The war was young…. And surely they needed as long notice as possible of an enemy’s approach, for they were at that time addicted to the practice of undressing—than which nothing could be more unsoldierly. On the morning of the memorable 6th of April, at Shiloh, many of Grant’s men when spitted on Confederate bayonets were as naked as civilians; but it should be allowed that this was not because of any defect in their picket line. Their error was of another sort: they had no pickets.
—Ambrose Bierce
I saw an open field…so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.
—Ulysses S. Grant
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.
—Herman Melville
“THE POWER is in your hands; use it, & you will be sustained by all above you,” wrote Halleck, reinstating Grant and sanctioning an invasion. Grant took a boat upriver, almost due south, to get back to his army. He made his headquarters at Savannah, Tennessee; one division of his army was five miles upriver at Crump’s Landing under Lew Wallace, while five more divisions were camped in fields stretching west from a high bluff seven miles farther south, at Pittsburg Landing. There the senior of Grant’s generals, William T. Sherman, was in command. A sharp-eyed, red-bearded, nervous, and brilliant man, Sherman too in civilian life had tried and failed to achieve the success that had come to a brother, in his case Senator John Sherman. He too had lost Halleck’s confidence—and his own command—and had just been reinstated. He had been in his final year at West Point when Grant entered, but now Grant was his commander, and Sherman had no trouble remembering that fact. When Grant arrived, Sherman assured him that his green army encamped in clearings stretching to the southwest toward Shiloh meetinghouse was ready for an attack on the Confederate stronghold at Corinth, Mississippi, nineteen miles to the southwest.1
At Corinth, other generals had their own attack in mind. Albert Sidney Johnston and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard had forty thousand men ready to move; there were roughly the same number of Yankees under Sherman. Huge armies moved slowly on country lanes; rain and the tracks of wagons and thousands of feet had made a dispiriting mud, and it took four days for the Confederate army to get into striking position. Johnston, a tall and confident Kentuckian turned Texan, urged his men toward battle with a call to be “worthy of your race and lineage; worthy of the women of the South.” He had at his side not only the aggressive Beauregard but also Leonidas Polk, his West Point roommate; Braxton Bragg, irascible and determined; and William J. Hardee, a veteran career soldier. On Saturday night, April 5, 1862, the huge force was just south of Sherman’s position and so clamorously noisy that they lost hope that their attack could be a surprise.2
They were wrong. But not because none of the Federal soldiers noticed them—indeed, there was a skirmish on April 5, but Grant, reporting it to Halleck, commented, “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us.” Somehow, Grant had convinced himself that his was an army just of attackers, not defenders. No protective fortifications had been built, and as Ambrose Bierce said, there were no organized lines of pickets to guard the sleeping camp. Unwilling to imagine being on the defensive, Sherman sneered at the cowardice of an officer who gave him a scout’s report that danger was near. And so, naked in their blankets or groggily standing over campfires cooking breakfast, farm-boy soldiers were borne down by rebels attacking at dawn.3
Grant was at breakfast, too—at Savannah, twelve miles downriver—when at 6 A.M. he heard gunfire. Leaving his food, he quickly canceled a meeting with General Don Carlos Buell—who had arrived the evening before, ahead of his troops—and instead ordered Buell to summon his men (some of whom were spread back as far as Nashville). Then, on an agonizingly slow river boat, he started for Pittsburg Landing, pausing at Crump’s Landing only long enough to call across the water to General Lew Wallace to get his men ready to move. Reassuringly, Wallace replied that he already had. Reaching Pittsburg Landing about 9 A.M., Grant, who had a sprained ankle, was helped onto his horse, and with a crutch strapped to his saddle headed up the high bluff for a conference with Sherman.
