Chapter Twenty The winter of 1863–1864 “opened very cold and severe,” according to Sherman, who well remembered the raw weather during his march to Knoxville in early December. The frigid conditions continued through the Christmas season with little sign of moderation. On a numbing New Year’s Day Sherman left Lancaster, en route for Memphis, to begin preparations for his destructive foray across the state of Mississippi. Minnie accompanied her father as far as Cincinnati, in order to return to Mount Notre Dame, the convent school where she had been studying.1
The night was bitter cold when their train steamed into the Cincinnati depot. It was about 4:00 a.m. when he and Minnie got to the 340-room Burnet House, then the pride of Cincinnati, easily identifiable by its great dome, and called by the Illustrated London News “the finest hotel in the world.” They tried, apparently without success, to start a fire, and then slept together to keep warm. A few days later, aboard the U.S. Juliet, a small gunboat that Admiral Porter made available for Sherman’s trip down the Mississippi, he wrote Minnie: “I can not tell you how bad I felt to leave you alone at that school in Cincinnati, but it is so important that you should now be studying that I could not help it.” Writing to Ellen soon after, he said that “Minnie acts somewhat like Willie, with that simple confidence that is very captivating.”2
Sherman’s journey to Memphis proved to be a dangerous ordeal. At Cairo, Illinois, which he had reached by train from Cincinnati, he found the Mississippi almost icebound. “With the utmost difficulty we made our way through [the ice],” he wrote in his memoirs, “for hours floating in the midst of immense cakes, that chafed and ground our boat so that at times we were in danger of sinking.” At last he reached Memphis on January 10, and he wrote Ellen that the winter at Memphis was as severe as in Ohio. People who knew the river expected floating ice to reach the Gulf of Mexico, “which will be an extraordinary phenomenon.”3
In contrast to the Memphis weather, many of the citizens gave Sherman a warm reception. “People here have crowded about all day,” he informed Ellen on January 11, “and seem disappointed that I am not coming here to stay.” The mayor and a group of leading citizens honored him with a banquet at the Gayoso on January 24. Realizing that he would be called upon to speak, he assured Ellen that he would be careful, “as I know full well there is a clique who would be happy to catch me tripping.” He wrote his brother John that he dreaded the dinner “more than I did the assault on Vicksburg.”4
Sherman actually enjoyed the banquet, “which was really a fine affair,” he proudly told Ellen, noting that “the hall of the Gayoso was crammed and the utmost harmony prevailed.” He sent her a copy of the newspaper Argus, which reported his speech “about right,” and then he declared that his remarks were well received, in fact “vehemently applauded.” He also sent John a copy of the Argus, while warning him against the Bulletin for its inaccuracies. Telling John that he could not “speak from notes, or keep myself strictly to the points,” nevertheless, he had no doubt that “the effect of my crude speeches is good,” which he delivered with a manner “in earnest and language emphatic.”5
A few days later, in another letter to Ellen, Sherman claimed that he “was not aware of the hold I had on the people [of Memphis] until I was there this time.” He told her that “every time I went into a theater or public assembly there was a storm of applause.” Such adulation is subtly addictive. Perhaps Sherman would have been wise to recall his own words, when he earlier cautioned his friend Grant against the lustrous plaudits ensuing from the conquest of Vicksburg, and memorably proclaimed that “this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day.”6
Sherman’s time in Memphis kept him busy, both tending to affairs of the Army of the Tennessee and preparing to sally forth from Vicksburg to Meridian. “Today my pen has been going for ten hours,” he told Ellen in one of his letters, “and I have signed the death warrant of several soldiers, two negros & one Guerrilla, all for murder & hard crimes.” Sherman’s major concern was preparing the formidable raid he would lead into enemy territory. Although the Confederacy had been split down the Mississippi River, Sherman thought that the severance should be broadened and secured against any future Rebel encroachment upon that vital artery.7
His primary interest focused on the area east of the river. If this region were safe against Rebel attacks upon American shipping, Sherman believed the trans-Mississippi would be of minor consequence. He had previously explained to John: “We are killing Arkansas & Louisiana. . . . All the people are moving to Texas with their negroes & cattle—Let them go—Let the back door open, & let them have Texas. Admit an irreconcilability of interest & character, but assert the absolute Right to the Valley of the Mississippi, and leave malcontents to go freely to Texas.” Sherman considered Texas little, if any better than Mexico, which he despised. Abandoning Texas would be good riddance for the nation. Once the secessionists of Arkansas and Louisiana joined the Texans, he predicted that “their pugnacious propensities will be aimed at Mexico.”8
By late January, Sherman’s plans for his marauding expedition were complete. He had put together a force of more than 20,000 infantry, consisting of two divisions from Stephen Hurlbut’s command in Memphis and two divisions from James McPherson’s Seventeenth Corps in Vicksburg. Upon Sherman’s instructions, McPherson had sent out spies who learned the enemy’s location and approximate strength. While in Memphis, Sherman had ordered Brigadier General William Sooy Smith to form a cavalry command of about 7,000 troopers. At the same time that Sherman’s infantry marched from Vicksburg toward Meridian, Smith’s cavalry would ride south from Memphis, also striking straight for Meridian.9
On January 28, the General was once again aboard Juliet, the now familiar little gunboat that had brought him safely through the ice. He was “bound for Vicksburg in a fog,” as he told John, while hurriedly writing to several family members. He informed Ellen, “I expect to leave Vicksburg in a very few days, and will cut loose all communications, so you will not hear from me save through the Southern papers, till I am back to the Mississippi.” As might be expected, he spoke again of Willy, and declared that his heart had been “too much wrapped up” in the boy. Admitting also that he had been “too partial to him,” he then denied his wife’s recent observation that he had been slighting Lizzie in favor of Minnie. After asserting, as he shifted to another topic, that “I have had my share [of military campaigning] but cannot avoid the future,” he again, perhaps wistfully but also unrealistically, brought up California. Surely he knew that Ellen’s temper would flare, but nevertheless, he wrote that if he could be certain of employment, he would go to California “this spring, but I fear my motives would be misconstrued.”10
