REMARKS AT ARMY OF POTOMAC REUNION
NIAGARA FALLS, N. Y.
When you consider that it is now thirty-three years after the war, that
the Government has published every report, letter and order that was of
any moment, you will agree with me that it is difficult to interest an
Army audience in talking about another Army, and I shall not detain you
long on that subject. There are, however, some incidents of General
Grant's first visit to your Army, his return to ours, and the planning of
the grand campaign that was to end the war, that may interest you.
In December, 1863, after the Battle of Chattanooga, the Army of the
Tennessee camped along the railway from Columbia, Tenn., to Decatur and
Huntsville, Ala. After the Battle of Chattanooga General Grant returned to
Nashville and called there to meet him several Corps Commanders of the
Army of the Tennessee, and General Sheridan of the Army of the Cumberland.
If I remember rightly, there were present Generals Grant, Sherman,
Sheridan, Granger, Logan, Rawlins, and myself. All of us of the Army of
the Tennessee were a hard-looking crowd. None of us had seen Nashville or
any base of supplies since we had marched from the Mississippi River to
Chattanooga, and we had been hard at work building railways and foraging.
We arrived in Nashville late in the afternoon, and General Sherman took us
to General Grant's headquarters. General Grant suggested that we should
call upon the Military Governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, and pay our
respects to him. We, of course, followed General Grant, and were
introduced to Governor Johnson. I remember that our uniforms were greatly
worn, one or two of us wearing blouses with Army overcoats, and he looked
at us with a very quizzical eye, until General Grant said to excuse us
that he had not given us time since we reached the city to change our
suits; but Grant knew we had no others. Governor Johnson was then a very
radical man, and was very emphatic in informing us that while he was
Military Governor of Tennessee no rebel would receive much consideration
from him, and brought his fist down on a piano in the room with such force
that the sound from it startled us all, and we left there with the idea
that rebels in Tennessee had better get out; but we soon found that his
words were much stronger than his acts, for I hardly ever got my hands on
rebel stock or supplies that I did not find Johnson trying to pull them
off.
After our visit, General Sherman suggested that we should all go to the
theater that evening, and under his lead we went to the principal opera
house to hear the play of Hamlet. We were all strangers in Nashville; even
General Grant was not well known. We paid our way in and found the theater
crowded with soldiers going to and returning from veteran furloughs.
General Sherman, who you all know was a great lover of the theater, sat
alongside of me and soon commenced criticising the play, earnestly
protesting that it was being murdered. I had to check him several times
and tell him unless he kept quiet the soldiers in the audience would
recognize him and there would be a scene. We had entered late, and there
soon came on the scene where Hamlet soliloquizes over the skull of Yorick.
The audience was perfectly still, endeavoring to comprehend the actor's
words, when a soldier far back in the audience rose up and in a clear
voice called out, as the actor held up the skull, "Say, pard, what is it,
Yank or Reb?" The house appreciated the point and was instantly in an
uproar, and General Grant said we had better leave, so we went quietly
out, no one discovering Grant's or Sherman's presence. Sherman immediately
suggested that we should find an oyster-house and get something to eat,
and General Rawlins was put forward as guide and spokesman. He led us to a
very inviting place. We went in and found there was but one large table in
the place. There was one man sitting at it, and Rawlins, in his modest
way, without informing the man who his party was, asked him if he would
change to a smaller table and let us have that one. The man said the table
was good enough for him and kept on eating, and Rawlins backed out into
the street again. Sherman said if we depended on Rawlins we would get
nothing to eat, and said he would see what could be done. He hailed a man
who pointed out another saloon kept by a woman, and to this Sherman took
us, and she served us what we then considered a very nice oyster stew. As
we sat around the table, we talked more than we ate, and by the time we
had half finished our supper the woman came in and asked for the pay and
said we must leave, as under the military rules her house must close at 12
midnight and it was then a few minutes after that hour; so out we got and
took our way to Grant's headquarters, where we bunked down the best we
could during the night. Some of the staff heard of our evening's adventure
and gave the news to the press, and the next morning before breakfast all
the parties were present to apologize to Grant that they did not recognize
him, as we were out of our own jurisdiction and in that of the Army of the
Cumberland; but Grant in his modest way satisfied them that he had no
complaint. However, there poured in on him for all of us complimentary
tickets and invitations to almost everything in Nashville.
After breakfast we all assembled in a large room at headquarters to hear
what General Grant had to say to us. He took up with us the plan for a
winter campaign. He proposed himself to take about 30,000 of the troops
concentrated at Chattanooga and transport them by the Ohio and Mississippi
Rivers to New Orleans, and there take with him the troops of General Canby
and go thence to Mobile and attack that place. General Sherman was to go
to Memphis, gather up all the forces along the Mississippi River,
including the troops at Vicksburg and Natchez, together with the
Seventeenth Corps, and march from Vicksburg to Meridian and thence join
Grant at Mobile. I was to take the Sixteenth Corps, which was then located
on the line of the Nashville and Decatur road, together with about 10,000
cavalry that General William Sooy Smith had concentrated near Nashville,
and sweep down through Alabama, Northern Mississippi, and Western
Tennessee, attacking any forces of the enemy that might be met, and
destroying all the railroads and provisions that had been stored in that
country, this with a view of making it difficult for any of the
confederate armies to again occupy the territory, so as to enable Sherman
and Grant, when the spring and summer campaign came on, to utilize all the
Union troops that had been occupying that country. After the plans were
all made and all the arrangements agreed upon, General Grant reported them
to Washington, but President Lincoln objected because he was afraid, if we
took so many troops from Chattanooga, that Longstreet, who was occupying
Eastern Tennessee with his Army, would return to Chattanooga or Middle
Tennessee and undo all we had accomplished in the Battle of Chattanooga.
