As to freeing the negroes, I don’t think the time has yet come,” Sherman wrote his wife on July 31, 1862. “When negroes are liberated either they or their masters must perish. They cannot exist together except in their present relation, and to expect negroes to change from slaves to masters without one of those horrible convulsions which at times startle the world is absurd.”¹ In his profound racism, this Union general was in step with most of his fellow white Americans; in his defense of the institution of slavery, as were those Democrats who shared his views, he was increasingly out of step with Northern politics and public opinion; in his fear of a bloody slave revolt—used as an argument to exonerate slavery as a caste system—he was not only out of step with Northern opinion, but aligned to Confederate opinion. In sum, Sherman’s still thoroughly proslavery ideology was becoming increasingly anachronistic fourteen months into a bloody civil war in which the abolition of slavery and not merely the restoration of the Union was well on the way to becoming the chief Union war goal.

While his division was marching through rural Tennessee early in the summer of 1862, Sherman acted on his opinions when issuing orders concerning the duties of his subordinate officers and men toward those many slaves who, as did Negroes all over the South, ran to join his columns in self-emancipation when Union troops advanced. “The well-settled policy of the whole army now is to have nothing to do with the negro,” Sherman said, using as his authority Henry W. Halleck, his superior. “Exclude them from camp … is the reiterated order. We cannot have our trains encumbered by them, nor can we afford to feed them, and it is deceiving the poor fellow to allow him to start and have him forcibly driven away afterward.” Using this kindly paternal interpretation of his actions, Sherman ordered his subordinates to “remove all such now in camp, and to prevent any more from following our … columns of march.”² Presumably the slaves would then wander the countryside in privation, often to be recaptured into slavery by their masters. But that was none of this Union general’s concern (though others made special provisions for caring for such fugitive slaves, several doing so earlier in the war). Sherman was at war with the master class, but not for the benefit of their bondsmen and bondswomen. He preferred to exclude the issue from his view by barring the fugitives from his camp.

After he took charge of Memphis on July 21, Sherman was confronted with the fact that thousands of slaves had escaped to this Union garrison town. He had to accept their reality and deal with them. He also realized that here in a land of hostile whites, he suddenly had a huge labor pool consisting of enemies of his enemies who were on his side, even if he was not on theirs. The day after his arrival in Memphis, he had begun to set large numbers of freedmen, eight hundred within a week, on the construction of the massive fort he was building, and employed hundreds more on other public works and as teamsters and servants.³

As an expedient, Sherman ordered that these laborers be fed and housed by the army and paid one pound of chewing tobacco per month in lieu of wages. He understood intuitively that these were not slaves but employees, who had a right to a wage, however minimal, for their labor. Given the ever-increasing numbers of slaves showing up in Memphis, and congressional passage of a law authorizing the army to receive and employ fugitives from slavery, on August 8 Sherman issued his own regulations, including a provision to account in writing for hours of work, and for payment from this account in clothing and tobacco but not in cash. “No wages will be paid until the court determines whether the negro be slave or free.” In general, this order was narrowly concerned with army employment of fugitive labor, and was extremely reluctant in broaching the possibility of future emancipation. “It is neither [my] duty nor pleasure to disturb the relation of master and slave, that is for the courts,” Sherman insisted, playing for Unionist sentiment among slaveholders. Should civil law be reestablished in Memphis, Sherman presumed, “the loyal masters will recover their slaves and the wages they have earned during their temporary use by military authorities.” This suggested that Sherman was just leasing the slaves of loyal masters, while disloyal masters would lose theirs. This unlikely distinction was the conservative spin men like Sherman were trying to place on the reality of thousands of slaves who had in fact already freed themselves. Again in deference to Southern sensibilities, and in reference to his own values, Sherman declared that “no influence be used to entice slaves from their masters,” nor to prevent their voluntary return to them, adding for the benefit of the throngs of masters who were knocking on his door demanding the return of their slaves, “no force or undue persuasion” would be allowed masters seeking to “recover such fugitive property.” Fugitive property was less than human as a formulation, but it was property fugitive from his enemy and thus was of value to the Union, and therefore to be guarded, however reluctantly.⁴

In comparison to other Union officers operating in his own theater of war at this time, Sherman was narrow in his construction of the ambiguous status of fugitive slaves. Civil courts were closed, general military rules were nonexistent, and legislation could not catch up to the rapidly evolving situation on the ground, and so officers had rather a large range of practical options. For example, Sherman was at pains to reassure Confederate General Gideon Pillow that his General Orders Number 67 were simply his regulation of the “present labor of the slaves,” with ultimate payment “to the master or to the slave, according to the case,” to be decided after the war by reconvened state tribunals. In contrast, Union General Samuel R. Curtis had begun to issue letters of manumission to fugitive slaves who had “satisfied him they had been used as property to carry on the war,” but where Curtis had given the benefit of the doubt to the fugitive slaves, whose humanity he thus acknowledged, Sherman reassured Pillow that he would “grant no such papers, as my opinion is it is in the provision of the court to pass on the title to all kinds of property”—fugitive slaves were still chattel property until judges might rule otherwise. Sherman’s presumptive judgment was that in the present he would preserve slavery to the best of his abilities. In 1862, when a group of fugitives captured some riverboats flying a white flag and used them to escape to Union lines, Sherman ordered them delivered back across Confederate lines to their owners, because, he wrote, “the law is that negroes escaping from their masters into our military lines cannot be delivered back by me, but these boats … carrying our flag of truce were not actually or even theoretically in our military lines.”⁵

