The Man Who Saved the Union (30 page)

Lincoln wasn’t convinced. Like Grant he thought battles more important than cities; McClellan might capture Richmond but until he defeated the Confederate army the rebellion would continue. Anyway, he thought McClellan moved too slowly. “
Your call for Parrot guns from
Washington alarms me, chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination,” he wrote McClellan in mid-May. “Is anything to be done?”

In fact nothing was to be done. “
We are quietly closing in on the enemy preparatory to the last struggle,” McClellan responded. But haste risked ruining all. “Situated as I am, I feel forced to take every precaution against disaster and to secure my flank against the probably superior force in front of me.” He needed more men, more arms, more time.

Lincoln stewed, mostly in silence. He recognized his lack of military experience. He occasionally nudged McClellan but declined to overrule him. He doubted the wisdom of McClellan’s strategy but couldn’t disprove it. He gnashed his teeth when Lee in late June proved less timid than McClellan expected and drove McClellan back down the Virginia peninsula in what came to be called the
Seven Days’ battles.

McClellan blamed Lincoln and the War Department. “
I have lost this battle because my force was too small,” he wrote
Edwin Stanton, the war secretary since January. “I am not responsible for this.… I know that a few thousand more men would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory. As it is, the Government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result.… You have done your best to sacrifice the
army.… You must send me very large re-enforcements, and send them at once.”

Lincoln smoldered at McClellan’s refusal to take responsibility. “
If we had a million men we could not get them to you in time,” he told the general. “We have not the men to send.” The next day he added, “The idea of sending you fifty thousand or any other considerable force promptly is simply absurd.” Yet he tactfully tempered his criticism with encouragement. “If you are not strong enough to face the enemy you must find a place of security and wait, rest, and repair. Maintain your ground if you can but save the Army at all events.… We still have strength enough in the country and will bring it out.”

McClellan professed to be unfazed by his reversal. “My position is very strong and daily becoming more so,” he wrote Lincoln on July 7. “
If not attacked today I shall laugh at them.… Annoy yourself as little as possible about me, and don’t lose confidence in this army.” He continued to rationalize his defeat. “
Prisoners all state that I had two hundred thousand enemy to fight—a good deal more than two to one and they knowing the ground.”

Lincoln lacked the self-confidence as yet to fire McClellan, but he determined that a change was necessary. He kept McClellan in command
of the Army of the Potomac but appointed Henry Halleck general-in-chief of the entire Union army.

Halleck got the summons at Corinth on July 11. “
I will start for Washington the moment I can have a personal interview with General Grant,” he replied.

26

J
ULIA
G
RANT FOLLOWED HER HUSBAND IN THE NEWSPAPERS AND THE
comments of her neighbors and friends, and when opportunity allowed she followed him physically. His headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, were but 150 miles from her childhood home at St. Louis, and following a visit to her Missouri family she took the children and ventured south to join him. She later recounted a dream from the beginning of the journey. “
The day I started, about the middle of the afternoon, I felt nervous and unable to go on with my preparations,” she wrote. “I went into my room to rest for a few moments, when I distinctly saw Ulys a few rods from me. I saw only his head and shoulders, about as high as if he were on horseback. He looked at me so earnestly and, I thought, so reproachfully, that I started up and said, ‘Ulys!’ ” She proceeded to Cairo, en route hearing of the
battle of Belmont, which had occurred on the day of her dream. Grant met the train at the Cairo station. “I told him of my seeing him on the day of the battle. He asked at what hour, and when I told him, he said: ‘That is singular. Just about that time I was on horseback and in great peril, and I thought of you and the children, and what would become of you if I were lost. I was thinking of you, dear Julia, and very earnestly too.’ ”

Julia and the children stayed with Grant in Cairo in a commandeered house and dined with him and a few other officers and their families. After Grant’s forces seized Paducah, Kentucky, she and the children rode a truce boat to that city to see what her husband and their father had wrought. The boat on the return voyage carried some Kentucky women indignant at Grant’s occupation of the city but more indignant at the secession that had provoked it. “
I remember one of them
who most industriously, I really thought spitefully, knitted all the way,” Julia related. “Her knitting needles clashed like lances.” A mild observation from Julia on the sentiments of Kentuckians caused the woman to explode: “Mania! Mania! Madam! Epidemic! Madam! Why the whole South has gone
ravin
’ mad!”

