Grant Moves South (55 page)

Headquarters, then, were at LaGrange, Tennessee. Eaton found the house Grant was occupying, and was told by an aide to go down a passage and knock on a closed door. He did so, was invited to enter, and found Grant in the middle of a conference with other generals. Grant told him to sit down, and when Eaton gave his name Grant remarked: “Oh—you are the man who has all these darkies on his shoulders.”

Eaton sat there while the conference continued, and took his first look at the Major General commanding. He had heard tall tales about Grant's dissipation, and he studied his face carefully and, to his relief, saw no signs to indicate that these tales were true—“Everything about him betokened moderation and simplicity”—and the generals at the conference clearly respected him. The meeting broke up at last, and as the officers left Grant asked Eaton to pull his chair over to the table: “Sit up and we'll talk.” Eaton at once began to ask that he be excused from the unwelcome new assignment. He pointed out that he was usefully employed where he was, that he had no military rank to speak of, that to pull the Negroes out of camp would bring him into conflict with all of the officers who were now using escaped slaves as servants, and that all in all he just did not feel up to the job. Grant listened attentively without being in the least impressed, and said finally: “Mr. Eaton, I have ordered you to report to me in person, and I will take care of you.” Then he began to explain just what Eaton was to do.

It was necessary to set up a special camp for the fugitive slaves, Grant explained, for two reasons—sheer military necessity, to
protect the troops against disease and demoralization, and common humanity, to keep the Negroes themselves from misery and death. The contrabands would not be a dead weight on the army, because there were many things they could do. About the army camps they could relieve soldiers of fatigue duties for the surgeon general, the quartermaster and the commissary, and they could work for the engineers on the building of roads and bridges and fortifications. Some women could help in camp kitchens and in hospitals, and a great many could help to pick, bale and ship the waiting cotton. Those who picked cotton would be paid for their work, and the baled cotton would be sent North and sold for government account. Citizens who had not left their plantations could use the contraband labor to gather their crops if they paid for it.

As Grant went on, Eaton began to see that this General had given the problem a great deal of thought. The Negro at the moment had a peculiar status, somewhere between slavery and freedom; Grant believed that if the Negro could show his worth as an independent laborer he could later be given a musket and could be used as a soldier, and eventually, if this worked out well, he could even become a citizen and have the right to vote. “Never before,” wrote Eaton, “had I heard the problem of the future of the Negro attacked so vigorously and with such humanity combined with practical good sense.” Reconciled to the task which he had been given, and greatly encouraged as to the capacity of Grant himself, Eaton went off to tackle the new job.

It was not easy. The first contraband camp was set up near Grand Junction, Tennessee, several miles from the nearest army camp, and the bewildered contrabands from all around were brought to it. An improvised hospital, with an Army surgeon in charge, was set up for the innumerable sick, and an abandoned house was taken over for a pesthouse—the first combing-out of the Army camps brought in eight Negroes suffering from smallpox. Grant ordered the quartermaster corps to meet Eaton's requisitions for condemned tents and surplus clothing, as well as for axes, spades and other tools, ordered the commissary department to honor requisitions for rations, and detailed a regiment to act as camp guards. He did this, as a matter of fact, without authority, and if Washington had overruled him he might eventually have been personally liable
for enormous sums; long afterward, talking to Eaton, Grant touched on this point, asking lightly: “I wonder if you ever realized how easily they could have had our heads?” However, authorization of a sort was presently received from Halleck, and the work went forward.