He also composed a letter to Minnie. “Time passes so fast . . . and my life is such a turmoil,” he wrote her, “that it is only in the quiet of night that I can think of my dear Children that Seem to me dearer and dearer.” He felt compelled to tell her “how much I think about you, and how anxious I am that you should improve the few years that remain to you of Childhood.” In a short while, “I will go out to the Big Black where we were so happy last summer, when you and Willy used to ride with me.” Maybe he would escape death once more, he said, but if not, he assured her that he was comforted by the faith that she would think of him always.11
Sherman’s restless, perceptive mind seemed relentlessly engaged in analyzing national affairs, political and military, economic and social—and also racial. On the last day of January, he wrote a long letter to the assistant adjutant general of the Army of the Tennessee, in which he crafted an impressive, succinct summation of how the war began and developed, as well as revealing his hopes and vision for the eventual resolution of the tragic conflict:
I know that Slave owners, finding themselves in possession of a species of property in opposition to the growing sentiment of the whole Civilized World . . . foolishly appealed to War, and by skilled political handling they involved . . . the whole South. . . . Some of the Rich & slaveholding are prejudiced to an extent that nothing but death & ruin will ever extinguish, but I hope that as the poorer & industrial classes of the South realize their relative weakness, and their dependence upon the fruits of the earth & the good will of their fellow men, they will not only discover the error of their ways & repent of their hasty action, but bless those who persistently have maintained a Constitutional Government strong enough to sustain itself, protect its citizens, and promise peaceful homes to millions yet unborn.12
The letter he wrote to his brother on January 28 addressed similar issues. Sarcastically he admitted “the right of secession,” explaining that “men may expatriate themselves” from the nation. They may go anywhere, even to Madagascar he mused, “but they can not carry with them the ground.” He also would like to see the abandoned plantations “pass into new hands, even that of negros, rather than to speculators with Contract negros whom they treat as Slaves.” Considering Sherman’s view of blacks as inferiors, such a statement is rather remarkable.13
By February 3, 1864, the rush of letter writing ceased, and Sherman’s march got under way. He had succeeded in maintaining secrecy, and his own soldiers were not sure where they were going. In the hope of confusing the Rebels, he spread stories that the destination was Mobile. “The expedition is one of celerity,” he explained in his orders, and “all things must tend to that [end].” Not a single tent, “from the commander-in-chief down,” was to be carried. “I will set the example myself,” he declared to Ellen. Most significant, Sherman was going to operate without any supply line, while conducting a major raid deep into enemy territory, and covering about three hundred miles round trip. In addition to what the men could carry in their haversacks, they would live on rations transported in three wagons allotted to each regiment and, as Sherman had said when journeying from Memphis to Chattanooga, “the corn and meal of the country.” Gathering food from the Southern countryside would serve a double purpose, denying it to the Confederate military. When a woman complained of Yankees raiding her meat house, Sherman said the men needed the meat, and Southerners, because they had initiated the war, “must bear the consequences.”14
On February 6, Sherman’s troops marched into Jackson—for the third time in less than a year. “I am here again and a new burning has been inflicted on this afflicted town,” he wrote Ellen the next day. A number of buildings were torched, although the statehouse and the courthouse did survive. As Sherman’s columns headed for Meridian, a distinct path of devastation unfolded east of the capital. Several towns suffered almost total annihilation, as flames and smoke marked the route of the Blueclad columns. Sometimes the Southern cavalry, as it fell back before the Union advance, destroyed supplies that might benefit Sherman’s forces. Most of the havoc, however, was attributable to the Federals.15
By February 14, the General was in Meridian. He had expected to encounter enemy infantry, but Leonidas Polk, the Confederate “bishop-general,” had pulled his troops out and retreated into Alabama. “I scared the Bishop out of his senses,” Sherman boasted to Ellen with obvious relish. His only opposition was Rebel cavalry, which he easily brushed aside. He gave his men a day of rest and then put them to work destroying anything of military value.16
The top priority was the two intersecting railroad lines, the north–south Mobile & Ohio, and the east–west rails from Jackson to Selma. Thousands of men were assigned to work on the railroads, tearing up miles of track, burning the ties and bending the rails; they also destroyed bridges, trestles, rolling stock and locomotives. In addition to the railroads, Sherman’s men wrecked the town and its environs, burning depots, storehouses, hospitals, hotels, offices, sawmills and the arsenal. The General would report that Meridian “no longer exists.” He started back to Vicksburg on February 20, the day that Ellen’s mother died. Sherman, of course, would not know about Maria’s passing until after he returned to Vicksburg.17
At the time he left Meridian, Sherman was very concerned that he had neither seen nor heard from Sooy Smith. Hoping to learn something about the cavalry’s fate, he extended his return march, circling to the north for a number of miles before heading west. But Smith was nowhere near. Farther to the north, at Okolona, Mississippi, he had encountered Nathan Bedford Forrest. Although the Confederate troopers were significantly outnumbered, Forrest attacked aggressively and triumphantly. When the battle was over, Smith had lost nearly 400 men. He had also lost any desire to further engage with Forrest and headed back toward Memphis.18