The battle had actually begun before any general ordered it to. A nervous and alert detachment of General Benjamin M. Prentiss’s men had gone scouting and encountered what they first took to be a small Confederate raiding party. The Southerners opened fire and pursued the Northerners. Hearing the firing, the Confederate commanders, about to order an attack, did so at once, and it was their raiders who savagely entered the Union camp. Alerted by the firing, Sherman was instantly up and in the saddle. Although two horses were shot from under him and he sustained a wound in his hand, Sherman spent the whole of that awful Sunday trying to shore up the battered armies. Grant joined Sherman in the morning; his first act on the battlefield was to establish a line to stop the “stragglers,” the terrified men who were running away.4
The fields and woods between Shiloh meetinghouse and the river were bounded to the south and north by marshy creeks, and Johnston’s aim was to drive Grant’s men not to the river, across which they might escape, but northward to Owl and Snake creeks, where, trapped in the marsh thicket, they could be cut down. Beauregard was sent to the left, where he took the Shiloh church; Hardee’s men, to his right, began the relentless slaughter of Prentiss’s men. These Yankees were driven onto low-lying ground adjacent to a twenty-acre peach orchard in splendid full bloom. As the rebel bullets destroyed the trees, the petals—like wedding confetti—fluttered down on dying men. And in the hollow next to the trees, the firing was so intense, so ceaseless, and so lethal that the area earned the name Hornets Nest. Prentiss’s men fought there for hours, saving the rest of Grant’s men from rout, until finally, Prentiss could last no longer and surrendered the few soldiers still alive to Hardee.
During the day Grant sent men of his own staff to find out what had happened to Lew Wallace. The Indiana general, with no more orders than those he had heard on the riverbank but with the sounds of a desperate battle to summon him, was in fact on the move. The only problem was that he had taken the wrong road. He had also refused to accept spoken instructions from a captain on Grant’s staff who found him, and it took Captain William R. Rowley and Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson over an hour of hard riding to find Wallace again and force him to confront his error and begin the agonizingly slow business of a countermarch. The operation took hours, and Wallace did not get into the day’s battle.5
Late in the day, at a desperate hour for the Union forces, General Buell arrived by gunboat, and Grant went aboard to guide him and his men into battle. Grant’s story of Buell’s reaction to the grim arena into which he was moving suggests powerfully the differences in the perspectives with which the two commanders saw the war.
As we left the boat together, Buell’s attention was attracted by the men lying under cover of the river bank. I saw him berating them and trying to shame them into joining their regiments. He even threatened them with shells from the gun-boats near by. But it was all to no effect. Most of these men afterward proved themselves as gallant as any of those who saved the battle from which they had deserted. I have no doubt that this sight impressed General Buell with the idea that a line of retreat would be a good thing just then. If he had come in by the front instead of through the stragglers in the rear, he would have thought and felt differently. Could he have come through the Confederate rear, he would have witnessed there a scene similar to that at our own. The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.
Grant was understanding, even compassionate, in his picture of the stragglers whom his armed guard had not prevented from finding a place to hide, but his calm prose does not explain just what the situation was at the front at the close of the day. Prentiss’s men were dead or captured, and everywhere, the Union forces were vulnerable. Why, then, didn’t the Confederates finish their destruction of Grant’s armies? Why didn’t Beauregard fight on into the night and deliver the final blow? How was it that Grant’s bewildered, bloodied troops rallied so strongly the next day that they drove the Confederates into retreat to Corinth?6
Part of the answer—but only part—lay in the arrival of Buell’s and Wallace’s reinforcements. Another part of the explanation may be found in the developing recognition of the terrible world of the battlefield as both commanders and men paused to survey it. At the crest of the day, some of Bragg’s men, out of ammunition, had charged toward the landing with only bayonets, but such heroics ceased as the almost victorious Confederates looked about them. Like Grant, they could see fields so covered with bodies that one could have crossed them on steppingstones of corpses. They could hear the screams of wounded and dying men. Such terrible carnage, and the inability to face the responsibility for causing more, may have been what later paralyzed the flamboyant commander Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville. A similar perception may have stopped Beauregard, Bragg, Polk, and even Hardee at Shiloh. Their troops, weary rather than triumphant, wanted not to finish the job, but to sleep—some of them in the tents of the men they had driven out at the start of the day. Their energy was down.
