The institution officially opened its doors on New Year’s Day 1860, and Sherman proved to be an excellent college president; he got on well not only with the students but with the Louisiana politicians from the governor on down. These were, however, ominous and uncertain times. The abolitionist John Brown had recently caused a great uproar with his famous raid, and his body had barely begun to molder in the ground when a schism over slavery split the Democratic Party and practically ensured the election of Lincoln. Residing in Louisiana, Sherman didn’t need to read the tea leaves to see that this would lead to war.
His personal feelings were strongly antisecession. Sherman viewed the United States as an entity in which individual states could not be permitted simply to make off with themselves without the consent of the majority of states. Such a policy, Sherman said, would cause state after state to peel away until “we should reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.” On slavery, however, Sherman, like many if not most men, North and South, was a man of his time and loathed the notion of abolition almost as much as secession, because he worried that it would bring on civil war. “I would not,” he wrote to Thomas Ewing, Jr., his foster brother, “abolish or modify slavery. Negroes in the great numbers that exist here must of necessity be slaves. All the congresses on earth cannot make the negro anything else but what he is.” Sherman was more ambivalent about slavery spreading to the territories, a burning issue of the day, “but as to abolishing it in the south or turning loose 4 millions of slaves, I would have no hand in it.”
Nevertheless, Sherman described himself as “an ultra” on the question of secession. “I believe in coercion [war] and cannot comprehend how any Government can exist unless it defend its integrity.” But the two issues—national integrity and slavery—he wrote, “should be Kept distinct, for otherwise it will gradually become a war of Extermination without End.” So said William Tecumseh Sherman.
As war clouds enveloped Louisiana Sherman one night after dinner delivered himself of a harsh and prophetic sermon to the academy’s French instructor, whom he considered a friend: “You, you people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceful secession. You don’t know what you are doing … The country will be drenched in blood. You mistake the people of the north. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people, and will fight too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … The North can make a steam-engine, a locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing to war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail!”
Having thus summed up the situation, Sherman had arranged by early February 1861 to extract himself from Louisiana, as the Southern states seceded one after the other. First, however, he wanted to set the affairs of the academy in good order and was in the process of doing so when without warning the governor seized the federal forts and arsenals. For Sherman, the straw that broke the camel’s back came when wagonloads of rifles, “still in their old familiar boxes with U.S. scratched off,” arrived at the school “for safe keeping.” Thus, he wrote indignantly, “I was made the receiver of stolen goods.”
Next day Sherman handed in his resignation and caught a steamboat north to St. Louis, where he accepted the presidency of a mule-drawn streetcar service. When war finally broke out after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 Sherman’s foster father Ewing and his brother John Sherman, now a U.S. senator, jerked a few political strings so that Sherman found himself colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry, a regular army regiment. Three months later he commanded a brigade at the First Battle of Bull Run where he managed to put on an admirable performance despite the appalling Federal rout. Following this, he accepted assignment as second in command of the Department of the Cumberland, headquartered in Louisville, where the rumor started that he had gone insane.
The situation in Kentucky was confused, delicate, and extremely critical when Sherman arrived. The governor had been pressing for secession but the legislature was against it. Both Rebels and Yankees were raising troops there. Lincoln was trying everything he knew to keep Kentucky in the Union while Jefferson Davis was doing his best to keep it out. The man commanding the department was 56-year-old Gen. Robert Anderson, who had suffered the humiliation of surrendering Fort Sumter. Anderson had become feeble from the strain ever since Sumter, and the month after Sherman arrived, he stepped down and Sherman stepped up. It was not an agreeable job.
Scarcely had Sherman moved his things into Anderson’s office than Simon Cameron, the U.S. secretary of war, arrived in Louisville on a fact-finding tour with an entourage of newspaper reporters, whom he insisted should remain in the room during the briefing. When Anderson asked Sherman’s opinion of what it would take to quell the rebellion in his sector, Sherman replied that it would probably take around 200,000 men to subdue the entire Mississippi River Valley. Cameron was naturally taken aback, since there weren’t 200,000 men in the entire army at that point, but nothing further was said.
