The Training Ground Read online

  The railroad tracks heading west stopped abruptly at the Allegheny Mountains. Sherman had to race for his post at Pittsburgh aboard a stagecoach. A letter was waiting from an old classmate informing him that the Third Artillery had just received orders for California and that Sherman should apply for permission to join them. A whirlwind odyssey of rule bending immediately followed, during which Sherman had fled the recruiting office (he left a corporal in charge) in a desperate quest to secure a transfer to Company F. The clock was ticking. Once that ship sailed for California, Sherman’s hopes of seeing combat sailed with it. Relegated to the recruiting office once again, he would be destined to spend the war traveling up and down the Ohio River, pleading for able-bodied men to join the U.S. Army.

  But he had been in luck. “I got my orders about 8 p.m. one night,” Sherman wrote. “The next morning traveled by stage from Brownsville to Cumberland, Maryland, and thence by cars to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, in a great hurry lest the ship might sail without me.”

  It hadn’t. The Lexington was a former sloop of war commissioned exactly twenty years and three days before Company F’s departure for California. It had been refitted in 1840 as a store ship and had its twenty-four cannons reduced to just six. It had been a proud vessel before the castration, seeing action in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Atlantic. In particular, the Lexington had played a decisive role in the Falkland Islands crisis of 1831, its mighty twenty-four-pounders raking the village of Puerto Soledad in response to the seizure of U.S. fishing boats by the Falklands’ Argentine governor. The Lexington was 127 feet from stem to stern and 33½ feet at the beam. In its glory days its crew had numbered 190. Now it required just 50 sailors to set a course and trim the sails. Those men, however, combined with Company F, meant that the Lexington’s slim hull was near full capacity once again. The ship’s crew slept in hammocks between decks, while the enlisted soldiers were crammed into bunks built along the hull and amidships. Over the course of the voyage, it was understood that soldiers would be pressed into service performing nautical and maintenance duties alongside the sailors.

  Sherman and the other army officers (who would also serve in nominal fashion alongside their naval counterparts) slept two to a room. He shared a berth with First Lieutenant Edward Ord, who had also been his roommate at West Point.

  They were alike in many ways, particularly in their keen intelligence and disdain for pressed uniforms and combed hair. Ord, a mathematical genius who was reputed to be a descendant of Britain’s King George IV, was “unselfish, manly, and patriotic” in Sherman’s eyes. Small wonder that the two got along: Sherman could have used those words to describe himself. Theirs was a friendship that would endure for almost five decades.

  Ord was the friend who had alerted Sherman that Company F was short a junior officer, thus making it possible for Sherman to apply for the vacancy and be onboard the Lexington in the first place. Their cabin was small and cramped, with barely enough room for their bunks and chests of personal belongings. Sherman, who possessed a great flair for the theatrical, liked to call it a stateroom.

  Sherman was twenty-six, born into a family whose history was intertwined with that of a young United States. The first Shermans had sailed from Essex County, England, in 1634, just fourteen years after the Mayflower voyage. Roger Sherman, a distant relative, signed the Declaration of Independence. The family was situated in New England for the first century and a half after their arrival, then moved west after the Revolutionary War to take advantage of a land grant. In this way, Charles R. Sherman, a twenty-one-year-old attorney, brought his young bride, Mary, to Ohio in 1811. He left a year later, enlisting to fight the British during the War of 1812.

  As was their custom when waging war in North America, the British army enlisted the help of Native American tribes. One such tribe was the Shawnee, led by a charismatic orator named Tecumseh. “Live your life,” Tecumseh had said in 1809, rallying other tribes to fight encroachment by American settlers, “that the fear of death can never enter your heart.”