After seeing a copy of Sherman’s General Orders Number 67, his brother, John, wrote him that he thought they were acceptable except for the proviso holding back cash wage payments. “You ought to presume their freedom until the contrary is shown & pay them accordingly,” John urged, demonstrating that he was certain that Unionists in authority ought to lean toward the fugitive slaves and away from reinforcing the institution of slavery. John believed that to defeat the South “we must make friends of the blacks. If we repel them in the future as in the past, we will check their disposition to aid us.” This political realism, perhaps tinged with idealism, was spreading rapidly, John informed his brother. “You can form no conception at the change of opinion here [in Ohio, and in the North generally], as to the Negro Question.” Men of all political persuasions, overcoming “both party divisions and our natural prejudice of caste,” now “agree that we must seek the aid and make it the interests of the negroes to help us.” John had understood the logic of the rapid flow of Northern opinion, and had concluded, as had nearly every Republican in Congress, “I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of universal emancipation.”⁶

This letter of John Sherman’s, particularly the part about overcoming caste prejudice, was an admonition to the general to stop being recalcitrant to the point of reactionism on the “Negro question.” Unlike Senator Sherman, General Sherman thought public opinion misguided and foolish. Also arguing from realism rather than from an overtly restated racism, he replied to his brother that the guiding principle of his orders had been to “appropriate the labor of negroes as far as will benefit the army,” that “not one nigger in ten wants to run off” in any event, that the army could not possibly feed, clothe, and house all of them, and that they made a “horrible impediment” to an advancing army. In sum, “you cannot solve this negro question in a day.” In his remaining months in Memphis, Sherman employed more and more fugitive laborers in practice, while fearing he would become overloaded with them, and he never abandoned the general principle that he opposed emancipation. “I do not think it to our interest to set loose negroes too fast,” he wrote Grant in September. On November 12, in a letter to a Southern judge in recaptured Memphis he continued to plan to “reserve this question of slavery,” while Northern and Southern armies fought out the real and “dire conflict between National and State authority.”⁷ Sherman remained a proslavery Unionist even three months after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, on September 22, 1862.

Underlying the argument Sherman was making about the impracticability of emancipation lay, of course, his assumptions about the inferiority of the whole race of blacks that fitted them for slavery. This racialism was in large part replicated, during this same period, in Sherman’s opinions of the Jews. He blamed the war on blacks as he blamed it on Jews. As he made the linkage in a letter to Ellen on August 20, 1862, “The cause of the war is not alone in the nigger, but in the mercenary spirit of our countrymen.” For Sherman, the personification of this evil mercenary spirit was the speculator, and the speculator was the Jew. In Memphis, Sherman observed a lively trade in Southern cotton, and reasoned in a letter to Grant, “I found so many Jews & Speculators here trading in cotton and secessionists had become open in refusing anything but gold that I have found myself bound to stop it. This gold has but one use, the purchase of arms & ammunition” in Northern cities for smuggling south into the Confederacy. As for issuing new trading passes to “swarms of Jews, I have stopped it.” Trading with the enemy, including illicit arms sales, was a problem for the Union army, and there were speculators eager to trade, a small minority of whom were Jewish, but for Sherman, as for many other Union generals, “Jews and speculators” was the offending category from which and speculators was often dropped. When he heard that the government had decided to encourage the trade in cotton rather than end it, Sherman fumed to Washington that “the country will soon swarm with dishonest Jews.” In this categorization of traders, Sherman was in concert with Grant. On July 26, Grant ordered a subordinate at the cotton trading river port of Columbus, Kentucky, to “examine the baggage of all speculators coming South, and, when they have [gold] specie, turn them back.… Jews should receive special attention.” On December 17, 1862, Grant went even further. Like a medieval monarch, he expelled “The Jews, as a class” from his department. Lincoln rescinded the order, pointing out that though he agreed with expelling crooked speculators, he could not agree to the exclusion of Jews “as a class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks.”⁸

Jews like niggers, niggers like greasers (Mexicans) or Indians, were for Sherman, in common with many of his contemporaries, “classes” or “races” permanently inferior to his own. Lincoln in his way, and John Sherman in his, had an understanding that when it came to defining races, Americans employed customary hierarchical categories rather than natural absolutes—even if these two leaders often agreed with the customs—and thus Lincoln and John Sherman were open to change over time. Men like William T. Sherman did not share this cultural definition of race, taking their prejudices as fixed truths about natural and immutable racial categories. Thus for him Jews were Jews were Jews and “everyone” knew what that meant. Even after Lincoln’s order rescinded Grant’s expulsion of the Jews, Sherman continued expressing his unchanging opinion of them to his colleagues, if he now slightly disguised it. “Merchants as a class are governed by the law of self-interest,” he wrote both Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Admiral David Porter on October 25, 1863. The high profits of contraband trade will call many to engage in it, “but this is confined to a class of men you and I know well.” Porter certainly knew just whom Sherman meant. “The real merchant—that man who loves his country,” the merchants who were not the you-know-who’s—would not “endanger our lives” with illegal trade in arms.⁹

