The Man Who Saved the Union (54 page)

So Grant continued to close the ring. He considered bringing Sherman north from Savannah by sea, but when sufficient transports proved hard to find, Sherman suggested simply continuing his march, across the Carolinas and into Virginia. He could cover the distance by land as surely as by water, he said, and would accomplish much good on the way. “
I know this trip is necessary to the war. It must be made sooner or later, and I am on time and in the right position for it. My army is large enough, and I ask no reinforcement, but simply wish the utmost activity at all other points, so that concentration against me may not be universal.” He would strike for Columbia, South Carolina, the capital of the state that had started all the trouble and a city with symbolic importance second to none. “I expect Davis will move Heaven and earth to catch me, for success to my column is fatal to his dream of empire. Richmond is not more vital to his cause than Columbia and the heart of South Carolina.” Events were progressing favorably but must be exploited, Sherman said. “The poor white trash of the South are falling out of their ranks by sickness, desertion, and every available means; but there is a large class of
vindictive Southerners who will fight to the last. The squabbles in Richmond, the howls in Charleston, and the disintegration elsewhere are all good omens to us, but we must not relax one iota, but on the contrary pile up our efforts.” Sherman knew his business. “I will start with my Atlanta army, 60,000, supplied as before and depending on the country for all in excess of thirty days. I will have less cattle on the hoof, but I hear of hogs, cows and calves in Barnwell and the Columbia districts; even here we found some forage. Of course the enemy will carry off and destroy some forage but I will burn the houses where the people burn forage and they will get tired of that.”

Grant bade Sherman good luck and turned to Phil Sheridan to bring similar pressure from the west. The winter was harsh along the Shenandoah; Sheridan wrote Grant in February that snow had covered the ground since December and was currently a foot deep on the roads. The cavalry he sent after Confederate guerrillas came back frostbitten. “
It is utterly impossible to do anything here in such weather,” Sheridan said. “I have never experienced a colder or worse winter.” Grant acknowledged the complication of the weather but told Sheridan to come out of the valley when he could. “
As soon as it is possible to travel, I think you will have no difficulty about reaching Lynchburg with a cavalry force alone. From there you could destroy the railroads and canal in every direction so as to be of no further use to the rebellion this coming spring or, I believe, during the existence of the rebellion.” Sheridan should then continue as conditions warranted. “From Lynchburg, if information you might get there would justify it, you could strike south, heading the streams in Virginia to the westward of Danville, and push on and join Sherman.” Sheridan and Sherman, together with smaller forces operating elsewhere, could fairly cut the ground from under the rebellion. “I would advise you to overcome great obstacles to accomplish this.”

G
rant’s belief that the rebellion was dying gained credibility from peace feelers out of Richmond. On January 30 three civilians rode up to the Union lines at Petersburg and presented a letter for Grant. “
We desire to pass your lines under safe conduct and proceed to Washington, to hold a conference with President Lincoln upon the subject of the existing war and with a view of ascertaining upon what terms it may be terminated,” the letter said. It was signed by Alexander H. Stephens,
John A.
Campbell, and
R. M. T. Hunter—respectively the vice president of the Confederacy, the assistant secretary of war and a leading member of the Confederate senate.

Grant telegraphed the request to Lincoln, who quickly decided he didn’t want the Confederate agents anywhere near Washington. Lincoln told Grant to hold them at City Point pending the administration’s decision whether to talk with them. Grant had Stephens and the others shown to a passenger steamboat in the James River. He dropped by occasionally and let himself be engaged in small talk but avoided matters of substance. “
I found them all very agreeable gentlemen,” he recollected. He allowed them to come and go; they visited the shore and wandered about Grant’s headquarters. But he refused to accord them any official status; they were simply his guests.

Like many others, Grant found Stephens curiously impressive. He had read the Georgian’s speeches and thought him a reasonable man. He had also thought him a small—diminutive—man. “But when I saw him in the dusk of the evening I was very much surprised to find so large a man as he seemed to be,” he recalled. The discrepancy soon came clear. “When he got down on to the boat I found that he was wearing a coarse gray woolen overcoat, a manufacture that had been introduced into the South during the rebellion. The cloth was thicker than anything of the kind I had ever seen, even in Canada. The overcoat extended nearly to his feet, and was so large that it gave him the appearance of being an average-sized man. He took this off when he reached the cabin of the boat, and I was struck with the apparent change in size, in the coat and out of it.”