  Ironically, Tecumseh’s maverick style struck a nerve with those same settlers. They identified with his independence, courage, and refusal to quit in the face of long odds. He even won the respect of men who took up arms against Tecumseh’s cause — men like Charles Sherman. He admired Tecumseh and his tactics very much, so much so that when Mary bore their second son, in 1816, Charles was determined to name the boy after that Shawnee chief. Mary would have none of it. She insisted upon James, after her brother (Charles and Mary’s first son, born in 1810, was named Charles — but for her brother by that name). When the Shermans finally had a third son in 1820, Mary bent.

  “When I came along, on the 8th of February, 1820, mother having no more brothers, my father succeeded in his original purpose,” Tecumseh Sherman later wrote of his mother’s lack of enthusiasm for the offbeat moniker.

  Tecumseh Sherman, or just “Cump,” was only nine when work called his father away from home in June 1829. Charles Sherman had risen to become a member of the Ohio Supreme Court. His duties that summer were to ride horseback from town to town, presiding over the circuit court. He was thirty-nine and healthy.

  Sherman later wrote about his father’s last day in court: “He took his seat on the bench, opened court in the forenoon, but in the afternoon, after recess, was seized by a severe chill and had to adjourn the court. The best medical aid was called in, and for three days with apparent success, but the fever then assumed a more dangerous type, and he gradually yielded to it.”

  Tecumseh Sherman’s words, lacking in emotion and abounding in simplification, sounded like those of a grown-up describing the awful turn of events as diplomatically as possible to a nine-year-old boy.

  Mary now had no source of income. Rather than subject her children to a life of poverty and want, she sent some off to live with neighbors. Tecumseh would be raised by a prominent local judge named Thomas Ewing. Though the boy, like generations of his relatives, had been raised Episcopalian, Ewing’s Catholic wife insisted that he be baptized into her faith. Not only that, but Maria Ewing found the child’s true name deeply inappropriate for a Christian youth. She chose to call him William. Forever after he was officially William Tecumseh Sherman.

  Thomas Ewing was an important Whig politician who would one day hold a cabinet-level position as the first secretary of the interior. In 1836, the year that Sherman made up his mind to attend West Point, Ewing was a U.S. senator. Arranging an academy appointment was hardly an issue.

  On his way toward the Hudson, Sherman stopped in Washington to visit Ewing. He happened to be walking past the White House when his eyes befell Andrew Jackson on the lawn, fretting over policy with his advisers.

  Sherman stopped dead in his tracks to watch. “I recall looking at him a full hour, one morning, through a wood railing on Pennsylvania Avenue, as he paced up and down the gravel walk on the north front of the White House,” Sherman later recalled. “He wore a cap and an overcoat so full that his form seemed smaller than I had expected.”

  Standing near Jackson were Washington’s other major power brokers: Vice President Martin Van Buren, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.

  West Point, with its focus on fraternity and discipline, was the ideal university for Sherman. Not that he showed any great potential as a soldier or a leader — just the opposite. Sherman’s grades were exemplary, but his tendencies toward independence and impulse were his undoing. He racked up demerit after demerit, never rising above the rank of cadet private during his entire four years. “Then, as now, neatness in dress and uniform, with a strict conformity to the rules, were the qualifications required for office, and I suppose I was found not to excel in any of these,” he later wrote with a shrug.

  Sherman was posted to the Third Artillery after graduation. In due time he was sent to Florida, where the Seminole Wars had taken on the feel of a mop-up action. Sherman would remember his time in Florida for its shark-filled ocean waters, its man
grove swamps, and the delicious dinners of sea turtle steak. His chief duty was rounding up rogue bands of Seminoles for deportation to their new homes in Oklahoma. “We at Fort Pierce made several excursions . . . into the Everglades, picking up here and there a family, so that it was absurd any longer to call it a ‘war.’ ”

  Sherman, however, was constantly one remove from the action. Fellow officers like Brevet Brigadier General Zachary Taylor, Colonel William Worth, and Lieutenant Braxton Bragg made their reputations during the Seminole Wars, but Sherman never got the chance to prove himself in battle. He was transferred from Florida to an outpost in Alabama. From there he spent time in New Orleans and Charleston.

