Shiloh, 1862 (18 page)

Nevertheless, Sherman described himself as “an ultra” on the question of secession. “I believe in coercion [war] and cannot comprehend how any Government can exist unless it defend its integrity.” But the two issues—national integrity and slavery—he wrote, “should be Kept distinct, for otherwise it will gradually become a war of Extermination without End.” So said William Tecumseh Sherman.

As war clouds enveloped Louisiana Sherman one night after dinner delivered himself of a harsh and prophetic sermon to the academy’s French instructor, whom he considered a friend: “You, you people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceful secession. You don’t know what you are doing … The country will be drenched in blood. You mistake the people of the north. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people, and will fight too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … The North can make a steam-engine,
a locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing to war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail!”

Having thus summed up the situation, Sherman had arranged by early February 1861 to extract himself from Louisiana, as the Southern states seceded one after the other. First, however, he wanted to set the affairs of the academy in good order and was in the process of doing so when without warning the governor seized the federal forts and arsenals. For Sherman, the straw that broke the camel’s back came when wagonloads of rifles, “still in their old familiar boxes with U.S. scratched off,” arrived at the school “for safe keeping.” Thus, he wrote indignantly, “I was made the receiver of stolen goods.”

Next day Sherman handed in his resignation and caught a steamboat north to St. Louis, where he accepted the presidency of a mule-drawn streetcar service. When war finally broke out after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 Sherman’s foster father Ewing and his brother John Sherman, now a U.S. senator, jerked a few political strings so that Sherman found himself colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry, a regular army regiment. Three months later he commanded a brigade at the First Battle of Bull Run where he managed to put on an admirable performance despite the appalling Federal rout. Following this, he accepted assignment as second in command of the Department of the Cumberland, headquartered in Louisville, where the rumor started that he had gone insane.

The situation in Kentucky was confused, delicate, and extremely critical when Sherman arrived. The governor had been pressing for secession but the legislature was against it. Both Rebels and Yankees were raising troops there. Lincoln was trying everything he knew
to keep Kentucky in the Union while Jefferson Davis was doing his best to keep it out. The man commanding the department was 56-year-old Gen. Robert Anderson, who had suffered the humiliation of surrendering Fort Sumter. Anderson had become feeble from the strain ever since Sumter, and the month after Sherman arrived, he stepped down and Sherman stepped up. It was not an agreeable job.

Scarcely had Sherman moved his things into Anderson’s office than Simon Cameron, the U.S. secretary of war, arrived in Louisville on a fact-finding tour with an entourage of newspaper reporters, whom he insisted should remain in the room during the briefing. When Anderson asked Sherman’s opinion of what it would take to quell the rebellion in his sector, Sherman replied that it would probably take around 200,000 men to subdue the entire Mississippi River Valley. Cameron was naturally taken aback, since there weren’t 200,000 men in the entire army at that point, but nothing further was said.

When he returned to Washington, Cameron sent a note to the adjutant general asking him to prepare a memo of the conversation at the briefing, including Sherman’s “insane” opinion that 200,000 soldiers would be required. Apparently the note and other information leaked to the press and soon newspapers were circulating reports that the commanding general of the Department of the Cumberland had “gone mad,” “was crazy,” “had gone insane.” The more Sherman tried to straighten things out, the worse it became; news reports of his “insanity” snowballed, and in time the question of his mental stability seemed to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two of his close relatives, in fact, had been institutionalized, and Sherman himself found he was beginning to doubt his sanity.
This was also when Sherman’s hatred of the press began to solidify. There had been a few unpleasant run-ins with newspapers while he was in California, but the harsh attacks on his sanity drove Sherman past the point of no return. According to the author Emmet Crozier in
Yankee Reporters, 1861–65
, when the
Cincinnati Appeal
correspondent Florus B. Plimpton met Sherman during one of his inspections south of Louisville, he handed the general a letter of introduction from his editor. Sherman looked the youthful reporter up and down, handed him back the letter, and replied, “The next train to Louisville goes at half-past one. Take that train. Make sure you take that train.”

Startled, Plimpton protested, “But, General, the people are anxious, I’m only after the truth.”

“The truth!” Sherman shouted. “That’s what we don’t want. No sir; we don’t want the enemy any better informed than he is! Go on home; make no mistake about that train!”

In any case, things continued to wear on Sherman, and on November 5, 1861, less than a month after he had taken command, he asked to be relieved.

Whatever Sherman did during his leave of absence seemed to restore him, and he returned, bright eyed and eager, to find that Henry Halleck, whom he had known in California, had just been placed in command of the Department of the West. Halleck assigned Sherman to run the district of Cairo—Grant’s old job—but with no army, since Grant had taken that with him to fight the battles of Forts Henry and Donelson. Cairo at this point was described by one observer as “a small place at the terminus of the Illinois Central railroad, a place of not much account, low and flat, and at some seasons entirely under water.” Sherman’s job was
to keep Grant supplied and reinforced, and that was where they began a long-distance friendship that lasted through the war and afterward. He was extremely solicitous of Grant’s needs and promised to send him anything “within reason,” up to and including surgeons, nurses, officers’ wives, laundresses—even himself. It was for his outstanding performance as Grant’s supply officer that Sherman was rewarded with the 9,000-man division of green recruits and sent to spearhead the Southern invasion in early March 1862.

