Chapter Twenty-Five   

A SOLDIER OF RENOWN

On the morning of April 17, Sherman was about to board a train at Raleigh, North Carolina, for a short ride to negotiate with Joe Johnston, when he received a telegram from Edwin Stanton informing him that the President had been assassinated. Secretary of State William Seward and his son had been attacked about the same time as Lincoln and were seriously injured. The secretary of war warned Sherman that he had “evidence that an assassin is also on your track.” Sherman ordered the telegrapher not to reveal the awful news to anyone. He planned to return from a noon meeting with Johnston by late afternoon, and at that time would break the stunning news to his officers and the army.¹

A few miles out from Durham Station, Sherman and Johnston met in a small farmhouse belonging to James Bennett and his wife, readily granted to use as the site of the conference. The two generals had never seen one another before that day, “but we knew enough of each other,” thought Sherman, “to be well acquainted at once.” All staff officers remained outside the house. The Bennetts withdrew into a little log structure nearby. “As soon as we were alone together,” Sherman said he showed Johnston the dispatch announcing Mr. Lincoln’s assassination. Observing the Confederate general closely, Sherman declared that he made no attempt to conceal his distress. Johnston condemned the act unequivocally and said he hoped that Sherman did not think the Confederate government had instigated it. Sherman assured him that he did not believe Johnston, Lee or any Confederate military officers would have condoned an assassination. He “would not say as much for Jeff Davis,” and other “men of that stripe”—a remark that angered Davis when he heard about it. Sherman was impressed by Johnston’s concern about Lincoln’s death. Johnston looked upon the loss as a blow to the people of the South who, he said, “had begun to realize that Mr. Lincoln was the best friend the South had.”2

The two generals discussed the impact of the assassination on the country generally, and on the armies. Sherman worried about the effect on his troops in Raleigh. Many Union soldiers revered Lincoln and Sherman feared that some might seek vengeance on the North Carolina capital and the surrounding areas. Johnston seemed fully aware of the delicate situation with which Sherman would have to deal. The generals were in complete agreement that any further fighting was to be avoided if at all possible. Johnston wanted to not only surrender his army, but also arrange terms to cover all Confederate forces. Like Sherman, he seemed quite troubled about the possibility of the Southern armies breaking up and waging guerrilla actions. Sherman questioned whether Johnston had the authority to negotiate on such a broad scale. Admitting he did not at that moment, Johnston believed he could procure such power from Jefferson Davis. The generals agreed to meet again the next day at noon, at the same place. Their conversation had been “extremely cordial,” in Sherman’s words. He then hurried back to Raleigh, hoping that word of the President’s assassination had not leaked out while he was gone.³

It had not. Before making an announcement to the army, Sherman stationed heavy guards in Raleigh, and ordered his generals to see that order was maintained. “The general commanding announces, with pain and sorrow,” read Special Field Orders No. 56, “that on the evening of the 14th instant, at the theater in Washington City, his Excellency, the President of the United States, Mr. Lincoln, was assassinated.” Telling of the attempt to kill Secretary of State Seward and his son, Sherman stated, “It is believed, by persons capable of judging, that other high officers were designed to share the same fate. Thus it seems that our enemy, despairing of meeting us in open, manly warfare, begins to resort to the assassin’s tools.” While confident that “the great mass of the Confederate army would scorn such acts,” Sherman considered the assassination “the legitimate consequence of rebellion against rightful authority.” Union men, he concluded, “must now be prepared for . . . assassins and guerrillas; but woe unto the people who seek to expend their wild passions in such a manner, for there is but one dread result!”4

The announcement was powerful and memorable, the last statement packed with emotion. Perhaps Sherman might have chosen a less rousing thought on which to end, but he had little time to formulate the announcement, and he surely wanted the army to have no doubt that their commanding general had been deeply moved, both by the President’s death and the manner in which he died. “I doubt if, in the whole land, there were more sincere mourners over [Lincoln’s] . . . sad fate then there were in . . . Raleigh,” Sherman wrote of his army. Soldiers gathered “in little squads, silent or talking in subdued but bitter tones,” observed Major Hitchcock, “many . . . weeping like children.” General Howard remarked that “the grief is . . . completely depressing amongst the officers.” He saw generals shedding tears when they spoke of Lincoln.⁵

Some angry soldiers sought to strike out in retaliation. Thomas Osborn stated that it was only “with considerable difficulty that the army has been restrained from acts of revenge.” The most serious threat was mounted by about two thousand men from General Logan’s Fifteenth Corps. Billeted just outside of Raleigh, a mob began marching toward the city, bellowing threats to burn the capital. As they approached, General Jacob Cox, whose troops were guarding Raleigh, watched anxiously, wondering what the next few minutes might bring. Then Black Jack Logan galloped up and ordered his men to turn back. They halted momentarily, then resumed moving toward the city. Only when Logan, raising his booming voice, threatened to open artillery fire on them with canister, did the soldiers finally obey his order and return to camp.⁶

During that evening, and early the next morning, Sherman sought the advice of his generals before again meeting with Johnston. “Without exception,” Sherman said, they all advised him “to agree to some terms” that would end the conflict. “If Johnston made a point of it,” they even thought Jefferson Davis and his cabinet should be permitted to escape from the country. Black Jack Logan, according to his biographer, “was most vocal in favoring surrender on almost any terms.” Frank Blair, also a politician, was of like mind. Sherman remarked that “either Logan or Blair” insisted that, if necessary, “we should even provide a vessel to carry [Davis and company] . . . from Charleston to Nassau.”7

On the morning of April 18, Sherman again boarded a railcar, in company with most of his personal staff, and steamed to Durham Station, where he and Johnston once more rendezvoused at the Bennett house. Johnston assured him that he had indeed gained the authority to surrender all the Confederate armies. In return Johnston wanted an assurance of the political rights of Confederate officers and soldiers. This, he contended, would be very helpful in gaining their acceptance of the surrender terms.⁸

Only a few days earlier Sherman had written General Grant, praising his surrender terms with Lee as “magnanimous and liberal,” and saying that he would “of course grant the same” to Johnston when the time came. Reiterating that intention on April 15, Sherman promised Grant that he would “be careful not to complicate any point of civil policy.” Unfortunately, whatever his motives, Sherman proceeded to do the very thing he had pledged not to do. He did say to Johnston that Lincoln’s amnesty proclamation of December 1863 was still in force, and that it guaranteed surrendered soldiers would receive a full pardon, which restored their rights of citizenship. Johnston insisted that Confederate officers and men were alarmed and, regardless of the Lincoln proclamation, the surrender terms needed to address the issue.⁹

Johnston also wanted to bring John Breckinridge, who was nearby, into their deliberations. Sherman objected. The former vice president of the United States was then serving as Confederate secretary of war, and Sherman contended that he and Johnston were engaged in a military convention. Johnston countered that Breckinridge was also a major general in the Confederate Army, and his input could be valuable. Sherman relented and the Kentuckian joined the discussion. He soon confirmed what Johnston had contended about the uneasiness of Southern soldiers and officers regarding their political rights after surrender.10

Not long after Breckinridge joined them, Sherman walked to the door and called for his saddlebags, which a staff member quickly brought to him. He produced a bottle therefrom and offered Johnston and Breckinridge a drink. The latter is said to have “poured out a tremendous drink, which he swallowed with great satisfaction.” Possibly Sherman felt the two Southerners were ganging up on him and sought to create a more congenial atmosphere through imbibing a little alcohol. During the negotiations, Sherman reportedly shoved back his chair and blurted something to the effect: “Who is doing the surrendering anyhow? If this thing goes on, you’ll have me sending a letter of apology to Jeff Davis.” And then again, perhaps Sherman himself simply wanted a drink, and politely offered the others one as well. Breckinridge’s alcoholic pleasure was short-lived, however. When Sherman, working intensely on composing the surrender terms, poured himself another drink, he then corked the bottle without passing it on. While Joe Johnston attributed the sleight to absentmindedness, Breckinridge was incensed, later telling Johnston that “no Kentucky gentleman would ever” have done such a thing.¹¹

When Sherman finished writing the surrender document, he felt great pride and confidence in the achievement. It was, he assured Grant and Halleck, “an absolute submission of the enemy to the lawful authority of the United States, and disperses his armies . . . in such a manner as to prevent their breaking up into guerrilla bands.” Because both Johnston and Breckinridge “admitted that slavery was dead,” Sherman claimed he “could not insist on embracing it in such a paper, because it can be made with the states in detail.” Sherman said that as he wrote, he recalled his conversation with Lincoln at City Point and composed terms that “concisely expressed his views and wishes.” Admiral Porter, who was with Sherman at City Point, declared that “Sherman would not, and could not have been censured,” for his surrender terms if the conversation between Lincoln and the General had been known. Porter asserted that “Mr. Lincoln, had he lived, would have acquitted the General of any blame.”12

Whether Porter was right about Lincoln or not, the fact remains that Lincoln was dead, and Sherman had plunged into delicate and controversial issues. He had entered into terms of a political nature. His document recognized the existing state governments in the South, effective as soon as their members took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Where conflicting state governments existed, the U.S. Supreme Court would determine which should be recognized as legitimate. His terms sanctioned the reestablishment of Federal courts in the South, and guaranteed the “political rights and franchises” of the Southern people, “as well as their rights of persons and property.” The terms seemed even to leave a possibility of recognizing the Confederate war debt. Sherman also indicated that no one was to be punished “by reason of the late war, so long as they live in peace and quiet.”¹³

No doubt Sherman believed that he was acting in the best interests of the nation, and in the spirit of the assassinated president. But many in the North believed that, at the least, major Confederate political and military leaders should be punished, the franchise denied to all who had supported the Confederacy and freedom, including the right to vote, assured for the former slaves. Whatever Sherman, Johnston and Breckinridge might think about slavery being “dead,” Southern plantation magnates had long defined slaves as “property,” the right of which Sherman’s surrender terms guaranteed. When the document reached Washington, the brouhaha was on.

