Almost immediately after the grand parade passed in review in Washington, Sherman said farewell to the Army of the West. At the end of May he joined Ellen and his family, and on an extended leave of absence from the army they became reacquainted. They visited the University of Notre Dame, where two of their sons were students, and went on to Chicago to attend an affair designed to raise money for wounded veterans. On the Fourth of July, 1865, Sherman attended the mustering out of a couple of his previous corps at St. Louis.
At the end of his period of leave, Sherman was given a temporary command in the West while the army was being reorganized. It took a while, and not until mid-1866 was he given a solid berth: as commander of the West. It was a position that made him nearly coequal in status with Grant, as no corresponding command was established in the East. Grant had undergone no such period of uncertainty that Sherman endured, because as commander in chief of the U.S. armies before the end of the war, he simply remained in place.
The vast volunteer army that had mobilized during the Civil War was inevitably disbanded at that time. According to Sherman’s figures, its wartime strength had been about one million five hundred thousand names on the muster rolls, of whom about eight hundred thousand men were present for duty. The act of July 28, 1866, reduced it to a regular establishment of about fifty-four thousand, organized into ten regiments of cavalry, five of artillery, and forty-five of infantry. The command structure of the peace establishment was fixed at one general (Grant), one lieutenant general (Sherman), five major generals (Halleck, Meade, Sheridan, Thomas, and Hancock), and ten brigadiers (McDowell, Cooke, Pope, Hooker, Schofield, Howard, Terry, Ord, Edward Canby, and Lovell Harrison Rousseau).
A notable aspect of this command structure was the retention of several officers who had performed poorly during the war. Among the brigadiers being retained were three men who had once been in command of the Army of the Potomac (or its predecessor): McDowell, Pope, and Hooker. Other generals were reduced all the way back to their regular ranks. George A. Custer, for example, was reduced from the grade of major general (volunteers) to lieutenant colonel (regulars). To ease the pain of the demotion, such officers were addressed informally by their wartime rank.
The assignment as commander in the West was ideal for Sherman. He was by nature a Westerner, and he never lost his special distaste for Washington in general and politicians in particular. Unlike many residents of the Eastern states, he did not sentimentalize the great hordes of buffalo or the “noble redskins” who inhabited the plains. Always practical and forward-looking, he quickly became absorbed in the country’s next great task, that of completing two lines of railroad tracks being laid across the continent. That effort had begun as far back as the 1850s, when Sherman was a banker in California.
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One of Sherman’s overriding characteristics was his loyalty, and at the top of the list of those who enjoyed that loyalty was Grant. Sometimes that commendable trait worked to Sherman’s inconvenience. One such example occurred in the fall of 1866, while Sherman was on an inspection trip in New Mexico. There in the wilderness Sherman received a message from Grant in Washington ordering him to report to army headquarters without delay. Sherman did not welcome the order, especially because it involved a journey down the Arkansas River with only a small escort through country inhabited by tribes he described as “disaffected.” Nevertheless, it never crossed Sherman’s mind to protest. Fortunately, he made it back to Washington and reported to his chief.
When Grant greeted him, Sherman quickly sensed that his superior was in an angry state of mind. President Johnson, Grant confided, was in the process of drawing up orders for him to go on a mission to Mexico, a mission Grant regarded as an insult: The general in chief was to accompany an envoy that Johnson was planning to send to the entourage of Benito Juarez, the leader of a Mexican movement opposing the French-installed Emperor Maximilian. Grant agreed with Johnson’s policy of supporting Juarez, but he had no intention of obeying the president’s order, regardless of the consequences.
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The crisis in Mexico had been long in coming. In early 1864, at about the time that Sherman was fighting the battle of Dalton, Emperor Napoleon III of France had set out to establish a European emperor in Mexico City, one over whom he himself would exercise hegemony. The puppet he chose was a thirty-five-year-old Hapsburg prince, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph. To place Maximilian on the throne—and to keep him there—Napoleon had allocated a division of twenty-eight thousand French troops to occupy Mexico City. The United States protested, but was helpless at the time to interfere. Maximilian, accompanied by Empress Carlota, landed at Veracruz, and by late May 1864 he was established as emperor on the throne at Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City.
