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

were excited orderlies and officers,” wrote one observer after Shiloh, “but though his face was besmeared with powder and blood, battle seemed to have cooled his usually hot nerves.” Halleck obtained Sherman’s promotion to major general, and when Grant finally began his great move on Vicksburg at the end of 1862, it was Sherman whom Grant asked Halleck for as a division commander. 42

Sherman eventually became as indispensable to Grant as “Stonewall” Jackson had been to Robert E. Lee. And Sherman was as unabashed in his admiration for Grant as any Confederate for Marse Robert: “I believe you are as brave, patriotic and just as the great prototype, Washington—as unselfish, kind-hearted, and honest as a man should be—but the chief characteristic is the simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in the Saviour.” Like Grant, Sherman made a deep and favorable impression on Charles Dana. “On the whole, General Sherman has a very small and very efficient staff; but the efficiency comes mainly from him,” Dana wrote to his chief, Secretary of War Stanton, in July 1863. “What a splendid soldier he is!”43

When Grant went east at the end of 1863 to supervise operations in the Virginia theater, there was no question but that Sherman would take command in the west and conduct the operations Grant had planned against Atlanta. He shared Grant’s notion of the primary importance of the western theater. “From the West, when our task is done,” Sherman prophesied, “we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond, and the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.” Gone was the paranoid behavior Sherman had manifested in Kentucky. Under Grant’s tutelage, he had developed into an energetic field commander, capable of quick decisions and even quicker movement. Instead of waging war by the defensive book, carefully preserving Southern property as the armies tiptoed past it, Sherman now began to talk about bringing it all crashing to the earth, about putting the thumbscrews to the South. In September 1863, he urged Halleck and Lincoln to turn the war into a campaign of desolation, since desolation was the only language the Confederates would understand.

I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that a nation has the right, and also the physical power to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it—that we will do it in our time and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be one year or two, or ten or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land… that we will not cease till the end is attained. … I would not coax them or even meet them half way but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it. … The people of this country have forfeited all right to a voice in the councils of the nation. They know it and feel it and in after-years they will be better citizens from the dear-bought experience. … 44

To a Tennessee woman who objected to manners so cruel, Sherman replied with a shrug: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”45

There was one point on which Sherman had not changed his opinions, and that was the future of the black slaves his soldiers encountered in Tennessee and Mississippi. “Do you really think we worship Negroes?” Sherman asked sarcastically when a Southerner pressed him about the future of the slaves. He bowed to the Emancipation Proclamation as a military necessity, but he consistently declined to use black Union soldiers in combat (though later he conceded to assigning them garrison duties), and he publicly doubted whether freed slaves could be “manufactured into voters, equal to all others, politically and socially.” 46

Notions such as that had destroyed the career of many an officer in the Army of the Potomac. But the eastern army was Lincoln’s and Stanton’s, an army so close to the politicians that it could hardly help but endure close political scrutiny. The western armies were something else: their uniforms were sloppier, their drill was slouchier, and their overall opinion of themselves was boundlessly higher. Away over the Appalachians, Sherman’s politics were less noticeable, and less of a liability so long as Grant continued to sponsor him and Sherman kept on winning battles. The time would come when politics would catch up with Sherman, and then they would nearly destroy him.47

For now, it was the soldiers in Chattanooga who were Sherman’s chief concern. The force that Grant left Sherman was something of a hodgepodge. The heart of it was George H. Thomas’s 61,000-man Army of the Cumberland (comprising the 14th and 20th Corps). Beside them were two smaller commands Grant had amalgamated for Sherman, the old 24,000-man Army of the Tennessee (comprising the 15th Corps and units of the 16th and 17th Corps) under a marvelous young engineer named James B. McPherson, and the 13,500 men of the Army of the Ohio under John M. Schofield (4th and 23rd Corps). Together with his cavalry, Sherman had more than 98,000 men at his disposal, along with 254 guns in his artillery train, and at the beginning of May (just as Grant was crossing his wagons over the Rapidan and into the Wilderness), he moved out of Chattanooga, pointed like a dagger at Atlanta. 48

Opposing him was what was left of the beaten and demoralized Confederate Army of Tennessee. The disaster at Missionary Ridge ought to have spelled the end for this luckless army, had not the individual corps commanders taken over and managed to patch the army back together in northern Georgia. At least Braxton Bragg was gone now, and in his place Jefferson Davis appointed the onetime victor of First Bull Run, General Joseph E. Johnston. Douglas Cater of the