Secretary of War Stanton rose like a viper and struck vehemently at Sherman. Long aggravated by Sherman’s negative attitude toward blacks serving in the army, or toward their being placed on an equality with whites, Stanton led a charge to reject Sherman’s surrender terms, as well as discredit and embarrass the General. At a hastily arranged meeting of Andrew Johnson, the newly sworn-in president, as well as the cabinet and General Grant, the terms were officially disavowed, while the conversation even entailed implications of disloyalty on the part of Sherman. Stanton reacted as if Sherman had penned an unalterable treaty rather than a proposal to be duly considered. In Stanton’s impassioned denigration of Sherman, “there were echoes of Ebenezer Creek,” in the words of one historian, as well as Stanton’s controversy with the General in Savannah.

Stanton bluntly ordered Grant to give notice of the government’s disapproval to the General. He told Grant that “the instructions given to you by the late President Abraham Lincoln on the 3rd of March by my telegraph of that date, addressed to you, express substantially the views of President Andrew Johnson and will be observed by General Sherman.” The secretary of war ordered Grant to “proceed immediately” to Sherman’s headquarters, “and direct operations against the enemy.” Since Lincoln’s death, Edwin Stanton, as his biographers Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold Hyman concluded, “was indeed in virtual control of the government,” and he was essentially ordering Sherman removed from command.14

Stanton’s March 3 telegram, conveying Lincoln’s instructions about negotiating with Lee, stated that Grant was “not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands, and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions.” Unfairly for Sherman, Stanton neither sent him a copy of Lincoln’s instructions nor conveyed to him the substance of Lincoln’s message, which obviously he should have done if he expected it to be followed. When Sherman conferred with Johnston, uppermost in his mind was the conference with Lincoln at City Point, where the President spoke of lenient terms of capitulation and the opportunity of arranging the surrender of all Confederate armies in such a manner as to forestall the breakup of Rebel forces into guerrilla bands. As some critics have asserted, Sherman’s disdain for politicians and his own sense of importance as a military conqueror should be factored into any evaluation of his motivations in authoring the lenient surrender terms. These, however, were not primary.¹⁵

Even General Halleck, whom Sherman had long considered a friend, provided Stanton with information that, whether Halleck so intended or not, could be readily analyzed to Sherman’s detriment. Halleck, recently placed in charge of Virginia and the section of North Carolina not occupied by Sherman’s forces, wired Stanton on April 22; from “respectable parties” in Richmond, he told Stanton that he had learned the president of the Confederacy, “and his partisans” were trying to escape with a “very large” cache of “gold plunder, to go to Mexico or Europe.” They hoped “to make terms with Sherman or some other Southern commander,” and Halleck concluded that “Johnston’s negotiations look to this end.”

Four days later, Halleck, who by then knew that Sherman’s surrender terms with Johnston had been overturned, sent another message to Stanton, which was even more disparaging to Sherman. Halleck had ordered, acting upon Grant’s instructions (which were unknown to Sherman), that General George Meade and the Army of the Potomac should move into North Carolina and block the retreat of Johnston’s forces. Also, George Thomas, George Stoneman and James Wilson, all under Sherman’s command, should “pay no regard to any truce or orders” of Sherman. It was as if no negotiations had ever occurred between Sherman and Johnston. When Sherman learned of Halleck’s role in “the deadly malignity” perpetrated against him, he never forgave the man. Halleck eventually apologized for his message to Stanton. Sherman refused to accept the apology, and bitterly declared that when warned of an assassin being on his trail, “I little dreamed he would turn up in the direction and guise he did.”16

Stanton, for his part, continued to spew a massive dose of venom against Sherman. His letter of April 22 to Major General John A. Dix in New York, who commanded the Department of the East, strongly intimated that Sherman, in Sherman’s later summation, was “a common traitor and a public enemy,” whose subordinates had been instructed to disobey his “lawful orders.” The letter got into the hands of newspapermen—as Sherman correctly believed that Stanton intended—and was published in many Northern papers. “To say that I was merely angry . . . would hardly express the state of my feelings,” Sherman wrote in his memoirs. “I was outraged beyond measure.” While undoubtedly Sherman had overstepped his authority, he did not deserve to be treated in the way that the impetuous Stanton had branded his motives, and then spread the awful implications far and wide. “I do think that my rank, if not past services,” Sherman declared in a letter to Grant on April 28, “entitled me at least to the respect of keeping secret what was known to none but the cabinet until further inquiry could have been made.”17

Sherman of course had known nothing about the hullabaloo in Washington until Grant, acting on Stanton’s orders, arrived at his headquarters on April 24. Tactfully and carefully, Grant explained some aspects of the situation but did not share the full story. Although the two generals talked at length, Grant did not reveal that Stanton had ordered him to take over Sherman’s army. Neither did Grant inform Sherman of the impassioned cabinet meeting—during which Grant had remained silent while Stanton raged against Sherman. Considering Stanton’s frame of mind, Grant well may have thought that silence was the path of wisdom in that situation. There was no mention of the charges that Sherman intended to allow Jefferson Davis to escape from the country nor the rumors that Sherman planned to seize power and become a dictator. (Attorney General James Speed seemed to believe this, at least for a time.)

Sherman remained calm and reasonable as he and Grant conversed. At once Sherman notified Joe Johnston that the terms had been disapproved in Washington and the truce was terminated. Since both wanted an end to the war, they soon met again at the Bennett house and signed a new document that closely emulated Grant’s surrender terms with Lee. Grant was pleased and returned to the capital. Having listened to Sherman’s point of view, Grant was incensed at the manner in which Stanton had dealt with him. The actions of the secretary of war, and those who supported him, were “infamous—infamous! After four years of such service as Sherman has done—that he should be used like this.”¹⁸

Grant immediately composed an explanatory message to Stanton, designed to restore confidence in Sherman, who had acted upon “what he thought was precedent authorized by the President.” It was a good telegram, clearly indicating that Sherman had acted in good faith and had taken steps at once to set matters right when informed his terms were unacceptable. But Stanton was in a white-hot fury. Just three words—“Your dispatch received”—constituted the sole recognition that the secretary of war made of Grant’s message. Caustically Stanton inveighed: “The arrangement between Sherman and Johnston meets with universal disapprobation. No one of any class or shade of opinion approves it. I have not known as much surprise and discontent at anything that has happened during the war.” His last sentence declared, “The hope of the country is that you may repair the misfortune occasioned by Sherman’s negotiations.”19

Stanton then proceeded to delete the portions of Grant’s telegram that explained Sherman’s motivations and attitude. He released a mere two sentences to the press, which omitted any indication that most of Grant’s message had been expunged. The highly misleading publication simply read: “I reached here [Sherman’s headquarters] this morning, and delivered to General Sherman the reply to his negotiations with Johnston. Word was immediately sent to Johnston terminating the truce, and information that civil matters could not be entertained in any convention between army commanders.” Historian Burke Davis stated that the full copy of Grant’s telegram was hidden away in Stanton’s files—found only after the secretary of war died.²⁰

As yet unaware of the unscrupulous machinations of Stanton, Sherman wrote him on April 25 and actually stated: “I admit my folly in embracing in a military convention any civil matters, but unfortunately such is the nature of our situation that they seem inextricably united, and I understood from you at Savannah that the financial state of the country demanded military successes, and would warrant a little bending to policy.” Sherman added another sentence explaining further his negotiations with Johnston, after which he closed with a protest that after “four years’ patient, unremitting, and successful labor, I deserved no reminder such as is contained in the last paragraph of your letter [of April 21] to General Grant. You may assure the President I heed his suggestion.” Stanton was in no mood to listen to any explanations. Regardless of the General’s admission of “folly,” the conclusion of his letter was surely not to Stanton’s liking. But the secretary of war was so aroused that even if Sherman had said nothing about what he “deserved,” it probably would have made no difference whatsoever.21