Napoleon, however, was in for a surprise. Maximilian, it turned out, did not act as the puppet he had expected. Within a short time he developed a sincere affection for his Mexican subjects and strove to do his best for them. But he never had a chance to succeed. The Mexican people resented being ruled by a foreigner, and the United States, once the Civil War was over, was in a position to take action against him. The Mexican people themselves might not have possessed the power to remove Maximilian, but the United States did.
As of late 1866, President Johnson was not yet ready to undertake military action against Napoleon and Maximilian, but he felt free to take the diplomatic step of sending a minister to Juarez. The emissary he selected was to be Lewis D. Campbell, of Ohio, and Johnson assumed that sending a man with the stature of General Grant to accompany him would emphasize American support.
Grant sensed that the president had an ulterior motive. As with most vice presidents who have ascended to the presidency, Johnson had decided to run for a second term on his own. Grant suspected that Johnson viewed him as his greatest rival, because Grant was the most popular man in the country. Even though Grant had not as yet professed an interest in running, perhaps the presidential bug had already bitten him. He had developed a strong suspicion that Johnson, by sending him to Mexico, was seeking to remove him from the political scene. Sherman had his own suspicions: that he himself would become embroiled in the matter of Grant’s mission.
Sherman’s conjecture was borne out. When he reported to President Johnson, the president quickly told him of the plan for Grant to go to Mexico. He had sent for Sherman, he said, to function as acting general in chief of the army during Grant’s absence. On receiving this word, Sherman did not hesitate. He advised the president that he already knew of the plan for Grant’s mission but divulged, possibly to Johnson’s surprise, that Grant would refuse to go. He sugarcoated Grant’s defiance by saying that Grant was far too busy with more important matters and could not possibly comply. On the other hand he suggested that he, Sherman, could more easily be spared to go on the mission. A surprisingly cheerful President Johnson accepted the offer and sent instructions to the war department to substitute Sherman’s name for Grant’s.
That matter settled, Campbell and Sherman had a practical problem to face: Nobody knew where Juarez was located. For lack of a better prospect, the two decided to head for Veracruz by way of Havana, where the Spanish authorities might be able to help. They left New York by steamer on the evening of November 10, 1866. The mission seemed to entail no urgency, for the two emissaries lounged around Havana for several days while the Spanish governor lavishly entertained them. They enjoyed the warmth of the climate, which contrasted starkly with the cold of the North. Eventually they sailed for Veracruz, still hoping that Juarez would be there.
They could not have been more misguided. On arrival at Veracruz, Sherman and Campbell found no sign of Juarez. Instead they found the harbor full of French ships. The French emperor, they learned, had given in to American threats, and was withdrawing his force. The ships were busily preparing to evacuate Maximilian and his court. Maximilian was still in Mexico City, but everybody was expecting him to leave from Veracruz before all the troops were gone. Eleven hundred packages of furniture had already been shipped out.
The French showed them no hostility despite the reason they were there. When General François Bazaine learned of Sherman’s presence in Veracruz, he quickly sent an invitation for Sherman to visit Mexico City. Sherman would have liked to accept, but since he was on a mission accredited to the “court” of the man rebelling against Maximilian, he decided that such a visit would be improper.
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All this was a sideshow to Campbell and Sherman, who were seeking Juarez, not Maximilian, so they set out to find him. Northern Mexico seemed to be promising, so they visited, among other places, Lobos Island, Tampico, and Matamoros. Nowhere did they find a sign of him. Campbell even went into the interior of Mexico, to Monterrey. Finally they gave up and headed for New Orleans. There Sherman requested and received permission from Grant to give up the chase and return to St. Louis. He was home by Christmas.
He was not the least perturbed by the failure of the mission; in fact, he seemed to have enjoyed the jaunt. His mission, as he saw it, had been accomplished by the time his ship had slipped out of New York Harbor on November 10: He had prevented a break between Grant and President Johnson.
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The next year, 1867, saw Sherman in Washington more often than he would have liked, playing the strange role of providing comfort to a beleaguered President Andrew Johnson, who was running out of people he could trust. What got Sherman in such an awkward position was not his interest in Washington affairs, but his lack of interest. The only inclination he felt regarding the nation’s capital was to stay out of politics. For that reason Johnson trusted him.