  Sherman traveled through chunks of the South on horseback, studying the lay of the land, memorizing the topography, and making a mental map of its roads and of the paths of its streams and rivers. In time he could travel just as knowledgeably through the swales and mountains of Georgia as through his native Ohio. Sherman never forgot those lessons.

  “The knowledge thus acquired was of great use to me, and consequently to the government,” he would later note with some understatement.

  AS 1845 TURNED into 1846 American soldiers massed in Corpus Christi, anticipating the start of yet another war. Sherman was posted to Charleston’s Fort Moultrie, light-years from combat. That thriving port, with its wharves and shops and ships laden with cotton, was good duty. An artificial island made up of rocks that had formerly been used as ballast in cotton ships was sprouting in the middle of the bay. Military engineers had dumped the rocks there on purpose and then leveled them once the mound rose high enough to poke out of the sea. A fort was being built on top of this artificial foundation.

  Despite the close proximity to Fort Moultrie and another installation named Fort Johnson, the new fortress was considered vital to America’s coastal defenses.

  In 1817, President Monroe had advocated a network of new defenses to prevent invasion by sea. Over the protests of the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers, Monroe appealed to France for help in their construction. The Napoleonic War veteran General Simon Bernard was commissioned to design some two hundred fortresses on the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Sumter, the pentagonal fort Sherman could see being built atop the pile of rocks in Charleston Harbor, was named for South Carolina’s Revolutionary War hero, the legendary General Thomas “the Gamecock” Sumter, who had fought with Light-Horse Harry Lee. It would have brick walls five feet thick and room enough to house 135 guns and garrison 650 men. The first rocks had been dumped into the harbor in 1829.

  In 1846, as the first shots were fired on the Rio Grande, Fort Sumter, in Sherman’s words, “was barely above the water.”

  On May 1, Sherman was transferred to the recruiting service. Polk’s call for volunteers had not yet gone out. There was a sense that the army would need more men to fight Mexico (the Northeast was a hotbed for recruiters, thanks to the surplus of able-bodied farm laborers and immigrants; one 1842 study had shown that half of all regular army enlistments were from either New York or Pennsylvania). For an officer during a time of war, the assignment was a career death sentence.

  But that was someone else’s problem now. Sherman stood aboard the swaying, creaking decks of the Lexington.

  “Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart,” said Tecumseh.

  That’s exactly what First Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman was trying to do — if only he could be a part of the action. His military career had been lackluster so far, and he had always arrived at war too late.

  It was his deepest desire that California would change all that.

  FIFTEEN

  First Mississippi

  JULY 17, 1846

  On a sweltering midsummer day, Colonel Jefferson Davis disembarked in New Orleans to meet his troops for the first time. Three miles south of the city, the 936 officers and men of the First Mississippi were camped on the very site where Andrew Jackson had fought the Battle of New Orleans — yet another coincidence in which Davis’s past and present collided.

  The men of the First Mississippi were as flamboyant as their commander was ambitious. Each state’s volunteer regiment was allowed to design its own uniform. One group of Kentucky volunteers dressed in tricornered hats and hip boots made of red goatskin. Still other volunteer regiments wore various shades of green, pink, and gray. For their part, the men of the First Mississippi had chosen to adorn themselves quite smartly in broad black straw hats, white trousers made of a heavy-duty “duck” cotton fabric that was more often used for making tents, and garish red shirts. In addition, almost every man — including lowly privates — traveled with a personal slave or servant to attend to his needs, for the members of the First Mississippi came from some of the state’s finest families. Davis, who hadn’t made time to have a uniform tailored before leaving Washington, was the sole member of the unit who arrived in Saint Louis clad in civilian clothing.