On April 26 Sherman and Johnston returned yet again to the Bennett house. The generals were as eager for peace as ever. Nevertheless, reaching an agreement proved difficult. The most troublesome issue concerned the status of the surrendered Confederates. While acknowledging that Grant’s terms to Lee were generous, Johnston considered them inadequate. Neither food nor transportation had been provided to help Lee’s paroled soldiers return to their homes. As a result, their homeward path had become a trail of robbery and violence. Johnston, understandably, did not want this to happen with his troops, and in this respect contended that he should receive better terms than Lee. Sherman could see his point but was convinced that the administration in Washington would not approve any terms except those that Grant gave Lee. The fruitless discussion went on for some time, until Sherman decided to call in General Schofield and see if he had any suggestions about solving the knotty problem.²²

Schofield proved to be very helpful. After Johnston’s surrender, he would be in command of a force to maintain order in North Carolina. While Sherman took most of the Union troops to Washington, Schofield would be administering the details of Confederate demobilization. He assured Johnston that he would do everything possible to avoid the situation the Southern general feared. Field transportation would be lent to the troops for the journey to their homes. Every brigade or separate body of men would retain a number of arms equal to one-seventh of its effective strength, which could be used, if necessary, to defend themselves against guerrillas and bushwhackers. Private horses and other private property of both Confederate officers and men would be retained by them. Transportation by water from Mobile or New Orleans would be provided for troops from Arkansas and Texas. The Union army would also furnish 250,000 rations to Johnston’s troops.

Both Johnston and Sherman were satisfied with such an arrangement. Schofield then wrote the terms, essentially the same as Lee received at Appomattox, except for the additional provisions to get the troops home in as orderly a manner as possible. Johnston and Sherman placed their signature upon the document, Johnston remarking “I believe that is the best we can do.” Sherman returned to Raleigh and conferred with Grant, who soon approved the revised terms with his signature. Staff officer George Nichols interestingly remarked that “Johnston has been induced to surrender quite as much by the discontent and threats of his own soldiers as by the Federal force. . . . Johnston has pursued the only wise course left open to him.”23

WITHIN A SHORT TIME, Sherman would learn the full extent of Stanton’s actions. His rage against the secretary of war then fully matched that of Stanton toward him—if any difference in degree existed, Sherman’s wrath exceeded that of Stanton. Sherman wanted nothing more to do with the man. Before leaving by water for a short inspection trip to Savannah, he met with about a dozen of his generals at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh. Among those present was Major General Carl Schurz, who wrote that “I witnessed a scene which I shall never forget.” Sherman, declared Schurz, “paced up and down the room like a caged lion and . . . unbosomed himself with an eloquence of furious invective which for a while made us all stare.” Schurz said that Sherman “lashed the Secretary of War as a mean, scheming, vindictive politician, who made it his business to rob military men of the credit earned by exposing their lives in the service of their country.” Those who attacked Sherman were “a mass of fools not worth fighting for.” He “railed at the press, which had altogether too much freedom; which had become an engine of vilification.” Schurz, who admired Sherman, was not particularly concerned about the outburst in the presence of his generals, but feared that “a similar volcanic eruption in public” might seriously damage the General’s standing “before the people.”²⁴

When Sherman had realized that a number of newspapers across the country were attacking him, he worried that his military career, having just reached its zenith, might well be destroyed by the clamor of his old enemy, the press. Such a fate was not about to occur. Some significant newspapers supported Sherman strongly; the influential Ewing family, along with Senator John Sherman, rallied behind him, and the negative outcry, which was never as widespread as the General feared, fizzled and failed. Victory is a formidable ally, which usually trumps all opposition, and Sherman’s triumphs ruled the day—which was the most important factor in this unseemly affair. Sherman’s troops were fiercely loyal to their commander, and the Northern people were primed to celebrate the end of the great war. The majority of the nation was in no mood to discard the conqueror of Atlanta and the leader of the march to the sea, whose great military achievements were fresh in their minds. In early May, his brother-in-law Tom Ewing wrote Sherman, “There is an almost universal feeling of indignation, manifest in the press & everywhere else, at the conduct of the Government towards you.” Sherman remained a hero.25

It took him a good while to cool down, however, as well as time to realize that his army career was far from ended. He vented his anger in a number of letters to various people. Probably no accusation disturbed him more than the charge of insubordination leveled against him by the New York Times. “I have never in my life questioned or disobeyed an order,” he declared to General Grant, “though many and many a time have I risked my life, my health, and reputation in obeying orders, or even hints, to execute plans and purposes not to my liking. It is not fair,” he raged, “to withhold from me plans and policy . . . and expect me to guess at them, for facts and events appear quite different from different stand-points.” He thought “a great outrage has been enacted against me by Mr. Stanton and Mr. Halleck. . . . My officers and men feel this insult as keenly as I do,” he stated, and declared that he intended to treat Stanton “with scorn and contempt . . . for I regard my military career as ended.” Whatever might happen in the future, he hoped “to stay with my army until it ceases to exist, or till it is broken up and scattered to other duty.” He concluded, “The lust for Power in Political minds is the strongest passion of Life, and impels Ambitious men (Richard III) to deeds of Infamy.”²⁶

“Washington is as corrupt as Hell,” he exclaimed in a letter to Ellen. He intended to “avoid it as a pest house.” As so often when he was upset, his thoughts turned westward. He knew of a people who would not treat him in such a manner, he stated to General Logan—“the West, the Valley of the Mississippi, the heart & soul, and future strength of America, and I for one will go there.” Still smarting from Stanton’s actions in late May, Sherman again lashed out at politicians: “I am not a politician, never voted but once in my life, and never read a Political Platform. If spared I never will read a Political Platform or hold any Civil office whatsoever.”27

ON APRIL 30, Sherman headed for Savannah, leaving his corps commanders to lead the army’s march northward from Raleigh. He planned to rejoin the troops at Richmond, and from there accompany them the remainder of the way to Washington for a final grand review. Upon arriving in Savannah, he ordered that large quantities of food and other supplies should be distributed to Georgia’s suffering people. General James Wilson, acting on Sherman’s orders, soon was issuing 250 bushels of corn per day to civilians and, by June, meal and flour were being dispensed copiously in Atlanta. It was as if Sherman intended to prove, as more than once he had said, that he was indeed a true and generous friend of the South.²⁸

After a short visit in Savannah, Sherman sailed back up the coast to rejoin his army. In the harbor at Morehead City, North Carolina, where his journey was delayed by a storm, he visited with Chief Justice Chase, who had come south to study the issue of African-Americans being permitted to vote. Sherman jumped at the chance of telling Chase why he was “not prepared to receive the negro on terms of political equality.” Black suffrage would “arouse passions and prejudices at the North,” including the prejudices of “our own armed soldiers.” (Only a few Northern states allowed blacks to vote.) As for Southerners, most were adamantly opposed to giving the vote to blacks, and Sherman believed such a policy could not be sustained.

The South was a vast region, as Sherman was well qualified to point out, and many of its people could not be reached by United States military forces. The U.S. Army, he declared, “cannot combat existing ideas with force.” Why not “imitate the example of England in allowing causes to work out their gradual solution?” He concluded his little lecture strongly with a reminder for Chase, relative to force: “That you may study the chances of changing the tone and character of a people by military occupation . . . I invite your attention to the occupation of Spain by Napoleon’s best armies from about 1806 to the close of his career.”29

Sherman was still seething about Stanton. The General had written a hard-hitting attack on the secretary of war, which he intended to publish, even if it would “soon lead to the closing of my military career,” and he showed it to the chief justice. Chase was disturbed at the thought of the nation’s possibly losing such a commander as Sherman, as well as the General’s aggressive and bitter attitude toward Stanton. While the chief justice was certainly no friend of the secretary of war, he did not think the publication of Sherman’s piece was wise and persuaded him to lay aside any public denunciation of Stanton. Chase’s daughter, traveling with her father, recalled portions of Sherman’s conversation with the chief justice. Particularly, she remembered Sherman’s claiming that if Lincoln had lived, “I should never have been insulted in this fashion! We neither of us are the kind to kick an enemy after he is conquered.” She also described Sherman’s face as “red with indignation as he strode up and down the cabin like an enraged lion.”³⁰

But certainly not all was gloom and doom. “At Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, and Morehead City,” reported the General to Ellen, “officers, soldiers, sailors and citizens paid me . . . honored respect, especially my old soldiers, more especially when they heard they were down on me at Washington.” When Sherman rejoined his army outside of Richmond, he was inundated by officers and men who greeted him warmly. He wrote Ellen that “they received with shouts my public denial of a Review for Halleck.” General Halleck, explained Sherman, had ordered Slocum’s wing to enter Richmond and pass in review before him. “I forbade it,” Cump with relish declared to Ellen. “Tomorrow I march through Richmond with Colors flying & drums beating, as a matter of Right and not by Halleck’s favor, and no notice will be taken of him personally or officially. I dare him to oppose my march.”³¹