Problems were immense. Among the refugees, “want and destitution were appalling,” and although Grant consistently gave Eaton full support the means to deal with the suffering never seemed quite adequate. It was nearly impossible for Eaton to get assistants; almost to a man, the soldiers of this army hated to do anything which seemed to resemble serving Negroes, and just about the only helpers Eaton could get were reluctant enlisted men formally detailed for the job. (He got these, he recalled, in the ratio of one helper for each thousand of contrabands.) Provost marshals objected when Eaton tried to take fugitives away from them—they did not especially want the Negroes, but they did not like to see their own authority cut down—and on at least one occasion Eaton had to go to Grant himself to make a refractory provost understand who was boss. The citizens of the neighborhood were bitterly opposed to anything the Yankees might do, especially to anything which involved turning slaves into free men, and their antagonism was a constant pressure—particularly so when Eaton began to send out foraging details to impress foodstuffs for his charges. After a few weeks of it, Eaton had to take an intricate bundle of problems off to Grant for settlement. Grant then was far down the railroad, at Oxford, and so to Oxford Eaton went. He got there just as the campaign of invasion was reaching its worst moment.

Grant gave him plenty of time, shelving for the moment the heavy problems arising from Forrest's raid, McClernand's anticipated arrival at Memphis and the down-river movement of Sherman's troops, and Eaton was able to explain his difficulties. He had just finished doing this, and was sitting beside Grant in front of headquarters, when a courier gave Grant the message which signified the final collapse of Grant's campaign: the news that Colonel Murphy had surrendered the vast Holly Springs base to Van Dorn's cavalry.

Grant read it impassively. Eaton said that the General did not change expression, except that his mustache twitched a little. Then
Grant told Eaton what the message said and what it meant: he would have to withdraw his army and work out a completely new plan of campaign. He explained that he had given plenty of warning of Van Dorn's approach, and that with ordinary diligence Murphy should have been able to save the depot, and he added: “People will believe that I was taken unawares and did nothing to protect my supplies, whereas I did all that was possible.”

Then Grant returned to Eaton's problems and wrote out the comprehensive order which Eaton had requested. He also told Eaton that it would probably be necessary, in view of what Van Dorn had done, to move the whole Grand Junction camp bodily off to Memphis.

Returning to Grand Junction, Eaton rode on the train with Jesse Grant and with Julia. Jesse, he remembered, kept calling his attention to the enormous waste of hides at the slaughterhouses where the Army butchered its beef cattle. As an old tanner, Jesse could see that these would be very valuable, if he could just get them North, but he confessed that his son would not let him do anything at all about them. General Grant would not permit a profit to be made for anyone connected with the Grant family.

Moving the contrabands off to Memphis was something. The camp near Grand Junction had hardly got into operation; now every man, woman and child—most of them completely helpless, and all of them scared and bewildered—had to be taken cross-country to a city that did not want them, and the railroad which was to take them, the war-wracked line of the Memphis and Charleston, was swamped with the movement of troops. Such trains as were made available were hopelessly crowded, but the frantic Negroes refused to be left behind. They jammed passenger and freight cars, clinging to platforms and roofs, so that the trains had to go very slowly to keep from dislodging the refugees. At Memphis, accommodations were inadequate, and all over the city for a night or two little groups of hopeless people built bonfires on street corners and huddled around them while an early snowfall came down. Somehow, the first few nights and days were survived—by most of the Negroes, at any rate—and Eaton set up a new camp for his charges. Except in his capacity as a willing unpaid servant who would do
anything at all which his new masters asked of him, the Negro was wanted by nobody. The townspeople disliked him, and so did the army, and merely to keep him from starving, freezing or dying of disease or of plain, unvarnished discouragement was the most anyone could hope for.

Yet amid all of the confusion and unavoidable harshness, one thing was happening: the homeless Negro was slowly beginning to be recognized as a human being. Eaton was insisting that families—where they existed in any sort of understandable form—should be kept together, and he found that many of his people wanted to be married. Most marriages, he learned, merely solemnized unions which had existed for years on a sort of stock-farm basis, and he did his best to make such unions permanent and legal; he recalled that one day a chaplain who worked for him performed 119 marriages in one hour, and the morale of the contrabands began to rise. Eaton was able to use the services of a number of plantation-trained Negro preachers, whose qualifications sometimes were tenuous. One of these had deserted his own wife, and insisted on living with another woman, and an army chaplain tried to get this man to see the error of his ways, which scandalized the righteous. The Negro could not be moved; he had prayed and prayed about it, he said, but the Lord had sent him no clear call to make a change and so he thought he would go on as he had been doing. Soldiers finally had to get him out of the camp, whereupon he and his light o'love caught smallpox and died—a retribution which deeply impressed his former congregation.
¹⁹