By the same form of racialist generalization, heightened by his habit of endemic contempt, for Sherman niggers were niggers were niggers, the mudsill of the society that had enslaved them and them alone. After the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves of the Confederacy, Sherman did not continue to reinforce the institution of slavery as he marched through the South, but neither did he change his opinion of blacks. Rather, he took emancipation as a further means of punishing his enemies. “The masters by rebelling have freed the negro, and have taken from themselves the courts and machinery by which any real law could be enforced in this country,” he wrote General James B. McPherson on November 18, 1863. “They must bear the terrible infliction which has overtaken them, and blame the authors of the rebellion and not us.” Concomitantly, Sherman now encouraged slaves to flee their masters and come to Union garrison towns, not to help blacks but to demonstrate to whites that they “must take the consequences” of their rebellion. Whatever the eventual fate of the Negroes, he told a group of Mississippi planters, “ex necessitate, the United States succeeds by act of war to the former lost title of master.” For Sherman, emancipation had ended Southern white mastership as part of their ongoing destruction in war. He was not much concerned with its meanings for former slaves, of whom he, as a Union agent, was a new master.¹⁰

In Union war policy, emancipation had led directly to the active recruitment of black Union troops. This next giant step was taken by the Union leadership, from Abraham Lincoln on down. In his attempt to sell this dramatic new policy to the more conservative members of the public and his own army, Lincoln frequently employed arguments that were practical in nature, as he thought these might be more effective than more ideologically based modes of persuasion. As he wrote to one conservative Northern politician on August 26, 1863, “I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do, in saving the Union,” an opinion he anticipated most of his commanders could share, even archconservatives like Sherman. In his own beliefs, which he did not hesitate to express publicly, Lincoln went beyond such practicality to the moral meanings of emancipation tied to the use of black troops. Thus in this same letter he linked the practical with the ideal when he argued that “negroes, like other people act upon motives.… If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln thus related white honor to the use of black troops. He also comprehended black honor, for he understood the liberation of the spirit that military participation would bring the freedmen. “There will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation [of freedom].” Lincoln also insisted that white men who opposed the use of black troops, “with malignant heart, and deceitful speech,” would be acting out of a spiritual dishonor they would be ashamed of in future years.¹¹

“I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support,” U. S. Grant wrote Lincoln on August 23, 1863. “This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.… By arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers, and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion they strengthen us.”¹² In striking contrast to the opinion of his commander and closest military friend, of all the leading Union generals Sherman was the most outspoken in his resistance to this policy innovation, the most overtly racist in his opposition, and the most openly insubordinate to civilian dictates, from those issued by the president on down.

When Lorenzo Thomas began the active recruitment of black troops in Mississippi in April 1863 during the campaign against Vicksburg, Sherman made his feelings perfectly clear. In a letter to Ellen he asserted, “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed.… With my opinion of negroes and my experience, yea prejudice, I cannot trust them yet. Time may change this but I cannot bring myself to trust negroes with arms in positions of danger and trust.” Time and the spread of Union recruitment among blacks only served to deepen Sherman’s prejudices. He insisted to Henry Halleck late in 1863 that as an abstract principle the Confederates would only “finally submit” to fellow white men who displayed courage and skill equal to theirs, superior resources and “tenacity of purpose,” and a clear and single purpose—“to sustain a government capable of vindicating its just and rightful authority, independent of niggers, cotton, money, or any earthly interest.” Unionism through war would have to be a kind of purification ritual, in which, to achieve victory, the whitest of white men would have to purge themselves of all forms of pollution, the two chief forms being filthy lucre and filthy niggers.¹³

In common with the prejudices of most of his soldiers, Sherman wanted to keep his troops free from the contamination they believed Negroes would bring. When Lorenzo Thomas addressed his men, telling them they would have to adjust to the presence of black troops, Sherman followed, telling his men—“who look to me more than anybody on earth”—that he hoped that if the government did make use of black troops, “they should be used for some side purpose & not be brigaded with white men.” Reporting this speech to his brother, John, Sherman added that his experience with Negroes even in limited roles as teamsters and cooks had proven to be a disaster. “They desert the moment danger threatens.… At Shiloh all our nigger servants fled, and some of them were picked up by boats 40 miles down the River. I won’t trust niggers to fight yet.” He did not oppose taking them from the enemy, however, and finding other uses for them than fighting.¹⁴ He was perfectly willing to use Negroes as laborers and in “pioneer brigades,” to dig the trenches, build the forts, chop the wood, and haul the water, all in aid to the real, white soldiers.

