Terrible Swift Sword (43 page)

Six generals from both armies met at the McLean house on April 10 to arrange the formal surrender by Lee's troops of their weapons, flags, and horses, and the Rebels' parole to their homes. While Generals Longstreet, Gordon, and Pendleton from the Confederate army and Union generals Gibbon, Merritt, and Charles Griffin haggled over these details, Sheridan and his Cavalry Corps, unwanted with the fighting now done, were setting out for Petersburg.

That morning, Sheridan had waited until the unusually late hour of 8 a.m., when both armies would be sure to witness it, to lead his Cavalry Corps, four abreast and in closed formation, through the middle of Appomattox Court House.
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He and his men rode east from Appomattox at a shockingly leisurely pace compared with the swift, relentless pursuit that had ended in Wilmer McLean's parlor. At nighttime it seemed strange to the cavalrymen to make their camp without posting pickets. The reality that their war, at least, was over began to sink in.

 

THE CAVALRY CORPS WAS at Nottoway Court House when a telegraph operator happened to notice a bulletin being transmitted to General Meade. President Lincoln had been assassinated, it said. Sheridan dismissed the report as a “canard” and went to bed.

But it was true, and when Sheridan reached Petersburg, he was ordered to march to Sherman's aid in North Carolina with the Cavalry Corps and VI Corps. When the expedition was under way, a message from Army Chief of Staff Henry Halleck reached Sheridan's army on April 28 at South Boston, Virginia. Johnston had surrendered to Sherman, it said. The column retraced its steps to Petersburg.

Sheridan and his staff boarded a steamer to Washington, while the Cavalry Corps proceeded there on horseback. The troopers crossed the devastated, bone-littered northern Virginia countryside where, during the Overland Campaign, they had begun to crush the rebellion, and where they had lost so many comrades. They
might have remembered beating Jeb Stuart's cavalry at Yellow Tavern, ensuring that it never again would ride circles around the Union army, or the three Shenandoah Valley triumphs that had broken the back of Jubal Early's army.

The Cavalry Corps had performed its most memorable service, however, during the past month—when it had smashed Lee's right flank, flushing him out of Petersburg, and had then stopped his army from escaping into the mountains. While his men might have time to savor their achievements, Sheridan would not. New orders awaited him in Washington.
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1865–1867

THE DAY AFTER HE REACHED WASHINGTON, DC, Phil Sheridan stared in dismay at the orders handed to him by one of Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant's staff officers. Dated May 17, the orders formally relieved him of his Middle Military District command—unsurprising, with the Shenandoah Valley secured for eight months. The surprise was that he was now commander of all US troops west of the
Mississippi River. “Your duty is to restore Texas, and that part of Louisiana held by the enemy, to the Union in the shortest practicable time.”

If the Confederate commander in those states, Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith, refused to surrender, Sheridan was to pursue Smith and his men as “outlaws.” Sheridan would command more than 50,000 veteran bluecoats from Major General Edward Canby's Army of the Gulf; Major General J. J. Reynolds's Arkansas corps; IV Corps; XXV Corps; and two Cavalry Corps divisions. Grant's next words sent Sheridan out the door of his room at the Willard Hotel at a fast walk, on his way to see the general in chief: “You will proceed without delay to the West to arrange all preliminaries for your new field of duties.”

If “without delay” meant what Sheridan feared, he would miss the Grand Review of the Armies scheduled for May 23 and 24. He had relished the opportunity to lead his beloved Cavalry Corps one last time, in a procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, under the proud gaze of the nation's leaders.
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SHERIDAN HAD RETURNED TO a capital whose atmosphere had markedly changed since the previous August, when he had met with Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton to discuss his new assignment commanding the Army of the Shenandoah. At that time, Washington had just experienced the terror of Jubal Early's appearance outside the city, and uncertainty lingered over whether Early would return. Sheridan had dispelled that uncertainty by destroying Early's army in three decisive battles over one month.

The charged atmosphere that had previously defined Washington, with fear lurking so close to the surface, was now gone, replaced by a curious flatness—a postpartum letdown after the delivery of America from civil war and the shocking loss of Lincoln. The federal district still wore its widow's weeds—the White House flag hanging at half-staff, the black bunting draping the public buildings—but the Grand Review was expected to lift spirits and close out the mourning period.
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Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist, had humbly promised to carry out Lincoln's plan for reunification. Grateful that the bloodletting was finally over and still grieving over Lincoln's assassination, politicians had ceased their vicious partisanship. The rare truce would not last.

 

SHERIDAN ASKED GRANT TO delay his departure until after the Grand Review, because of his “strong desire to head [his] command on that great occasion.” But Grant quietly refused. It was “absolutely necessary to go at once,” he said. He pointed to a sentence in Sheridan's orders that read, “I think the Rio Grande should be strongly held, whether the forces in Texas surrender or not.” There was a good reason for this—”a motive not explained by the instructions,” said Grant.
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When Mexican president Benito Juarez's government defaulted on Mexican bonds held by Britain, Spain, and France, those nations had sent an expeditionary force in 1861 to coerce the payments. The British and Spanish troops soon left, but the French had remained at the urging of Mexico's clerics and conservatives, who saw the French as allies who might help them regain their former influence.

Claiming to represent Mexico's legitimate government, the priests, bishops, and wealthy landowners pronounced Mexico a constitutional monarchy and invited France's Napoleon III to appoint an emperor. He chose the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the younger brother of the Austrian emperor. Maximilian established friendly relations with the Rebels in neighboring Texas, and during the war, goods flowed into Texas from Mexico, aiding the Confederacy.
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In his opinion, Grant told Sheridan, Maximilian's reign in Mexico was no less than “a part of the rebellion itself, because of the encouragement that invasion had received from the Confederacy.” The Civil War could not end until the French and Austrians were driven from Mexico, he said.

