The Man Who Saved the Union (59 page)

Sherman was outraged at this public dressing-down. He might have acknowledged hoping for too much by way of a deal with Johnston, but as he pointed out, the agreement explicitly said it was not final until approved by the authorities in Washington. He would have accepted a quiet rejection on the order of what Grant delivered when he traveled south. But this public slap, he inferred, was raw politics, an opening round in the fight for control of reconstruction after Lincoln. And it was made at his expense.

He wrote to Grant complaining of the insult. “
I have never in my life questioned or disobeyed an order,” he said, “though many and many a time have I risked my life, health, and reputation in obeying orders, or
even hints, to execute plans and purposes not to my liking.” He reminded Grant that he had not been privy to the opinions of the politicians at Washington and therefore could not judge what they would find unacceptable. “For four years I have been in camp dealing with soldiers, and I can assure you that the conclusion at which the cabinet arrived, with such singular unanimity, differs from mine. I conferred freely with the best officers in this army as to the points involved in this controversy, and strange to say they were singularly unanimous in the other conclusion, and they will learn with pain and amazement that I am deemed insubordinate and wanting in common sense; that I, who in the complications of last year, worked day and night, summer and winter, for the cause and the Administration, and who have brought an army of 70,000 men in magnificent condition across a country deemed impassable, and placed it just where it was wanted almost on the day appointed, have brought discredit on our Government.” This alone, Sherman said, should have entitled him to better consideration than he had received.

But he was happy that he would not have to endure such abuse longer, on the present subject at least. “I envy not the task of reconstruction, and am delighted that the Secretary has relieved me of it.” He assumed from Grant’s refusal to replace him that he still enjoyed the confidence of the general-in-chief. “I will therefore go on and execute your orders to their conclusion, and when done will with intense satisfaction leave to the civil authorities the execution of the task of which they seem to me so jealous.”

51

H
AD
L
INCOLN LIVED, THE WAR’S END WOULD HAVE FORCED HIM TO
answer questions he had avoided amid the fighting. He would have been required to say whether emancipation implied
citizenship for the freedmen; whether citizenship entailed suffrage; how far political equality, if it came to that, demanded social equality; and who would enforce the rights of African Americans against the resistance the assertion of such rights must inevitably evoke. In short, he would have been required to specify what reconstruction meant.

The task fell instead to Andrew Johnson. Little was known of the new president outside his small circle, and what
was
known wasn’t promising. He had been added to Lincoln’s ticket in
1864 entirely to facilitate the president’s reelection; no one envisioned Johnson’s becoming president himself. The Tennessee Democrat fairly represented neither the ruling party nor the war’s winning section. All he brought to his new job were his personality and individual gifts, which didn’t give him a great deal to work with.
Oliver Temple knew Johnson from the selective world of Tennessee Unionist politics. “
Johnson was a man of the coolest and most unquestioned courage,” Temple granted. “When he was assailed on account of his loyalty”—to the Union—“by a mob of ruffians in Lynchburg, Virginia, on his way from Washington, in the spring of 1861, and one of them attempted to pull his nose, he drew his revolver and kept the whole pack at bay.” Yet Johnson was also a man of deep character flaws. “Johnson’s life was full of stormy passions,” Temple said. “It had no rest, and but little sunshine in it. He was strong and self-willed; had excessive confidence in his own power; was obstinate and dogmatic, and had little respect for the opinion of others.” Everything Johnson gained in life he
earned by his own effort, as he had been born poor and received no formal education. In part as a result, he despised the rich and the wellborn even as he envied them. “He denounced aristocrats, yet imitated them, and if not one at heart himself, he had all their worst ways,” Temple said. Johnson seemed to have but one goal in life, one interest. “Never was a human breast fired by a more restless, inextinguishable love of power. His ambition was boundless. To it he sacrificed everything—society, pleasure, and ease.”

