The Man Who Saved the Union (53 page)

Sherman instructed his troops to be self-sufficient. “
The army will forage liberally on the country during the march,” he declared at the outset. The foraging Dolly Lunt experienced was part of a process Sherman’s army soon perfected. Brigade commanders detailed companies of foragers who left their camps before dawn in the general direction of that day’s march. They set out afoot but acquired wagons or carriages from the farms and plantations they visited. “
Often I would pass these foraging parties at the roadside, waiting for their wagons to come up, and was amused at their strange collections—mules, horses, even cattle, packed with old saddles and loaded with hams, bacon, bags of corn meal, and poultry of every character and description,” Sherman recalled. “Although this foraging was attended with great danger and hard work”—even widows, albeit not Dolly Lunt, sometimes defended their homes with lethal force—“there seemed to be a charm about it that attracted the soldiers, and it was a privilege to be detailed on such a party. Daily they returned mounted on all sorts of beasts, which were at once taken from them and appropriated to the general use; but the next day they would start out again on foot, only to repeat the experience of the day before.” Sherman didn’t deny that his foragers—known both pejoratively and affectionately as “bummers”—sometimes exceeded their orders. “No doubt many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence were committed.” Civilians were handled roughly and occasionally money, jewelry and other easily concealed items never reached the commissary. “But these acts were exceptional and incidental.” In any event they were part of war.

Skirmishes with Confederate forces afforded diversion from what became, for Sherman’s army, almost a lark. “
The weather was fine, the roads good, and everything seemed to favor us,” Sherman wrote of one particularly pleasant stretch. “Never do I recall a more agreeable sensation than the sight of our camps by night, lit up by the fires of fragrant pine-knots. The trains were all in good order, and the men seemed to march their fifteen miles a day as though it were nothing.”

F
or a month after Sherman cut loose from Atlanta, Grant heard nothing reliable of his whereabouts. Southern papers sketchily asserted that he was meeting his match or would meet it soon, that his army was surrounded and starving or nearly so. Northern papers summoned self-declared experts on Georgia geography to explain to readers what Sherman’s army must be experiencing if it went this way or that. Lincoln, more confident of ultimate victory than before his reelection, nonetheless fretted that a failure by Sherman’s army would lengthen the war significantly. Grant promised the president that all would be well. Sherman and his men would come out somewhere on the coast, if not necessarily at Savannah, he said. If the worst happened they could always go back north. Lincoln was calmed and paraphrased Grant to visitors: “
Grant says they are safe with such a general, and that if they cannot get out where they want to, they can crawl back by the hole they went in at.”

His confidence notwithstanding, Grant welcomed a report that Sherman had arrived at the coast. A copy of the
Richmond Dispatch
that reached Grant’s headquarters on December 13 placed Sherman five miles from Savannah. “
I congratulate you and the brave officers and men under your command on the successful termination of your brilliant campaign,” Grant wrote Sherman after confirming the report and while Sherman invested Savannah. “I never had a doubt of the result. When apprehensions for your safety were expressed by the President, I assured him that with the Army you had, and you in command of it, there was no danger, but you would strike bottom on salt water some place.” Grant added, “I would not feel the same security, in fact would not have entrusted the expedition to any other living commander.”

Sherman prepared to assault Savannah, but at the last moment the Confederate commander evacuated the city. On December 22 Sherman sent a message that reached Washington on the 24th:

To His Excellency President Lincoln:

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.

47

G
RANT SPENT THE WEEKS OF
S
HERMAN’S MARCH TIGHTENING THE
noose about Lee and Richmond. He ordered George Thomas in Tennessee to attack Hood’s Confederate army, which had gone north about the time Sherman went south. Thomas was under Sherman’s command, and Grant’s orders would have gone through Sherman if Sherman had been within reach by telegraph or courier. But Sherman’s plunge beyond his communications compelled Grant to telegraph orders to Thomas himself. And Thomas’s slowness to respond required Grant to send the same orders again and again. “
If Hood is permitted to remain quietly about Nashville you will lose all the road back to Chattanooga and possibly have to abandon the line of the Tennessee,” Grant wrote Thomas on December 2. “Should he attack you it is well, but if he does not you should attack him before he fortifies.” Later that day he reiterated: “You will now suffer incalculable injury upon your railroads if Hood is not speedily disposed of; put forth, therefore, every possible exertion to attain this end.” Thomas pleaded bad weather and said he required time to augment his forces. Grant told him to stop finding excuses. “
Hood should be attacked where he is,” he said. “Time strengthens him in all probability as much as it does you.” The next day he put the matter more bluntly: “
Attack Hood at once.”

