Сн. ХХІІІ.]

GRANT NEEDED IN WASHINGTON

503

ions of the Sixth Corps, from City Point, with General Wright in command, arrived at the wharf in Washington, and soon after four o'clock in the afternoon were in the neighborhood of Fort Stevens.1 The capital was saved. The next day a severe skirmish took place, which was watched from the fort by the President, who was apparently oblivious of the flying bullets of the sharpshooters, until the fall of a wounded officer near him caused General Wright to ask him peremptorily to retire to a safer spot. The night of July 12 the Confederates withdrew, burning, as they departed, the house of Postmaster-General Blair at Silver Spring. A pursuit was attempted which accomplished nothing. Dana, who had gone to Washington, saw accurately the situation, and with prophetic insight foretold the result. "Nothing can possibly be done here toward pursuing or cutting off the enemy, for want of a commander," he telegraphed Grant. "There is no head to the whole, and it seems indispensable that you should at once appoint one. Hunter will be the ranking officer if he ever gets up, but he will not do. Indeed, the Secretary of War directs me to tell you, in his judgment Hunter ought instantly to be relieved, having proven himself far more incompetent than even Sigel. He also directs me to say that advice or suggestions from you will not be sufficient. General Halleck will not give orders except as he receives them; the President will give none, and until you direct positively and explicitly what is to be done, everything will go on in the deplorable and fatal way in which it has gone on for the past week."4 There was a mass of contra

McCook's, p. 230. I have been helped in this account by the recollections of my brother, Robert R. Rhodes, then a corporal in Company B, 150th Ohio N. G., stationed at this time at Fort Bunker Hill.

1 Despatch of Wright, July 11, 4.10 P. M., O. R., vol. xxxvii. part i. p. 265; see also the reports which follow, p. 265. The advance of the Nineteenth Corps arrived the same day.

2 Nicolay and Hay, vol. ix. p. 173; Chittenden, p. 415.

3 Charles A.

4 O. R., vol. xxxvii. part ii. p. 223. Grant's flippant words were a poor answer to this weighty communication: "If the enemy has left Maryland," he said, 66 as I suppose he has, he should have upon his heels veterans,

dictory orders, a playing at cross purposes, the outgeneralling of the Federal commanders by Early, and a demoralization of the Union forces. Despatches were a long while in transmission between Washington and Grant's headquarters, and everything operated badly, for the reason that there was no efficient head. As long as he had no competent coadjutor in the Shenandoah valley, the commander of the armies should have been in Washington, or for a time even with the troops in pursuit of the Confederates. Toward the end of July Early turned upon his pursuers, drove them across the Potomac, and sent McCausland, with his cavalry, on a raid into Pennsylvania. McCausland occupied Chambersburg (July 30), and "in retaliation of the depredations committed by Major-General Hunter. . . during his recent raid," demanded from the citizens of the town "$100,000 in gold, or, in lieu thereof, $500,000 in greenbacks or national currency."1 Compliance therewith being impossible, the Confederate general carried out his threat, and laid the best part of the town in ashes.2

militiamen, men on horseback, and everything that can be got to follow to eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them."- O. R., vol. xxxvii. part ii. pp. 300, 301. Grant's support of Hunter is incomprehensible unless it was due to his kindness of heart. See ibid., pp. 332, 365.

1 McCausland's order, ibid., part i. p. 334.

2 Couch's report, ibid., p. 331; see, also, p. 334, and part ii. pp. 515, 525, 542; Pond, The Shenandoah Valley, p. 102; McClure, Lincoln and Men of War Times, pp. 239, 387.

Lincoln telegraphed Grant, Aug. 14: "The Secretary of War and I concur that you had better confer with General Lee, and stipulate for a mutual discontinuance of house-burning and other destruction of private property."-Complete Works, vol. ii. p. 561. In this connection I add a citation from Grant's celebrated despatch to Sheridan of Aug. 26: "Give the enemy no rest. . . . Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions, and negroes, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah valley to remain a barren waste."— O. R., vol. xliii. part i. p. 917.

Pursuit of McCausland was ordered, and resulted in the crippling of his force. "This affair [the final skirmish of the pursuit]," writes Early, "had a very damaging effect upon my cavalry for the rest of the campaign.”. Pond, The Shenandoah Valley, p. 107.

CH, XXIII.] SHERIDAN COMMANDER IN THE SHENANDOAH 505

An aberration or negligence of Grant was certain to be followed by a gleam of his military genius, and such a gleam it now falls to me to record. August 1 he ordered General Philip H. Sheridan to the Shenandoah valley on temporary duty, this order furnishing the text for a despatch from Lincoln, which is sickening in its despair. "I have seen your despatch," the President wrote to Grant, "in which you say, 'I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field, with instructions to put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes, let our troops go also.' This, I think, is exactly right as to how our forces should move; but please look over the despatches you may have received from here even since you made that order, and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here of putting our army south of the enemy,' or of 'following him to the death' in any direction. I repeat to you, it will neither be done nor attempted, unless you watch it every day and hour, and force it."1 Grant now paid a visit to the army of Hunter, and as that general in conversation expressed his willingness to be relieved, Sheridan was placed in permanent command.2 A different chapter on the Shenandoah valley from that of 1862, 1863, or 1864 until August 1 is henceforward to be written.3