Sherman was angry when at last he learned of Smith’s retreat. “I am down on William Sooy Smith,” he told Ellen. “He could have come to me, I know . . . and had he,” Sherman claimed, “I would have captured Polk’s Army, but the Enemy had too much Cavalry for me to attempt it with men afoot.” He had also wanted to destroy Forrest and was convinced that Smith had the strength of force with which to do it. “In this we failed utterly,” he declared, “because General . . . Smith did not fulfill his orders . . . as contained in my letter of instruction to him of January 27th . . . and my personal explanations to him at the same time.” Based on the account in his memoirs, Sherman never again placed any military confidence in Smith.19
Except for the failure of Smith’s mission, Sherman was pleased with the Meridian expedition. He had no doubt that Confederate military operations west of Meridian would be far more difficult than before, while Union transportation on the Mississippi River would be less vulnerable. Of inestimable importance for future operations, Sherman now had firsthand convincing evidence that he could lead an army through the heart of Rebel territory, living off the land with no supply line whatsoever, and the enemy could not stop him. Grant had moved from the Mississippi River, south of Vicksburg, with only a skimpy supply line, to place the Rebel fortress under siege, and then reestablish full river communications with the north. Now Sherman had marched a much greater distance without any supply line. The impact on Southerners in his path had to be devastating. They had witnessed Union forces going wherever they pleased, and destroying anything they chose.20
As Sherman rode toward the Big Black River on his return to Vicksburg, his thoughts again focused upon Willy, his “almost too loved boy,” about whom he said to Ellen, “I yet can dream of him as still alive.” Crossing the Big Black, and seeing “the ruins of our old camp,” he recalled how “Willy ran to me, his whole heart beaming in his face.” The General could hardly realize “that I should never see him again.” Aboard the steamboat Westmoreland, churning up the Mississippi toward Memphis, Sherman wrote of Willy’s “pure & brave Spirit [which] will hover over this Grand Artery of America.” In words charged with emotion, he declared, “I want to live out here & die here also, and don’t care if my grave be like De Soto’s in its muddy waters.” Sherman would soon be on his way to Georgia, however, and he would not again see the Mississippi’s “muddy waters” until the war was over.21
BY THE SPRING of 1864, the United States military forces had succeeded in delivering a number of massive, strategically crippling blows against the Confederacy. From Fort Henry, Fort Donelson and Nashville on the secessionists’ northern border to New Orleans on the southern, the Union campaigning inflicted enormous casualties and recovered an immense amount of Rebel territory. Most of the Federal achievements were never to be overturned, even briefly, and none permanently. The war for the Union, a noble and inspiring cause, had broadened significantly into a fight for the emancipation of the slaves, an objective equally noble and worthy, as well as destructive of the Confederacy’s fundamental raison d’etre.
In addition, at the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, the U.S. Army had thrown back a formidable Rebel invasion, led by the South’s most able general, in the bloodiest clash of the war. This huge, spectacular engagement in time engendered, as historian Stephen Woodworth recently observed, “the myth that it was somehow the turning point or decisive battle of the Civil War.” Actually Vicksburg, as historian Gary Gallagher declared in a sesquicentennial article, “loomed far larger in 1863 than did Gettysburg.” The conquest of Vicksburg meant that Sherman’s “Grand Artery of America,” securely under Federal control, guaranteed an immutable division of the western Confederacy, from its receding northern border to the Gulf of Mexico.22
Even when the Southerners achieved a great but costly victory at bloody Chickamauga, the triumph proved strategically barren. The United States had also established an ever tightening naval blockade around the 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline, a stranglehold that the Southerners’ diminutive navy could never hope to break. And the once strongly held Confederate faith that, if nothing else, foreign intervention would secure their independence, seemed by 1864 relegated to the growing catalogue of Rebel might-have-beens.
Yet after three years of struggle, the outcome of the war had not been determined. Many square miles of the Confederacy’s vast heartland were still intact. The determination of the Southern people to resist “Yankee domination” had not been broken. The Rebels still had two major armies poised to continue the fight. Although the Confederacy was obviously diminished and weakened, it appeared to be far from willing to quit. Unquestionably, Sherman realized those facts. Shortly after his destructive foray across Mississippi, he wrote that “the Devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired—No amount of poverty or adversity seems to shake their faith—niggers gone—wealth & luxury gone, money worthless, starvation in view within a period of two or three years, are causes enough to make the bravest tremble, yet I see no signs of let up . . . the masses determined to fight it out.”23
Thus as the spring of 1864 drew nigh, the United States had once again to gird itself for battle, once more to take the offensive and carry the war to the Southerners—invade and conquer. The Confederacy had only to defend and maintain in order to succeed, but the North had to win the war. It would be a hard and demanding year. “All that has gone before is mere skirmishing,” prophesied Sherman in a mid-March letter to Ellen.24
Romantic illusions of the glory of war were long gone, destroyed by the ubiquitous reality of suffering and death. While the United States had a much larger manpower pool from which to recruit soldiers than did the Confederacy—where approximately one-half of the Southern white male population between the ages of eighteen and thirty was being killed or maimed—the fact that the Union percentage of casualties was not as high as the Rebels seemed of little comfort when fathers and husbands, sons and brothers, and friends were being killed and crippled. No war in the nation’s history had been like it—not even close.