When he returned to Washington, Cameron sent a note to the adjutant general asking him to prepare a memo of the conversation at the briefing, including Sherman’s “insane” opinion that 200,000 soldiers would be required. Apparently the note and other information leaked to the press and soon newspapers were circulating reports that the commanding general of the Department of the Cumberland had “gone mad,” “was crazy,” “had gone insane.” The more Sherman tried to straighten things out, the worse it became; news reports of his “insanity” snowballed, and in time the question of his mental stability seemed to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two of his close relatives, in fact, had been institutionalized, and Sherman himself found he was beginning to doubt his sanity. This was also when Sherman’s hatred of the press began to solidify. There had been a few unpleasant run-ins with newspapers while he was in California, but the harsh attacks on his sanity drove Sherman past the point of no return. According to the author Emmet Crozier in Yankee Reporters, 1861–65, when the Cincinnati Appeal correspondent Florus B. Plimpton met Sherman during one of his inspections south of Louisville, he handed the general a letter of introduction from his editor. Sherman looked the youthful reporter up and down, handed him back the letter, and replied, “The next train to Louisville goes at half-past one. Take that train. Make sure you take that train.”
Startled, Plimpton protested, “But, General, the people are anxious, I’m only after the truth.”
“The truth!” Sherman shouted. “That’s what we don’t want. No sir; we don’t want the enemy any better informed than he is! Go on home; make no mistake about that train!”
In any case, things continued to wear on Sherman, and on November 5, 1861, less than a month after he had taken command, he asked to be relieved.
Whatever Sherman did during his leave of absence seemed to restore him, and he returned, bright eyed and eager, to find that Henry Halleck, whom he had known in California, had just been placed in command of the Department of the West. Halleck assigned Sherman to run the district of Cairo—Grant’s old job—but with no army, since Grant had taken that with him to fight the battles of Forts Henry and Donelson. Cairo at this point was described by one observer as “a small place at the terminus of the Illinois Central railroad, a place of not much account, low and flat, and at some seasons entirely under water.” Sherman’s job was to keep Grant supplied and reinforced, and that was where they began a long-distance friendship that lasted through the war and afterward. He was extremely solicitous of Grant’s needs and promised to send him anything “within reason,” up to and including surgeons, nurses, officers’ wives, laundresses—even himself. It was for his outstanding performance as Grant’s supply officer that Sherman was rewarded with the 9,000-man division of green recruits and sent to spearhead the Southern invasion in early March 1862.
On March 10 Sherman embarked his division on 18 steamboats up the Tennessee to Fort Henry
. Two days later Gen. C. F. Smith arrived with three more divisions and told Sherman to “push on under escort of the two gunboats Lexington and Tyler and break up the Memphis & Charleston railroad between Corinth and Tuscumbia, Alabama.” Smith said that he would be following with the rest of the army. At that point General Smith was “quite unwell,” Sherman noted. Sometime earlier he had scraped his leg on a rusty piece of tin while getting into a small boat and it had begun to fester and swell. There were no such things as antibiotics, and Smith was in pain, and considerable danger as well. Even as they spoke it had begun to rain.
It was still raining and the river was high as Sherman’s force passed by Pittsburg Landing. The captain told Sherman there had been a Rebel cavalry force there, and a battery, but the gunboats had disposed of them, killing half a dozen Confederates in the process. They steamed on below the Tennessee line and the river was in full flood. At a point where the river is the dividing line between Alabama and Mississippi they put in to the shore and disembarked. The objective was the town of Burnsville, about halfway to Corinth, 30 miles distant. There the rail company maintained large repair and maintenance shops; the idea was to tear up as much track as possible, burn the shops and depots, and put the M&C out of business for as long as possible.