The more actively the government pursued its recruitment of black troops, the more urgently and angrily Sherman resisted the policy. In the spring of 1864, as Sherman was organizing his campaign against Atlanta, Lorenzo Thomas traveled west again to coordinate the use of agents from Northern states to come south to recruit Southerners, primarily blacks, into the army as one means of filling up draft calls made on those Northern states. “My special duties here are to organize colored troops, and I expect full cooperation on the part of all military commanders to enable me to execute these special orders of the Secretary of War [in which] the President has taken an interest,” Thomas wrote to Sherman very pointedly from Natchez. Instead of cooperating, Sherman issued special orders that recruiting officers would not be allowed “to enlist as soldiers any negroes who are profitably employed” by the army, that his staff officers “will refuse to release him from his employment by virtue of a supposed enlistment as a soldier, and that any recruitment officer … who interferes with the necessary gangs of hired negroes” be arrested and if necessary imprisoned.¹⁵

This was insubordination. On the other hand, Sherman was coordinating a most promising campaign against Joseph Johnston’s army on the way to Atlanta, and so rather than punish him, the authorities in Washington, without quite conceding that he had the authorization to override their clear orders, tried to sweet-talk Sherman. Lorenzo Thomas wrote Sherman that the secretary of war wished “to express his strong desire” (rather than ordering him) that Sherman cooperate in the recruitment of black troops at least by sending them on to Thomas, now in Nashville. “I have seen your recent order respecting the enlistment of negroes,” Thomas continued, “the practical working of which, it seems to me, will stop almost altogether recruiting in your army. I know not under what circumstances it was issued, but the imprisonment of officers for disobedience seems to me a harsh measure.” Reading this rather plaintive letter where he might have anticipated an angry rebuke accompanied by a renewed order, Sherman knew he had the upper hand. At first he replied to Thomas with a letter that contained an element of conciliation amid the reassertion of his authority in his military sector to imprison Union recruiters who disobeyed him. “I believe that negroes better serve the army as teamsters, pioneers and servants,” he reiterated, “and have no objection to the surplus, if any, being enlisted as soldiers.” But, he added immediately, “I must have labor and a large quantity of it. I confess I would prefer 300 negroes armed with spades and axes than 1000 as soldiers. Still I have no objection to the enlistment of negroes if my working parties are not interfered with.” And then, defiantly reasserting his authority over Union recruiting agents on his turf by reaffirming rather than rescinding his offensive order, Sherman concluded that if his Negro working parties “are interfered with I must put a summary stop to it.”

Sherman was not retreating but stonewalling. Indeed, in the guise of cooperation he soon wrote again to Thomas proposing the regularization of pioneer brigades as an alternative to the Union policy of black troops. After all, he concluded, “the great mass of our soldiers must be of the white race, and the black troops should … for some years be used with caution and with due regard to the prejudice of the races.” Pressing forward to Atlanta, Sherman continued to protest black recruitment with increasing anger. “I must express my opinion that [such recruitment] is the height of folly,” he wrote to Henry Halleck on July 14, in a letter he must have intended to reach Stanton and Lincoln. And as for the recruiting officers, “I will not have a set of fellows here hanging about on any such pretenses.” Sherman was having his way.¹⁶

Four days later, the president himself replied to Sherman’s string of insubordinate dispatches. As was his wont, Lincoln wrapped firmness in the cloth of tact. He was unwilling “to restrain, or modify the law” on black recruitment “further than actual necessity may require,” he wrote Sherman, adding that, “to be candid, I was for the passage of the law.” He had not apprehended that the law would prove so inconvenient to armies in the field, “as you now cause me to fear.” Despite his acknowledgment of Sherman’s sensibilities, Lincoln got to the point quite clearly, if with civility, reminding Sherman of the constitutional subordination of the military to the president as commander in chief. “I still hope advantage from the law; and being a law, it must be treated as such by all of us. We here, will do what we consistently can to save you from difficulties arising out of it. May I ask therefore that you will give your hearty cooperation?”

Writing to others who opposed his policy at about this time, Lincoln was far more direct and forceful about the utility of black troops. To a conservative politician in Buffalo, New York, Lincoln wrote on September 12, 1864, “Any different policy in regard to the colored man [than black recruitment] deprives us of his help, and this is more than we can bear.… This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which can be measured and estimated as [can] horsepower and Steam-power.… Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.” But Lincoln addressed his most recalcitrant general not on the moral or even the practical merits of the issue, but by appealing to Sherman’s most general belief in law and constitutionalism, order, and authority. He had not asked for a conversion of belief, for he knew Sherman would not accept black troops with inward conviction, but for mere acceptance of a policy set by the commander in chief of the armed forces.¹⁷

In reply to Lincoln, Sherman telegraphed that of course he was a great believer in the due subordination of the military to civilian control, in principle: “I have the highest veneration for the law,” he told Lincoln, “and will respect it always, however it conflicts with my opinion of its propriety.” Conceding the principle, Sherman did not even address enforcement of the law at hand, instead reminding Lincoln, under a rather thin veneer of politeness, exactly who was going to win the battle that would save whose political skin. Grant was bogged down and suffering frightful losses in Virginia; Lincoln’s political stock was never lower; only Sherman was advancing in a way that could reverse Union fortunes in general and Lincoln’s in particular. Lincoln knew all that and Sherman knew it too. “When I have taken Atlanta and can sit down in some peace I will convey by letter a fuller expression of my views,” Sherman instructed Lincoln. At this level, war was politics by other means, and Sherman fully understood that his hand was stronger than Lincoln’s, at least for the foreseeable future. He had thrown Lincoln’s request for cooperation right back in his face.¹⁸