  Despite its historical impact, the campsite selected by interim commanders Lieutenant Colonel Alexander K. McLung and Major Alexander Bradford was abysmal. The regimental tents were pitched in a plantation field made swampy by frequent rains. Thick black clouds of mosquitoes tortured the men by day and by night. Vast puddles of water and mud pocked the area, and those impressive white trousers worn by each man were soon a filthy brown. Even worse, the regimental drinking water was also used for bathing and for washing clothes. Dozens of men staggered to the sick list.

  When the call for volunteers had gone out in early May, some seventeen thousand enthusiastic Mississippians had swelled the streets of Vicksburg. Now, the initial burst of patriotism had been replaced by the rigors and realities of life during wartime. The mud and dysentery — not to mention alligators and mosquitoes — of a Louisiana swamp were not what those once-eager men had had in mind when they raced to volunteer. With every day spent in camp, awaiting the long-delayed order to ship out for the Rio Grande, morale plunged further and further.

  Davis had arrived at a catastrophe in the making.

  The scene of failure and mismanagement cried out for bold and immediate leadership — something Davis recognized immediately. He was appalled by all he saw: the morass at Chalmette Plantation (the legal name of the fields housing the troops’ tents), the growing number of incapacitated troops, the absence of the special .54-caliber percussion-cap rifles he had ordered specially for his men, and the emotional gloom that had left his fellow Mississippians regretting their decision. Davis’s first order of business was relocating his troops to indoor quarters closer to New Orleans. He then busied himself with finding the missing shipments of rifles and securing berths on ships bound for Port Isabel.

  Davis had learned a thing or two about political muscle during his short time in Congress. He quickly got his way.

  By July 22, the men of the First Mississippi, who had (thanks to Davis) spent the previous five days living in the relative comfort of dry cotton sheds, were saying good-bye to New Orleans and clambering up the gangplank of a tall ship. Each man’s gear locker included a dress cap, a forage cap, two flannel shirts, two pairs of full-body underwear, a uniform coat, four pairs of socks, a woolen jacket, four pairs of overalls (three woolen and one cotton), a cotton jacket, a frock, a wool blanket that served as a bedroll, and canteens made from hollowed gourds or molded india rubber. The men were mostly farmers in real life and got paid very little for the privilege of risking their lives for their country. A private earned just eight dollars a month. Yet they were thrilled to be sailing, at long last, to war.

  Finding ships for the entire regiment and its supplies was an arduous process, so even though Davis longed to be astride Tartar in Mexico as soon as possible, he waited until the last man decamped on July 26 before setting sail himself. Six days later he disembarked near the mouth of the Rio Grande, onto a sandy, treeless offshore landmass known as Brazos Island, bringing to an end a turbulent month of cross-country travel and career change. His arrival went unmarked by marching bands,
fanfare, or even the presence of General Taylor and his army. In any case, a celebration would have seemed cruel. Texas made the Chalmette Plantation look like paradise.

  Bugs were everywhere. The Mississippians had never seen such swarms of flies and mosquitoes. This was particularly remarkable because they came from a state known for its swarms of flies and mosquitoes. There were no trees in their temporary new home, just a bustling new army camp and a standing order to remain on Brazos Island until there was room on a steamboat heading upriver to Camargo. The summer heat had reached its peak, beating down with the sort of ferocity that made even the most rugged individual seek out the merest sliver of shade. The only respite came from the hurricane season’s fierce northerly winds. But those also swirled the sand every which way, adding a fine layer of grit to the hard bread, fatty bacon, and bean soup that the men lived on, day after day.

  Davis took the conditions for granted. Wars were seldom fought in comfortable surroundings. His focus was on getting his men ready for battle. If Davis had anything to say about it, the First Mississippi would not be like the other volunteer regiments, with their drunkenness, sloppy appearance, and disdain for regulation. They would be men of honor and valor, soldiers whose behavior would not bring shame of any kind to the great state of Mississippi. He drilled them constantly to instill discipline and order. Davis also posted an around-the-clock guard at the camp, even though the Mexican army was hundreds of miles away.