Grant Moves South (42 page)

“Young man,” said Grant, “don't you know that the enemy is stuck in the mud, too?”

To this the abashed major could only reply: “No, I did not, General, but I do now.”
¹⁷

A
New York World
correspondent found Grant something of a puzzle, and in his attempt to describe him stumbled upon a fortunate phrase. Grant, he wrote, “has none of the soldier's bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He has no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks.… A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and square forehead, of short stature and thick-set. He is we would say a good liver, and altogether an unpronounceable man; he is so like hundreds of others as to be only described in general terms.”
¹⁸

Grant wanted to get away. Halleck had turned down his request for a transfer, but toward the end of May the attempt to get
duty in some other field was renewed through other channels. Major General David Hunter, who had had charge of things in St. Louis in the brief interim between Frémont and Halleck, and who later had served in Kansas, was this spring in charge of Federal troops along the Carolina coast. Camp rumor said that Hunter was about to be sent somewhere else, and Grant's staff angled to get the coastal command for Grant.

On May 24, Captain Rowley wrote to Washburne about it: “There is a matter which has just suggested itself to us. From certain articles in the few newspapers we get hold of it seems probable that Gen. Hunter may be superseded by some one. If such is to be the case I am
certain
that Gen. Grant would like
extremely
well to be assigned to the command that he now holds. And all things considered I think it would also be for the good of the service. We have now quite a number of their eastern generals in this department and have given them a fair start. Now let us do something for the Coast. Let us hear from you.” In a brief note mailed the same day, Rowley added: “Gen. Grant would be very much pleased to be transferred to a command on the coast as I have just heard him conversing upon the subject.”

On the same day Colonel Clark Lagow of Grant's staff wrote to Washburne on the same topic. He reported the general impression that Hunter was about to be relieved and urged that Hunter's position be given to Grant: “I am satisfied that the command would please him. I have heard him say as much (although he knows nothing of my writing this).”
¹⁹

Nothing came of this, and a few weeks later Rowley wrote to Washburne saying: “I am sorry there is no chance to get Genl. Grant into a wider field but am pleased to observe that public opinion is again beginning to set strongly in his favor.” Grant himself seems to have had no part in the wire pulling. On May 24 he wrote to a friend in the North, the Rev. J. M. Vincent of Galena, remarking that he was “quite unwell,” was presently confined to his bed, and feared that he might be in for a spell of sickness. He then went on to sum up his position at that moment:

I never asked for any position or any rank but entered with my whole soul in the cause of the Union, willing to sacrifice
everything in the cause, even my life if needs be, for its preservation. It has been my good fortune to render some service to the cause and my very bad luck to have attracted the attention of newspaper scriblers. It certainly never was my desire to attract public attention but has been my desire to do my whole duty in this just cause.
²⁰

Nevertheless, by the end of May Grant was about ready to leave. Sherman one morning rode over to visit with him, and found trunks and boxes packed and stacked up as if for some movement. Grant was sitting in his tent, at a rough table made of boards fastened to planks that had been driven into the ground, sorting letters and tying them into bundles with red tape. As Sherman recalled the matter, long afterward, Grant explained that he had leave to go home and was going to take advantage of it; he was simply in the way, here in Halleck's army, and he could not endure it any longer. Sherman argued with him, pointing out that he himself had almost left the Army, a few months earlier, when all the newspapers were proclaiming him a lunatic; he finally made up his mind to stick it out, he won advancement, and “now I am in high feather.” As Sherman told it later, Grant thanked him for this and agreed to stay for a while; and Sherman always believed that it was his own argument that kept Grant from dropping out of the Army altogether.
²¹

When he wrote his Memoirs Grant gave this account a rather casual confirmation, saying that he had obtained permission to leave the department and that Sherman, calling on him just as he was about to leave, had talked him out of it. What he wrote at the time, however, provides a substantially different version. According to Sherman's story, the leave of absence which Grant had been about to take would, in effect, have taken him out of the Army and out of the war; Grant's contemporary letters make it look much more like a routine matter, and—surprisingly enough—indicate that it was Halleck himself who persuaded him to stay with the Army. Sherman may have been influential in the case, but Grant failed to mention him when he described the episode to Congressman Washburne.