Sherman had every intention of continuing his independent policy forbidding recruitment of black troops. Although he claimed he lacked the time and peace to respond fully to Lincoln’s order phrased as a request, Sherman did have time the following week to write a lengthy reaffirmation of his independent political policy to John A. Spooner, the recruitment agent for Massachusetts, even while offering Spooner a pass within his lines to allow his pursuit of black recruits in the South, an apparent concession to Lincoln’s request. Among the reasons he opposed Spooner’s project, he wrote him quite candidly, were that “the negro is in a transition state, and not the equal of the white man.” While claiming that he had conducted far more Negroes to safety behind Union lines than had any other Union general, he asserted that “I prefer some negroes as pioneers, teamsters, cooks and servants; others gradually to experiment in the art of the soldier, beginning with the duties of local garrison,” and inferentially, none at all serving with his fighting forces. Sherman wrote Spooner that he might share this letter with other state agents, and sent several copies himself to other generals.¹⁹

When it leaked into the press a few weeks later, as Sherman surely must have realized it would when he circulated it, this defiant letter made a sensation all over the North. “I never thought my nigger letter would get into the press,” Sherman pretended to a St. Louis friend, but since it had made a splash, Sherman continued, “I lay low. I like niggers well enough as niggers, but when fools and idiots”—those professing “nigger sympathy,” as he put it in another letter—“try and make niggers better than ourselves, I have an opinion.”²⁰

Writing to his family at this time, Sherman was apoplectic about black recruitment and wholeheartedly loathing in his characterization of blacks. “I see the Government has settled down on the policy of … gathering up niggers and vagabonds,” Sherman wrote Ellen. He liked that phrase, niggers and vagabonds, repeating it to Ellen, and transmuting it into “niggers and bought recruits” in yet another letter to her, and to “niggers and the refuse of the south” in a letter to Thomas Ewing. “This kind of trash will merely fill our hospitals and keep well to the rear,” Sherman went on to Ellen. “I suppose I am to fight till this army is used and then wait for a new revolution.” Sherman believed that he had “remonstrated to Mr. Lincoln in the strongest terms,” but had been told by Lincoln that “it was the law and I have to submit.” Sherman wrote Ellen that he feared racial role-reversal in his army. “Niggers wont work now,” and half his white army was doing the kind of labor “which the very niggers we have captured might do, whilst those same niggers are soldiers on paper.” This reversal of customary racial subordination was “an insult to our Race,” Sherman fumed. “Modern philanthropy will convert our oldest and best soldiers into laborers whilst the nigger parades & reclines in some remote & soft place.” Under such a regime, his army would soon shrink away.²¹

Sherman used only a slightly less strident tone when, after the fall of Atlanta, as he said he would, he wrote Henry Halleck a letter intended for the president, replying in full to Lincoln’s abjuration to change on the issue of black recruitment. “I hope anything I have said or done will not be construed unfriendly to Mr. Lincoln or Stanton,” Sherman began, perhaps with irony intended, or perhaps without. “That negro letter of mine I never designed for publication,” he again protested, without disowning one whit of its contents, thus indicating that the semiofficial “nigger letter” indeed had been his reply to Lincoln’s request for cooperation. “I am honest in my belief that it is not fair to our men to count negroes as equals. Cannot we at this day drop theories and be reasonable men?” Sherman asked, meaning that innovative assertions of Negro equality be dropped for the customs of racism. “ ‘Is not a negro as good as a white man to stop a bullet?’ ” was a question, Sherman wrote, he often had been asked. “Yes,” he now answered, “and a sand bag is better; but can a negro do our skirmishing and picket duty? Can they improvise roads, bridges, sorties, flank movements, etc., like a white man? I say no.… Soldiers must do many things without orders from their own sense.… Negroes are not equal to this.” Sherman told Halleck that he intended to march in the future as in the past at the head of a lily-white army. “I have gone steadily, firmly, and confidently along, and I could not have done it with black troops, but with my old troops I have never a waver of doubt, and that very confidence begets success.”²²

Given his continued insubordination on the use of black troops, it is ironic that Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in September 1864 made the political impact Lincoln had hoped it would, for that victory immediately reversed public opinion about the progress of the war, and led directly to Lincoln’s substantial electoral triumph two months later. Sherman had served in absolutely indispensable ways both Lincoln’s immediate political needs and his larger war aims, even though he disagreed vociferously with those socially revolutionary goals.

After the fall of Atlanta, and perhaps in response to the ruckus his “nigger letter” had aroused, Sherman wrote a slightly more conciliatory letter on October 25 to Edwin Stanton, stating that he much preferred to keep black troops “for some time to come in a subordinate state, for our prejudices, yours as well as mine, are not schooled for absolute equality,” but added that if the government had “determined to push the policy to the end, it is both my duty and pleasure to assist,” and asked for the assignment of an officer to organize such black regiments in his sector. By this time, however, Sherman was well along in his plans to cut loose from his lines on his giant raid through Georgia. Any black troops organized to his rear would not join him on his march, which he knew full well when he wrote to Stanton in the spirit of apparent compliance. His army would remain racially pure.²³

Only after he had captured Savannah did the Union government succeed by fiat in attaching a black infantry regiment to Sherman’s command, by shipping one in by sea from the East. What he was forced to accept, Sherman subverted. He stripped these trained troops of their arms, and converted them into laborers, teamsters, and servants. Picking up on the spirit of racial contempt that Sherman expressed in these actions and in his racial policy pronouncements, Sherman’s soldiers brutally harassed these black recruits, rioting against them, killing two or three, and wounding many more. As one Ohio soldier wrote home, these few hundred black soldiers “were taught to know their place & behave civilly.”²⁴