On March 10 Sherman embarked his division on 18 steamboats up the Tennessee to Fort Henry. Two days later Gen. C. F. Smith arrived with three more divisions and told Sherman to “push on under escort of the two gunboats
Lexington
and
Tyler
and break up the Memphis & Charleston railroad between Corinth and Tuscumbia, Alabama.” Smith said that he would be following with the rest of the army. At that point General Smith was “quite unwell,” Sherman noted. Sometime earlier he had scraped his leg on a rusty piece of tin while getting into a small boat and it had begun to fester and swell. There were no such things as antibiotics, and Smith was in pain, and considerable danger as well. Even as they spoke it had begun to rain.

It was still raining and the river was high as Sherman’s force passed by Pittsburg Landing. The captain told Sherman there had been a Rebel cavalry force there, and a battery, but the gunboats had disposed of them, killing half a dozen Confederates in the process. They steamed on below the Tennessee line and the river was in full flood. At a point where the river is the dividing line between Alabama and Mississippi they put in to the shore and disembarked.
The objective was the town of Burnsville, about halfway to Corinth, 30 miles distant. There the rail company maintained large repair and maintenance shops; the idea was to tear up as much track as possible, burn the shops and depots, and put the M&C out of business for as long as possible.

Well before dawn Sherman sent his cavalry forward, then followed them with the infantry and artillery. “It was raining very hard at the time,” he said. “Daylight found us about six miles out, where we met the cavalry returning. They had made numerous attempts to cross the streams, which were so swollen that mere brooks covered the whole bottom.” Several men had drowned. “It was raining in torrents,” Sherman said. Word came from the rear that the river was rising very fast (in fact it rose 16 feet in 24 hours), and unless they returned immediately the way back would be impassable. Escape was “so difficult,” Sherman reported, “that we had to un-harness the artillery horses, and drag the guns under water through the bayous.”

They dropped back down the river and by that night, March 14, they had reached Pittsburg Landing, where they found Hurlbut’s division waiting on boats. Sherman also left his men on the boats and steamed down to Savannah, where he found General Smith bedridden in the Cherry mansion, his leg having worsened during the past two days. Smith told him to take the army’s chief engineer, James McPherson, and to land his division, and that of Hurlbut as well, at Pittsburg Landing, making camps “far back [from the river] to leave room for the entire army.”

On March 17 Grant, now reinstated, arrived and took charge of the army. He made his headquarters at the Cherry mansion in Savannah along with Smith, but he usually went up to Pittsburg
Landing every day. Benjamin Prentiss’s division soon arrived, as did McClernand’s and Hurlbut’s, and set up camps at Pittsburg. W.H.L. Wallace had assumed command of Smith’s old division. Lew Wallace’s division came up, but there wasn’t room at Pittsburg, so it was debarked at Crump’s Landing, about six miles north of Pittsburg. That gave Grant an army of 48,894 on the books. Buell, who was marching overland through Bowling Green and Nashville with 20,000 more, was expected April 6, a force that when combined would be irresistible.

A month earlier, the Green River in southern Kentucky was also running high and Rebel troops, who were evacuating Bowling Green, had burned all the bridges across it when, on the morning of February 14, Buell, whose army had arrived on the east side of the river, ordered his artillery to shell the town. A blanket of snow covered the ground. Josie Underwood had spent the night in the city with a family friend, a Mrs. Hall, only to find that the war at last had come to Bowling Green.

“The place was alive with panic,” she told her diary. “Soldiers were rushing wildly—cavalry and infantry—horses were being taken everywhere and everywhere found—citizens, men women and children, white and black, were fleeing over the hills to get out of reach of danger—whilst the steady Boom—swish, shriek, and bang of cannon shot and shell went on. One shell crashed through the corner of Mrs. Hall’s kitchen and a piece of metal fell into the biscuit dough that Aunt Sallie [a cook] was kneading—she rushed into the house where we all were, all spattered with flour—saying—‘Bless de Lord—a Union shell in my biscuit dough!’ ”

This was the day Josie and her family had waited for—the liberation of their state from Rebel influence. Fort Donelson would fall to Grant next day. But it was also a time of shock and sadness, for they had lost so much since those happy times at Mount Air and Memphis. They had lost in fact nearly everything since the war began ten months earlier.

It had been good to come home after her stay in Memphis, but not for long. “The feeling is growing more and more bitter between the Union people and secessionists, try as we will to maintain the same outward show of friendship,” Josie said. All of the “substantial” people in town were Unionists, she said, and the Rebels were by and large a shabby lot. They had kept a close ear to the proceedings at Fort Sumter where Major Anderson was holding out against the Confederate force in Charleston. Anderson was “a personal friend and distant cousin” of her father’s.

It wasn’t long before Josie received “a warm and beautiful” letter from Tom Grafton, who had left the Shelby Grays to become a major of a regiment from his native Mississippi. Grafton said he “hopes the North will recognize the South’s right to withdraw from a hated Union without bloodshed.” William Western was visiting Mount Air when word came about Fort Sumter’s fall. They were having dinner, and among the guests was Benjamin Grider, a Bowling Green lawyer who was married to Josie’s sister, and whose own sister, Jane, had been Josie’s traveling companion to Memphis. The two brothers-in-law were devoted to each other, according to Josie, but when news of Sumter arrived Western said, “I’ll go to Memphis and fight with the South—for that’s what she’ll do now,” to which Grider replied, “Well Bill, I don’t reckon Kentucky can stay neutral now—and I’ll raise a regiment to fight against you and whip you
back into the Union.” With that, they departed and Josie took a horseback ride around Mount Air.