Well before dawn Sherman sent his cavalry forward, then followed them with the infantry and artillery. “It was raining very hard at the time,” he said. “Daylight found us about six miles out, where we met the cavalry returning. They had made numerous attempts to cross the streams, which were so swollen that mere brooks covered the whole bottom.” Several men had drowned. “It was raining in torrents,” Sherman said. Word came from the rear that the river was rising very fast (in fact it rose 16 feet in 24 hours), and unless they returned immediately the way back would be impassable. Escape was “so difficult,” Sherman reported, “that we had to un-harness the artillery horses, and drag the guns under water through the bayous.”
They dropped back down the river and by that night, March 14, they had reached Pittsburg Landing, where they found Hurlbut’s division waiting on boats. Sherman also left his men on the boats and steamed down to Savannah, where he found General Smith bedridden in the Cherry mansion, his leg having worsened during the past two days. Smith told him to take the army’s chief engineer, James McPherson, and to land his division, and that of Hurlbut as well, at Pittsburg Landing, making camps “far back [from the river] to leave room for the entire army.”
On March 17 Grant, now reinstated, arrived and took charge of the army. He made his headquarters at the Cherry mansion in Savannah along with Smith, but he usually went up to Pittsburg Landing every day. Benjamin Prentiss’s division soon arrived, as did McClernand’s and Hurlbut’s, and set up camps at Pittsburg. W.H.L. Wallace had assumed command of Smith’s old division. Lew Wallace’s division came up, but there wasn’t room at Pittsburg, so it was debarked at Crump’s Landing, about six miles north of Pittsburg. That gave Grant an army of 48,894 on the books. Buell, who was marching overland through Bowling Green and Nashville with 20,000 more, was expected April 6, a force that when combined would be irresistible.
A month earlier, the Green River in southern Kentucky was also running high and Rebel troops, who were evacuating Bowling Green, had burned all the bridges across it when, on the morning of February 14, Buell, whose army had arrived on the east side of the river, ordered his artillery to shell the town. A blanket of snow covered the ground. Josie Underwood had spent the night in the city with a family friend, a Mrs. Hall, only to find that the war at last had come to Bowling Green.
“The place was alive with panic,” she told her diary. “Soldiers were rushing wildly—cavalry and infantry—horses were being taken everywhere and everywhere found—citizens, men women and children, white and black, were fleeing over the hills to get out of reach of danger—whilst the steady Boom—swish, shriek, and bang of cannon shot and shell went on. One shell crashed through the corner of Mrs. Hall’s kitchen and a piece of metal fell into the biscuit dough that Aunt Sallie [a cook] was kneading—she rushed into the house where we all were, all spattered with flour—saying—‘Bless de Lord—a Union shell in my biscuit dough!’ ”
This was the day Josie and her family had waited for—the liberation of their state from Rebel influence. Fort Donelson would fall to Grant next day. But it was also a time of shock and sadness, for they had lost so much since those happy times at Mount Air and Memphis. They had lost in fact nearly everything since the war began ten months earlier.
It had been good to come home after her stay in Memphis, but not for long. “The feeling is growing more and more bitter between the Union people and secessionists, try as we will to maintain the same outward show of friendship,” Josie said. All of the “substantial” people in town were Unionists, she said, and the Rebels were by and large a shabby lot. They had kept a close ear to the proceedings at Fort Sumter where Major Anderson was holding out against the Confederate force in Charleston. Anderson was “a personal friend and distant cousin” of her father’s.
