Grant Moves South (60 page)

Nobody was quite ready to say that Grant was a great man: nobody, at the same time, failed to realize that when you touched this stoop-shouldered, unassuming little man you touched somebody very special. The reputation that had been built up around Grant—hard-drinker, butcher, blundering man who knew nothing much except killing—still existed, and people were forever being pleasantly surprised to find that when they got at the man himself nothing of this nature was visible. Some devoted women came down the river this winter, dreading what they were going to see when at last they met this slouchy little general: they met him, and found that nothing that they had heard about him came close to the truth, and their hearts beat faster when they realized that this soldier was the kind of person they had doubted but dreamed about. Mary Livermore led this delegation from the Sanitary Commission down to Milliken's Bend, as the winter of 1863 ended, and she and the others who came with her had heard all of the stories—Grant boasted that he would take Vicksburg if it cost him three quarters of his army, Grant would turn the Mississippi out of its course and leave Vicksburg high and dry, Grant was a conscienceless drunkard who had to be put to bed at night by sorrowing juniors—and here, in a cramped room on a steamboat, they were talking with the man. They looked at him, these women who ahead of their generation knew men and their frailties and the bad things that could happen in a womanless army, and Mrs. Livermore wrote down what they saw:

“Grant was not a drunkard—that was immediately apparent to us. This conviction gave us such a joy that had we been younger we should all, men and women alike, have tossed our hats in the air and hurrahed. As it was, we looked each other in the face and
said heartily, ‘Thank God!' … The clear eye, clean skin, firm flesh and steady nerves of General Grant gave the lie to the universal calumnies then current concerning his intemperate habits and those of the officers of his staff. Our eyes had become practiced in reading the diagnosis of drunkenness.”

There were several things Mrs. Livermore wanted from the General, beside the chief thing—confidence, and an understanding—but when she saw him alone she realized that he was pressed for time, so she asked for only one favor. There were twenty-one desperately sick soldiers, whose names she had on a bit of paper, who needed to be discharged from the Army but who could not be discharged because somehow their papers had been lost so there was nothing on which Army routine could act. Twenty-one lives, which would very soon be lost unless something was done, and the doctors and officers she had talked with had raised difficulties … Lady, you don't know the Army, we can't do things this way, if the man's papers aren't straight he is out of luck.…

So Mary Livermore got into the cabin on the steamboat where Grant was working. The place was wreathed in heavy cigar smoke, and the table where Grant sat was stacked high with papers. Grant, when this woman came in, “seemed the most bashful man I ever encountered.” He got up in a hurry, tried to shove half a dozen chairs forward for her to sit in, took his cigar out of his mouth and his hat off of his head and then replaced both without knowing that he was doing it, and asked what he could do. She explained the matter of the 21 soldiers who were going to die. Grant mumbled something to the effect that this was a case for the medical director; she blurted out that it was time to cut a little red tape; Grant muttered that he would let her know about it … and the next day a staff officer came to Mary Livermore from Grant with the signed papers that sent the soldiers home with discharges, men who now had a chance to live again. From that moment, as far as this woman was concerned, Grant was a great man.
⁷

The old attacks continued, to be sure. In the middle of the winter Murat Halstead, editor of the
Cincinnati Gazette
, forwarded to Secretary Chase a despairing letter from a correspondent at Vicksburg: “There never was a more thoroughly disgusted, disheartened, demoralized army than this is and all because it is under such men
as Grant and Sherman.” The letter repeated all of the old allegations about sickness, about inefficiency of the medical department, about sick men who lacked care “while drunken doctors ride from barrooms to whore houses in government ambulances,” and Halstead inquired: “How is it that Grant who was behind at Ft. Henry, drunk at Donelson, surprised and whipped at Shiloh and driven back from Oxford, Miss., is still in command? Gov. Chase, these things are true. Our noble army of the Mississippi is being
wasted
by the foolish, drunken, stupid Grant. He can't organize or control or fight an army. I have no personal feeling about it, but I know he is an ass.”
⁸