In Savannah, Sherman began to receive admonitions from his friends and allies that he was increasingly out of step with political change not merely on the enlistment of black troops but on race relations in general. Lincoln, and most especially the more radical among the congressional Republicans, had won a triumphant reelection, and were beginning to push for civil and voting rights for the freedmen. As they moved with astonishing speed toward radical solutions to the American racial dilemma, they were no longer willing to tolerate every racial whim of the reactionary author of the “nigger letter,” even if he was winning victories. “While almost everyone is praising your march through Georgia,” the conservative Henry Halleck forewarned Sherman, “a certain class having now great influence with the President”—meaning the Radical Republicans—“are decidedly disposed to make a point against you … in regard to the ‘inevitable Sambo.’ They say that you have manifested an almost criminal dislike to the negro, and that you are not willing to carry out the wishes of the government in regard to him, but repulse him with contempt!” Sherman’s reputation for racial contempt had been aggravated, Halleck wrote Sherman, by his policy of driving fugitive slaves away from his line of march during his march through Georgia. Especially damaging were the actions of one of his division commanders, Jeff C. Davis, who had crossed over one Georgia river on December 9, and then had pulled up his pontoon bridge immediately after his troops had crossed over, abandoning the large band of fugitive slaves trailing his division to the pistols and swords of Joe Wheeler’s approaching Confederate cavalry, or as an alternative fate, to drowning in the swift river in panicked attempts to flee. Halleck urged Sherman to do something constructive and welcoming for the fugitive slaves in order “to silence your opponents.”²⁵

Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury and a powerful Radical leader who had always been a strong supporter of Sherman, was even blunter with Sherman, concerning the “apparent harshness of your actions towards the blacks. You are understood,” he warned Sherman, “to be opposed to their employment as soldiers and to regard them as a sort of pariahs, almost without rights.” As had Halleck, Chase urged Sherman to do something to counteract this reputation for “harshness & severity,” and to set a military standard that “for good or evil, will be followed by officers of lower character and less discretion.”²⁶

As might have been predicted, given his history on this subject, Sherman’s initial response to such criticism was anger and denial. “I deeply regret that I am threatened with that curse to all peace and comfort—popularity,” Sherman replied to Halleck in fulsome sarcasm. “Thank God I am not running for office.” As a general proposition he asked in exasperation, “But the nigger? Why in god’s name, can’t sensible men let him alone?” As to the specific charge against Jeff Davis, Sherman dismissed as “cock-and-bull” and as “humbug” the report that fugitive slaves were turned back so that Wheeler might kill them. Davis had told Sherman that he had forbidden certain slaves, old men, women, and children, from following him, “but they would come along and he took up his pontoon bridges, not because he wanted to leave them, but because he wanted his bridge.” Davis also told Sherman that he did not believe that Wheeler’s cavalry had killed “a single one of them,” although Sherman had not pressed Davis for any evidence for this assertion. Sherman reported this callous and internally inconsistent tale as the truth and as morally unexceptionable. He took Davis’s word as an officer and a gentleman. He was untroubled about those abandoned blacks, and thought Halleck need not concern himself either. In any event, Sherman insisted, far from being their enemy, “I profess to be the best kind of friend to Sambo.” Just look at how the “darkies” of Savannah had greeted him. “They gather around me in crowds, and I cant find out whether I am Moses or Aaron, or which of the prophets; but surely I am rated as one of the congregation.” (This greeting really tickled Sherman; to Ellen he commented, “It would amuse you to see the negroes, they flock to me old & young, they pray and shout—and mix up my name with that of Moses and Simon … as well as Abraham Lincoln, the Great Messiah of ‘Dis Jubilee.’ ”) All the false, pseudohumanitarian infatuation with the blacks—“Poor negro—Lo, the poor Indian”—was nothing but a “humbug” of current fashion in the tradition of the parlor charity to Indians expressed by reformers in the East. Nevertheless, Sherman thanked Halleck for his “kind hint,” and promised, “I do and will do the best I can for negroes.”²⁷

The administration effort to bring around the insubordinate hero of Atlanta and the march to the sea reached its unexpected denouement on the morning of January 11, 1865, when no less than the secretary of war disembarked from a federal revenue cutter at the port of Savannah. Edwin Stanton’s ostensible mission was to supervise the reestablishment of Union rule and marketing procedures for cotton in the recaptured city, but his deeper purpose was to redirect toward administration goals Sherman’s efforts in the field of race relations. Sitting down with Stanton, Sherman vigorously defended his practices, including those of Jeff Davis, and insisted that he was charmed by the simple character of the Negroes and by their faith in the Union war effort.