And the war was becoming ever more brutal. Sherman was familiar with Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. Whether from digesting Clausewitz or reflecting upon his own firsthand experience, or both, Sherman well understood that war has a natural dynamic, a dynamic toward ever more violence. This natural trend became exacerbated in 1864, fueled by the pressure of thousands of former slaves serving in the Union army. Southern whites, with the approval of Jefferson Davis, viewed those blacks as fugitive slaves, and their white officers as instigators of slave insurrections. Some Confederate soldiers had no intention of taking any black prisoners. Naturally the former slaves could be expected to retaliate, once they learned, and they soon did, of such racially charged Rebel behavior.25
The most famous Confederate massacre of black troops took place on April 12, 1864, fifty miles north of Memphis, at Fort Pillow. Sherman was not at all surprised. “Of course Forrest & all southerners will Kill them and their white officers,” he wrote his brother John. He also expected more such barbarity, declaring “it is inevitable.” No other case received the publicity of Fort Pillow, but Sherman was right in anticipating that similar and equally despicable events would follow. Already he could testify of deeply disturbing acts by some Southerners. On the very day of the Fort Pillow massacre, and before he knew about it, Sherman wrote General Lorenzo Thomas: “I heard a young lady in Canton [Mississippi], educated at Philadelphia, who was a communicant of a Christian church, thank her God that her negroes, who had attempted to escape into our lines at Big Black, had been overtaken by Ross’ Texas brigade and Killed. She thanked God and did so in religious sincerity.” Sherman then declared: “All the people of the South . . . unite in this, that they will Kill as vipers the whites who attempt to free their slaves, and also the ‘ungrateful slaves’ who attempt to change their character from slave to free.”26
The war’s violence grew in other ways too. More property—increasingly civilian as well as military—would be torched in 1864 than the previous year. Guerrilla depredations became more widespread and intensified in brutality. Prisoners of war were seldom exchanged anymore. The parole system had broken down after Vicksburg, when Confederate parolees returned to the Rebel army without being exchanged for Union prisoners. Any slim possibility of renewing the parole system ended when African-Americans began serving in the Federal army, because Southerners adamantly refused to exchange captured blacks. Prisons became more crowded, ravaged by disease, and many men did not survive.27
The great conflict, as might be expected, demanded still more soldiers. Union veterans were strongly encouraged to reenlist, with the promise of a thirty-day furlough, a four-hundred-dollar bounty and other inducements. Among the Federal’s western armies, a high percentage of the soldiers did choose to see the war through to the end. Bounties were also being paid to new men who joined up. Some received Federal, state and local bounties, all of which could amount to a sizable sum. Sherman strongly disliked the bounty system of raising troops. Cynically he claimed that “we have less sense even than the Mexicans, paying fabulous bounties for a parcel of boys & old men, and swelling our Muster Rolls, but adding nothing to our real fighting Strength.” Sherman believed, however, that more soldiers and larger armies were imperative to win the war, even if some of the new troops were “boys & old men.” The nation “can not put forth too much of an army this year,” he wrote his senator brother on April 5, declaring “the war is not yet over by a d——d sight.” In another letter he warned: “Don’t you delude yourself that [the conflict] is even approaching an end.” He stated that 1864 “may be the Crisis of the War.” In a letter to Minnie, he wrote that 1864 would “either raise our Country’s fame to the highest Standard or sink it to that of Mexico.”28
IN TRUTH, 1864 became the decisive year of the great struggle. On March 17, a momentous, war-changing event occurred. U. S. Grant was appointed general-in-chief of all the armies of the United States, with the exalted rank of lieutenant general. No one in the nation’s history had been elevated to lieutenant general since George Washington (Winfield Scott’s three stars represented a brevet, or honorary, rank, rather than an official one). While there were several lieutenant generals in the Rebel armies, Grant was the only one in the Federal forces. At last there would be unity of command, with Grant directing the overall war effort, east and west. Sherman was genuinely pleased with the decision. After observing Grant’s military capacity for two years, he had concluded that his friend was the single most able Union general.
Writing at once to congratulate the new general-in-chief, Sherman felt compelled to offer advice about one matter. “Do not stay in Washington,” he urged. Sherman feared that Grant might not be able “to stand the buffets of intrigue and policy.” Grant should direct operations from the western theater, where Sherman believed that the war’s decisive campaigning had been unfolding. “I tell you the Atlantic slope and Pacific shores will follow [the Mississippi Valley’s] destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk!” Earnestly he implored Grant, “For God’s sake and for your country’s sake, come out of Washington!”29
Grant was more politically discerning than Sherman gave him credit for being, and he fully realized that President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress—not to mention public opinion—expected him to maintain his headquarters in the east, and oversee the military operations against the formidable Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee. That army still lay uncomfortably close to Washington. Sherman should have understood this. Possibly he was so focused on the war in the west that he was blind to the reality of politics in the east. Perhaps his longtime disdain for politicians benumbed him to the necessity of working with and pleasing men whom he basically considered inferiors.