Julia and the children, like the families of the other officers, understandably stayed clear of the battlefields, hospitals and other grim features of war, with the result that the campaigning sometimes resembled a holiday tour. Julia recalled approaching Corinth after the Confederates evacuated that town. “
As we entered the encampment, which extended from near the depot to far beyond the headquarters, the campfires were lighted, and I do not think I exaggerate when I say they numbered thousands,” she wrote. “The men were singing ‘John Brown.’ It seemed as though a hundred or so sang the words and the whole army joined in the chorus. Oh, how grand it was!” Julia remembered Grant’s house at Corinth as the most pleasing residence he and the family had ever inhabited. “The General’s headquarters were in a handsome and very comfortable country house, situated in a magnificent oak grove of great extent. The house was a frame one, surrounded by wide piazzas, sheltered by some sweet odor-giving vine—Madeira vine, I think. On the grounds were plantain, mimosa and magnolia trees. A wide walk extended around the house. It was like a garden walk without sand or pebbles on it, only the mold or earth. It was kept in fine order, as it was sprinkled and raked morning and evening”—by the slaves who lived on the property. “It was the delight of Nellie and Jess to make footprints with their little rosy feet in this freshly-raked earth.”

H
er Corinth holiday ended sooner than Julia would have wished. Shortly after Grant decided he mustn’t leave the army, he realized he
could
leave Corinth. He detached his headquarters from Halleck’s and moved to Memphis, which had fallen to Union forces following a gunboat battle in early June 1862. The trip alerted him to some of the wrinkles of the war. “
With my staff and small escort I started at an early hour, and before noon we arrived within twenty miles of Memphis,” he remembered. “At this point I saw a very comfortable-looking white-haired gentleman seated at the front of his house, a little distance from the road.” Grant wanted to visit with the man, but not wishing to alarm him he sent his staff and escort down the road. He walked alone to the
porch and asked for a glass of water. “I found my host very congenial and communicative, and stayed longer than I had intended, until the lady of the house announced dinner and asked me to join them. The host, however, was not pressing, so that I declined the invitation and, mounting my horse, rode on.”

Grant caught up with the others at a shady spot two miles ahead. They waited out the heat of the summer day before continuing to Memphis, where he discovered the source of his white-haired host’s disinclination to have him stay for dinner. The man’s name was
De Loche and he was a Union loyalist, a rarity in that region. “He had not pressed me to tarry longer with him because in the early part of my visit a neighbor, a
Dr. Smith, had called and, on being presented to me, backed off the porch as if something had hit him. Mr. De Loche knew that the rebel General Jackson”—
William Jackson of Tennessee—“was in that neighborhood with a detachment of cavalry. His neighbor was as earnest in the Southern cause as was Mr. De Loche in that of the Union. The exact location of Jackson was entirely unknown to Mr. De Loche, but he was sure that his neighbor would know it and would give information of my presence, and this made my stay unpleasant to him after the call of Dr. Smith.”

Memphis educated Grant to issues he and other Union commanders would confront for the rest of the war. Till then he had had no experience of responsibility for a sizable Southern population living at home. Pittsburg Landing and Corinth were small villages from which the inhabitants fled on the approach of battle, but Memphis was a real city—of some 45,000 people—and most of its residents remained during the Union occupation. Grant became the de facto governor of the city and the surrounding region, and he spent hours each day hearing grievances and petitions. A local church had been seized to house Union soldiers; a deacon of the church demanded the building back. Grant said the congregation was free to join the services conducted by the Union army chaplain. The deacon expressed shock; his fellow congregants could never listen to the radical theology espoused by the Yankee preacher. Grant said they could get used to it or stay away.