The troubles in Washington stemmed from a clash that had developed between Congress and President Johnson over the fundamental question of how to handle a defeated and prostrate South. The followers of Abraham Lincoln advocated compassion and quick restoration of the Union. But the Republican Party—the Democrats had no say—was split by a second group called the “Radical Republicans,” dedicated to punishment of the South for the crime, as they saw it, of bringing on the Civil War. President Johnson and most of his cabinet were Lincolnians; the Congress, on the other hand, was dominated by Radical Republicans. Johnson soon found the attitudes of the Radical Republicans too harsh for his tastes, and tempers rose. Even in his own cabinet, Johnson had to contend with one Radical Republican who sided with the Congress, none other than Secretary of War Edwin W. Stanton. With the passage of time, Stanton became more and more of a thorn in Johnson’s side.
The congressional elections of 1866 had been a disaster for Andrew Johnson. A contributing factor was his mistake of campaigning personally for moderate candidates. With Johnson’s abrasive personality, and the public’s nostalgia for the martyred Lincoln (despite his own role as a Lincoln supporter), Johnson wound up facing a Congress two-thirds of the members of which were Radical Republicans. From then on the president was helpless in dealing with his enemies.
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The Radical Republicans showed Johnson no mercy. In April of 1867 they passed the Tenure of Office Act, which forbade the president from firing any official in the executive branch who had been confirmed by the Senate. Though the act was manifestly unconstitutional, it was passed over Johnson’s veto. To add to his woes, Johnson had already lost the confidence of Grant by attempting to micromanage the army. He also attempted to substitute Grant for Stanton as secretary of war on an interim status. Grant interpreted that ploy as trying to make use of his “celebrity.” And Grant was now convinced of Johnson’s intentions to run for a second term as president, a fact that further cooled their relationship.
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Sherman was once again unwillingly drawn into this imbroglio in early January 1868 when he was summoned to Washington to head a board of officers charged with rewriting army regulations. The task was easy and readily fulfilled, but the working conditions were nearly intolerable. The officers were forced to do their work at army headquarters, across the street from the White House.1 Grant and Secretary Stanton wandered in and out at will. Sherman was all too aware of the power struggle going on between President Johnson on the one hand and Congress on the other, with Grant and to a lesser extent himself as pawns in the chess game. For Sherman the situation was made all the worse because he was torn by divided loyalties. He was punctilious in his respect for the office of the presidency, but Grant was his close friend, whom he would never let down. The only answer, as he saw it, was to stay out of the melee—so far as possible. Though often summoned by the president, who remained confident of his loyalty and judgment, Sherman attempted always to keep the welfare of the United States, not of one partisan group, at the forefront.
The Sherman board finished its work and submitted the results to the adjutant general on about the first of February, 1868. Though Johnson was reluctant to let him go, Sherman was somehow able to depart Washington.
The reprieve was short. Before long President Johnson came up with another idea affecting Sherman. He proposed to establish a new headquarters on the East Coast with Sherman in command. It would be called the Eastern Command and would correspond in status to his present Western Command. In an effort to gain Sherman’s agreement, Johnson promised to establish the rank of brevet general, four-star, to which Sherman would be elevated. Such a prospect would have been a strong temptation for any officer who would place personal ambition over the public good, but Sherman was not that man. Interpreting the plan as an effort to further decrease Grant’s powers, he flatly turned it down. He felt so strongly that he was willing to resign from the army rather than accept the offer.
On February 14, 1868, Sherman wrote his concerns to Grant:
Your dispatch is received informing me that the order for the Atlantic Division has been issued, and that I am assigned to its command. I was in hopes I had escaped the danger, and now were I prepared I should resign on the spot, as it requires no foresight to predict such must be the inevitable result in the end. I will make one more desperate effort by mail, which please await.
Sherman accordingly wrote a strong letter to Johnson, and this time the president accepted his plea and retained him in St. Louis. Other issues were moving fast, out of Sherman’s range.