Sherman did not exaggerate about the loyalty of his troops, or their disdain for Halleck. A soldier of the Thirtieth Illinois would not believe that Sherman made any mistake, “until I know all about it,” and apparently did not particularly care anyway: “I’d rather fight under him than Grant, and if he were Mahomet we’d be devoted Mussulmen.” When Halleck posted guards at the roads into Richmond, many of Sherman’s men were enraged, ready to shoot their way into the Virginia capital. One group of men from the Eighty-Fifth Indiana did throw the guards into the James River and proceed into the city.32

On May 11, after Grant had given him the required orders, Sherman marched his army across the James and into Richmond, having told Halleck that he preferred they not meet, and warning the general to stay out of sight, lest his presence should bring on violence. Ignoring Halleck’s headquarters, Sherman and his triumphant forces audaciously tramped through the capital. Ellen, initially taken aback by Cump’s mild terms to Johnston, was now altogether in step with her husband. Attributing his leniency to a pure and merciful heart and learning of the injustice inflicted by Stanton and Halleck, she wrote Sherman on May 17 that she was “truly charmed to find that you have had so good an opportunity of returning the insult of that base man Halleck.” She had “not felt so much pleased with anything since the fall of Savannah—since ‘Sherman marched down to the Sea.’” Climactically she exuded, “I would rather have seen that defiant parade through Richmond than anything else since the war began.”³³

For a long time back, Ellen had not cared for Halleck, but Sherman, over a span of many years, considered him a close, personal friend, a man in whom he placed his trust. Their relationship dated from Sherman’s first days in California. He now felt betrayed. Once he wrote Halleck that he had lain awake all night contemplating Halleck’s actions, and concluded he could not “consent to the renewal of a friendship I had prized so highly, till I can see deeper into the diabolical plot than I now do.” He never saw deeply enough; the friendship was never renewed.³⁴

After resting for a day on the north side of Richmond, Sherman began marching for Washington. The Virginia battlefields arrested the army’s attention. Sherman swung back and forth, riding from corps to corps, and taking in many of the sites. Gruesome evidence of murderous struggle were all about—a landscape marred by extensive entrenchments, trees blasted by artillery fire and riddled by musket balls, burned-out houses marked by still-standing chimneys, numerous skeletons of soldiers, some never buried, others dug up from shallow graves by animals. Sherman was intensely moved. In a letter to James E. Yeatman in St. Louis on May 21, 1865, he wrote, “I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers.”35

On May 17, the army reached Alexandria, and there encamped on the outskirts of Washington. Upon learning that a grand parade was soon to be held, during which President Johnson and the cabinet would review both the eastern and western armies, Sherman wrote John Rawlins, the army chief of staff in Washington, that his forces would be ready, “though in the rough. Troops have not been paid for eight or ten months, and clothing may be bad, but a better set of legs and arms can not be displayed on this continent.” Bitter about the way he had been treated by Stanton, and aware of rumors flying that he planned to take over the government, Sherman told Rawlins to “let some one newspaper know that the vandal Sherman is encamped near the canal bridge. . . . Though in disgrace, he is untamed and unconquered.”³⁶

On May 20, Sherman met with Grant, and also visited with President Johnson and all his cabinet, except for Stanton. Sherman was really pleased by the President’s warm greeting. With arms outstretched Johnson reportedly said, “General Sherman, I am very glad to see you—very glad—and I mean what I say.” Sherman wrote, “He was extremely cordial to me, and knowing that I was chafing under the censures of the War Department, especially of the two war bulletins of Mr. Stanton, he volunteered that he knew of neither of them till seen in the newspapers.” The secretary of war, Johnson said, “had shown [them] neither to him nor to any of his associates in the cabinet till they were published.” Such a gratifying message from the President could only have strengthened and hardened Sherman’s animosity toward Stanton.37

There was further irritation. The powerful congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War summoned Sherman to testify about the surrender terms he had forged with Joe Johnston. Sherman wanted to put off his appearance until after the grand review, but the committee, chaired by the radical Ohioan Ben Wade and dominated by radicals, insisted that he come before them at once. Motivated by goals essentially political, the radical Republicans viewed President Lincoln’s early actions about Reconstruction of the Southern governments as too liberal and hoped to show that Sherman’s disavowed surrender terms actually emanated from Lincoln. On May 22, Sherman was questioned for several hours. Articulately and defiantly, he stood his ground while refraining from losing his temper. He managed to denounce both Stanton and Halleck with convincing arguments, testifying that “my chief object” in negotiating with Johnston was to keep his army from scattering into guerrilla bands. When pressed about the conference with Lincoln, Sherman was evasive, saying as little as possible, and claiming that “nothing specific and definite” had been said in regard to peace terms with the Confederacy while also declaring that, “had President Lincoln lived, I know he would have sustained me.”³⁸

Sherman’s strongest attack against Stanton concerned the war secretary’s March 3 telegram to Grant, conveying Lincoln’s wishes relative to negotiating with Lee, about which Sherman, as noted earlier, had no knowledge. Stanton had used it against him unscrupulously, implying that Sherman had violated the President’s clear instructions. “I was not in possession of [the telegram],” Sherman declared to the committee and devastatingly added that “I have reason to know that Mr. Stanton knew I was not in possession of it.” He also charged that Stanton, during his visit in Savannah, had indicated to him that civil matters should be dealt with, and thus Stanton’s public attacks on him, in tandem with Halleck, constituted “an act of perfidy.” The general lashed out at Halleck in equally aggressive terms, especially striking at Halleck’s April 26 dispatch, where Sherman’s generals had been instructed not to obey his commands.³⁹

Undoubtedly Sherman was pleased when at last he could get on with the grand review, scheduled for May 23 and 24. On the first day, General George Meade’s eastern army proudly marched from the Capitol, paraded along Pennsylvania Avenue, with their bands triumphantly sounding martial airs, and continued past the reviewing stand where the President, cabinet members and general officers watched the spectacular event. It was, by any standard, a great show, and an immense crowd took it in. While Sherman was aware that the easterners made a few basic marching errors, he worried that his own rough westerners, scheduled for the next day, might not do as well.

At least he had resolved one issue. Both Black Jack Logan and Oliver Howard wanted to ride at the head of the Army of the Tennessee in the grand review. Logan, of course, had taken command of that army when James McPherson was killed and led it to one of the most important victories in the Atlanta campaign. Although Sherman then picked Howard as permanent commander, and he directed the army to Savannah and through the Carolinas, Howard had recently been named to head the Freedmen’s Bureau. Sherman chose Logan to replace Howard and Black Jack had just assumed command. Howard contended, however, that because he had headed the army since Atlanta he should lead it in the great parade. Sherman requested that he relinquish that honor, arguing that it would mean “everything” to Logan, while Howard, as a Christian, wouldn’t “mind such a sacrifice.” Sherman knew his man. Howard submitted, probably feeling better about his “sacrifice” because Sherman asked the one-armed general to ride side by side with him at the head of all the troops.40

The morning of May 24 was “extremely beautiful,” according to Sherman’s recollection, “and the ground in splendid order for our review. The streets were filled with people to see the pageant, armed with bouquets of flowers for their favorite regiments or heroes, and everything was propitious.” Sherman was pleased that Ellen, with their son Tommy and her father, was present for the grand occasion. Markedly unlike his typical rough and unkempt appearance when campaigning, General Sherman on this day was smartly arrayed in full military regalia. Most of his troops had never seen their commander looking so clean and sharp, and even his horse was adorned with wreaths on its big neck. “Old Glory” seemed to be fluttering everywhere, all around the Capitol and along the parade route. Regimental bands were poised to add their martial strains for the festivities, Sherman having decided not to allow any music from civilian groups, which he believed had created some of the marching problems he observed among Meade’s men. “Punctually at 9 a.m.,” Sherman wrote that “the signal gun was fired, when in person, attended by General Howard and all my staff, I rode slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowds of men, women, and children densely lining the sidewalks, and almost obstructing the way.”41

Following closely behind Sherman and Howard came Logan, at the head of the Fifteenth Corps, Army of the Tennessee, whose “swarthy coal-black hair gave him the air of a native chief,” observed Horace Porter. Equally arresting was Sherman’s red hair, with the sun shining upon it, as he rode with hat in hand. Wondering how well his troops were marching, the General finally turned in his saddle and looked back. While some of the men wore new uniforms, others had only their heavily worn clothing, and not a few were barefoot. Sherman’s concern, of course, was not their clothing, but how they were marching. “The sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.” Years later he declared, “I believe it was the happiest and most satisfactory moment of my life.” Carl Schurz, who said that because of his experiences he had developed “a profound abhorrence of war,” could not help but be impressed. “I must confess,” he wrote, “when I saw those valiant hosts swinging in broad fronted column down Pennsylvania Avenue, . . . Sherman’s bronzed veterans—the men nothing but bone, muscle and skin—their tattered battle-flags fluttering victoriously over their heads in the full pride of achievement, my heart leaped in the consciousness of having been one of them. It was a spectacle splendid and imposing beyond description.”⁴²