Whatever the nuances of Sherman’s strongly worded, heartfelt exhortations for Grant to remain in the west, he obviously had set aside his own self-interest. If Grant went east, Sherman would be the odds-on favorite to succeed him, thus rising to command all the Union armies in the west. Nevertheless, Sherman sincerely admonished Grant not to go east. When he realized that Grant’s decision was irrevocable, he then wrote brother John, “Give Grant all the help you can,” he urged. “He will expect your friendship—We are close friends. His simplicity and modesty are natural & not affected.” He also warned John, “Don’t disgust him by flattery or importunity,” and declared that “Grant is as good a leader as we can find. . . . His character more than his Genius will reconcile Armies and attach the People.”30
Thus Sherman succeeded to the command of the vast Military Division of the Mississippi, embracing the Departments of the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee and Arkansas. Meanwhile, the new general-in-chief wasted no time in devising and implementing a grand, coordinated spring offensive on all fronts. The Confederacy’s two major armies would be the primary objectives: Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, then encamped near the Rapidan River, and the Army of Tennessee, positioned in northwest Georgia near Dalton, and led by Joseph E. Johnston, who had succeeded Braxton Bragg following the Rebel defeat at Chattanooga. Grant envisioned subsidiary campaigns as well, intending to keep pressure on all Rebel forces, east and west. He himself would be the key general in the east, and Sherman in the west. Grant summoned Sherman to meet him in Nashville, where they would discuss strategy face-to-face.
Although they were together for several days at the Tennessee capital, the two generals never got a chance to talk at length. Sherman then accompanied Grant to Cincinnati, but conversing on the train proved unsatisfactory as well. Finally they checked in at the Burnet House, broke out maps and discussed their plans in detail. The two men had the whole war in their hands. Years later, Sherman pointed out Parlor A, and stated that the campaign began right there. “He was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was his plan. No routes prescribed. . . . It was the beginning of the end.” Thus the Burnet House, and particularly Parlor A, became a hallowed site of the Civil War. There the Grand Army of the Republic held meetings for years.*31
More specifically, Grant planned to ride with the Army of the Potomac, which he left under the command of George Gordon Meade. “Lee’s army will be your objective point,” he told Meade. “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” There too would go Grant, who was well aware of Confederate hopes for military gains in 1864, gains sufficient to strengthen war weariness in the North, and possibly lead to the defeat of President Lincoln in that fall’s election. By this stage of the conflict, the defeat of Lincoln very possibly constituted the only realistic chance for the Confederacy yet to achieve success. Grant intended to overwhelm the enemy armies and end the war before the presidential election. If that goal proved impossible, he and Sherman would, at the least, apply unrelenting pressure, east and west, against the Rebel armies. Any important Southern military gain must be made impossible.32
“You I propose to move against Johnston’s army,” Grant instructed Sherman, “to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” Grant added: “I do not propose to lay down for you a plan of campaign, but simply to lay down the work it is desirable to have done, and leave you free to execute it in your own way.” Sherman assured the general-in-chief that he would “not let side issues draw me off from your main plans, in which I am to knock Joe Johnston, and to do as much damage to the resources of the enemy as possible.” Reflecting their understanding in Cincinnati, Sherman vowed: “I will ever bear in mind that Johnston is at all times to be kept so busy that he cannot in any event send any part of his command against you or Banks.”33
Sherman referred to Major General Nathaniel Banks, who was another “political general.” A former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Banks was a facile chameleon throughout the course of his political career: twice a Democrat, once a Know-Nothing and twice a Republican. Although he had no military experience, his political clout gained him a commission as major general of volunteers. In the spring of 1864, he commanded the Department of the Gulf. Grant and Sherman had to work with the man, for Banks enjoyed the support of President Lincoln. They intended for Banks to open a subsidiary attack against Mobile at the same time that Sherman launched his campaign against Joe Johnston in north Georgia, if not before. Once he captured Mobile, Banks was to drive northward toward Montgomery, prevent Confederate forces in Alabama from reinforcing Johnston and open a supply line from the Gulf of Mexico that could help sustain Sherman’s striking force of 100,000 men.34
On April 10, Sherman wrote Grant: “If Banks can at the same time carry Mobile and open up the Alabama River, he will in a measure solve the most difficult part of my problem, viz., ‘provisions.’” But Sherman, having spent two days in New Orleans with Banks after the march across Mississippi, was not impressed by the man. Banks was then preparing to lead an expedition up the Red River to Shreveport and beyond, for which Sherman lent him two divisions, specifying that they must be returned to him for the Georgia campaign. The Red River expedition was slow getting under way, however, as Banks prepared for the establishment of a civil government in Louisiana and invited Sherman to participate in a grand inauguration of the governor. Sherman was put off. “I regarded all such ceremonies as out of place at a time when it seemed to me every hour and every minute were due to the war.” He left, clearly with no intention of depending on Banks for significant help. “Georgia has a million of inhabitants” he wrote Grant. “If they can live, we should not starve. If the enemy interrupt our communications, I will be absolved from all obligations to subsist on our own resources, and will feel perfectly justified in taking whatever . . . we can find.”35
If Sherman had placed any faith in the Mobile campaign he would have been sorely disappointed, for it never even got under way. The Lincoln administration decided that Banks should first lead a joint army-navy expedition up the Red River into western Louisiana and eastern Texas, thus making a show of force to impress French Emperor Louis Napoleon III, who had sent an army into Mexico. Banks could simultaneously seize Southern cotton for wealthy men in the North. “The Real Power that controls us,” Sherman declared in a letter to his father-in-law, in a statement strongly reminding how little war ever changes, “is a swarm of men who are trying to make money.”36
The Red River campaign was a debacle. Approximately thirty-five miles south of Shreveport, Banks’s advance was stopped at Sabine Crossroads. Admiral Porter wrote Sherman that only the fighting of Andrew Jackson Smith’s command, on loan from Sherman, “saved Banks from utter rout.” Ultimately retreating back down the river, Banks almost lost Porter’s gunboat flotilla to the falling water level above Alexandria. Only the ingenuity of Wisconsin Colonel Joseph Bailey, who ingeniously devised a dam and created a chute deep enough to float the ironclads, saved Banks from a humiliating disaster. Obviously Banks failed to awe Louis Napoleon. Perhaps eventually more concerned with trying to extract cotton, he managed to seize very little.