Even worse was an attack which came from a former friend of Grant's, Brigadier General C. S. Hamilton. Hamilton and Grant had known one another in the Old Army, Hamilton had fought well at Iuka and Corinth, and when Grant went down the Mississippi he left Hamilton in charge of the district of West Tennessee. Hamilton wrote Grant cordially, wishing him well and adding: “I hope you will be entirely successful in your undertaking. The taking of Vicksburg is
your
right, and I hope it may be added to the laurels which belong to you as the most successful general of the war.” But although he wrote in this friendly fashion, Hamilton was growing bitter. Others were being promoted past him—McPherson, among them—and Hamilton suspected that it was because of favoritism. He had been brooding for a long time, and on February 11—two days after writing that friendly letter to Grant—he wrote to his friend, Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin, in quite a different vein:

You have asked me to write you confidentially. I will now say what I have never breathed.
Grant is a drunkard
. His wife has been with him for months only to use her influence in keeping him sober. He tries to let liquor alone but he cannot resist the temptation always. When he came to Memphis he left his wife at LaGrange & for several days after getting here was beastly drunk, utterly incapable of doing anything. Quimby and I took him in charge, watching him day & night & keeping liquor away from him & we telegraphed to his wife & brought her on to take care of him.

Hamilton was full of bitterness. He asserted that General Hurlbut, who commanded at Memphis, was another drunkard; that McPherson
had done nothing to deserve his recent elevation to Major General; and that McClernand was not to be trusted. (In an earlier letter, Hamilton had explained that Gordon Granger, a major general in the Army of the Cumberland, was “an ignorant, drinking, blatant, obscene loafer” and that Rosecrans was probably mixed up in cotton deals and, despite his reputation as a devout Catholic, was a very profane man and a hard drinker to boot.)
⁹

There is nothing to show that Grant knew anything about what Hamilton was saying, either then or later. He did know, however, that Hamilton was scheming to replace McPherson in command of the 17th corps, and Grant wrote to Halleck to protest about it; and a little later, when Hamilton found himself unable to get along with Hurlbut and offered his resignation, Grant promptly sent the resignation along with the recommendation that it be accepted. The War Department agreed, and Hamilton ceased to be a problem.

The point is that things were a little different now. Washington had been told, over and over again, that Grant was a drunkard. The fact that these stories—the detailed, seemingly circumstantial ones, at any rate—nearly always came from men who had been having a fight with Grant, or who found some order of his oppressive, may have taken a little of the sparkle off of the charges; in any case, they were beginning to collapse of their own weight, they were no longer raising a sensation. Washington was beginning to see that this general was an entirely different sort of man. The one quality in Grant which was becoming more evident than any other was a quiet, unshakable strength of purpose which made him wholly reliable, a man who could be counted on, a man who had a sort of inevitability about him—and this, of all human qualities imaginable, is the last thing to be found in an alcoholic.

It was just a little later this spring that Chaplain Eaton, who had “all of those darkies on his shoulders,” went to Washington to report to the President on the work he was doing. He found that Lincoln had come to his own conclusion. Lincoln told him how a delegation of Congressmen had come to the White House to urge Grant's removal on the ground that he drank too much. As Eaton remembered the conversation, Lincoln said: “I then began to ask them if they knew what he drank, what brand of whiskey he used,
telling them most seriously that I wished they would find out. They conferred with each other and concluded they could not tell what brand he used. I urged them to ascertain and let me know, for if it made fighting generals like Grant I should like to get some of it for distribution.” Eaton recalled that when he went to see Grant at the beginning of the spring he had been warned that the man was showing the signs of hard work, “looking like half a dozen men condensed into one”; he found it so, seeing Grant clad in an old brown linen duster and a battered slouch hat, with his trousers worn through by constant rubbing against saddle leather—“His very clothes, as well as the crows' feet on his brow, bore testimony to the strenuousness of the life he was leading.”
¹⁰