Sherman turned again to the front and proudly continued to lead the procession, riding side by side with Howard. When Howard fell back a pace or two, Sherman motioned for the general to move up alongside him. Fittingly preceding each division of white soldiers were the black pioneer units, “armed with picks and spades,” symbolic of the essential labor they had performed during Sherman’s campaigns—the only African-Americans that he allowed to serve with his forces. They “marched abreast in double ranks,” wrote Sherman, “keeping perfect dress and step, and added much to the interest of the occasion.” Near Lafayette Square someone called Sherman’s attention to William Seward, the secretary of state, still recovering from injuries suffered in the assassination conspiracy. He was sitting in an upper window of a brick house, heavily bandaged and feeble from his wounds, as he watched the victory parade. Sherman turned, rode a few steps in Seward’s direction and waved his hat. “He recognized the salute,” remembered Sherman, “returned it, and then we rode on steadily past the President, saluting with our swords. All on his stand arose and acknowledged the salute.”43

Having passed the reviewing stand, Sherman turned into the gate of the White House grounds, dismounted and went up on the stand, where he greeted Ellen—whom he had not seen for a year and a half—her father and Tommy. Then he shook hands with President Johnson, General Grant and all the cabinet members except Stanton. “As I approached Mr. Stanton, he offered me his hand,” Sherman declared, “but I declined it publicly, and the fact was universally noticed.” Writing General Schofield in North Carolina, Sherman said the grand review “came off in magnificent style, and . . . Stanton offered to shake hands with me in the presence of the President but I declined.” Clearly Sherman was delighted to snub Stanton at that auspicious moment. “I then took my post on the left of the President, and for six hours and a half stood, while the army passed in the order of the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Twentieth, and Fourteenth Corps. It was, in my judgment,” remembered the General in his memoirs, with understandable satisfaction, and perhaps pardonable egotism, “the most magnificent army in existence.”⁴⁴

Many of the officers and men in Sherman’s forces, aware of their commander’s difficulties with the secretary of war, felt much the same as their leader did about Stanton. Sometimes they made a spectacle of themselves, “especially when a little in liquor,” as Grant said. Two days after the grand review, a group of officers were at Willard’s Hotel, “drinking and discussing violently the conduct of Mr. Stanton,” according to Grant’s report to Sherman. From time to time, one of them would leap up on the counter and lead the others in giving “three groans for Mr. Stanton,” and then take another drink. In addition to the Sherman-Stanton issue, Grant was concerned about maintaining control over the huge number of soldiers camped around the capital, especially considering the rivalry between the eastern and western forces. He told Sherman of his conversation with General Christopher C. Augur, who commanded the Department of Washington. Augur declared, in Grant’s summary words, “when the men of the different armies meet in town, if drinking, they are sure to fight.” Augur was right. “What we want is to preserve quiet and decorum,” Grant told Sherman, until the men could be paid and discharged. He expected Sherman to take whatever steps were necessary to enforce discipline.45

Sherman acted at once, hastening to see General Augur. Finding that the general was not in his office, he consulted with the officer of the day and provost-marshal, requesting them “as a favor to me to arrest and imprison any officer or man belonging to my command who transgressed any orders, rules, or regulations of the place, more especially for acts of drunkenness, noise or rowdyism.” Sherman then rode the streets until midnight, observing the situation. “I thank you for leaving the matter of orders to my management,” he told Grant, “and I . . . assure you nothing offensive shall occur of any importance. Such . . . things as a tipsy soldier occasionally cannot be helped, but even that shall be punished according to ‘local orders.’”⁴⁶

More irritating to Sherman than rowdy soldiers were the reports circulating in Washington that Democrats, particularly that wing of the party which had opposed the war, wanted Sherman as their presidential candidate in 1868. His conflict with Stanton had fueled the speculation. No doubt it was difficult for anyone, above all politicians, to believe that an immensely popular person like Sherman, who was in a position to make a formidable run for the presidency, actually had no interest whatsoever in doing so. While Sherman never intended to be a candidate of either party, he wrote Grant that he considered it “an insult . . . that copperheads who opposed the war or threw obstacles in the way of its successful prosecution,” wanted him as their standard-bearer. “I would like Mr. Johnson,” he wrote Grant, “to believe that the newspaper gossip of my having Presidential aspirations is absurd . . . and I would check it if I knew how.”47

By this time, although still angry at Stanton and Halleck, Sherman realized that he had come through the aggravating episode with his military reputation fully intact—in the opinion of many Americans. “Mr. Johnson has been more than kind to me,” he wrote General Schofield on May 28, “and the howl against me is narrowed down to Halleck and Stanton.” Two days later, Sherman posted Special Field Orders No. 76, an appropriate and moving farewell address to his army, and thus quietly concluded his role in the war. “He had won great renown as a soldier, and an immense popularity all over the Northern country,” observed Carl Schurz in his Reminiscences. “This he knew,” Schurz declared of Sherman, “and he thoroughly relished it.”⁴⁸

Indeed he did. In the years to come, many societies and public organizations made Sherman an honorary member, and he would attend their gatherings with pleasure. His appearances at the theater, which were frequent whenever he was not out on the Great Plains, or some other place where such entertainment could not be had, were often greeted by the orchestra striking up “Marching Through Georgia,” while the audience stood and applauded the General’s arrival. At any social occasion, for as long as he lived, he would be received as an honored guest.

Sometimes he did grow weary of strangers who approached him on the street or the train or wherever they happened to come upon him. Soon after the war, he wrote his brother John that he had thought about making a trip to Detroit to see an old friend, “but am bothered by people in traveling so much that I prefer to be quiet till the people run after new gods.” Within a short time, he predicted, new issues would drop him “out of memory.” He was wrong. The Civil War was too big, and he himself had become too big for that to happen. If the people did find “new gods,” they never ceased venerating the old god. Sherman’s fame would endure, and when it involved formal occasions, set social pieces or gatherings of Civil War veterans, especially the Army of the Tennessee, these the General would always, as Carl Schurz said, “thoroughly relish.”49

IN EARLY JUNE, Sherman took Ellen and Tommy to New York. Newspapers hailed his arrival in the city, and large crowds gathered to see the illustrious, controversial, red-haired general with the fascinating Indian middle name. The Shermans lodged at the Twenty-Third Street mansion of William Scott, the widower of a cousin of the General who hosted a reception in Sherman’s honor. Many prominent men and women came, eager to be identified, if only briefly, with a hero. In addition, the General would soon learn, if he did not already know, that a remarkable number of women, sometimes young as well as older, would now welcome his company—one of the prices of military fame. At forty-five, Sherman was still slim, his stomach flat, and although his face was wrinkled, he manifested a ruggedly handsome appearance. Physical attractiveness made his fame all the more alluring. Young women would sometimes greet him with a kiss. Numerous women of all ages would seek him out, simply because he was now viewed as one of the nation’s greatest men.⁵⁰

Next it was on to West Point for a short visit at the military academy. Winfield Scott, architect and leader of the magnificent Mexico City campaign in the 1840s, who was then in his late seventies, embraced Sherman with gusto, thanking God that “you have lived to see this day and that I, too, have lived to see it.” Sherman shook hands with many of the cadets, and delighted in telling them what the school had been like when he was there. In the future, the General would return time and again to West Point, for he was comfortable there, and he knew that more than any experience of his life, the military academy had defined his being. “I was fit for the Army but nothing else,” he had remarked in the late 1850s. Actually that was not true, but it was true that Sherman never wanted any career other than that of a soldier, and finally he had succeeded at his chosen profession, probably to a greater degree than he ever dared to dream.51

Resuming the journey, which developed into sort of an informal victory tour, they headed for Chicago and the Sanitary Fair, held for the benefit of soldiers who were suffering and impoverished by the war, in which Ellen played a prominent role. Sherman remained in Chicago for about two weeks, speaking at the fair and upon several other occasions, including at the theater, where he addressed a receptive audience from his opera box. Naturally, since South Bend, Indiana, lay near by, he and Ellen visited with two of their children, who were in school there.

During the following weeks, he spoke at least once in every city that he visited, and in Cincinnati, the Enquirer claimed that he received “the largest ovation . . . paid to any distinguished man during the war.” Sherman was bothered, however, to find that people everywhere were focused on the march to Savannah, while relatively ignoring the Carolinas, which he considered both a more significant campaign, and more difficult. “The march to the sea,” he told John, “seems to have captivated everybody, whereas it was child’s play compared with the other.” He was right. Confederate engineers, as earlier noted, never expected Sherman to take the route he did, for they considered it a near impossible undertaking in winter. Regardless of Sherman’s judgment and wishes, the nation remembered the march to the sea, and thus it ever would be.⁵²

But Sherman could have the personal satisfaction of knowing that in the Atlanta campaign, with his mastery of logistics and maneuver warfare, as well as in the marches through Georgia and the Carolinas, he had developed a new understanding of the most effective way of waging the war, and the least costly in terms of the lives of his soldiers.

