Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

into the crater, no one had any clear idea what to do next. The stunned Confederates rallied, sealed off the crater, and, after stubborn but disorganized Federal resistance, managed to recapture the crater and most of the Federal soldiers in it. The battle of the Crater became simply one more in the long string of the Army of the Potomac’s missed chances, and Grant admitted to Halleck, “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. … I am constrained to believe that had instructions been promptly obeyed that Petersburg would have been carried with all the artillery and a large number of prisoners without a loss of 300 men.”37

The lack of a dramatic victory, and the prospect of a long and empty siege, fell painfully short of what the country had expected from Grant, and the price for that disappointment was liable to be severe: 1864 was an election year, and if Lincoln had nothing to show for three years of war but Grant besieging Petersburg and Richmond for who knew how long, then it was entirely possible that the North would turn to another president and another solution. But there was still one other voice to be heard from before that decision would be made, and it would belong to a man who was at that moment almost a thousand miles away.

TO ATLANTA AND THE SEA

The only piece of Grant’s overall strategic plan in 1864 that actually worked the way he hoped was the move he had outlined from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and the principal reason this part succeeded when so many others miscarried was the simple fact that he had entrusted it to William Tecumseh Sherman. The war had turned a nodding acquaintance between the two men into one of the most formidable friendships in American history. Part of this mutual admiration grew out of the company misery is supposed to enjoy: the careers of both men before the Civil War had followed much the same dismal course, for in both cases the army proved a poor employer, and a West Point education was a poor preparation for anything but army employment. Sherman veered erratically from the army into banking, then into near destitution when his San Francisco bank failed, and after that into real estate speculation. He arrived at the year 1857 thirty-seven-years old but looking more like a man of sixty, a nervous, fidgety chain smoker with a thin coating of reddish hair and a perpetually scraggly shadow of beard. “I am doomed to be a vagabond,” he wrote. “I look upon myself as a dead cock in the pit, not worthy of future notice.”38

However, in 1859 Sherman successfully applied for the superintendency of the new Louisiana State Military College. There, the transplanted Ohioan spent two of the happiest years of his life, until he gradually came to think of himself as being as much a Louisianan as anything else. He did not particularly like slavery, but he also believed that it was the only condition fit for blacks, and he was perfectly willing to defend Louisiana slavery if necessary, provided that Louisiana did not put herself beyond the pale by attempting to secede from the Union: “I am willing to aid Louisiana in defending herself against her enemies so long as she remains a state in the general confederacy; but should she or any other state act disunion, I am out.”

Disunion and Civil War are synonymous terms. The Mississippi, source and mouth, must be controlled by one government. … Louisiana occupies the mouth of a river whose heads go far north, and does not admit of a “cut off.” Therefore a peaceable disunion which men here think possible is absurd. It would be war eternal until one or the other were conquered. … I always laughed when I heard disunion talked of, but I now begin to fear it may be attempted.39

Disunion was exactly what Louisiana proposed in 1861, and one week before Louisiana adopted its secession ordinance, Sherman resigned from the military college and headed north. After a wait of five months, he was summoned to Washington and commissioned as colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry.40

Sherman’s first round of Civil War service nearly finished him. He commanded a brigade of infantry at First Bull Run, and then was promoted and transferred to the Department of the Ohio. Unfortunately for Sherman, the department commander resigned, and until the new commander could be appointed and arrive on the scene, Sherman had to assume responsibility for organizing and administering the entire department. The nervous excitement was too great for a man of Sherman’s high-strung temperament—he quarreled with the press, declared that it would require 200,000 reinforcements to subdue the Confederates, and insisted on returning runaway slaves to their owners. Finally, on November 15, Don Carlos Buell showed up to take charge of the Department of the Ohio, and Sherman was moved over to Henry Wager Halleck’s department in St. Louis. Vengeful newspaper reporters circulated stories that Sherman had actually gone insane, and it looked as though his second military career had gone broke even faster than his bank.41

In a rare display of perspicacity, Halleck discounted the newspaper stories, and when Halleck began moving up the Tennessee River in March 1862, he gave Sherman command of a division and sent him to Pittsburg Landing to reinforce Grant. There, on April 6, Sherman’s division, posted around the little Shiloh Baptist Church, was the first in the way of the Confederate wave that rolled over the Grant’s army. To the surprise of his quondam critics back in Ohio, Sherman displayed an unexpectedly cool head in the midst of the Confederate onslaught. The peculiar geography of battle transformed Sherman: he personally rallied shattered regiments, plugged up holes in the Federal lines, and had four horses shot from under him. Under his direction, the right flank of Grant’s army managed to perform the most difficult maneuver in the military textbooks, an orderly retreat under fire. “All around him