On June 1, Grant wrote to Washburne asking him to intercede with the Secretary of War to win promotion for a young Lieutenant
Dickey, son of the colonel of the 4th Illinois cavalry and brother-in-law of the late General W. H. L. Wallace. He then remarked: “I leave here in a day or two for Covington, Ky., on a short leave of absence. I may write you again from there if I do not visit Washington in person.”
²²
The projected Washington visit may conceivably have been in connection with the attempt to get a transfer to some other department, but the trip to Covington—where Jesse Grant lived, and where Julia and the children spent a good deal of time during the war—does not sound like a momentous step that would have brought Grant's military career to a close. In any case, a little more than a fortnight after writing this letter Grant sent Washburne another one, which tells how he came to abandon the trip north.

Your letter of the 8th inst. addressed to me at Covington Ky. has just reached.—At the time the one was written to which it is an answer I had leave to go home, or to Covington [here Grant added “for a few days,” then crossed the phrase out] but Gen Halleck requested me to remain for a few days. Afterwards when I spoke of going he asked that I should remain a little longer if my business was not of pressing importance. As I really had no business, and had not asked leave on such grounds, I told him so and that if my services were required I would not go atal. This settled my leave for the present, and for the war, so long as my services are required I do not wish to leave.

He added that he would presently be going to Memphis, where his headquarters were to be for the immediate future.
²³

It is possible to read more strain into the Grant-Halleck relationship in the spring of 1862 than really existed. Grant's feeling toward Halleck became extremely bitter after the war, but there was no bitterness in evidence during the war, and Grant apparently did not then feel that Halleck had seriously mistreated him. He undoubtedly described his emotional condition accurately when, a month after the letter just cited, he told Washburne that Halleck “is a man of gigantic intellect and well studied in the profession of arms. He and I have had several little spats but I like him and respect him nevertheless.”
²⁴
Halleck, for his part, seems to
have had nothing in particular against Grant: he simply was, and for a long time remained, very lukewarm in respect to this subordinate, not so much because Grant had got into his black books as because he himself was a dismally bad judge of men. The only proof that is needed, as far as this point is concerned, is the fact that in the summer of 1862 Halleck could write: “It is the strangest thing in the world to me that this war has developed so little talent in our generals. There is not a single one in the west fit for a great command.”
²⁵
When he wrote that, Halleck was fresh from a command that included, among others, Grant, Sherman, Thomas and Sheridan!

Halleck underrated Grant, but so did almost everyone else. There was a rather general impression, through most of 1862, that Grant was nothing more than an earnest, uninspired plodder who had blundered his way into certain victories. Halleck had planned to replace him early in the winter, had been reluctant to keep him in command in the pre-Shiloh period, and indeed was to make one more effort to put another man in his place; but it seems likely that all of this reflects nothing much more than acceptance of the common opinion regarding the unimpressive-looking soldier who could never manage to appear like a great strategist.
²⁶