While the General’s informal, triumphant tour unfolded, the country had been divided into five military divisions. Sherman was assigned to command the Military Division of the Mississippi, soon to become known as the Military Division of the Missouri. It constituted a vast territory, approximately one-third of the country, extending west of the Mississippi River, and north of Texas, all the way to the Rocky Mountains and northward to Canada. Sherman’s headquarters would be in St. Louis, hundreds of miles away from Washington, that city he detested. He was pleased to be looking to the development of the great western part of the nation. He believed that many a former soldier would be doing the same. Returning home after the war, they would “find their places occupied by others . . . and that they themselves had changed.” They would “naturally,” he thought, turn to “the great West,” rather more “stimulated than retarded by the danger of an Indian War.”53

With a touch of excitement and anticipation, Sherman prepared to make his home in St. Louis. The many friends who welcomed him back, including Henry Turner, raised $30,000 to buy him a house. When Sherman selected a fine, impressive structure at 912 Garrison Avenue, which cost some $24,000, his generous friends deposited the rest of the money in his bank account. While Sherman initially seemed to be taking both his fame and the inevitable postwar adjustments in stride, Ellen found that being the wife of a national hero was not all to her liking. She complained of being “stared at,” as well as being the subject of “odious comparisons.” The women admiring her husband irritated her: “Of course, every good looking young fashionable thinks it a pity so distinguished a man could not have her for his wife instead of the worn down old woman before her.” Ellen said that she had “always known that Cump must succeed if health were spared him & I therefore feel no particular elation at his present success, although the country seems wild with joy.” In coming years, Ellen would increasingly dwell upon negative factors, as she interpreted them, and to a great degree reject a social life other than her concerns for family and the Catholic faith, with its promise of a better life after death.⁵⁴

As for the General, within a few months he was once again feeling economic pressures. In a letter to his longtime friend E. O. C. Ord, Sherman confided: “I almost regret that instead of accepting a Big House,” on which the property taxes were very heavy, “I had not awaited my chance to choose a house in some more quiet and cheap place.” He complained also of not being able to use the free public schools, “for which we are all taxed,” and instead was “compelled [meaning because of Ellen] to use Catholic schools which are very costly.” When the last of his children, Philemon Tecumseh, who like his father would be called Cump, was born in early 1867, Sherman felt still more financial strain. “My pay is now about $1,070 a month,” he wrote his brother John, declaring that “I can barely get along and could not live here except that I received a house as a present.” Soon after, he concluded that he could not send Minnie to school in New York, because it would be too expensive.55

WHEN SHERMAN TOOK command of the army on the Plains, he said that “my thoughts and feelings at once reverted to the construction of the great Pacific Railway.” Chartered by the U.S. Congress during the war, construction was already under way when Sherman assumed his new post. He determined to place the resources of the army behind this momentous project. In October, he and his chief aides, Joseph Audenreid and Lewis M. Dayton, along with a few others, took a train out to Omaha, pulled by an engine named the “Major General Sherman,” to celebrate the completion of the first sixteen miles of track and assure the builders personally that he “would afford them all possible assistance and encouragement.” He was pleased that General Grenville Dodge, his highly valued compatriot in arms during the Civil War, was the railroad’s chief engineer, having resigned from the army to take that position.

During the winter of 1866, Sherman made a trip to Washington, lobbying for President Johnson to create new military departments within the Division of the Missouri, to better protect the railroad workers from Indian attacks. “Every time they build a section,” Sherman promised, “I’ll be on hand to . . . see that it is properly built.” He exaggerated but little. Over the next couple of years he often headed west from St. Louis, both to check on the railroad and further familiarize himself with his immense territorial command. On May 10, 1869, the tracks of the Central Pacific, building eastward from California, and the Union Pacific, building westward from Omaha, were joined at Promontory, Utah. General Dodge paid tribute to Sherman, by then general-in-chief of the army, whose “continuous 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.” The highest point on the railroad, west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, which was, according to Stephen Ambrose, 8,242 feet in elevation, making it “the highest point of any railroad anywhere,” was christened “Sherman Summit.”56

The other of Sherman’s major responsibilities while commanding the Division of the Missouri concerned the Native Americans. A long, often violent and mostly sad relationship between the European settlers of North America and the Indians, as the Europeans and their descendants called them, reached a deplorable climax in the years following the Civil War. An ultimately disastrous Indian policy had been pursued earlier, during the administrations of Andrew Jackson and his chosen successor, Martin Van Buren. Most of the Indians east of the Mississippi had been driven westward, beyond the great river, with treaty-guaranteed promises of a permanent territory of their own, forever free of white encroachment. Understandably, the Native Americans did not want to leave their ancestral homelands, favored by heavy forests, ample rainfall and abundant game, to endure a lengthy, difficult journey (“the trail of tears”) to a relatively dry and barren region, where the Indians of the Great Plains already roamed a vast area as they tracked the buffalo to support their way of life. But the eastern Indians were given no choice. The white man demanded their land.

Then, after the Civil War, a rapidly expanding, aggressive, white American civilization began another, big encroachment upon the allegedly “permanent” and guaranteed Native American territory. Farmers, sheepherders and cattlemen headed west, encouraged in part by the Homestead Act, passed during the war, which provided 160 acres of free land to anyone living on and working that land for five years. Large numbers of former soldiers, as Sherman expected, decided to go west. So too did prospectors, seeking a gold strike—perhaps another discovery like the California bonanza—or a silver strike, or some other precious mineral. The building of the transcontinental railroads employed many men, and a lot of them took up permanent residence in the West. White hunters were attracted by the huge number of buffalo, which supplied food and clothing for the Plains Indians. These hunters killed the great animals, which were easy targets, because of so-called sport—also for buffalo hides—and to clear the way for the railroads (a buffalo herd might sometimes block a train for hours). Many white men, looking upon Native Americans as inferior beings (the proverbial “savages”) seemed to have no qualms about intruding upon Indian territory whenever they might be so inclined. The Indians naturally felt betrayed, concluding that the white man could not be trusted, and armed clashes—sometimes instigated by the whites, sometimes by the Indians—became inevitable.

Sherman found himself in a very frustrating position. On the one hand he was expected to protect the white settlers from the Indians; on the other, he was charged with defending the Indians against white infringement upon their territory. Evenhanded action proved very difficult, for often it was impossible to know, with reasonable certainty, just what had occurred and who was responsible. Some whites blamed any violence on the Native Americans, fostering all manner of rumors, and sometimes actually stirring up trouble in the hope of enlisting the army against the Indians. Sherman was not easily fooled and realized that the Indians at times were falsely accused. If he declined to take sides with the whites, some criticized him severely. When a group of Denver citizens burned the General in effigy, he wrote John, “I am of course held responsible by the frontier people for not rushing to war because of occasional depredations, some of which have been committed by white men.” About the same time, he told Ord that some Indians “cannot resist the chance to take a scalp & steal a few fresh horses.” Then, he said, “a few scattered cases of this kind become Exaggerated till war is regarded as sure to come.”57

The General’s task was amplified by the vastness of the territory he commanded, coupled with an inadequate number of troops with which to keep order across more than a million square miles of harsh landscape. Once he remarked: “It is these awful distances that make our problem out here so difficult.” Nevertheless, he vowed that “little by little” he would get the job done. As for the size of the army, in the summer of 1866 Congress authorized a total force of some 57,000 officers and men—dramatically down from approximately one million during the Civil War. Obviously no one thought it necessary, once the Confederacy was defeated, to keep a million men under arms, but the 57,000 was reduced to about 25,000 by 1869, and so it would remain until the Spanish-American War. This force was charged with assuring stability during Reconstruction in the South, manning 255 forts and posts all over the nation and dealing with the Indian country. At the beginning of Sherman’s tenure as commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, he had about 25,000 men available, a number that gradually declined over the next several years. The Native American population was probably 250,000.58

In the summer of 1867, Congress created an eight-man Peace Commission to address the Indian issues. Four members were civilians, including Nathaniel G. Taylor, the federal government’s commissioner of Indian Affairs, and four were military men, among whom Sherman was of course the most prominent. The other generals were Alfred Terry, William S. Harney and Christopher Augur. The group met with various Indian representatives, at several sites, during 1867 and 1868. Sherman seems to have become increasingly pessimistic about the ultimate fate of the Indian. At North Platte, Nebraska, where the commission was scheduled to meet with a number of Cheyenne and Sioux, Sherman wrote Ellen that the night before the conference, “the Indians got on a big drunk and are not now in condition to have their talk.” He then declared, “I guess we will have to give them a good ducking in the Platte and then proceed to business,” adding that “the more I see of them, the more satisfied I am that no amount of sentimentality will save them the doom in Store for them.”⁵⁹