Still Thomas stalled. Grant worried that Hood would bypass Thomas and continue north to the Ohio River and perhaps beyond. At a moment when the psychological balance had tipped crucially in favor of the North, such a Confederate campaign might be disastrous. “
If you delay any longer, the mortifying spectacle will be witnessed of a rebel army moving to the Ohio River,” Grant wrote on December 11. “Hood
cannot stand even a drawn battle so far from his supplies of ordnance stores. If he retreats and you follow, he must lose his material and much of his army.… Delay no longer.”

When Thomas
still
refused, Grant determined to fire him. He dispatched
John Logan to Nashville to relieve Thomas but told him to halt if word met him en route that Thomas had finally moved against Hood. He shortly wondered if he had done the right thing by sending a subordinate, and he traveled to Washington with the idea of continuing to Nashville himself to settle the matter directly.

At Washington he received the news he had been wanting to hear for weeks. “
General Thomas with the forces under his command attacked Hood’s army in front of Nashville at 9 o’clock this morning,” the December 15 message from the front asserted. “The enemy were driven from the river, from his entrenchments, from the range of hills on which his left rested and forced back upon his right and center, and the center pushed back from one to three miles with the loss of 17 guns and about 1500 prisoners.… The whole action today was splendidly successful.”

Grant suspended his plans to replace Thomas, yet he let the general know he was being watched. “
I was just on my way to Nashville, but receiving a dispatch from Van Duzer”—of Thomas’s staff—“detailing your splendid success of today I shall go no further,” he wrote. “Push the enemy now and give him no rest until he is entirely destroyed. Your army will cheerfully suffer many privations to break up Hood’s army and render it useless for future operations.… Much is now expected.”

T
he reduction of
Fort Fisher had a similar strangling purpose. The Confederate fortress guarded the mouth of the Cape Fear River and the approach to Wilmington, North Carolina, the last important point of Atlantic access to the Confederacy. The Union naval
blockade was supposed to seal the coast, but blockade runners slipped through, bringing supplies that helped keep Lee’s army in the field. Grant determined to strengthen the blockade by capturing Fort Fisher.
Benjamin Butler and the
Army of the James were his tools of choice, but at first the tools appeared poorly suited to the task. Butler conceived a plan to assault the fort with a gunboat packed with powder that would explode and stun the defenders physically, mentally or both. Grant, recalling the failure of similar attempts at Vicksburg and Petersburg, was skeptical but didn’t stop Butler from trying. Butler worked with the navy’s David
Porter to fill the chosen vessel with explosive and a timer. The craft was then grounded beneath the walls of the fort. The Union side watched anxiously and the Confederate defenders wondered what was happening. A second later the boat blew up but with no more force than might have been created by a bursting boiler, which the Confederates in fact thought had caused the vessel’s destruction. Butler proceeded to land troops anyway, while Porter’s gunboats provided artillery cover. But Butler changed his mind upon the arrival of Confederate reinforcements, and he withdrew the troops.

Grant lamented the reversal, believing the foothold once established should not have been abandoned. “
The Wilmington expedition has proven a gross and culpable failure,” he wrote Lincoln from City Point on December 28. He faulted procrastination and poor security. “Delays and free talk of the object of the expedition enabled the enemy to move troops to Wilmington to defeat it.… Who is to blame I hope will be known.”

Grant soon decided the blame was Butler’s and sacked the general. Meanwhile he tried to calm the irate Porter, who had risked his own men for Butler’s irresolution. “
Please hold on where you are for a few days, and I will endeavor to be back again with an increased force and without the former commander,” Grant wrote Porter.