Meanwhile, the military picture took a sudden turn. Beauregard had been sparring and running a long bluff, in his effort to keep the Federals away from Corinth; he adopted various devices, including the trick of running empty trains into the town, after dark, with much whistling and chuff-chuffing, with the garrison cheering each arrival, which led Federal scouts to report the steady arrival of heavy reinforcements; but he was hopelessly overmatched, and at the end of May he got his army and most of his supplies out, headed south, and let the Federals have the strategic spot which they wanted so badly. To the last moment, the invaders were misled. At 1:20
A
.
M
. on May 30, John Pope sent Halleck word that Beauregard was being heavily reinforced, and warned: “I have no doubt, from all appearances, that I shall be attacked in heavy force at daylight”; five hours later Pope realized that he had been cruelly deceived and he ordered his skirmishers forward, while the explosion of ammunition dumps which Beauregard had been
unable to salvage sent huge clouds of smoke into the morning air. Before 9 o'clock Pope held Corinth, the United States flag was hoisted over the courthouse, and Pope informed Halleck that the Confederates “evacuated yesterday and last night. They marched down the Mobile railroad.”
²⁷
An officer in the 3rd Iowa wrote that he and his comrades had “an undescribable feeling of mortification that the enemy with all his stores and ordnance had escaped,” and Colonel John Smith from Galena wrote angrily that he hoped “all that twaddle about Grant” would stop, because “this biggest of all blunders the Commanding Genl. is responsible for.” Years later, Grant recalled that officers and men were disappointed, since “they could not see how the mere occupation of places was to close the war while large and effective Rebel armies existed.” He himself believed that a two-day campaign could have turned the trick.
²⁸

In Richmond, Jefferson Davis was indignant because Beauregard had not put up a fight, and he called him sharply to account for it, replacing him in command shortly afterward with Braxton Bragg; but Beauregard's position had been hopeless from the start, and he had done all anyone could have expected of him in getting his army away uncaptured. At his peak strength he had had no more than 52,000 effectives, of all arms; when Corinth was occupied Halleck commanded 128,315 in the Corinth area, not to mention 22,000 more at Nashville, Cumberland Gap and in northern Alabama,
²⁹
and the whole Confederate position in the West was rapidly crumbling. Far to the south the Navy had opened the mouth of the Mississippi, smashing its way past Forts Jackson and St. Philip and occupying New Orleans, which was now held by Federal troops under Major General Ben Butler. The Navy had had similar success in the upper river, destroying a Confederate fleet in a pitched battle near Memphis and occupying both that city and Fort Pillow. Federal troops under General J. M. Schofield held all of Missouri, and another Federal army led by General Samuel R. Curtis, which had beaten the Confederates in the battle of Pea Ridge early in the spring, was moving eastward across Arkansas toward the city of Helena, eighty miles below Memphis. The Confederates still occupied Vicksburg, and controlled the river from there down to Baton Rouge, but Rear Admiral David Farragut was bringing his salt-water fleet up the river and he
seemed likely to repeat at Vicksburg the triumph he had won below New Orleans.

When Halleck reported the occupation of Corinth, Secretary Stanton telegraphed: “I suppose you contemplate the occupation of Vicksburg and clearing out the Mississippi to New Orleans,” and Halleck replied that if the Navy did not take Vicksburg unaided “I shall send an expedition for that purpose as soon as I can re-enforce General Curtis.” This message Halleck sent on June 12; two weeks later he still hoped that the Navy could take Vicksburg, but “if not it will probably be necessary to fit out an expedition from the army.” Apparently Halleck really did have some such expedition in mind—for a time, at least—and Grant hoped that he himself would be ordered to lead it, but the expedition never materialized.
³⁰

The expedition never materialized because Federal strategy in the West began to sag just when the opportunity was greatest. It sagged because the old desire to occupy territory of strategic importance kept the high command from realizing that if enemy armies were pulverized the strategic importance of cities, railroad lines and the like would take care of itself.

Pope was ordered to pursue the retreating Confederates, and he reported that the woods were full of Rebel stragglers and that the enemy force seemed to be disintegrating, but he was not allowed to keep up the pressure. Halleck said frankly that if the Confederates would just go as far as Okolona—a town on the Mobile and Ohio railroad, sixty miles south of Corinth—he would be satisfied, because “the repair of the railroads is now the great object to be attended to.”
³¹
Halleck had a number of weighty problems on his mind, and the books from which he had gained his strategic wisdom had somehow failed to teach him that the destruction of the last sizable Confederate army in the West would solve all of those problems for him.