At Stanton’s urging, Sherman organized a meeting with twenty of the leading freedmen of Savannah, mainly Methodist and Baptist preachers. In the racial context of the South in 1865, this was an unprecedented gathering, where blacks, so recently slaves, were treated as humans whose opinions were important. Just by calling this meeting, Stanton, who was something of a racial progressive, was making an emphatic point to Sherman about the essential humanity of the freedmen. Stanton also had a Union officer make an official transcript of the meeting, further elevating the occasion. After quizzing the black leaders about their understanding of the meanings of the Emancipation Proclamation, their relationship to the national government, and their opinion of the system of recruitment of black troops, Stanton had Sherman leave the room, and then asked the blacks what they thought of him. They told Stanton what they thought he wanted to hear, that Sherman was to them an agent of Providence. “Some of us called upon him immediately upon his arrival,” they told Stanton, “and it is probable he did not meet [Stanton] with more courtesy than he did us. His conduct and deportment toward us characterized him as a friend and gentleman.”

Despite the favorable publicity he received, Sherman was greatly affronted by Stanton’s upending of racial protocol. This deep resentment still rankled ten years later when Sherman depicted this event in his Memoirs. “It certainly was a strange fact that the great War Secretary should have catechized negroes concerning the character of a general who had commanded a hundred thousand men in battle, had captured cities, conducted sixty-five thousand men across four hundred miles of territory, and had just brought tens of thousands of freedmen to a place of security; but because I had not loaded down my army by other hundreds of thousands of poor negroes, I was construed by others as hostile to the black race.”²⁸ Sherman could not abide Stanton’s demonstration of a tentative new racial order.

Following this meeting, which he hoped would motivate Sherman to consider a more charitable disposition toward blacks, Stanton urged him to devise some plan that would “meet the pressing necessities of the case”—namely, the existence of vast numbers of freed slaves in the South. At least that is the way Sherman reconstructed in his Memoirs what had followed this meeting. Sherman recalled that he had then sat down and drafted his Special Field Orders Number 15, which he issued after Stanton had edited them carefully. Other historians have stressed Stanton’s role in the authorship, as well as that of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. Whatever their exact genesis, these orders were an extremely radical proposal for redistribution of land confiscated from slaveholders to the newly freed slaves. In the Sea Islands of South Carolina, and for thirty miles up the rivers from the sea in South Carolina and parts of Florida and Georgia, “abandoned” plantations (from which the owners had fled on the approach of Union troops) were to be distributed in plots of “not more than forty acres of tillable ground” to black heads of families, each of whom was to be given “a possessory title in writing.” Sherman and Stanton then appointed Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, a Radical Republican Sherman despised, as Union inspector in charge of this project.²⁹

Beyond emancipation itself, this was the single most revolutionary act in race relations during the Civil War. It seemed to initiate a system of land redistribution, including the specific notion of forty acres to each black man, which only the most advanced minority of Radicals and freedmen would carry into the post-Civil War era, with even the majority of congressional Republicans balking at this invasion of the right to secure title in private property, a principle that might be extended into other governmental activities. How extraordinarily ironic it appears that a reactionary racist would father this extreme measure. Many historians have even insisted in disbelief that Sherman went along, not comprehending where Stanton was leading him. Stanton’s presence undeniably forced Sherman to act, but Sherman wanted to do something dramatic to solve his problems with the administration once and for all.

In fact, the politics of the event and Sherman’s reasoning were, though complex, not unfathomable and not really inconsistent with his earlier beliefs and with his desire to manage his current problems. Neither did he believe he had been gulled. In fact, he thought he had won the argument. He wrote to his wife while drafting the orders, “Mr. Stanton has been here and has been cured of that negro nonsense.” He had proposed, he told Ellen, an alternative to the use of blacks as soldiers and a solution to the problem, which would be presented by those throngs of fugitive camp-followers he otherwise anticipated as he blasted up through the Carolinas: He would get them off his trail and onto the land. “I want soldiers made of the best bone and muscle in the land, and won’t attempt military feats with doubtful materials. I want [the Negro] treated as free and not hunted and badgered to [be] made a soldier of, when his family is left back on the plantation. I am right and won’t change.”³⁰

Sherman also believed that he had created a system that would put the administration of the freedmen of the deep South he was reconquering permanently into the hands of others, allowing him to walk away from those problems and look beneficent in the process. As he wrote to Major General J. G. Foster, commander of those parts of South Carolina already in Union hands, which was most of the territory covered by the Special Orders, “I think the impression at Washington is that both you and I are inimical to the policy of rearming negroes, and all know that [Saxton] is not, and his appointment reconciles that difficulty.” Sherman cynically urged Foster to let the Radical political general Saxton take on the problem and make the inevitable mistakes, and then to pounce on him and punish him for those errors. To Stanton, Sherman wrote soon after he left Savannah that in his Special Field Orders he had been “unable to offer a complete solution” to the problem of the freedmen. However, “we have given an initiative and can afford to await the working of the experiment,” he wrote Stanton in apparent sympathy for the project.