Lincoln was struck too. The president decided to see the Confederate commissioners and arranged for a conference at Hampton Roads. He later compared impressions with Grant, asking him if he had watched Stephens take off his coat. Grant replied that he had. “Well,” Lincoln said, “didn’t you think it was the biggest shuck and the littlest ear that ever you did see?”

The conference came to nothing. Lincoln’s peace terms since the Emancipation Proclamation had been the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. Stephens and the others accepted neither forthrightly, and Lincoln, on the verge of victory, was in no mood to let them equivocate.

Grant suspected a ploy, an effort by Davis to buy time. The envoys had wanted an armistice until the talks ended; Grant refused, with
Lincoln’s approval. “
The peace feeling within the rebel lines is gaining ground rapidly,” he wrote Sherman. “This, however, should not relax our energies in the least, but should stimulate us to greater activity.”

S
herman didn’t require the encouragement. His army rolled north from Savannah, extending the swath of destruction it had wrought across Georgia. In the third week of February it approached Columbia. “
General Howard will cross the Saluda and Broad Rivers as near their mouths as possible, occupy Columbia, destroy the public buildings, railroad property, manufacturing and machine shops, but will spare libraries and asylums and private dwellings,” Sherman ordered. Howard and his men did cross the rivers and occupy the city; they destroyed the public buildings, railroad property and machine shops.

But the libraries, asylums and private dwellings were not wholly spared. On the night of February 17 a fire spread across much of the city. Most of those who experienced the blaze had never seen the like. “
The northern and western sky was not only all aflame, but the air was filled with myriad sparks and burning brands,” one eyewitness recalled. “They fell upon the wooden house-tops; they dashed against the windowpanes, lurid with reflected light; they fell in showers into the garden and among the trees; they mingled with the eddying dust which whirled along the street. It was the rain of fire, which is so sublimely expressed in music, in that grand oratorio—‘Israel in Egypt.’ ” Residents and property owners felt the destruction personally. “
Oh, that long twelve hours!” diarist
Emma LeConte recorded the next day. “Never surely again will I live through such a night of horrors. The memory of it will haunt me as long as I shall live—it seemed as if the day would never come. The sun arose at last, dim and red through the thick, murky atmosphere. It set last night on a beautiful town full of women and children—it shone dully down this morning on smoky ruins and abject misery.”

LeConte and other South Carolinians had heard stories of Sherman’s brutal practices; the burning of their homes suggested he was indeed the monster described. “This is the way the ‘cultured’ Yankee nation wars upon women and children!” she wrote. “Failing with our men in the field,
this
is the way they must conquer!…One expects these people to lie and steal, but it does seem such an outrage even upon degraded humanity that those who practice such wanton and useless cruelty should call themselves men. It seems to us even a contamination to look at these
devils. Think of the degradation of being conquered and ruled by such a people! It seems to me now as if we would choose extermination.”

Sherman denied responsibility for the fire and set his men to work dousing the flames. He suggested that the retreating Confederates had ignited the cotton stored in the city, lest the Federals seize it, and that the high wind that evening had spread the flames. “
If I had made up my mind to burn Columbia I would have burnt it with no more feeling than I would a common prairie dog village,” he testified later. “But I did not do it.”

Others blamed the chaos of the moment. Union general Oliver Howard asserted that his efforts to restore order did little good. “
During the night I met Logan and Wood and other general officers, and they were taking every possible measure to stop the fire and prevent disorder. Nevertheless, some escaped prisoners, convicts from the penitentiary just broken open, army followers, and drunken soldiers ran through house after house and were doubtless guilty of all manner of villainies, and it was these men that, I presume, set new fires farther to the windward in the northern part of the city.”