Not so the near-vanquished. Fright had driven some men to shiver beneath the overhang of the bluff, and a similar fear of dying sustained the energy of those who remained in battle. Through an awful night of cold and rain, they knew they would have to fight to survive. Grant was at one with them. His swollen leg aching, he could get no sleep in the rain at the foot of a tree and moved to a log building in use as a hospital. But he found the noise of the surgeons’ saws, the smell of flesh, and the agony of the victims “more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire” and returned to the tree in the rain. Finally, Grant slept, and he woke “feeling a great moral advantage would be gained by becoming the attacking party….” He ordered his men to “advance and recapture our original camps.”7
Striking early, Grant’s armies, including now Buell’s and Wallace’s troops, fought viciously. Two thousand of Buell’s men, fresh to battle, fell wounded or dead. The day was as full of carnage and chaos as the previous one had been, but as Howard C. Westwood has said of Shiloh, “the great thing about Grant was his self-control and stubbornness. He did not panic. He had the genius to meet each contingency, even a contingency produced by his own grave blunder….” And by the end of Monday his men had driven the enemy back onto the road from Corinth on which they had come. But Grant, like George Gordon Meade later at Gettysburg, missed his main chance. He did not pursue and destroy his enemy’s armies. Now his energy was gone. “The great fatigue of our men,” he wrote Buell, “they having been engaged in two days fight…would preclude an advance tonight.” The Confederates pulled back to Corinth; when the great battle at Shiloh was over, everything was exactly as it had been before it began, except that a quarter of the men who had fought there had been captured, killed, or wounded. There had been more casualties in two days than had been sustained by Americans in the whole of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War. More than three thousand American men were dead—1,723 from the South and 1,754 from the North. Everything was the same, and nothing was the same. Grant, and slowly the whole nation, learned from Shiloh that the Civil War would not be ended by one side’s waiting the other out, or by negotiation, or by some single swift blow, as at Donelson. Johnston had sent his men into the battle—in which he himself was to die—telling them that it must be fought to protect a “fair, broad abounding land.” Grant knew after Shiloh that only when he had exhausted the people of that land by annihilating its armies would he break the rebellion.8
The Northern newspapers wrote of a great victory, and the people back home, impatient after months of inactivity, had their excitement. Grant was a hero again. And this time he saw what he had wrought. The horror had not stopped him while the battle raged, but on the second day he looked out on a thicket that had been cleared back to a field by bullets that blasted the brush and saw the ground covered with dead bodies. After the battle he reported “another great battle fought between two great armies, one contending for the maintenance of the best government ever devised, the other for its destruction.” “It is pleasant,” he asserted, “to record the success of the army contending for the former principle.” He concluded his report with the statement that the “country will have to mourn the loss of many brave men.” There were he thought still more men that Southerners would mourn and, what was more, the “enemy suffered terribly from demoralization and desertion.” Grant had won but the failure to pursue the Confederates and destroy their armies diminished Shiloh’s value. In his communication to Buell about the possibilities of pursuing Beauregard, Grant hinted that a reluctance to be insubordinate held him back; he told Buell that because of orders “previously received and a dispatch also of to-day from Major Gen. Halleck it will not…do to advance beyond…some point which we can reach and return in a day.” Halleck’s attitude led to Lew Wallace’s surmise that “after the battle General Grant was as much under General Halleck’s order not to do anything as before it.” Shiloh had accomplished very little. From the peninsula below Richmond, six hundred miles away on the Atlantic coast—where McClellan was losing battles—young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote home to his parents, “Pittsburgh Landing seems to have been rather an equivocal victory after all…[d]oesn’t it?”9
And for a time it appeared that Shiloh would be equivocal indeed for its victor, Ulysses Grant. Major General Halleck, due to take field command of his forces on April 8, actually arrived at the front on April 11—four days late for Shiloh. Immediately, he set about amassing his enormous armies—General Buell’s Army of the Ohio; General John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi (which, on the same day as Shiloh was won, had taken Island 10—a critical position on the Mississippi River—and made possible the Union occupation of Memphis); and the Army of the Tennessee, Grant’s army. But Grant was no longer to be commander of the Army of the Tennessee. Lincoln, though pleased with the victory, was sobered by the appalling casualty figures. John McClernand, reporting directly to him, spoke of “slaughter” and the president began to wonder if he had placed his trust wisely. On April 23, Stanton wired Halleck, “The President desires to know…whether any neglect or misconduct of General Grant or any other officer contributed to the sad casualties….” Halleck, already unimpressed by Grant’s performance at Shiloh, did not want him to have a prime field command, and instead raised him to a meaningless position as second in command of all the armies of the west. The Army of the Tennessee was assigned to General George H. Thomas. Lew Wallace recalled that while returning to his own camp one day he “saw a tent out by itself. A man stood in the door. His seemed a familiar figure and, looking a second time, I recognized General Grant, and rode to him. Bringing a campstool, he invited me to sit. The conversation was chiefly remarkable in that he made no allusion to his treatment by Halleck—neither by voice, look, nor manner did he betray any resentment. That very silence on his part touched me the more keenly.” Grant had been banished to an island in the midst of his men. “I was,” he recalled, “ignored….”10
Corinth lies nineteen miles southwest of Shiloh as the crow flies, just south of the Tennessee border in Mississippi. By wagon road it was twenty-two miles away. In Grant’s view, long afterward, the Union forces “ought to have seized it immediately after the fall of Donelson and Nashville, when it could have been taken without a battle, but failing then it should have been taken, without delay, on the concentration of troops at Pittsburg Landing after the battle of Shiloh.” Grant thought an attack certainly ought not to have awaited the arrival of Pope’s thirty thousand men on April 21. But Halleck waited even longer: “On the 30th April the grand army commenced its advance from Shiloh upon Corinth.” The absurdity of this ponderous movement of more than 100,000 men toward Corinth—just a little town, albeit the headquarters of the Confederate armies in the west—was not lost on some of the participants. Lew Wallace was subjected to the ludicrous lesson Halleck insisted on teaching his officers for their having been caught without trenches at Shiloh. Halleck “was moving at the rate of a mile a day,” wrote Wallace, “throwing up works at every halt. That is, he gained a mile every day to go into besiegement every night. At the end he would have spent a month doing what General Johnston had done in three days.”11
Lew Wallace had the wit to guess that Grant was ironic when, in his Memoirs, he reached for a classical allusion to explain Halleck’s Corinth and wrote, “The movement was a siege from the start to the close.” Halleck’s monstrously large army enveloped itself. It permitted the Confederate armies around it to go free, and as Wallace noted, when the majestic progression was accomplished, “Corinth was not captured; it was abandoned to us. At dawn of May 30th we marched into its deserted works, getting nothing—nothing—not a sick prisoner, not a rusty bayonet, not a bite of bacon—nothing but an empty town and some Quaker guns.”12
Halleck made much of nothing. He declared the occupation of Corinth a great victory. Five days afterward he wired Washington, “Thousands of the enemy are throwing away their arms…. The result is all I could possibly desire.” He was right; a month later he would be called to Washington to be given what he most desired, the command not just of all the armies of the west, but of all the armies of the Union. What he did not do was to deploy his immense armies immediately against the enemy at Chattanooga and Memphis and Vicksburg. Instead, men were put to work building around Corinth the most impressive complex of earthworks in the world. It was the Confederacy that had won. It had gained time. Grant knew this. “These fortifications were never used,” was his bland, damning judgment of the enterprise.13
This cool comment was written a quarter of a century after the events; in 1862 Grant could not be so dispassionate. He was disgusted with having been shouldered aside by Halleck and was about to make the blunder of requesting a new assignment, a move which almost surely would have been interpreted as petulance and very likely would have sent him into professional oblivion. Grant needed a friend, and he found one.
William Tecumseh Sherman was the most brilliant man Ulysses Grant knew well. He was not always the wisest, but his surging, savage intelligence was as important in driving Grant ahead in war as it was to be impotent in restraining him in the political world that Grant entered when peace came. Sherman, two years older than Grant, was also born in Ohio. An orphan, he was raised by Thomas Ewing and married his daughter Ellen, with whom he did lifetime battle in astonishingly candid letters—for example, relentlessly taking her to task for subjecting him to double costs in educating their children, school taxes and tuition for Roman Catholic schools. He also conducted a rich political discourse by mail with his brother, Senator John Sherman. He had opinions—almost none of them democratic—on every subject and might continue the discussion of an idea from conversation to correspondence and back to conversation again. Often a letter seemed to start in midsentence and press ahead without stopping for a pause of punctuation. His wit was mordant, his tone exuberant, and his intelligence irrepressible.