I may not leave this part of my subject without mentioning the tradition that, on account of the failure and great loss of life of Grant's campaign, over which the feeling of the country was intensified by the Confederate invasion of the North and the imminent danger of Washington, the question of his removal from command was mooted; or, to present another phase of the story, that he was warned that a further cam

1 Aug. 3, O. R. vol. xxxvii. part ii. p. 582.

2 Ibid., vol. xxxvi. part i. p. 30; vol. xliii. part i. p. 719.

3 On Early's invasion, see reports of Lee, Early, Wallace, Hunter, and the despatches of Sigel, ibid., vol. xxxvii. part i.; the correspondence, ibid., part ii. and vol. xl. part iii.; Rec. of Lincoln, Chittenden; Grant's Personal Memoirs, vol. ii.; Life of Lee, Long; Early's article, Century War Book, vol. iv.

paign of attrition must be avoided. There are two despatches which may be considered to support, moderately, the less extreme version of the matter. July 17 the President thus telegraphed Grant: "In your despatch of yesterday to General Sherman, I find the following, to wit: 'I shall make a desperate effort to get a position here which will hold the enemy without the necessity of so many men.' Pressed as we are, by lapse of time, I am glad to hear you say this; and yet I do hope you may find a way that the effort shall not be desperate in the sense of great loss of life." The next day Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 500,000 volunteers, by virtue of the Act of Congress of July 4, 1864, the passage of which had been largely influenced by the great losses in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, and ordered a draft to take place immediately after September 5 for any unfilled quotas. July 19 Halleck wrote Grant: "We are now not receiving one-half as many as we are discharging. Volunteering has virtually ceased, and I do not anticipate much from the President's new call, which has the disadvantage of again postponing the draft for fifty days. Unless our government and people will come square up to the adoption of an efficient and thorough draft, we cannot supply the waste of our army.

Whatever implied warning there may have been in these despatches of Lincoln and Halleck, I have found no evidence indicating the shadow of an intention of the supersedure of Grant, nor do I believe that such a thought even occurred to the President. Indeed, there was no one to take his place. Extenuating none of his faults, there can be no doubt that so far as any military ability had been developed, Grant was the

1 Complete Works, vol. ii. p. 549.

2 This act repealed the $300 exemption clause which had been a large factor in the incitement of the New York draft riots; if one were drafted now, he must go into the service or furnish a substitute.

3 Complete Works, vol. ii. p. 551.

4 O. R., vol. xxxvii. part ii. p. 385.

5 Halleck, be it remembered, was the President's chief-of-staff.

CH. XXIII.]

GRANT AND MCCLELLAN

507

fittest of all the generals to command the armies of the United States. That the President had confidence in him is plainly manifest. Before Grant knew of the proclamation calling for 500,000 volunteers, he suggested that there ought to be an immediate call for 300,000. Lincoln, in reply, informing him of what he had already done, said, "Always glad to have your suggestions." During July and August there obtained the usual pressure which came in time of disaster, for the restoration of McClellan to command; 2 but I have written in vain if the reader can suppose that Lincoln entertained the idea of displacing Grant by McClellan, or that such a change would have redounded to the benefit of the Union cause.3

Despondency and discouragement are words which portray the state of feeling at the North during the month of July,

1 July 19, 20, O. R. vol. xxxvii. part ii. pp. 384, 400.

2 This is well illustrated by Francis P. Blair's self-imposed mission to McClellan about July 20.- Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia, 1864, p. 790. The Cincinnati Commercial (Rep.) of Aug. 2 thought that McClellan should be placed in command of the defences of Washington. The N. Y. World of Aug. 5, in citing the Cincinnati Commercial article, said that several Republican newspapers had expressed the same view. A pedler told a guest at a New York City hotel that he now sold more of McClellan's portraits than he did of Grant's (N. Y. Tribune, Aug. 12), an exhibition of surface public sentiment different from that of the previous April, when at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in New York City the sword-voting contest (each vote costing one dollar) terminated amid great excitement and some turbulence in 30,291 votes for Grant and 14,509 for McClellan.-N. Y. Tribune, April 23, 25, World, April 25.

3 I believe that the following citation from Wilkeson, Rec. of a Private, represents the sentiment which preponderated in the army: "The enlisted men spent much time in comparing Grant with McClellan. The latter had many warm friends among the soldiers. He only of all the men who had commanded the Army of the Potomac was personally liked and admired by his troops. Soldiers' eyes would brighten when they talked of him. Their hard, lean, browned faces would soften and light up with affection when they spoke of him, — and still it was affection only; they did not, as a rule, concede to him military talent. And the general opinion among them was, given Grant in command of the army in 1862, and the rebellion would have been crushed that year. Asked how McClellan would have done with the army of 1864 under his command, they shrugged their shoulders and said dryly, 'Well, he would have ended the war in the Wilderness - by establishing the Confederacy.'"— P. 192.