In the spring of 1868, Sherman and Samuel F. Tappan, one of the civilian members of the Peace Commission, headed into southeastern New Mexico to confer with the Navajos. Sherman detested New Mexico. “I want to see this country lay hold of Mexico again,” he was fond of saying, “and thrash her till she promises to take those damned territories [Arizona as well as New Mexico] back again.” He denounced the New Mexicans as “a mixed band of Mexican, indian & negro,” inferior to any of those three races “if pure.” Perhaps Sherman’s intense feelings against New Mexico made him more inclined to sympathize with the Navajos.60

As usual, Sherman traveled south to meet the Navajos with very little escort, like he did all over his vast division, remarking to Grant that four armed men could make their way anywhere in New Mexico. Interestingly, while on the trek to see the Navajos, Stewart Van Vliet, his good friend since West Point days, who well knew Cump’s habits, wrote him a letter. Van Vliet was worried about the way Sherman continually exposed himself to danger. “I want to see you out of that Indian country,” Van Vliet implored, “for you expose yourself so unnecessarily with insufficient escort, that I am always afraid that you will ‘go under’ on one of your trips.” Now, if Grant became president, which would elevate Sherman to general-in-chief of the army, Van Vliet declared that “I don’t want you to lose the chance through the instrumentality of some rugged Indian.” Sherman was not about to change his well-established practices. Maybe, having survived the Civil War, in which he had expected to be killed, he had developed something of a sense of invincibility. Perhaps even more, he genuinely liked the freedom of roaming over the great western territories in the company of only a handful of soldiers. And clearly he felt there was not much danger.⁶¹

The Navajos, formerly a numerous people, had been compelled to leave their home country four years earlier, travel several hundred miles and resettle on a reservation known as the Bosque Redondo, meaning “the Round Forest.” Sherman said it was nothing but “a mere spot of green grass in the midst of a wild desert.” There was hardly any wood available, the water was foul, and the soil poor. The Navajos had worked hard, but the first year worms ate the corn crop, also again the next year, and the third year a hailstorm destroyed the crop. Sherman told his senator brother: “We found 7,200 Indians there . . . abject and disheartened.” They were living in miserable poverty, dejected and without hope. Sherman suggested the possibility of going east into Indian Territory, where he promised that the army would protect them. The Navajos were not interested in going east, or anywhere else except back to their ancestral homeland, centered in the northwestern corner of New Mexico. Sherman mulled over the matter. The next day, he told them that they could go home, and within approximately a month the Navajos were once again in their ancestral country. It was a good thing that Sherman did for them. They have fared better than most of the Native American peoples.62

Samuel Tappan was impressed and heaped high praise on Sherman: “Congress and the people are glad to leave it [the Indian issue] to you. . . . Your march to the sea and your settlement of our Indian issues so far, gives you a prestige that no one else has or ever will have in this country.” Tappan spoke the truth—at that point in time. However, Sherman’s compassion for the Navajos would never be equaled in his dealings with any other Indians. In the fall of 1868, he wrote John, “The Indian War on the plains need simply amount to this. . . . All who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so until killed off.” He predicted: “We will have a sort of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travelers and settlers, but the country is so large . . . that we can not make a single war and end it.”

The U.S. troops, who were widely scattered, “have daily chases and skirmishes,” he said, “sometimes getting the best, and sometimes the worst, but the Indians have this great advantage—they can steal fresh horses . . . and drop the jaded ones. We must operate each man to his own horse.” But Sherman believed that he knew how to deal with the Native Americans. He would take the war to the Indians during the winter, “and when winter starves their ponies, they will want a truce and shan’t have it [emphasis added], unless the civil influence compels me again, as it did last winter.” Shortly before writing John, when trouble with the Cheyenne and the Arapaho had erupted once more, the General told Ellen, “Probably in the end it will be better to kill them all off.” Samuel Tappan and others whose sympathies lay with the Indians would soon be upset by Sherman’s plans for any Native Americans who refused to be confined to a reservation.⁶³

During the years when Sherman commanded the Division of the Missouri, he was called more than once to the nation’s capital. In the fall of 1866, he received a summons from President Johnson. The issues were a diplomatic mission to Mexico and a high-stakes political struggle in Washington. The President was engaged in a heated controversy about Reconstruction in the South, and regarded Secretary of War Stanton as a spy for the radical Republicans who opposed Johnson’s policies. Johnson knew that the outspoken Sherman’s views of the Southern question were akin to his own and broached the possibility of the General’s replacing Stanton. Obviously Sherman had no love for Stanton, but neither did he intend to leave his western post for a cabinet position. The Mexican mission gave Sherman a way out of the problem.64

President Johnson wanted General Grant to escort the newly appointed American minister to Mexico, Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio, to his new assignment. They would be on a quest to establish a good relationship with Benito Juárez, the self-proclaimed president of Mexico. Juarez was favored by many Mexicans in the hope of ridding their country of Louis Napoleon’s puppet government, which had been established during the American Civil War, and propped up by some 20,000 French troops. The presence of General Grant clearly would constitute a statement that the United States wanted the French out of Mexico. While Grant, and presumably all Americans, were against the French presence south of the border, the army’s general-in-chief, then being widely promoted as the next Republican candidate for the presidency, had no intention of leaving the country—particularly not when he suspected that Johnson was trying to remove him from the political limelight. When Sherman met with the President, he knew, having already talked with Grant, that his friend was not going to travel to Mexico. After making that fact clear to Johnson, Sherman himself volunteered to accompany Campbell if the President so wished. He did, likely thinking that was the best solution for which he could hope, and thus Sherman sailed for Mexico on what proved, from the first, to be a useless trip.⁶⁵

“Campbell is quite an inferior man” was Cump’s appraisal in a letter to Ellen. He said that Campbell “drank so much the first two days out . . . that I got from him a promise of abstinence.” Sherman did it by means of a mutual pledge, “so that I can not now take my usual nooning. But it makes no difference,” he assured his wife, for he was never addicted to liquor, and “would have been ashamed to meet French and Spanish officers with a Drunken Minister as our National Representative.” Matters only got worse upon reaching Mexico, because they searched in vain for President Juárez, “who is . . . away up in Chihuahua for no other possible purpose than to be where the devil himself can not get at him.” Sherman had “not the remotest idea of riding mule back a thousand miles in Mexico to find its chief magistrate.” While he believed that the French occupation of Mexico should be terminated, he told John that he would “deplore anything that would make us assume Mexico in any shape—its territory, its government, or its people.”66

Disappointed in Lewis Campbell and disgusted with the trip generally, Sherman came back to the United States ahead of Campbell, intending to be home in St. Louis by Christmas. He journeyed by way of New Orleans, where he saw several old friends and stayed with General Phil Sheridan. Then traveling by rail, he came northward through Mississippi and Tennessee, meeting a number of former Confederates who wanted to visit with him along the way. As for Lewis Campbell, who came into New Orleans a few days after Sherman left, his public drunkenness in the Crescent City, said to have occurred for three nights in a row, became a serious embarrassment, which even the arrival of Campbell’s daughter did not arrest. Appalled when he heard of Campbell’s spree, Sherman wrote Thomas Ewing Sr. that he was “sometimes amazed that our Government should entrust delicate business” to such men—a sentiment he also expressed to Ellen.⁶⁷

Sherman was back in St. Louis by Christmas, and soon prepared to celebrate New Year’s Day, an occasion he always enjoyed, by holding an open house. Ellen, expecting the birth of a child any day, was in no condition, physically or mentally, to preside as hostess. The General was delighted to have his daughter Minnie, less than a month away from her sixteenth birthday, act in place of her mother and receive with him a host of guests in the parlor from eleven in the morning until nine in the evening. Ellen was pleased that Minnie could “relieve me of a duty that is irksome.” The birth of Philemon Tecumseh Sherman, on January 9, 1867, led Ellen to remark to her father that “Cump is much pleased with his boy, and well he might be,” she added, “for the child is strong and healthy and exactly like him.” She observed that “Cump attempts to alter his tone of voice when he speaks to him (if there is no one about), and assumes a tender and persuasive tone, but,” she concluded, “he makes a horrible failure of it.”68

Although the occasion of Philemon Tecumseh’s birth was a happy one for Sherman, it did dredge up melancholy memories of Willy, as had his recent trip through Mississippi. In March, he traveled to Lancaster and removed Willy’s body, to be transferred to a new grave, at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, where Sherman himself intended to be buried. He also had Charles Celestine’s remains transferred there. Not long afterward, he wrote Ord: “Ain’t you haunted by the thousands of ghosts that flit about those deep and tangled ravines that make up Vicksburg? . . . It was Vicksburg that cost me my Willy, and I can not but feel that it must be an unpleasant spot.”⁶⁹

That spring, Sherman rewarded his daughter Lizzie for making good grades at school, taking her and a few of her friends for a several-hundred-mile excursion on the Union Pacific. The ride was completed without difficulty, but right after Sherman got back to St. Louis, Indians struck several stagecoach stations, attacked a surveying party and hit the Union Pacific Railroad in northern Colorado. Immediately heading west again to assess the damage and the general situation, Sherman realized that an all-out war against the Indians still was impossible, because of the inadequate number of troops he had available. Nor could he possibly protect every white settlement. As soon as he struck the Indians in one place, they would ride for another, usually and wisely refusing to fight except when they could set up an ambush or in some manner gain an advantage.⁷⁰