He was also almost as much of a failure as Ulysses Grant. He went to West Point when very young, and served in the Mexican War, of which he saw far less than Grant did. Like him, he subsequently had a tour of duty on the Pacific Coast. Resigning from the army, he tried his hand as a lawyer in the developing state of Kansas, but he did not prosper and brought his wife back to the Ewings, who had been caring for their eldest child. In 1859, leaving the family in Ohio, he went to Alexandria, Louisiana, to be the superintendent of a new military school modeled roughly on West Point. With secession, he left Louisiana, and in April 1861 took up employment with a railroad company in St. Louis, declining a post in Washington which would probably have led to his being assistant secretary of war; this choice did not enhance his credentials as a patriot. But his curiosity would not allow him to stay out of the war. He was horrified when Charles Ewing, his foster brother, wanted to take his seven-year-old son to watch the tense confrontation between Nathaniel Lyon and the rebels at the arsenal in St. Louis. But as the day grew more exciting, he and his son went along to take a look. Suddenly there was firing in the street: “I heard the balls cutting the leaves above our heads, and saw several men and women running in all directions, some of whom were wounded. Of course there was a general stampede. Charles Ewing threw Willie on the ground and covered him with his body.” Like Grant, Sherman had had no such adventures with his father—indeed, he had had no father at all—and the two generals filled some deep need within themselves by bringing their sons into a life that was so intensely theirs. The child, like the father, was never away from the war from that day on; he grew ill and died at Vicksburg, and Sherman’s letter telling of his death was one of the most eloquent of the hundreds of thousands of letters of mourning written between 1861 and 1865.14
Sherman had reddish hair, pitted skin, and a scant beard. He was lean and ceaselessly restless. Genteel observers were apt to describe him as “horrid-looking”; men who were drawn to him found him exasperating but never boring. In the early months of the war, he was viewed very skeptically by his superiors. Sherman joined Grant’s command just before Shiloh, and their acquaintance quickly grew into a comfortable friendship based on trust, enhanced with easy humor and a sense of private equality, and fostered by Sherman’s never-failing public recognition that Grant was his superior. O. O. Howard recalled a reunion of the two just before Chattanooga: “[Sherman came] bounding in after his usual buoyant manner. General Grant, whose bearing toward Sherman differed from that with all other officers, being free, affectionate, and good humored, greeted him most cordially. Immediately after the ‘How are you, Sherman?’ and the reply, ‘Thank you, as well as can be expected,’ he extended to him the ever welcome cigar. This Sherman proceeded to light, but without stopping his ready flow of hearty words, and not even pausing to sit down.” To get Sherman to relax, Grant “arrested his attention by some apt remark, and then said: ‘Take the chair of honor, Sherman,’ indicating a rocker with a high back. ‘The chair of honor? Oh, no! that belongs to you, general.’ Grant, not a whit abashed by this compliment, said: ‘I don’t forget, Sherman, to give proper respect to age.’—‘Well, then, if you put it on that ground, I must accept.’”15
It had been a far less cheerful day when, after Corinth, Sherman heard gossip to the effect that Grant was planning to leave the command. Sherman rode to Grant’s exile encampment, which “consisted of four or five tents, with a sapling railing around the front” in a clearing in the woods off the main road.
As I rode up, Major Rawlins, Lagow, and Hilyer, were in front of the camp, and piled up near them were the usual office and camp chests, all ready for a start in the morning. I inquired for the general, and was shown to his tent, where I found him seated on a camp-stool, with papers on a rude camp-table; he seemed to be employed in assorting letters, and tying them up with red tape into convenient bundles. After passing the usual compliments, I inquired if it were true that he was going away. He said, “Yes.” I then inquired the reason, and he said: “Sherman, you know. You know that I am in the way here. I have stood it as long as I can, and can endure it no longer.” I inquired where he was going to, and he said, “St. Louis.” I then asked if he had any business there, and he said, “Not a bit.” I then begged him to stay, illustrating his case by my own.
