Terrible Swift Sword (13 page)

Grant would not forget that Sheridan relentlessly harried Bragg's retreating army when no other commander did.

APRIL–MAY 1864

THE UNION ARMY HAD A SURFEIT OF MAJOR GENERALS but not a single three-star general. The rank of lieutenant general had fallen into disuse after November 1861, when seventy-five-year-old Winfield Scott retired as commanding general. George Washington had been the only permanent US lieutenant general; Scott had held the rank by brevet. On February 26, 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law reviving the rank.

The Confederacy boasted more than a dozen lieutenant generals, but Lincoln wanted to appoint just one: Ulysses S. Grant. The Senate swiftly confirmed Lincoln's nomination of Grant. As commander of all Union armies, Grant was now one of the three most powerful men in the Union, along with Lincoln and War Secretary Edwin Stanton.

While Scott had remained in Washington, Grant chose to make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac in northern Virginia—to be close to the action and to insulate himself from the inevitable second-guessing by Lincoln and Stanton. Major General George Meade, however, remained the Army of the Potomac's titular commander. The army would become Grant's main weapon for crushing the rebellion, and he immediately began readying it for a major campaign.
²

Grant was a quiet, modest man whose shyness was sometimes misinterpreted as aloofness. In March 1864, Colonel Theodore Lyman of General Meade's staff happened to be in the dining room of the Willard Hotel in Washington when Grant entered with his fourteen-year-old son, Fred. The diners burst into cheers and crowded around the general to shake his hand, but Grant appeared bored by the attention, Lyman wrote. He described him as “rather under middle height, of a spare, strong build; light-brown hair, and short, light-brown beard,” with a curved nose set under blue eyes and a square jaw. “His face has three expressions: deep thought; extreme determination; and great simplicity and calmness.”
³

Grant became army commander a week after Brigadier General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick led an unsuccessful raid to rescue Union war prisoners in Richmond. Carried out over the objections of Meade and the Cavalry Corps commander, Major General Alfred Pleasonton, the raid was conceived by the Lincoln administration after the mass escape by Union officers from Libby Prison in Richmond.

The raid's failure tarnished the image of the improving Union cavalry. The 12,000-man Cavalry Corps conducted reconnaissance, escorted officers and wagon trains, and patrolled picket lines, and sometimes it fought Rebel cavalry units.

After Grant's promotion, Pleasonton was transferred to the Division of the Missouri, which was commanded by another Grant exile, Major General William Rosecrans. Kilpatrick was sent to Major General William Sherman's Army of the Tennessee. Grant, Stanton, and Major General Henry Halleck, the army's chief of staff in Washington, began searching for a new cavalry leader.

 

IN WINFIELD SCOTT'S OPINION, the cavalry had little value; he opposed organizing even regimental-size mounted forces. It was Lincoln who prodded his reluctant generals to create larger units. The early Union cavalry commanders were Old Army mounted officers who lacked experience in leading large formations. They doled out their cavalrymen piecemeal to infantry divisions to use as they saw fit.

Only since early 1863 had the Cavalry Corps existed as a separate command. Its first commander, Major General George Stoneman, lasted until just June 1863, when he was relieved of his command after failing to get into Robert E. Lee's rear as he retreated from Chancellorsville. Stoneman was assigned to run the new Cavalry Bureau, whose job was to equip the Cavalry Corps.

Pleasonton succeeded Stoneman. Under the forty-year-old veteran of the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, and Chancellorsville, the cavalry fought Jeb Stuart's cavaliers to a draw at Brandy Station, the major all-cavalry battle of the war, and performed solidly at Gettysburg. Pleasonton reorganized the Cavalry Corps into three divisions led by aggressive, battle-tested officers. All this was to the good, but Pleasonton quarreled with Meade. Grant's arrival supplied an excuse to replace him.

Even after the Cavalry Corps became a separate entity, its three divisions rarely operated together and never as an independent strike force. Meade required the Cavalry Corps commander to share quarters with his staff, to better serve the needs of the infantry.
⁴

 

GRANT'S FIRST CHOICE FOR Pleasonton's replacement was Major General William B. Franklin, a classmate of his at West Point who had led troops at Antietam and Fredericksburg. But Franklin had made powerful enemies, chief among them Ambrose Burnside, with whom he had shared blame for the debacle at Fredericksburg in 1862. The poisonous feeling between Franklin and Burnside and their respective allies compelled Grant to drop Franklin. More names were considered and rejected, and then Halleck, during a meeting with Grant and President Lincoln, suggested Philip Sheridan.
⁵

Halleck, of course, knew Sheridan from their months together in Mississippi, when Sheridan, before becoming a regimental and brigade commander, had organized Halleck's headquarters campsite. Having no firsthand experience with Sheridan, Stanton and Lincoln took Halleck at his word. “Major General P.H. Sheridan is assigned to command the Cavalry Corps, Army of the Potomac,” read the April 4 announcement.
⁶

Sheridan had just turned thirty-three. Two years earlier, he was a captain whose highest ambition was to hold a field command. After toiling in the relative obscurity of the western theater as one of dozens of division commanders, he would now move into the bright spotlight trained on the Army of the Potomac. Operating as it did just forty miles from Washington, the army's every move was endlessly scrutinized by the Lincoln administration.

Grant, who would later claim Sheridan was the man he had wanted all along, did not object. While he well remembered Sheridan's aggressiveness at Booneville and Missionary Ridge, at the moment Grant had greater issues to address than the Cavalry Corps; he was busy readying his 120,000-man Army of the Potomac for a major offensive in northern Virginia.