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On February 23, 1868, a bill for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson was introduced on the floor of the House of Representatives. On March 23 it was passed by a near-unanimous vote, and three days later it was taken up for trial by the Senate. It took until May 20 before a verdict was reached: thirty-five in favor of impeachment as opposed to nineteen against.
President Andrew Johnson was acquitted in his impeachment trial by the margin of a single vote. A couple of days after the verdict, Edwin Stanton resigned as secretary of war, to be replaced by one of Sherman’s previous subordinates, Major General John M. Schofield. And William T. Sherman was allowed to resume full command at St. Louis, at least for the short time left of the Andrew Johnson presidency.
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Sherman did not have very long to enjoy his command in St. Louis after escaping Washington and the Johnson impeachment proceedings. Only a few months were left before the 1868 presidential election, in which Ulysses Grant was comfortably elected. Sherman, as the next-highest-ranking officer and Grant’s closest associate, was his logical successor as general in chief, and Congress so appointed him, creating a new rank, that of general of the army. Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan took over Sherman’s old post in St. Louis as commander in the West. In theory this was the obvious arrangement, but in practice it proved not as smooth as it had been during the war. Grant and Sherman were no longer in the field fighting an enemy; they were in Washington, where politics could mar any relationship.
One issue caused a brief rift between Grant and Sherman. It stemmed from a flaw in the American military system that had plagued the army since President James K. Polk and General Winfield Scott clashed during the Mexican War (1846–1848)2: the powers and prerogatives of the secretary of war as contrasted with those of the top general. The term “general in chief,” as applied in 1869, was misleading, because it implied that the holder possessed power over the entire army—under the authority of the secretary, of course. But such was not the case. The so-called “technical services”—adjutant general, quartermaster general, chief of engineers, chief of ordnance, etc.—reported directly to the secretary, not to the general in chief. In point of time they antedated the existence of a general in chief, which office had been established only in 1821. The general in chief, in practice, was only the senior combat general of the army.
Sherman had hopes that this flaw in organization might be rectified, as General in Chief Grant had unsuccessfully importuned President Andrew Johnson to do. And on March 8, 1869, on assuming his duties in Washington, he received this welcome letter:
By direction of the President, General William T. Sherman will assume command of the Army of the United States.
The chiefs of staff corps, departments, and bureaus will report to and act under the immediate orders of the general commanding the army.
Any official business which by law or regulation requires the action of the President or Secretary of War will be submitted by the General of the Army to the Secretary of War, and in general all orders from the President or Secretary of War to any portion of the army, line or staff, will be transmitted through the General of the Army.
Apparently, with a “military” president, a thorn in the army’s side had been removed by a single stroke of the pen. Sherman had every reason to feel optimistic. It appeared that Grant would consult Sherman on all things pertaining to the army.
In a short while, however, Sherman detected disturbing signs. Grant replaced John Schofield, appointed by Johnson, as secretary of war with his own previous aide, John Rawlins, who was terminally ill. Further, Sherman picked up word that the technical services were “restive” under the arrangements whereby they reported to the general in chief rather than to the secretary. As Sherman explained it, they had never considered themselves to be part of the army. Rather they saw themselves as part of the war department. Apparently they had their way. On March 26 Sherman received the following order:
By direction of the President, the order of the Secretary of War, dated War Department, March 5, 1869, and published in General Orders No. 11, headquarters of the army, Adjutant-General’s Office, dated March 8, 1869, except so much as directs General W. T. Sherman to assume command of the Army of the United States, is hereby rescinded.
All official business which by law or regulations requires the action of the President or Secretary of War will be submitted by the chiefs of staff corps, departments, and bureaus to the Secretary of War.
JOHN A. RAWLINS, Secretary of War.
By command of General SHERMAN:
E. D. TOWNSEND, Assistant Adjutant-General.
Sherman could not take this reversal without protest. He crossed the street from army headquarters to the White House to confront his commander in chief. Grant was noncommittal, even hostile. Rawlins was dying, he said, and it would be wrong to hurt him. But Sherman suspected that the technical services commanded enough influence in Congress that they had forced Grant to back down.
Sherman showed his displeasure in the only way proper: He stood stiffly, saluted, and said, “Mr. President, if that is your desire it will be carried out.”