He tapped
Alfred Howe Terry to lead the second assault. To ensure security he didn’t inform even Terry what the mission was until Terry’s force had boarded transports and set off. “
Here there is not the slightest suspicion where the troops are going,” Grant assured Stanton. Savannah was murmured as the destination, for the benefit of ears attuned to such things.

Terry opened his orders at sea and discovered that he was to accomplish what Butler had not. The orders urged Terry to listen to Porter. “
It is exceedingly desirable that the most complete understanding should exist between yourself and the Naval Commander,” Grant wrote. Terry and Porter achieved the requisite meeting of minds and directed the largest amphibious operation of the war. The Confederates fought well but were outgunned and outmanned. On January 15 the commandant of Fort Fisher surrendered the place.

L
ee got the word a
short time later and realized that the days of his army were numbered. His men were short of everything necessary for fighting: food, clothing, shoes, ammunition, medicine. Hunger drove
desertions; as Lee watched the flesh melt from the bones of his men, he saw the men melt from the ranks of his army. “
Desertion is increasing in the army, notwithstanding all my efforts to stop it,” he lamented. He requested broader authority from the Confederate government to shoot deserters. “A rigid execution of the law is mercy in the end. The great want in our army is firmer discipline.” But he knew this wasn’t true: the army’s great want was food. And though he received the shooting authority he requested, the desertions continued. The fall of
Fort Fisher, which severed his last link to the world beyond America, guaranteed that the desertions would accelerate.

The Confederate government responded by drafting and arming slaves. The measure revealed the rebels’ desperation, given the longstanding Southern fear of armed slaves. But Lee and the army had been using slaves to dig trenches, erect parapets, repair railroads and manage mules on behalf of the Confederacy; putting guns in hands that had wielded shovels and picks was a logical if nonetheless daunting step. Lee endorsed the move as a practical necessity. “
The enemy will certainly use them against us if he can get possession of them,” he wrote. “And as his present numerical superiority will enable him to penetrate many parts of the country, I cannot see the wisdom of the policy of holding them to await his arrival, when we may, by timely action and judicious management, use them to arrest his progress.”

The Confederate government meanwhile made Lee commander in chief.
Jefferson Davis had held the post, but the Confederacy’s numerous setbacks sparked calls that he relinquish the command to Lee. Davis initially resisted, as did his wife, who declared of her husband, “
If I were he, I would die or be hung before I would submit to the humiliation.” Eventually he realized he had no choice. Lee accepted the job with unfeigned reluctance. “
Deeply impressed with the difficulties and responsibilities of the position, and humbly invoking the assistance of Almighty God,” he declared, “I rely for success upon the courage and fortitude of the army, sustained by the patriotism and firmness of the people.”

He then told his wife: “
I think General Grant will move against us soon—within a week if nothing prevents—and no man can tell what may be the result.”

G
rant wasn’t quite ready to move. “
I could not see how it was possible for the Confederates to hold out much longer where they were,” he
wrote later. “There is no doubt that Richmond would have been evacuated much sooner than it was, if it had not been that it was the capital of the so-called Confederacy, and the fact of evacuating the capital would, of course, have had a very demoralizing effect upon the Confederate army.”

Grant assumed that Lee would wish to save the army but that Davis might try to save the capital. He didn’t know which priority would prevail. Nor had he any desire to waste more troops assaulting Richmond if that city might be abandoned imminently by the Confederates’ own choice. Yet he worried that Lee might elude him. He rarely lost sleep over impending battles but he lost sleep now. “
I felt that the situation of the Confederate army was such that they would try to make an escape at the earliest practicable moment, and I was afraid, every morning, that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone, and that nothing was left but a picket line. He had his railroad by the way of Danville south, and I was afraid that he was running off his men and all stores and ordnance except such as it would be necessary to carry with him for his immediate defense. I knew he could move much more lightly and more rapidly than I, and that, if he got the start, he would leave me behind so that we would have the same army to fight again farther south—and the war might be prolonged another year.”