 

GRANT PLANNED TO ESCALATE the war in the belief that doing so would end it sooner. His strategy called for Union armies in every major theater to attack the
Confederates simultaneously, bringing as many troops to bear on as many points as possible. Lieutenant General James Longstreet had demonstrated at Chickamauga that the Rebels could still win battles when permitted to shift troops along their internal lines. Grant's plan would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Confederates to reinforce one point without placing another in jeopardy.

“The enemy have not got army enough” to reinforce every attacked point, wrote Grant. With the Union's massive superiority in numbers—a half million combat troops, ready for action—Grant believed that at least one field army would be able to break through. Lincoln instantly grasped Grant's point. “As we say out West,” said the president, “if a man can't skin, he must hold a leg while somebody else does.”

The Army of the Potomac would cross the Rapidan River to engage and destroy Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, while Major General Benjamin Butler ascended the James River to threaten Richmond from the southeast. Sherman would march with 120,000 men in three armies on Atlanta; German-born Major General Franz Sigel would advance up the Shenandoah Valley and get on Lee's flank; and Major General Nathaniel Banks would strike at Mobile.

The Lincoln administration and the Union army would discover that Grant's perspective on the importance of winning or losing individual battles sharply differed from his predecessors'. Four of the five previous Union army offensives in northern Virginia had ended in retreat; the fifth, in stalemate.

Grant planned to prosecute his campaign in northern Virginia whether he won battles or lost them. He understood that the war might yet be won if enough irreplaceable Rebel soldiers could be killed or maimed and war's awfulness could be brought into the homes of enough Southern civilians. This was at once a new and an old concept of war: “total war.”
⁷

LONGSTREET'S DEPARTURE FROM CHATTANOOGA to attack Burnside in Knoxville had prompted Grant to strike at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. After breaking the siege of Chattanooga, Grant had ordered IV Corps—Sheridan's and Thomas Wood's divisions—to march to Knoxville to reinforce Major General Ambrose Burnside.

The weary troops were given no time to exchange their ragged clothes and broken shoes or to obtain winter gear, although they would be campaigning in the East Tennessee mountains, where winter had already begun. With four days' rations in their haversacks, they began the hundred-mile march to Knoxville.

Burnside's troops had repulsed Longstreet by the time the relief column reached Knoxville, but Longstreet lingered in the mountains. East of Knoxville, at a cold
place improbably named Strawberry Plains, Sheridan's division made its winter camp.
⁸

When Longstreet withdrew into Virginia in January, Sheridan's division was then sent to Loudon, southwest of Knoxville, to safeguard labor crews that were rebuilding the railroad between Knoxville and Chattanooga. As Sheridan's men left Strawberry Plains, “a general disgust prevailed” over the seemingly pointless misery they had endured there that winter.

Sheridan took a forty-day furlough—his first extended leave in eleven years and his first break from field command in twenty months. He went home to Somerset and visited Chicago and Milwaukee.
⁹

 

UNBEKNOWNST TO SHERIDAN, WHILE he was on leave in February, his name was in play while Grant and Halleck weighed possible candidates for commander of the Army of the Tennessee. But Major General James B. McPherson got the job.
¹⁰
Then, shortly after Sheridan returned from his furlough, he received a telegram from Halleck: “Lieutenant-General Grant directs that Major-General Sheridan immediately repair to Washington and report to the Adjutant-General of the Army.”
¹¹

Sheridan did not know why he was being summoned, but he was certain the telegram meant “a severing of my relations” with his division. Finding the idea of a formal leave-taking from his men unbearable, Sheridan resolved to depart without saying good-bye. “I feared to trust my emotions,” he wrote.

When he boarded the train at the Loudon station, however, he discovered that his division had assembled on the hillsides to see him off. Many of these soldiers had served with him at Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. “They amply repaid all my care and anxiety, courageously and readily meeting all demands in every emergency that arose,” he wrote.

As the train left for Chattanooga, Sheridan's men waved good-bye to him.
¹²

 

SHERIDAN LEARNED FROM MAJOR General George Thomas when he reached Chattanooga that he had been appointed commander of the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac—the largest cavalry force in the Union army. The news was daunting. “The information staggered me at first,” Sheridan wrote. “I felt loth [
sic
] to undergo the trials of the new position.”

This was understandable. He knew scarcely anyone in Washington; he had no political connections in the Lincoln administration, or in the Army of the Potomac for that matter. Moreover, he knew little about the army's previous operations in Virginia. These negative factors notwithstanding, “there was no help for it, so after reflecting on the matter a little I concluded to make the best of the situation.”
¹³

For Phil Sheridan, who believed in careful preparation and energetic execution, this meant more than adjusting mentally to his new role. He studied maps of Virginia
and the Army of the Potomac's history, and he learned what he could about the men with whom he would serve. And in Major James Forsyth of the 18th US Infantry he found someone to tutor him in the ways of the Army of the Potomac. Not only was Forsyth Sheridan's friend and his former adjutant at Chickamauga, but he had also served in the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula and Antietam campaigns. Sheridan named Forsyth as his chief of staff.

Sheridan also brought with him two aides-de-camp from Tennessee: his younger brother Michael and First Lieutenant Thomas Moore. Needing an advisor with cavalry experience, he chose Captain Frederick Newhall of the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry to be his senior aide-de-camp.
¹⁴