Before the battle of Shiloh, I had been cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of “crazy;” but that single battle had given me new life, and now I was in high feather; and I argued with him that, if he went away, events would go right along, and he would be left out; whereas, if he remained, some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place.16
Grant had indeed asked for a leave, in order to go to Covington; there he planned to consider whether to seek a transfer within the army or to resign from it. But, he recalled later, “General Sherman happened to call on me as I was about starting and urged me so strongly not to think of going, that I concluded to remain.” This seemingly casual conference was a critical turning point in the lives of both men, and perhaps in the Civil War. Grant drew confidence from Sherman’s act of friendship. “I…am,” wrote Sherman, “rejoiced at your conclusion to remain; for you could not be quiet at home for a week when armies were moving, and rest could not relieve your mind of the gnawing sensation that injustice had been done you.” Grant did not get lost in the self-defeating politics involved in complaining about commands and attempting to obtain reassignments, but he saw that if Sherman was correct that he must not try to get away from Halleck, there was still a way to get Halleck away from him. A promotion to Washington would do the trick, and when Halleck was called to the capital, Grant took the opportunity, on July 22, 1862, to write to Elihu Washburne. “I do not know the object of calling Gen. H. to Washington but if it is to make him Sec. of War, or Commander-in-Chief, Head Quarters at Washington, a better selection could not be made. He is a man of gigantic intellect and well studied in the profession of arms. He and I have had several little spats but I like and respect him nevertheless.” Halleck was named general in chief, and from the nature of their association later in the war, when Grant superseded Halleck in authority while Halleck retained his post as chief of staff, it appears that Grant meant what he said. Only years later did Grant learn of Halleck’s underhanded allegations of alcoholism, and lose his respect for the man. In the Memoirs, when he made summary evaluations of the important generals, he simply omitted Halleck.17
In the summer of 1862 Grant was politic enough never to complain about Halleck in his letters to Washburne; instead, he armed the congressman with politically useful tidbits about how the people of western Tennessee might be made loyal to the Union—notably by the re-establishment of the orderly procedures of civilian life, such as the mail service and trade. He also provided Washburne with texts that would be read by any eyes as evidence that Grant was the model of a loyal general: “It is hard to say what would be the most wise policy to pursue towards these people [the Southerners whom he found to be tiring of the war] but for a soldier his duties are plain. He is to obey the orders of all those placed over him and whip the enemy wherever he meets him.” Grant’s problem was that he received no such definitive orders. In the summer and fall of 1862 many fierce battles were fought in Tennessee and northern Mississippi—battles in which, as Grant noted, more men were killed than in all the battles of the Mexican War but which in the ultimate history of the Civil War were “dwarfed by the magnitude of the main battles so as to be now almost forgotten except by those engaged in them.” Halleck’s huge force was allowed to disperse and become scattered, its command divided, and its objectives unfocused; the great concerted drive on the enemy which Grant favored, could not be carried out until someone got the offensive into focus again.18
Three months after Shiloh, on the Fourth of July, the Union men in Memphis, whistling in the dark, treated themselves to a great celebration. The city had been taken after Pope destroyed its defenses, and Grant’s headquarters were there. At the Independence Day festivities he had as his guest a curious newspaperman whom Edwin M. Stanton had brought into the War Department. Charles A. Dana, who was conducting for Stanton an investigation of quartermastering corruption in Cairo, went downriver to meet the Shiloh general. Dana knew Grant was “under a cloud” because of Shiloh, but received a “pleasant impression…of a man of simple manners, straightforward, cordial, and unpretending.” He found the general self-possessed and eager to make war.19
Stanton and Lincoln listened to Dana, and in the fall of 1862 Grant was restored to the command of the Army of the Tennessee, but his earlier hopes and plans for a swift, merciful victory were gone: “Up to the battle of Shiloh, I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.” After Shiloh, he knew that the Confederacy was determined in its resolve to fight back and fight back again, and indeed, to go on the offensive and force the Union forces to fight back. Grant could see no indication that vast bloodshed would hasten the end. Neither discouragement at a spectacular defeat, as at Donelson, nor disgust at a spectacle of gross carnage, as at Shiloh, would hasten the rebels into surrender. Not single battles, not the occupation of territories, not the control of rivers on which the commerce of a society moved, would prove decisive. Now it was a war of annihilation, not a game of chasing and beating the other man’s army. Now a whole society had to be defeated. Heretofore, Grant and other commanders had exerted much effort to prevent the pillaging of civilian property, but, he reported, on August 2, as he was beginning to reassert himself in the war in the west, “I was ordered from Washington to live upon the country” and “directed to ‘handle rebels within our lines without gloves.’”20