Grant didn’t worry about culpability or weep for Columbia. “
One thing is certain,” he wrote long after the embers, if not the passions, had cooled. “As soon as our troops took possession, they at once proceeded to extinguish the flames to the best of their ability with the limited means at hand. In any case, the example set by the Confederates in burning the village of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania”—in July 1864—“would seem to make a defense of the act of firing the seat of government of the state most responsible for the conflict then raging, not imperative.”

48

E
VEN IF THE WINTER RAINS HAD NOT RENDERED THE ROADS AROUND
Richmond impassable, Grant would have been reluctant to attack the fortified position Lee occupied. “
Whilst the enemy holds nearly all his force for the defense of Richmond and Petersburg, the object to be gained by attacking entrenchments is not worth the risk to be run,” he explained to George Meade. “In fact, for the present it is much better for us to hold the enemy where he is than to force him south.” Sherman was proceeding north through the Carolinas; Sheridan was coming from the west. “To drive the enemy from Richmond now would be to endanger the success of these two columns.” Patience was the virtue of the moment; when Sherman and Sheridan arrived would be the time to attack Lee.

Yet patience came hard. Sherman’s operations once more took him out of reach of telegraph. “
I feel no doubt of the result with him,” Grant told a friend, “but cut loose as he is I necessarily feel anxious. As long as Sherman is individually safe, his army will be. But an unlucky ball to touch him would materially mar the prospects of his army. Sherman has immortalized his name and that of the army he commands. It would be too unfortunate now to have anything occur to prevent him, and those under him, enjoying their laurels.” Grant didn’t like to think about such an occurrence, but he couldn’t help it. “My anxiety will be intense until I hear directly from Sherman.”

A letter from Lee moderated Grant’s anxiety somewhat. “
Lieutenant General Longstreet has informed me,” Lee wrote on March 2, “that in a recent conversation between himself and Major General Ord as to the possibility of arriving at a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy
difficulties by means of a military convention, General Ord stated that if I desired to have an interview with you on the subject, you would not decline, provided I had authority to act. Sincerely desiring to leave nothing untried which may put an end to the calamities of war, I propose to meet you at such convenient time and place as you may designate.” Lee added, “In such event, I am authorized to do whatever the result of the proposed interview may render necessary or advisable.”

Grant read the letter as indicating Lee’s desperation, and so he put him off to let the desperation deepen. “
General Ord and General Longstreet have probably misunderstood what I said,” he replied. Grant had sent Ord to talk to Longstreet about an exchange of prisoners; he hadn’t told Ord to invite broader discussions. Perhaps Ord had done so on his own; perhaps Longstreet had embellished what Ord said. Most likely, Grant surmised, Lee simply took the prisoner talks as an opportunity to suggest a more comprehensive negotiation.

In any case, Grant lacked authority to discuss any but the narrowest military questions. “General Ord could only have meant that I would not refuse an interview on any subject on which I have a right to act, which of course would be such as are purely of a military character,” he told Lee.

Grant could, of course, have asked for broader authority. But now was not the time. Writing to Stanton, he said, “
I can assure you that no act of the enemy will prevent me pressing all advantages gained, to the utmost of my ability.”

A
week later Grant stood uncomfortably aboard a steamboat in the James River at City Point. He had dressed more formally for the occasion than was his headquarters habit, for his companions that evening included
Elihu Washburne and a number of other dignitaries visiting from Washington. Washburne carried the gold medal that had been struck by order of Congress to reward Grant for his services in Tennessee the previous year. Washburne warmly thanked and congratulated Grant, and he read a letter from Lincoln. “
Please accept, for yourself and all under your command, the renewed expression of my gratitude for your and their arduous and well-performed public service,” the president said.

Grant scarcely heard the words. All he could think of was that he would have to give a speech in reply. He reached in his pocket for the paper on which he had scribbled a couple of sentences, which he now mumbled in a voice so low as to be barely audible even to those standing
beside him. “
I accept the medal and joint resolutions of Congress which the President has commissioned you to deliver to me,” he told Washburne rather than the audience. “I will do myself the honor at an early date to acknowledge the receipt of the letter of the President accompanying them, and to communicate, in orders, to the officers and soldiers who served under my command prior to the passage of the resolution, the thanks so generously tendered to them by the Congress of the United States.”