Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War by Charles Bracelen Flood

Author:Charles Bracelen Flood [Flood, Charles Bracelen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, bought-and-paid-for, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780061148712
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

During the time that Sherman was conducting what became known as the Meridian Campaign, Grant wrote a brief letter to Julia. In it he said, “It now looks as if the Lieut. Generalcy bill was [sic] going to become a law. If it does and is given to me, it will help my finances so much that I will be able to be much more generous in my expenditures.”

This was Ulysses S. Grant’s way of telling his wife that Congress was going to name him as the first lieutenant general since George Washington received that rank. The promotion would automatically make him general in chief, placing him above Halleck, who under General Orders 98 ceased to hold that position and was “assigned to duty in Washington as Chief of Staff of the Army, under the direction of the Secretary of War [Stanton] and the lieutenant general commanding [Grant].” Ulysses S. Grant would command all the Union armies. He could therefore stay in the West or go east, but he decided to leave his vast Western theater of war, which he intended to turn over to Sherman, and base himself in or near Washington, ready to face Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

There were things that Grant already knew he wanted to do. The man who had grown up with horses was to say that, until now, the campaigns of the armies of the Union had reminded him of draft horses that were pulling the same wagon, but doing it in an awkward and inefficient way. To this point in the war, despite individual Union victories such as Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Gettysburg, the Union Army was divided into nineteen geographical military departments, with the Army of the Potomac an entity unto itself. Generals in all those sectors had been acting, when they did, on their own initiative, often without consultation or coordination with their peers in adjoining departments. This had resulted in sporadic, uncoordinated attacks and campaigns: the South, often given time to recover after a limited Union offensive ground to a halt in one area, was able to move its troops considerable distances and consolidate its forces to counter a new Union threat.

Grant intended to impose a cohesive Union strategy. He was going to be one of the two major figures in implementing that—the other was Sherman. As usual, any officer talking to Grant about a military matter was left in no doubt as to what he wanted and was left with great latitude in accomplishing the objective. Soon, Grant and Sherman would be conferring face-to-face, and Sherman would always remember the overriding concept: “He was to go for Lee, and I was to go for Joe Johnston.”

There was no date on the letter in which Grant told Julia the news of his promotion—Sherman would be informed of it as soon as the promotion became official, and a warm exchange of letters between the two men would ensue—but Grant’s letter to Julia was written about February 10, 1864. On that date three years before, Ulysses S.

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