With his order, Sherman had washed his hands of his “Negro problem,” rid his army of any serious potential black content, purged his columns of large numbers of black camp followers, passed the unwanted blacks on to a man he despised, Saxton, and at the same time neutralized Republican criticism of his racial motives and practices. While he had claimed to despise popularity and to loathe blacks, Sherman was sensitive of his reputation and defensive about his motives. Like most Southern racists of the time, he claimed paternal feelings toward blacks, and he was quite willing to help them out if he could construe such help as aiding rather than retarding his larger military project. After all, he was a Union general and wanted to be a helpful part of the conquest of the Confederacy, if he could bend the desires of other Unionists around his plans and square them with his own opinions.³¹

Neither was it the case that this was a radical project of Stanton’s, seized opportunistically by Sherman. Land confiscation as one means of displacing the Confederate leadership had been discussed widely during the war. As early as August 24, 1862, John Sherman had written his brother, “If we can’t depend upon the loyalty of the white men of the South, I would give the land to the blacks or colonize a new set [of northern whites].” The general too had, since 1862, threatened Southerners with dispossession, their land to be redistributed to Northern white colonists. On January 31, 1864, for example, he had written a full analysis on the subject to a military lawyer in Tennessee, in a letter clearly intended for publication. “When the inhabitants persist too long in hostility it may be both politic and right that we should banish them and appropriate their lands to a more loyal and useful population.… If they want eternal war, well and good; we will dispossess them and put our friends in their place.… Many people with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.” On April 11, enclosing a copy of this letter, Sherman had written even more directly to John, “The whole people of Iowa & Wisconsin should be transported at once to West Kentucky, Tennessee & Mississippi, and a few hundred thousand settlers should be pushed into South Tennessee.” Sherman was talking about Northern white resettlement. Clearly his main goal was punishing disunionists rather than helping blacks. The next day, however, Sherman had made a racial shift in his thinking when he had written Lorenzo Thomas, his opponent on the issue of black recruitment, “I would prefer much to colonize the negroes on lands clearly forfeited to us by treason,” proposing specifically the “rich alluvial region” on the Mississippi River ten miles below Vicksburg, prime cotton plantation land, “as the very country in which we might collect the negroes, and where they will find more good land already cleared” than anywhere else. “It would enable the negro at once to be useful.” As an added fillip, this particular proposition, which was in fact enacted, stripped Confederate president Jefferson Davis himself of his land and gave it to his former slaves.

Thus Sherman had considered this project in land redistribution to blacks fully ten months before he issued Special Field Orders Number 15. He wanted to show Southerners that they had sacrificed all their property rights by rebelling against the Union and the Constitution. In addition, while on the verge of taking Savannah, Sherman had written Stanton that when he arrived there, “my first duty will be to clear the army of surplus negroes, mules and horses.”³²

If Stanton had also read and recalled Sherman’s letter to Lorenzo Thomas of April 12, 1864, a not unlikely proposition, it would have been Sherman who had given the embryo of Special Field Orders Number 15 to Stanton rather than the other way around. Even if Stanton had not read the letter, it is clear that Sherman had been giving considerable thought, over a significant span of time, to a scheme of land redistribution. Both men might well have arrived at a similar policy conclusion, coincidentally and by different routes. Although such a project had beneficial implications for blacks, that had not been Sherman’s initial goal. If, however, his orders were pleasing to blacks and Radical Republicans, that came as a bonus that would make the orders even more useful to him than they otherwise would have been, as they would get both these sets of antagonists off his back. He would be rid of the niggers, divesting himself of them as he would his excess mules and horses. At the same time, and of primary importance to him, he would, through this measure, keep young black males out of his army. If others took that as kindness, so much the better, as he could thus enact his self-proclaimed paternalist motives more credibly, and lay more claim to the title of friend of the freedmen. And in addition, land confiscation would be a major blow to the planter aristocracy that was running the war for the enemy. He wanted to smite his enemies in every possible way, and land confiscation would grievously injure the morale and material fortunes of his enemies, demonstrating their powerlessness before their conqueror, and humiliating them publicly with the insulting image of social pollution contained in the very thought that their ex-slaves would own their land. They would further be reduced toward nullities, having sacrificed their rights to their own property. In absentia, the Southern gentry would be able only to shriek in fury, thus deepening Sherman’s greater psychological project of driving the war into the very hearts of Confederates.

With this highly ironic act of legerdemain, Sherman concluded his history of reactionary insubordination to Lincoln’s policy on black troops by reaching to Lincoln’s left to form an improbable political alliance on this one issue with the most ultra of the Radical Republicans. He had maintained an independent racial policy throughout his period of major command, continuously acting opposite Lincoln’s wishes. In the end he served the war against slavery by his military success, which demonstrated that Lincoln understood the political implications of Sherman’s successes better than did Sherman himself. To achieve victory, Lincoln had taken enormous guff from Sherman, and had coolly focused on the grand strategy of the war, letting go significant elements of his racial policy in the pursuit of that final victory that would achieve the revolution. With his guns and deeds, Sherman had furthered racial justice, despite the fact that he had consciously intended to serve his own racist political agenda while he was at war at the head of a punishing and purifying white army.

After the war, Sherman would claim that he intended his Special Field Orders Number 15 only as an emergency war measure, and he did not protest when Andrew Johnson revoked it in 1866. One doubts whether Sherman, or Stanton for that matter, was thinking that far into the future in January 1865 when the two authored their plan. Blacks and some Radical Republicans seized eagerly on the idea, seeing in it a pilot project for a revolutionary change, which would be to their great advantage. This was probably the origin of the slogan of “forty acres and a mule” around which blacks would rally during Reconstruction. For Sherman, this had been almost exclusively an expedient that had promised to resolve several of his immediate problems. This plan furthered his ongoing need to focus his energy and his rage against his enemy, by liberating him from his own “Negro problem.” It was one more means to carry on a war that would be as destructive as necessary to achieve total victory.