Despite the possibilities of a dangerous confrontation with Native Americans, Sherman remained enthusiastic about taking guests for a ride on the railroad. He could be quite persuasive. Already he had been west with his brother John, during August and September of 1866. Two summers later, he was very pleased when General Grant, who did indeed become the Republican candidate for president in 1868, said that he wanted to take a trip west with him. In mid-July, joined by Phil Sheridan, the three generals, with their aides, struck out for Denver. It was a memorable trip. Frequently they stopped, speaking from the rear platform of the train, as they addressed the people who gathered to see the most famous U.S. generals of the Civil War. Probably never had the spectators witnessed so much high-ranking brass, all the more notable because one of the generals might soon be elected president of the United States.71

Sherman seemed most content, however, when traveling throughout the great West in the company of a small escort, as he so frequently did, especially while commanding the Division of the Missouri, and sometimes even after becoming the army’s general-in-chief. One of his letters to Ellen conveys a great deal about his feelings during such trips. He wrote her that “in this wild roving about, camping by the side of some stream with pickets out to give alarm if necessary & mules picketed close in, there is a charm that can not be described or reasoned about.” Biographer Lloyd Lewis, perhaps perceptively, although risking an overly romantic assessment, suggested that these years were “the Indian summer of his life as a campaigner,” like one last “mild return of the hardships that in four strenuous years had become delights.” Once more, “when all but the pickets were asleep,” Sherman could rise and “stand by the dying bivouac fire,” reflecting upon the war, an experience like nothing else in his life had ever been, or ever could be again. As Faulkner later expressed it in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”⁷²

The General’s western excursions, to some degree, probably served as a coping mechanism for the most profound, emotional-psychological experience of his life. By twenty-first-century estimates, 750,000 men died in the Civil War; many of the wounded were maimed for life. It seems humanly impossible not to be scarred permanently, mentally, by four years of unrelenting exposure to such mayhem. Perhaps Sherman, strongly girdled by military fame, may occasionally have engaged in a bit of romanticizing about the war. But likely this would have been an infrequent indulgence, for deep in his heart he always knew what the awful thing had really been like.

The western trips also served as an escape from the emotional and financial irritants of home life. While Sherman genuinely cared for his wife, he clearly considered her a hypochondriac and found her reticent nature, which became more pronounced with years, a troubling contrast with his own expansive personality. He also realized that he did not, and never would, make enough money to support the lifestyle of his family. Moreover, when back east, Sherman himself liked, at least occasionally, to partake of the good life. With respect to Ellen, he sometimes seemed not to realize how hurtful something he said might be or, worse, possibly, he simply did not care—almost as if he were just thinking aloud, uttering something that was sure to be disturbing, but was perhaps nothing more than a fantasy. More than once, for instance, he told her that he felt like abandoning his job, joining an Indian tribe and wandering the prairies.

When Congress, in the summer of 1866, created for Grant the rank of general of the army, Sherman was elevated to Grant’s old rank of lieutenant general, which approximately doubled his pay. When Grant became the President, Sherman rose to full general. Still money was scarce. Ellen demonstrated considerable patience with her husband’s ways, but occasionally she lashed out, as in a sarcastic commentary to her father. Cump had “missed his calling when he took a civilized wife, as nature made him for the spouse of a squaw.” If he actually did go to live among the Indians, “should they give him any power,” she declared that he would “kill off by severity and want of . . . Kindness . . . the unfortunate doomed tribe.”73

Sherman’s western trips may have made him feel more separated from Washington and the political posturing and maneuvering he so detested about both parties. But he frequently told his brother John what he was thinking about national concerns. Doubtless he would have liked for people to accept his judgments, but he was not possessed of a temperament to actually participate in the political process. To his credit, he realized that fact. Besides, he considered action in the political arena to be beneath him.

On one of the most important and controversial issues of the day, for example, the Reconstruction of the former Confederacy, Sherman left no question about where he stood. When Southern states began passing “Black Codes,” which were little more than thinly disguised updates of the old “Slave Codes,” and designed to keep the former slaves “in their place,” as their place was defined by Southern whites, Sherman seemed to have no reservations about such policy. If he did, he said nothing about it. While he did not wish to turn back the clock on the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, he did not think that the newly freed African-Americans were qualified either to vote or to hold government office. He would leave Southern whites, as well as the freedmen, in the power of many of the same leaders who had established the Confederacy and brought on four years of war. No other men, in Sherman’s estimate, neither common whites nor blacks, were qualified to control the Southern states. “The well disposed of the South must again be trusted,” he told John; “we cannot help it.” In Sherman’s opinion, Southern whites would never accept black suffrage. He feared rioting and anarchy if it were forced upon them, which might well require massive intervention by the U.S. Army. The capabilities of the military would be overextended, considering the dramatic army downsizing following the defeat of the Confederacy, as well as being far too costly to be practical.74

Sherman’s ideas were very close to those of President Johnson, who became locked in a struggle with Congress as he attempted to implement his minimal policy of Reconstruction. In 1867 Congress nullified Johnson’s efforts and passed several acts establishing its own policy to deal with the former Confederacy. The South was divided into five military districts, each commanded by a major general. Southern states had to write new constitutions and establish new state governments, which would guarantee African-Americans (males) the right to vote and hold office. Each state had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to blacks. If any state denied the franchise to blacks, its representation in the U.S. Congress and the electoral college would be proportionately reduced. Congress would decide when military rule would be lifted, and when a state was fit to be restored to the Union.

President Johnson was battling intensely with Congress, which was controlled by radical Republicans, many of whom were seeking to use Reconstruction for their party’s political gain. Early in 1868 he attempted to enlist Sherman as an ally. Not only were Sherman’s views of the Southern question close to his own; Johnson also considered the General trustworthy, and his military prestige was second only to Grant—indeed, it might even equal Grant’s. Furthermore, Sherman’s father-in-law was among those providing legal advice to the President (Thomas Ewing Sr. would also be involved in Johnson’s defense when he was impeached). Already, more than once, Johnson had tried to entice Sherman to become secretary of war.

In February 1868, the President moved to create a Military Division of the Atlantic, composed of “the Department of the Lakes, the Department of the East, and the Department of Washington,” to be commanded by Sherman, with headquarters at Washington, D.C. “I never felt so troubled in my life,” Sherman told Grant when he learned of Johnson’s intentions. He even thought, he said, about resigning from the army and asking Grenville Dodge to put him to work on the transcontinental railroad. Quickly realizing this was not a practical solution, he explained to Grant that “hard times and an expensive family have brought me back to starring the proposition square in the face.” Sherman did not want to leave his western command and his headquarters in St. Louis. He certainly did not want to live in Washington. Nor did he want any part of Johnson’s bitter brawl with Congress.75

He wrote a letter to the President, explaining his desire to remain where he was. He also wrote letters to John, Thomas Ewing Sr., Grant and others, making it clear—should the need for such clarity arise—that he had never sought to go to Washington. Because the nation’s capital already headquartered a department, as well as the army itself, Sherman did not see how he could render military service there. Just being in Washington, he believed, would cause him to “be universally construed as a rival to the General-in-Chief [Grant], a position damaging to me in the highest degree.” If he “could see my way clear to maintain my family,” he would not hesitate to resign. Since this was not an option, he concluded: “I beg the privilege of taking post at New York, or any other point you may name within the new military division, other than Washington.” When Johnson read the letter and realized how strongly Sherman opposed the new assignment, he backed off and told the General that he would be permitted to “retain your present command.”76

IN THE SPRING of 1868, Ulysses S. Grant was nominated for the presidency by the Republican Party. Sherman had long refused to believe that Grant was interested in the office. John Sherman, who was more savvy about national politics than his brother, and read Grant easily, had told Cump as early as March 1866 that it was “evident that Grant has some political aspirations and can, if he wishes it, easily attain the Presidency.” Sherman continued to insist that his friend had no intention of becoming the nation’s chief executive. “Grant told me he would not accept a nomination for President,” he wrote John in August 1867. A few weeks later, he assured John that Grant “writes me in the most unreserved confidence,” and that he “never has said a word that looks like wanting the office of President.” In that same letter to John, the General made a very significant comment, one that goes far in revealing his assessment of the military and politics: “I don’t think Grant, Sheridan, Thomas, or any real military man [emphasis added] wants to be President.” As a general in the U.S. Army, Sherman conceived of Grant, Sheridan, Thomas and of course himself as occupying a more worthy position as military men, and following a more honorable profession, than any politician who held any political office—even the presidency. But the close-mouthed Grant had probably never viewed the military in that vein, and in November 1868, he was elected as the eighteenth president of the United States.⁷⁷