Another petitioner was a lawyer who had represented Northern businesses with dealings in Memphis. His clients were owed money by Southern firms and individuals, but the Confederate congress had confiscated Northern property and claims in the South, including debts owed Northerners. The Union government, needless to say, didn’t recognize
the confiscation, and upon the capture of the city the Union provost marshal had seized such evidence as he could find of the debts. The lawyer had surrendered his clients’ receipts but now wanted them back. He said the Confederate government would hold him personally responsible for the debts when it regained control of Memphis. Grant shook his head in astonishment. “
His impudence was so sublime that I was rather amused than indignant,” he recalled. “I told him, however, that if he would remain in Memphis I did not believe the Confederate government would ever molest him.”

Other matters were more consequential. “
There is a great disloyalty manifested by the citizens of this place,” Grant wrote Halleck. “Undoubtedly spies and members of the Southern army are constantly finding their way in and out of the city in spite of all vigilance.” Sabotage was a real danger. “There is every probability that an attempt will be made to burn the city.” Grant tried to mitigate the hazard by suppressing newspapers he considered inflammatory. “
You will suspend the further publication of your paper,” his aide
William Hillyer wrote to the editor of the
Memphis Avalanche
. “The spirit with which it is conducted is regarded as both incendiary and treasonable, and its issue cannot longer be tolerated.”

Additional measures were more stringent. Raids and other attacks by rebel irregulars prompted Grant to declare that he would hold mere sympathizers accountable. “
Government collections shall be made of personal property from persons in the immediate neighborhood sympathizing with the rebellion, sufficient to remunerate the Government all loss and expense of collection,” he announced. The irregulars, moreover, had forfeited their right to appeal to the rules of war. “Persons acting as guerrillas without organization, and without uniform to distinguish them from private citizens, are not entitled to the treatment of prisoners of war when caught, and will not receive such treatment.”

Grant’s harshest measure was designed to flush the rebel sympathizers out of Memphis. “
The families now residing in the city of Memphis of the following persons are required to move south beyond our lines,” his
Special Order No. 14 declared: “First, all persons holding commissions in the so-called Confederate army.… Second, all persons holding office under or in the employ of the so-called Confederate government.… Third, all persons holding State, county, or municipal offices, who claim allegiance to said so-called Confederate government and who have abandoned their families and gone south.”
Special Order No. 15 appended a loophole:
a loyalty oath to the United States government that would allow the otherwise sanctioned to remain in their homes.

Grant knew that his orders would strain the fabric of Memphis life. To punish the men who were actively opposing the United States government was one thing; to target their wives and children was another. The loophole intensified the strain by asking family members to disavow the actions of their loved ones.

But the orders got the attention of the rebels, as Grant intended they should. Confederate general
Jeff Thompson sent a courier to Memphis with a message for Grant. “
I feel it my duty to remark that you must not for a moment suppose that the thousands who will be utterly unable to leave, and the many who will thus be forced to take the hateful oath of allegiance to a despised government, are to be thus converted into loyal citizens of the United States or weaned from their affection for our glorious young Confederacy,” Thompson warned. “General, I would tell you to beware of the curses and oaths of vengeance which the fifty thousand brave Tennesseans who are still in our army will register in Heaven against the persecutor of helpless old men, women, and children, and the
General who cannot guard his own lines
.”

Grant didn’t meet Thompson’s messenger. Before the lieutenant arrived, Grant got an order from Halleck to travel to Corinth, where Halleck told him of the summons he had received from Washington. Halleck didn’t say why he was going east, as he didn’t know for certain. “
But if it is to make him Secretary of War or Commander in Chief, Head Quarters at Washington, a better selection could not be made,” Grant wrote
Elihu Washburne.

Grant was learning the game of politics. Halleck left him in charge of the Department of the Mississippi, and Grant, pleased with the promotion and new authority, decided to be gracious in watching his superior go. “He is a man of gigantic intellect and well studied in the profession of arms,” Grant told Washburne. “He and I have had several little spats but I like and respect him nevertheless.”