Johnson’s initial pronouncements as president were unexceptional and broadly in keeping with Lincoln’s sentiments. He proclaimed amnesty and pardon for all participants in the rebellion who swore allegiance to the laws of the United States, specifically including the laws emancipating slaves. Various persons were excluded from this amnesty offer—the most visible of the rebels and the wealthiest—but such persons might apply individually to the president for a case-by-case review. At the same time, Johnson announced a protocol for reintegrating
North Carolina into the Union, a protocol that was generally interpreted as providing a model for the reintegration of other Southern states. He appointed a provisional governor, who, with the assistance of the military commander of the district that included North Carolina, would supervise a convention to amend the state’s constitution to make it conform with federal law. The voters for delegates to the convention would be those citizens who had qualified to vote under the state’s laws in 1860 and who had taken the loyalty oath.

G
rant watched, at first from a distance. Some admirers in Philadelphia, hoping to entice the Union hero to take up residence in the City of Brotherly Love, gave him a fine house. He moved the family in and attempted to make Philadelphia his base of operations. But a brief experiment convinced him he couldn’t afford the luxury of distance from Washington, and he accepted Henry Halleck’s offer of the use of a house in Georgetown until he and Julia could find one of their own in the capital.

Meanwhile he did what he could to facilitate the reknitting of North and South. He argued for the broadest possible amnesty for Confederate officers and men. “
Although it would meet with opposition in the North to allow Lee the benefit of amnesty, I think it would have the best possible effect towards restoring good feeling and peace in the South to have
him come in,” he wrote Halleck. “All the people except a few political leaders South will accept whatever he does as right and will be guided to a great extent by his example.”
Grant pressed to allow Confederate veterans to enlist in the Union army and urged that Confederate prisoners of war be released and transported to their home states in order to get that season’s crops planted. “
By going now they may still raise something for their subsistence for the coming year and prevent suffering next winter.” And he worked to keep the army out of the politics of reconstruction. “
Until a uniform policy is adopted for reestablishing civil government in the rebellious states, the military authorities can do nothing but keep the peace,” he said.

In the fourth week of May he reviewed the victorious Union armies as they marched through Washington. “
The sight was varied and grand,” he recalled. “Nearly all day for two successive days, from the Capitol to the Treasury Building, could be seen a mass of orderly soldiers marching in columns of companies. The National flag was flying from almost every house and store; the windows were filled with spectators; the doorsteps and sidewalks were crowded with colored people and poor whites who did not succeed in securing better quarters from which to get a view of the grand armies.” Meade’s Army of the Potomac filled the first day: well equipped, carefully disciplined—the picture of martial order and strength. Sherman’s westerners took up the second day. “Sherman’s army was not so well dressed as the Army of the Potomac,” Grant observed. “But their marching could not be excelled; they gave the appearance of men who had been thoroughly drilled to endure hardships, either by long and continuous marches or through exposure to any climate, without the ordinary shelter of a camp.” Sherman’s traverse of Washington recapitulated aspects of his march across the South. “In the rear of a company there would be a captured horse or mule loaded with small cooking utensils, captured chickens, and other food picked up for the use of the men. Negro families who had followed the army would sometimes come along in the rear of a company, with three or four children packed upon a single mule, and the mother leading it.”

By the evidence of the applause he received, Sherman had lost nothing of popular support as a result of Stanton’s rebuke. And the acclaim confirmed his ire at the secretary of war. “
To say that I was merely angry…,” Sherman recalled, “would hardly express the state of my feelings. I was outraged beyond measure.” Stanton tried to shake Sherman’s hand, but Sherman glaringly refused. “He offered me his hand, but
I declined it publicly, and the fact was universally noticed,” he said with satisfaction.