All of this was more than just another problem for General Grant, to whom nearly all of Eaton's problems sooner or later came for final disposal. Grant was not merely working out the most important military campaign of the war; he was also cutting out the path along which a race would move toward freedom and manhood, and he had little to go on beyond his own instincts. The new policy toward the Negro was only technically being made in Washington. President and cabinet and Congress might make any plans they chose, but in the long run what would happen to the colored man was pretty much up to the Army commander in the field, and a good part of the underlying meaning of the war was bound up in what the field commander might do.

Different commanders had tried different things. Away back in 1861 at Fort Monroe, Ben Butler had ruled that fugitive slaves entering the Union lines were, as property owned by Rebels, mere contraband of war, and since this ruling enabled the Army to meet the problem on an
ad hoc
basis it was welcomed. But the fugitive slave was a source of ferment. Nothing that was done about him was ever final; in the last analysis he was what the war was mostly about, and he grew as the war grew. He had been a thing and the war was revealing him as a man, and every soldier in one way or another had to adjust himself to that fact.

David Hunter, along the South Carolina coast—the General whose place Grant had thought he himself might fill, when his own unhappy role in the army that was advancing on Corinth that spring had seemed unendurable—had tried to make the adjustment by enlisting Negroes as soldiers; but the effort was just one jump ahead of anything Washington was then prepared to recognize, and Hunter had first been overruled and then displaced. Ben Butler, in New Orleans, had begun to crack the problem by enlisting free Negroes as soldiers; then Hunter's successor, Brigadier General Rufus Saxon, had won permission to recruit fugitive slaves, and the dark regiment of First South Carolina Volunteers had come into being as a result. But Washington had not quite made up its mind, and all anyone could say was that a recent Act of Congress authorized the President to receive into the service, for any useful labor which they might perform, such contrabands as local commanders might care to enroll. People in the North, happy enough to see slaves deserting their Confederate owners, were still frightened of what the Negro might mean if he came into their own midst as a free man, seeking a job and some recognition, and James Gordon Bennett had jeered in his
New York Herald:
“The Irish and German immigrants, to say nothing of native laborers of the white race, must feel enraptured at the prospect of hordes of darkeys over-running the Northern states and working for half wages, and thus ousting them from employment.”
²⁰
Within a year the workers of New York City whom Bennett was thus exhorting would put on a hideous race riot to prove that the hordes of darkeys frightened them beyond endurance.

In the middle of a trying military campaign Grant had this problem
along with that of the Jewish traders who wanted to buy cotton at a bargain, and the problems were strangely related; related, not merely because cotton was common to both of them, but because Grant and most other men were children of their time and, without thinking, used derisive words denying human dignity to whole groups of people whose right to claim human dignity was what was chiefly at stake in this war. Like nearly everyone else, Grant could thoughtlessly say “Jews” when he meant scheming fixers who would have sold their own mothers for gain, and he could say “Darkeys”—as James Gordon Bennett said it—when he meant pathetically displaced men and women who were struggling upward to the point where people might recognize their decency as human beings. He could say “Jews” when he struck angrily at the sharpers, and he could say “Darkeys” when he devoted priceless time and effort that should have gone to a military campaign to an attempt to help people who were climbing a hard ladder.… When he wrote his Memoirs, Grant chuckled mildly about the frontier schoolrooms in which, as a child, he had been taught over and over again that “a noun is the name of a thing.” He was grappling with the names of things now, and the grapple was like Jacob's, wrestling with the angel, for the names were important. Far ahead of him, not visible but perhaps dimly sensed, dependent in a strange way on the very campaign which he now was trying to repair, there might be a day when people of good will, like himself, would use no abraded epithets but would simply talk about human beings.