If the Vicksburg campaign was getting a bad press in the North, much of the blame undoubtedly belonged to Sherman. No American soldier ever disliked reporters more than Sherman did. The going-over he had received while commanding in Kentucky in the fall of 1861 had permanently embittered him; he considered newspapermen liars at best and Confederate agents at worst, and, quite literally, he would have been delighted to hang some of them if he could have found a proper excuse. This winter Sherman had been having a bitter passage at arms with Tom Knox of the
New York Herald
. Knox had written highly critical articles about the fight at Chickasaw Bayou and had recited the old charges that Sherman was insane, or on the edge of insanity. Sherman ranted that Knox was “a spy and an infamous dog,” asserted that his dispatch had given the Confederates information about Union strength and tactics before Vicksburg, and had the reporter court-martialed as a spy. The court-martial dragged on for days, refused to convict Knox of espionage, but did order him sent outside the army's lines, under penalty of imprisonment if he returned. In Washington, the press rallied in Knox's support, a delegation called on President Lincoln, and on March 20 Lincoln issued orders revoking the sentence of the court-martial; Knox could return to the Vicksburg area, said the President, and could stay there, “if General Grant shall give his express assent.”

Back to Milliken's Bend came Knox, seeking Grant's express assent. He did not get it. Grant told him bluntly that he was not going to overrule Sherman on this point. If Knox could make his peace
with Sherman, so that Sherman would agree that he should remain in this military area, then Grant would agree likewise; otherwise, Knox would have to leave. Grant suggested that Knox write Sherman a letter.

Knox would not apologize or beg. He wrote Sherman a stiff note which did no more than express regret at “the want of harmony between portions of the Army and the Press,” with a rider voicing hope that this want of harmony might presently diminish. This was not good enough for Sherman, and he refused to let Knox come back as a correspondent. “Come with a sword or musket in your hand, prepared to share with us our fate in sunshine or storm, in prosperity and adversity, in plenty and scarcity, and I will welcome you as a brother and associate,” he wrote to Knox. “But as a representative of the Press which you yourself say makes so slight a difference between truth and falsehood, and my answer is Never!” Grant sustained Sherman, Knox went elsewhere, and the
Herald
sent a new man down to cover the army's doings.
¹¹
The whole business unquestionably hurt the army's press relations, since Knox clearly had done nothing worse than to write a badly biased news story—no uncommon failing in those days. But the affair had a certain significance. Anyone could have guessed that Grant would not overrule Sherman—but here, in a case which had generated much heat, Lincoln was refusing to overrule Grant. Slowly but increasingly, the President was beginning to understand this far-off general.

Grant himself lacked Sherman's high-pressure temper, and had fewer personal problems with the press. Sylvanus Cadwallader remembered that during the advance down the Mississippi Central in the fall he had sent home a story commenting bitterly on the marauding and pillaging which Grant's soldiers inflicted on the people along the Tennessee-Mississippi border. When copies of the
Times
reached camp, Grant called Cadwallader to his tent. Cadwallader went, expecting to be sent home, perhaps even to be imprisoned as his predecessor had been. But Grant was calm enough; he asked whether the story in the
Times
was Cadwallader's, and when told that it was he went on to admit that the troops had indeed behaved very badly. They could not well be restrained, he said, without the cooperation of the regimental officers; invading the enemy's country
, he could not stop everything in order to hold courts of inquiry and courts-martial; if he himself caught a soldier engaged in acts of vandalism he would probably have him shot at once—and, all in all, if Cadwallader never wrote anything more untruthful than this particular story he would never be in any trouble at headquarters. Then Grant went on to sum up his own policy in regard to war correspondents. He would not try to censor letters or dispatches in advance of publication; newspapers and their reporters must determine what to publish, and he would make the reporters personally responsible by ordering them home if they sent off improper dispatches. All correspondents in his department, he added, were at liberty to give all of the facts about an army move that had already taken place; all he would insist was that they must not publish predictions about future movements.
¹²
Sherman might, and did, storm that unless the press could be muzzled “we are defeated to the end of time”; Grant simply said that the press must not reveal his military plans to the enemy, and let it go at that.