Grant tried to stay out of the quarrel. He respected and supported Sherman, and by his quiet but firm refusal to carry out Stanton’s order to relieve Sherman he had saved his friend’s job. But he had to work with Stanton, who had no desire to step aside, unless to step up to the presidency, and who was simply a difficult person. “
Mr. Stanton never questioned his own authority to command,” Grant wrote later. “He cared nothing for the feeling of others. In fact it seemed to be pleasanter to him to disappoint than to gratify. He felt no hesitation in assuming the functions of the executive, or in acting without advising him.” In public Grant defended Stanton. A committee of Congress charged with investigating Stanton’s oversight of the War Department called Grant to testify. “
In what manner has Mr. Stanton, Secretary of War, performed his duties?” he was asked. “Admirably,” he replied. “There has been no complaint.” Grant’s questioners inquired whether there had been any misunderstandings between Grant and Stanton. “Never expressed to me,” Grant said.

T
he Stanton-Sherman contretemps receded as other matters pressed forward. The surrender of Lee and Joe Johnston hadn’t quite terminated the war; Grant had to deal with the remnant Confederate armies. One headed by
Richard Taylor in Mississippi surrendered in early May, ending resistance east of the Mississippi. On May 17 Grant ordered Phil Sheridan to Texas to conclude operations there.

He had a second reason for sending Sheridan to Texas. During the war the French government under Napoleon III had concocted a scheme for reviving French influence in the Americas. The centerpiece of the scheme was an underemployed Austrian prince named Maximilian, whom Napoleon’s troops installed in Mexico City to the cheers of Mexican conservatives and the dismay of Mexican republicans. The American government protested this violation of the
Monroe Doctrine’s principle of noninterference by Europe in the affairs of the Americas, but under the duress of the war Lincoln could do little more. Grant likewise resented the French influence across the Rio Grande and upon the war’s end determined that there
was
something that could be done. Sending Sheridan south was a first step. “
The Rio Grande should be strongly held whether the forces in Texas surrender or not,” he told Sheridan.

The Confederate forces in Texas did surrender, before Sheridan
arrived. This allowed Grant to make his argument against France more explicit. “
I regard the act of attempting to establish a monarchical government on this continent, in Mexico, by foreign bayonets, as an act of hostility against the Government of the United States,” Grant told Andrew Johnson. “If allowed to go on until such a government is established, I see nothing before us but a long, expensive and bloody war, one in which the enemies of this country will be joined by tens of thousands of disciplined soldiers embittered against their government by the experience of the last four years.” Grant amplified this last point—that the former rebels might join the French in Mexico—by noting that Maximilian’s regime had allowed the Confederates free access to Mexico during the war. “It is notorious that every article held by the rebels for export was permitted to cross the Rio Grande and from there to go unmolested to all parts of the world, and they in turn to receive in pay all articles, arms, munitions of war, etc. they desired. Rebels in arms have been allowed to take refuge on Mexican soil protected by French bayonets.” Grant urged Johnson to register a “solemn protest” against the French presence in Mexico. Sheridan’s stationing on the Rio Grande would lend emphasis to the protest and allow additional measures if necessary.

When Johnson, under the influence of William Seward, registered a preference for quiet diplomacy, Grant made his case more strongly. “
Nonintervention in Mexican affairs will lead to an expensive and bloody war hereafter, or a yielding of territory now possessed by us,” he told Johnson. “To let the empire of Maximilian be established on our frontier is to permit an enemy to establish himself who will require a large standing army to watch. Military stations will be at points remote from supplies and therefore expensive to keep up. The trade of an empire will be lost to our commerce, and Americans, instead of being the most favored people of the world, throughout the length and breadth of this continent, will be scoffed and laughed at by their adjoining neighbors both north and south, the people of the British provinces and of Mexico.” Grant hoped to see an ultimatum from the president. “I would have no hesitation in recommending that notice be given the French that foreign troops must be withdrawn from this continent and the people left free to govern themselves in their own way.” The United States should assist the republican forces in Mexico. “I would openly sell, on credit, to the Government of Mexico all the arms, munitions and clothing they want, and aid them with officers to command troops.” If the French construed such action as a provocation, the United States army would be ready.