Banks did not get back to New Orleans until it was far too late to move against Mobile. Some 15,000 Rebel troops from Alabama were free to reinforce Johnston in north Georgia, which they did, and Sherman gained no supplies from the Gulf. Nor did Banks return the soldiers Sherman had lent him. Particularly, Sherman wanted back the division commanded by Andrew Jackson Smith, which he regarded as one of his best. “As I before stated,” he wrote Banks, “I must have A. J. Smith’s troops as soon as possible. I beg you will expedite their return.” Banks refused to release the borrowed veterans, thereby compelling Sherman to rethink the way he had intended to launch the north Georgia campaign.37
Two political generals, Franz Sigel and Benjamin F. Butler, also headed subsidiary operations in Virginia. Sigel, attempting to destroy a major source of Confederate rations in the Shenandoah Valley and disrupt Rebel communications with the western Confederacy, blundered to defeat at the Battle of New Market. Butler, commanding about 35,000 troops, approached Richmond from the east and south, seemingly with a realistic chance to capture the Confederate capital. However, General Beauregard, leading approximately half as many men as Butler, drove the Union forces onto a peninsula known as Bermuda Hundred, which was formed by the confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers. The Rebels entrenched across the opening of the peninsula, trapping Butler’s army “as if,” in Grant’s stinging, oft quoted words, “it had been in a bottle strongly corked.” All three subsidiary campaigns came to naught, leaving the great weight of defeating the Confederacy primarily upon the armies directed by Grant and Sherman.38
WHEN THE TWO GENERALS discussed war plans at Cincinnati in March, Sherman also got a chance to visit briefly with Ellen, who came in from Lancaster. With his wife expecting another baby soon, quite probably they talked about what to name the child. Already they had concluded, if the new arrival were a boy, that they would not call him Willy. Only a few days before, Sherman had written Ellen, “On reflection, I agree with you that [Willy’s] name must remain sacred to us forever. He must remain to our memories as though living, and his name must not be taken by any one. Though dead, he is still our Willy and we can love him as God only knows how we loved him.”39
After spending two days in Cincinnati, Sherman was back in Nashville by March 24, preparing for the great spring campaign. He would be commanding the largest U.S. armed force that had been assembled in the western theater since General Halleck’s advance on Corinth following the battle of Shiloh. He would be striking deep into the Southern heartland. The objective, in tandem with Grant, was nothing less than the final defeat of the Confederacy. Understanding fully what was at stake, Sherman was determined not to fail. First, he started for the front, traveling by rail in a special car, to confer face-to-face with his principal generals: James McPherson, commanding the Army of the Tennessee, George Thomas, commanding the Army of the Cumberland, and John Schofield, leading the Army of the Ohio. They rendezvoused in Chattanooga.40
“We had nothing like a council of war, but conversed freely and frankly,” remembered Sherman, who emphasized that preparations must be made at once. He fixed May 1 as the date “when all things should be ready.” Sherman realized that “the great question of the campaign was one of supplies,” a daunting responsibility, basically resting upon his shoulders. In addition to the needs of 100,000 fighting men, he must provide for 35,000 supporting animals—not to mention the thousands of men required to operate, maintain and defend the railroads and supply depots. Returning to Nashville, his chief depot for stockpiling essential supplies, the General was busy with preparations through most of April.
Fortunately, in this all-important aspect of war, Sherman had no superior in either the Union or the Confederate military—and perhaps no equal. Tennessee’s capital, he noted, “was itself partially in a hostile country,” and the city’s large warehouses and railroad equipment had to be well protected. Nashville was not the beginning point, though. The routes of supply would come from the Ohio River at Louisville, via the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, and the Cumberland River, which joined the Ohio west of Louisville, and both routes had to be guarded. Protecting supplies en route to Nashville, however, was relatively easy when compared with the rail lines from Nashville to Chattanooga, the forward base for Sherman’s forces. Between Nashville and Chattanooga, a distance of 136 miles according to Sherman, “every foot of the way . . . had to be strongly guarded against the acts of a local hostile population and the enemy’s cavalry.” Some allowances had to be made too for train wrecks, which were not an uncommon occurrence.41
Sherman estimated that to be reasonably certain of adequate supplies, he needed 130 cars, holding ten tons each, to reach Chattanooga every day. “Even with this calculation,” he wrote, “we could not afford to bring forward hay for the horses and mules, nor more than five pounds of oats or corn per day for each animal.” This amount was considerably less than the commonly accepted daily requirement of food and forage, which Sherman placed at twenty pounds for a horse. A man, he said, “can get along” with only two pounds. Sherman was banking on finding adequate fields of wheat and corn, plus a good deal of grass, as he advanced into Georgia. Beef cattle would be driven on the hoof. The soldiers would march.42
When Sherman wrote of protecting the rails “every foot of the way” from Nashville to Chattanooga, he exaggerated but little. Two railroads were available for the run to Chattanooga: the Nashville & Decatur line, which joined the Memphis & Charleston at Decatur, Alabama, and thence east to Chattanooga; and the Nashville & Chattanooga line, which met the Memphis & Charleston at Stevenson, Alabama, significantly farther east than Decatur. Obviously, as a glance at the angles instantly reveals, the Nashville & Chattanooga road was the shorter of the two. Both railroads were highly vulnerable targets for the Rebels to attack.