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The constant demands for Sherman’s presence in Washington did not require him to be at his desk all the time. The railroads had cut down travel time between Washington and St. Louis immensely. For two years he actually moved army headquarters to St. Louis. Thus he was able to stay in touch with his real interest, the building and the protection of the Union Pacific Railroad. His two obsessions—the railroad itself and settling the Plains Indians on the reservations—he regarded as parts of a single whole.
He was no passive or aloof supervisor. With every section of track laid, he rode out to inspect it. He was happiest, so it was reported, when he was in the field with troops, sleeping in a tent as in the old days. He mixed with the workers, many of whom were ex-soldiers, and some of whom still addressed him as “Uncle Billy.” He was talkative and reportedly would talk “half the night” of old campaigns and old comrades.3
The timing was favorable for securing workers. With demobilization of the Union and Confederate armies, many former soldiers, ill at ease in their home surroundings and needing jobs, joined the road gangs. The man in charge of the construction was an ex–Union Army officer named Grenville M. Dodge, who enjoyed a mutual understanding with his workers and also a mutual admiration with Sherman.
Sherman was called to Washington to be the general of the army before the task was finally completed, with the driving of the Golden Spike between the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, on May 10, 1869. Despite Sherman’s absence, Dodge had not forgotten his role. In reporting the event to Sherman he wrote,
The tracks of the Union and Central Pacific Railroads were joined today . . . 2,000 miles west of the Atlantic and 790 miles east of the Pacific Oceans.
Your continued active aid, with that of the Army, has made you a part of us and enabled us to complete our work in so short a time. I congratulate you for all you have done for us.4
The construction of the railroad was an unqualified success, but it was accomplished at the expense of the Indian tribes who inhabited the plains. Much as sensible people can sympathize with a proud nomadic race who can see the destruction of a cherished way of life, few would expect the white people of the coasts, especially uprooted by a great civil war, to allow the Great Plains to remain practically empty. Sherman had his own solution: that the Indian tribes should be absorbed by the Anglo culture, and quickly. In September of 1867 he met at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, with many Indian tribes—Cheyennes, Oglalas, and Brules. To them he issued a warning:
If you don’t choose your homes now it will be too late next year. . . . You can see for yourselves that travel across the country has increased so much that the slow ox wagons will not answer the white man. We will build iron roads, and you cannot stop the locomotives any more than you can stop the sun or the moon. . . . Our people East hardly think of what you call war out here, but if they make up their minds to fight, they will come out as thick as the herd of buffaloes, and if you continue fighting you will all be killed.
We now offer you this, choose your homes and live like white men and we will help you. . . . We are doing more for you than we do for white men from over the sea. . . .
We will be kind to you if you keep the peace, but if you won’t listen to reason we are ordered to make war on you in a different manner from what we have done before.5
Sherman’s message to the Indians was similar to his message to the Confederacy: We will be kind so long as you comply with our terms.
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Aside from his interest in Indian affairs, Sherman’s tenure as general of the army was not a significant period. As in the wake of other major wars, the country found interest in other things. The army of which he was head for thirteen years bore no resemblance to the Army of the West that had followed him from Chattanooga to Goldsboro. The British military historian John Keegan has called George A. Custer’s 7th Cavalry in 1876 a “poor thing.” The soldiers, he claimed, were “under-trained and miserably paid . . . recruited from the country’s unskilled poor.” Many were immigrants, principally Irishmen and Germans, who had joined up in the absence of any available employment despite the booming economy. A third of them were recruits.
As to the officers, Keegan claims that many of them were “returned rank-holders from the Civil War who had avoided risk-taking in combat and shrunk from the risks of making a new career in the aftermath.”
He concludes, referring to Custer’s 7th Cavalry in 1876,
A British cavalry regiment in a similar state of training would have been on the home establishment, working up for active service, not posted to active duty in a theatre of war.6
Keegan does not hold Sherman responsible for this state of affairs, though he notes that Sherman “revealed in his formulation of a strategy for pacifying the plains something of that disgust with warfare as an instrument of policy which was to overwhelm him in his declining years.”7
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Sherman stayed on as general of the army for more than thirteen years. He resigned his position in late 1883, and on February 10, 1884, his sixty-fourth birthday, he retired from the service of his country.