It wasn’t long before Josie received “a warm and beautiful” letter from Tom Grafton, who had left the Shelby Grays to become a major of a regiment from his native Mississippi. Grafton said he “hopes the North will recognize the South’s right to withdraw from a hated Union without bloodshed.” William Western was visiting Mount Air when word came about Fort Sumter’s fall. They were having dinner, and among the guests was Benjamin Grider, a Bowling Green lawyer who was married to Josie’s sister, and whose own sister, Jane, had been Josie’s traveling companion to Memphis. The two brothers-in-law were devoted to each other, according to Josie, but when news of Sumter arrived Western said, “I’ll go to Memphis and fight with the South—for that’s what she’ll do now,” to which Grider replied, “Well Bill, I don’t reckon Kentucky can stay neutral now—and I’ll raise a regiment to fight against you and whip you back into the Union.” With that, they departed and Josie took a horseback ride around Mount Air.
“The air was so balmy and sweet. The country is so lovely with the redbud and dogwood in blossom … we came home just as the sun was setting, the most beautiful place in the whole country round. The peach trees all in blossom make it look like a huge bouquet of pinks and the perfume of the honeysuckle has wafted to us on the gentle breeze just as we rode up the Hill from the front gate—never was there a more peaceful happy home and never I believe a happier girl than I. It is too horrible to think of war devastating this beautiful land.”
Yet that is exactly what happened. As spring turned to the summer of 1861, a few of Josie’s former school friends from secessionist families “fell away,” and there was an increasing coolness between Unionists and secessionists that often turned to outright hostility. William Western became a major in the cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Ben Grider, as promised, raised his Union regiment, the Ninth Kentucky, of which he was colonel. Josie’s uncle “Wint” (Winston Henry), a West Pointer, resigned his army commission, saying he “could not conscientiously fight any longer against the South.” His sister, Josie’s mother, said of him, “ ‘Oh! If he had only died or been killed defending the flag and the country for which his fathers fought!’ She begged us never to mention his name to her again—to let him be as one dead—too bad! So sad!”
Josie “got another beautiful letter from Mr. Grafton. It seems cruel not to write him—even if I …” She did not finish the sentence. Josie’s brother, Warner, only 15, ran off and joined the army against his family’s wishes. Somehow he found he way into Ben Grider’s regiment.
Then, at the end of the first summer of the war, General Johnston and the Confederate army came to Bowling Green and occupied the town. General Hardee brought an army of 27,000 to anchor the line behind the Green River—west to Columbus on the Mississippi and east to Virginia and the Cumberland Gap.
Josie had to give up her horseback rides. The soldiers overwhelmed the town and were camped in the orchards and fields at Mount Air. “T
he fields all trodden down and the fences being burned” (for firewood), she wrote. “Tonight as I looked out from my window at the tents shining white in the moonlight, with here and there a campfire, and hear the various bugle calls from far off and near—there is something thrilling and beautiful in it all, in spite of the underlying and ever-abiding sadness.”
In early October, someone warned Warner Underwood that he was under suspicion of spying for the Union and was being “watched.” A few days later a hundred soldiers “with gleaming axes” marched to the house and began felling the large old oak and walnut trees that had shaded the mansion for decades. The officer in charge said that the hill upon which Mount Air rested commanded a field of fire across the river and had to be cleared, and then they were going to erect a fort with artillery batteries. They tore down the cabin of an elderly slave, and when the man came to Josie’s father crying despair he could not be made to understand why Underwood was powerless to stop the destruction.
Rebel families in town were bolder now and frequently insulting toward Unionists. On November 5 Josie turned 21, worried about her father, who was being harassed, and her mother, who had fallen into ill health. Rebel officers began to make themselves at home at Mount Air. Josie’s father received a letter from his son-in-law Western, who was quite wealthy and had gotten wind of the situation at Mount Air. He offered to buy the property, slaves and all, for $50,000 in gold (more than $1 million today), reasoning that because he was a Confederate officer the place would be protected and the family could continue living there, just as they were. Underwood was tempted and grateful, but in the end the slaves changed his mind. When he tried to explain the situation to them, they could not understand it—only that they were being sold—and they implored against it wretchedly, Josie recorded: “I never would er believed Mars Warner you’d sell us!” “And dear Pa could not stand it—‘and I never will!’ he said. We will do the best we can together—come what may.”