On the Nashville & Chattanooga line there was an important bridge only twelve miles southeast of Nashville at the little town of Antioch. From Antioch to LaVergne, the rails crossed several trestles. Then came major bridges over Stones River, Duck River, and the Elk River. Just south of Cowan, Tennessee, stretched a tunnel, 2,228 feet long, which was certainly an inviting target. South of the tunnel, the grade declined steeply, presenting more destructive opportunities. Once beyond Stevenson, Alabama, the Memphis & Charleston was exceedingly vulnerable, crossing a lengthy bridge at Bridgeport, Alabama, before traversing high and rather fragile trestles on the thirty-mile approach into Chattanooga. The Nashville & Decatur route was similarly vulnerable—even more so in fact, because it covered a considerably longer distance.43
The crucial work of defending the Union’s indispensable line of communication would be coordinated from Nashville, with the largest numbers of troops, by order of General Sherman, stationed at Nashville, Murfreesboro, Columbia, Decatur and Stevenson, “from which places they can be rapidly transported to the point of danger.” Smaller reserves were to be placed “judiciously” at other points, from which they could be quickly shifted wherever necessary. An infantry regiment, for example, was to be stationed at Tullahoma, and two regiments at Bridgeport. A great number of block-houses, capable of withstanding the blasts of artillery, were constructed at various weak points. The Nashville & Chattanooga line had about fifty blockhouses, manned by a total of 1,400 soldiers. These forces, numbering about 25 men per blockhouse, were expected to “hold their ground . . . against any cavalry force until relief comes.” (Sherman was most concerned about Nathan Bedford Forrest.) The blockhouses must be prepared to fight “to the last,” he said, to “save the time necessary for concentration.” The Nashville & Decatur line was also heavily defended by blockhouses, although Sherman naturally preferred the shorter Nashville & Chattanooga route whenever possible.44
Not only did Sherman have to provide adequate numbers of guards, stationed at many points; also, crews of qualified workmen, with essential equipment and tools, had to be located at strategic points, ready to rapidly repair any damage, whether from accidents, natural causes or the destructive efforts of the enemy. These squads had to be versatile, capable of dealing with bridges, trestles, tunnels, creek crossings, rails and roadbeds. Furthermore, Sherman needed additional locomotives and rolling stock. The sixty locomotives and six hundred cars available when he took command were inadequate for stockpiling any surplus. He wanted one hundred locomotives and a thousand cars. With the approval of the secretary of war, he began accumulating rolling stock and engines from Northern railroads as fast as possible.45
Sherman also issued a general order limiting the use of the cars to “essential articles of food, ammunition, and supplies for the army proper, forbidding any further issue to citizens, and cutting off all civil traffic.” This order engendered considerable protest. Even President Lincoln, upon receiving requests from poor people of Union persuasion in east Tennessee, telegraphed Sherman inquiring whether he could not modify his orders. The General respectfully refused, stating that the railroads “had but a limited capacity, and could not provide for the necessities of the army and the people too.” No doubt Sherman took delight in denying use of the railroads to the press and to ministers. He noted that “every regiment has its chaplain and there is no necessity at all for these wandering preachers, who are a positive nuisance.” Refusing their request with relish, Sherman declared that the railroad was “purely for military freight. 200 pounds of powder or oats are worth more . . . than that amount of bottled piety.” Sherman vowed not to give in, although the “preachers clamor & the Sanitaries Wail.”46
Supervision of the railroads was centered in Nashville. When Sherman took command, Colonel Daniel C. McCallum was the overall director and general manager of western military railroads, having been appointed by Grant. Sherman retained McCallum, who supervised a Department of Transportation, led by Colonel Adna Anderson, that actually operated the supply trains. Colonel William W. Wright managed a Department of Construction, charged with the repair work essential to keep the roads functioning. Sherman’s goal was to stockpile a large quantity of supplies in both Nashville and Chattanooga—sufficient that even if his long communication line were seriously damaged, between either Louisville and Nashville or Nashville and Chattanooga, he could continue to supply his forces for several weeks while repairs were made. “Ordinary prudence dictated . . . an accumulation at the front,” he said. Once the campaign began, Sherman’s advancing forces obviously would depend upon an ever lengthening supply line. The Western & Atlantic Railroad, running from Chattanooga to Atlanta, would quickly come into play. Sherman’s railroads would never be out of commission long, and he gave Colonel Wright high marks—“a wonderfully ingenious, industrious, and zealous officer, and I can hardly do him justice”—for his demanding, and often difficult repair work.47
Although Sherman was pushing hard to be ready for the beginning of the campaign, he occasionally found time for his favorite diversion, the theater. Offered a private box at the New Nashville Theater, the General declined, preferring to be, as one contemporary wrote, “surrounded by his boys in blue, laughing and applauding . . . with as much gusto as any in the audience.” General Wesley K. Clark recently observed that “Sherman cemented his reputation with the troops through his sheer personal competence and presence on the battlefield. Whether it was demonstrating the proper way to construct a fascine, or showing up at the front personally to reconnoiter, Sherman earned his men’s trust and admiration . . . as someone with enormous personal competence.” Sitting in the audience with his soldiers at the theater surely contributed also to the popularity he enjoyed with the men. While Sherman undoubtedly realized that fact, the General, at least by this stage of the war, genuinely liked being in the midst of his troops.48