Even as Sheridan and Grant met, ex-Confederate troops were crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico under Maximilian's protection, carrying the weapons with which they had fought the Union. Grant wanted Sheridan to stop the exodus and to support Juarez and his allies in casting out the European usurpers.
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SHERIDAN REGRETFULLY LEFT WASHINGTON without realizing his wish to see in one place, one last time, his Cavalry Corps, the elite mounted troops with whom he had “gone through so many trials and unremittingly pursued and assailed the enemy.” While Sheridan was traveling to St. Louis, Major General Wesley Merritt led the Cavalry Corps through Washington during the Army of the Potomac's parade on May 23; Major General William Sherman's Army of the West marched the next day. Massive crowds witnessed this final passing of the Union army—and loudly applauded when George Custer, his long blond hair blowing in the breeze, masterfully subdued his horse when it unexpectedly bolted toward the reviewing officers “like a tornado.” At nighttime, the campfires of the armies of Grant and Sherman transformed Arlington Heights and the Potomac shoreline into blazing candelabra.
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In St. Louis, Sheridan boarded a steamboat for New Orleans. He had made this same journey a dozen years earlier as an adventure-seeking brevet second lieutenant en route to his first posting, with the 1st Cavalry at Fort Duncan, Texas.

That young man no longer existed. Sheridan had emerged from the ghastly abattoir divested of his youthful dreams and illusions about glory. At thirty-four, he was a tough, hard-eyed, clear-thinking warrior leader who had improbably scaled the summit of US military leadership.

 

NEAR THE MOUTH OF the Red River above Baton Rouge, a message from General Canby reached Sheridan: Kirby Smith had surrendered in New Orleans on May 26. The surrender absolved Sheridan of one objective and freed him to concentrate on the other: securing the Mexican-US border.
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Reaching the New Orleans headquarters of the Military Division of the Southwest—to be renamed weeks later the Military Division of the Gulf, responsible for Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida—Sheridan read disturbing reports about organized groups of armed ex-Confederate soldiers marching through Texas on their way to Mexico. The reports only underscored the belief that he now shared with Grant: that the “vindication of republicanism,” for which the Civil War had been fought, would not be complete until Maximilian was driven from Mexico.

Deciding to make an immediate show of force, Sheridan ordered four divisions of cavalry and infantry to Texas. Custer's 4,500 men, when they arrived in Alexandria, Louisiana, from the Grand Review, were sent to Houston; Merritt's 5,000 mounted troops were sent to San Antonio; and two infantry divisions from XXIII Corps, also placed under Sheridan's command, embarked for Galveston and Brazos Santiago, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Units from his four other infantry corps would follow; Sheridan would have 52,000 combat veterans at his disposal.
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A US CAVALRY REGIMENT, one of several riding from the East to join Sheridan's command, was crossing the Mississippi River below Vicksburg when the troopers spotted a rowboat full of men towing two horses to the west bank. Their suspicions aroused, the cavalrymen went to investigate. But the men fled, abandoning the horses.

A week or two later, Sheridan received a letter from his old nemesis, Jubal Early—one of the men in the rowboat. Early wrote that he and other former Rebels were crossing the river to join Kirby Smith in Texas, unaware that Smith had already surrendered, when they were forced to abandon the two horses, which belonged to Early. Demanding compensation, Early added that further pursuit of him would be futile, because he would soon be “on the great blue sea.” Sheridan bemusedly observed that if he had wanted to capture Early, he might have easily done so after Appomattox by merely riding to Early's home in Lynchburg. There is no record that Early's claim was ever paid.
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OUTWARDLY, NEW ORLEANS APPEARED unchanged by the war. Perhaps it was because the city had been under Union control since the arrival in spring 1862 of Admiral David Farragut's fleet and Major General Benjamin Butler's troops. Citizens hated “Beast Butler's” military regime, although he fed the hungry, employed the unemployed, and cleaned up the city, ridding it during the war of its annual
yellow fever and cholera epidemics. After a new Louisiana state constitution was adopted in 1864, a Unionist administration began governing the state. The economy stirred back to life, although the old ruling class was largely excluded.

The city's social life went on much as it had before the war. Women still promenaded on Canal Street, and there were balls, parties, and dinners. Gaiety and sin continued to coexist easily with social and religious conservatism. The docks teemed with ships and laboring men; the streets were alive with jostling drays and wagons. The men pursued their traditional pastimes of gambling, horseracing, hunting, fishing, and drinking.

But behind the doors of many elegant homes, gentry in patched clothing dined on cornmeal and pork. And lurking unpleasantly in the background, like the pungent odor of raw sewage emanating from the gutters, was a virulent hatred of the Yankees, the Unionist politicians, and the black freedmen.
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SHORTLY AFTER ASSUMING HIS new command in New Orleans, Sheridan rode to the Mexican border “to impress the Imperialists . . . . with the idea that we intended hostilities.” He was convinced that “history will not excuse the attempted annihilation of a nation on the plea of nonpayment of a million or two of debts due.”
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History might not excuse it, but Secretary of State William Seward appeared willing to do so, even if France's invasion was a flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Seward had remained at his post while recovering from the attempt made on his life on the night Lincoln was assassinated. He was unalterably opposed to US intervention in Mexico, determined instead to use diplomacy to reach a resolution.

In Brownsville, Texas, Sheridan began to rattle the saber loudly. He openly inquired about marching routes in Mexico and forage for horses and paraded his army up and down the east bank of the lower Rio Grande.