up on a gray mare named Nellie and put his arm around the horse’s neck and a foot over the hind part of the saddle. Then, hanging down along the side of the horse away from the enemy, he galloped back through the street crossings, which, he said, “I crossed at such a flying rate that generally I was past and under the cover of the next block before the enemy fired.”
Serving at times as regimental quartermaster, a position calling for attention to supplies and transportation at the rear of the fighting, Grant did all that in superior fashion and still repeatedly fought at the front. He was to say, “I never went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm … was always glad when a battle was over,” but his friend Longstreet saw a different picture: “You could not keep him out of battle … Grant was everywhere on the field. He was always cool, swift, and unhurried … as unconcerned, apparently, as if it were a hail-storm instead of a storm of bullets.” Among the officers in the thick of the fighting was Julia’s brother Fred, Grant’s West Point roommate. At Molino del Rey, Grant came upon Fred, who was in another regiment, minutes after his future brother-in-law was wounded in the thigh by a musket ball. He was soon able to write Julia that Fred would recover quickly.
On the day before General Winfield Scott’s victorious entry into Mexico City, Grant distinguished himself in the attacks made along the aqueduct road leading toward the complex of buildings and defenses on the city’s outskirts known as the Garita [city gate] San Cosme. He repeatedly took different kinds of initiatives. Grant moved forward on his own, actually working his way around an enemy breastworks until he was behind the Mexicans who were firing at the Americans. Returning to the American lines, he asked for volunteers and got twelve men. Grant led them, and an American company he came upon that was just entering the battle, back around to the side of the enemy position, attacked the Mexicans on their unprotected flank, and forced a retreat. When the numerically superior enemy reoccupied the breastworks later in the day, Grant’s Fourth Infantry led the American counterattack that finally won it back: another lieutenant reported that he and Grant were “the first two persons to gain it.”
As if that were not enough for the last afternoon of the war, Grant, scouting on his own again, “found a church off to the south of the road, which looked to me as if the belfry would command the ground back of the Garita San Cosme.” Once again, Grant trusted his instincts: he rounded up an officer in command of a mountain howitzer and its crew, and directed them as they wrestled the small cannon up the steps of the bell tower. When they opened fire on the Mexican soldiers who were behind walls where they thought they could not be seen, “The shots from our little gun dropped in upon the enemy and created great confusion.”
The commander of this wing of the American attack, Brigadier General William Worth, was studying the enemy position through a spyglass. This sudden successful development surprised him as much as it did the Mexicans. He sent his aide Lieutenant John C. Pemberton to bring Grant to him. Telling the gunners to keep up the fire, Grant reluctantly left the bell tower and reported to General Worth, who congratulated him, saying that “every shot was effective.” He ordered Grant to take a captain with another mountain howitzer and its crew back with him, and get it up in the tower to double the fire.
“I could not tell the General,” Grant said of that moment in which he combined military obedience and common sense in the middle of a hard-fought battle, “that there was not room enough in the steeple for another gun, because he probably would have looked upon such a statement as a contradiction from a second lieutenant. I took the captain with me, but did not use his gun.”
By nine the next morning, General Scott entered the center of Mexico City and walked into the National Palace accompanied by a group of his officers. After a last uprising and enemy effort to reenter the city that was quelled within twenty-four hours, the fighting in the Mexican War came to an end. Grant wrote Julia that the highly professional American forces had won “astonishing victories,” but added, “dearly have they paid for it! The loss of officers and men is frightful.” Twenty-one officers of the Fourth Infantry Regiment, many of them guests at the merry picnics and dances held near White Haven, and some who had attended the funeral Grant organized for Julia’s pet canary, had been sent from Jefferson Barracks to Mexico. Seventeen of them died there. In all, 78,718 American soldiers served in the Mexican War; 13,283 died, a higher percentage than in any other conflict in which the United States has been engaged. As for Grant’s view of the war, he later termed it “one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” That was Grant, in essence: he might disagree with his nation’s policy, but he had sworn to carry it out.
So, after varying lengths of time serving in the army of occupation, the men who would have to choose between fighting for the North or South thirteen years later began coming home. There were officers clearly marked for future high command, such as Robert E. Lee, whom Winfield Scott called “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field,” and the two unrelated Johnstons, Joseph E. and Albert Sidney, who would also side with the South. George Gordon Meade, Winfield Scott Hancock, and John Sedgwick had gained important experience that they would use in fighting for the Union. Other men received notice: at the climactic moment of the Battle of Chapultepec, Lieutenant George Pickett, the future Confederate general whose division would be slaughtered as part of the doomed Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, pulled down the Mexican flag that had been flying over the bravely defended Military College and hoisted an American flag. In the same battle, an artillery lieutenant from Virginia named Thomas Jonathan Jackson, later known as “Stonewall,” managed to advance his cannon so far up Grasshoppers Hill in the face of intense musket fire that his gunners finally left the gun and hid behind some rocks. The tall young warrior with blazing gray eyes strode back and forth as bullets cracked past him, shouting to his crouching men, “There’s no danger! See, I’m not hit!” In the final house-to-house fighting in Mexico City, Lieutenant George B. McClellan, who early in the Civil War would be the Union Army’s general in chief, saw a Mexican kill an American sergeant; grabbing the sergeant’s musket, McClellan killed the Mexican.
The talk in the army right after the Mexican War was that, of the junior officers, the one destined to rise highest was Don Carlos Buell, followed by George H. Thomas and Braxton Bragg. No one mentioned Ulysses S. Grant, although he had not only learned battlefield tactics during the bloody and demanding campaigns, but, fully as important, had mastered his regiment’s complicated problems of supply and transportation.
 
When at the end of the war Grant returned from Mexico to claim his bride, his face, as Julia’s sister Emma saw it, “was more bronzed from the sun, and he wore his captain’s double-barred shoulder straps with a little more dignity than he had worn the old one[s], perhaps. His shoulders had broadened some, and his body was stouter, and it may be that he had grown a little more reserved in manner.” They were married at the Dents’ house in St. Louis, with Julia’s cousin, Grant’s West Point classmate Lieutenant James Longstreet, acting as best man.

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