Sherman’s favorable stature had been increasing back home too, as well as in the eyes of the men he commanded. He was not yet “lionized” on a par with Grant, but his fame was spreading. A “Miss Bailey” had recently requested a lock of his hair. He told Tom Ewing Jr. that he referred her first letter to his redheaded orderly “whose modesty was so shocked that his face outrivaled in brilliancy his brick top.” When Miss Bailey wrote a second time, Sherman said he answered, sending her an autograph, “and describing my hair as red, bristly & horrid—I think she is satisfied to leave my locks out of the cluster of flowers to be made up out of the hairs of the Great men of the day. Such nonsense is repulsive to me.”49
He assured Tom that by May 1 he intended “to have a host as vast & terrible as Alaric led into Rome.” Already Southerners were in dread of his coming. Some Confederate officers, politicians, newsmen and even clergymen claimed Sherman was about to bring upon the South both brutal Northerners and hordes of savage former slaves. A Southern paper asserted that the “northern barbarians” respected neither life nor virtue, and “our wives and daughters are reserved for a fate even worse than death.” Southern men must arise, “strike” and exterminate “such living demons!”50
No doubt some despicable characters marched among Sherman’s “vast & terrible” host, but neither free blacks nor former slaves were a part of that throng. Sherman’s army was composed totally of white men. While preparing for the advance into Georgia, the General found time to express, more than once, his negative attitude about African-Americans serving in the Union Army. “I think the negro question is run into the ground,” he wrote John Sherman. Of course he had no choice but to accept the destruction of slavery, “and whatever the proper authorities resolve on I must do,” but like many army men, he did not believe that blacks would make good soldiers. He would not have them in combat roles, either for offensive or defensive purposes, if he could avoid it. “We ought not to engraft a doubtful element in the army now,” he declared, for “it is too critical a period.” Of necessity some men “must work & raise corn,” he said to John, so “why not use in a great measure the negro labor we have Captured, instead of scattering it and dissipating it in a poor quality of soldiery and in raising cotton.”51
Sherman had another objection to enlisting African-Americans in the Union Army. Mobilizing blacks offered Northern whites yet another way to avoid serving their country. Already they might purchase an exemption or hire a substitute. Sherman believed, as he told his brother, that “every man in the United States” should fight for his country. Recruiting blacks was “the means by which Massachusetts and other states can dodge their share.” Stating that “our own soldiers have prejudices,” he wrote that “these are aroused by the foolish squabbles of Governors to show that they have given their quotas.” Filling state quotas through the enlistment of blacks irritated Sherman as much as the bounty system of raising troops.52
Regardless of what Sherman thought of blacks serving in combat roles, the General knew, above all, that his forces must be ready to move by May 1. Writing to Grant from Nashville on April 24, Sherman felt confident. “Supplies are the great question,” he declared, then affirming, “I have materially increased the number of cars [arriving] daily.” From an average of 65 to 80 railcars coming into Nashville per day when he began, the number had grown impressively: 193 on April 23, and 134 the next day. He estimated that 145 cars daily “will give us a day’s supply and a day’s accumulation.”53
The number of Union soldiers available for the campaign was also impressive, although the total was not as great as Sherman desired. The failure of Banks to return the soldiers Sherman loaned him, plus a sizable number of men not yet returned from furlough, reduced the command he had originally anticipated by some 15,000 to 20,000. Nevertheless, Sherman still would lead a grand force, 100,000 strong. The Army of the Cumberland, commanded by Major General George Thomas, was the largest army by far: 60,773 men, and 130 guns. Major General James McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee numbered 24,465, with 96 guns, while Major General John Schofield’s Army of the Ohio (basically only a corps in size) weighed in with 13,559 men and 28 guns. The grand aggregate was 98,797 troops and 254 guns. The opposing Confederate forces, known as the Army of Tennessee (not to be confused with the Federal Army of the Tennessee), would begin the struggle with a force of approximately 55,000, soon strengthened by some 12,000 to 15,000 additional troops.54
In late April, Sherman removed his headquarters from Nashville to Chattanooga and prepared to take command in the field. Several hundred miles distant, northeast across the rugged mountains of Carolina and Virginia, Grant was poised with Meade and the Army of the Potomac, ready to move across the Rapidan River, in hope of flanking the Rebel army. At last the stage was set and both major military forces of the United States were positioned to launch campaigns simultaneously, west and east. “The weather is beautiful,” Sherman wrote Ellen on May 4, “and the army is in fine condition.” The beginning of the end was at hand.55
* The great hotel, which had opened the same year and month that Sherman and Ellen married and through the decades hosted some truly significant people, including Abraham Lincoln, survived into the mid-1920s, when it was torn down to make way for an office building—perhaps symbolizing the era when President Calvin Coolidge famously declared “the business of the American people is business.”