Grant had no fear of this, but he made up his mind to go immediately to
East Tennessee and take the forces there under General Foster, attack and
defeat Longstreet, and then come back and carry out his plans. He found
after reaching Knoxville that General Foster's forces could not be used,
so he abandoned the campaign, only sending Sherman to Vicksburg, who
marched out to Meridian and returned, while the 7,000 cavalry under
General William Sooy Smith, who was to join Sherman overland, moved south,
fighting and driving the enemy until he reached West Point, where he met a
superior force of the enemy and returned to Memphis.
In March, 1864, General Grant was called to Washington to be given his
commission as Lieutenant-General of the Army and command of all the
forces. On his return to Nashville, on March 17th, we were again called to
meet him. General Grant told us of his visit to Washington, his reception
by the President, and all the courtesies that had been paid him. He told
us that he accepted the commission of Lieutenant-General and Commander of
all the Armies on condition that his plans should not be interfered with
at Washington and that he should have the command of the staff departments
of the armies. Those departments had always considered themselves
independent of the Commander in the field; in fact, in the beginning of
the war the officers of Commissary Quarter-Master and Ordnance Departments
declined to obey the orders of the commanders they were serving under,
except upon the order of their chief in Washington. General Grant settled
this. A Commissary of Subsistence declined to carry out one of his orders,
and General Grant said to him that while he could not force him to obey
the order, he could relieve him and put in his place one of the line
officers who would obey all orders. This officer reported this to
Washington and it changed their orders so that they were ordered to obey
the orders of the officer in the field and to report their orders to their
chiefs in Washington. General Grant said that President Lincoln said in
reply to his request for the command of the staff departments that he
could not give him that legally; but, he said, "There is no one but myself
that can interfere with your orders; and you can rest assured that I will
not do it." We were all anxious to hear of his visit to the Army of the
Potomac, and his opinion of it, and Sherman soon got him to talking about
it. He said it was the finest Army he had ever seen; far superior to any
of ours in equipment, supplies, and transportation. He said, however, that
the officers he talked with considered he would have a much more difficult
problem on his hands than he had had in the West, and he said to Sherman
that some officer who both of them knew, but whose name I have forgotten,
told him, "You have not faced Bobby Lee yet;" and as he said it, I could
see that twinkle in Grant's eye that we often saw there when he meant
mischief. Grant, after discussing the Army of the Potomac and having
nothing but praise for it, informed us that he should make his
headquarters with that Army and leave Sherman to command the Armies of the
West, also informing us that he proposed to take several of us East with
him. Sherman protested strongly against this, and it was finally
compromised by his taking Sheridan and leaving the rest of us with
Sherman. During the two or three days we were with Grant he outlined in a
general way his plan of campaign that every Army should move as early as
possible in the spring, all on the same day against the enemy, so that Lee
and Johnston could not detach any of their commands to reinforce the
others. He said, "I will try to keep Lee from sending any force to
Johnston, but," he said to Sherman, "if he does, I will send you two men
where he sends one." He also informed us of the necessity of closing the
war with this campaign.
Our visit with Grant ended, he took Sherman as far as Cincinnati with him,
to talk over and complete their plans, while we returned to our commands
to fit them out for the campaign. General Sherman has since pointed out to
me in the Burnett House, at Cincinnati, the room they occupied the night
before they parted, and where over their maps the final orders were given
him and final arrangements made that inaugurated the two great campaigns
of Richmond and Petersburg in the East, and Atlanta in the West. After the
Atlanta campaign I paid General Grant a visit at City Point. I reached his
headquarters in October, and spent two weeks with him, and saw the Armies
of the James and the Potomac. Evenings we would sit around his camp-fire,
and in his genial, comprehensive way, he told us of his campaign and the
great battles you had fought, and brought out fully to me what a great
Army you were. I asked him what he claimed for the Battle of the
Wilderness. There had been great discussion, as you know, about it, and
Grant, with the same twinkle of the eye that I had seen at Nashville,
said, "I only claim that after that battle, (and I took the initiative on
the march towards Richmond,) that the Army of the Potomac was no longer
afraid of Bobby Lee." He had not forgotten his talk with us at Nashville.
Now you have had Grant's opinion of your great Army, and as my toast is
the Army of the Tennessee, I will close by giving you General Grant's
description of that Army when called upon to respond to the same toast at
one of our reunions. He said, "As an Army, the Army of the Tennessee never
sustained a single defeat during four years of war. Every fortification
which it assailed surrendered. Every force arrayed against it was either
defeated, captured, or destroyed. No officer was ever assigned to the
command of that army who had afterwards to be relieved from it or to be
reduced to another command. Such a history is not accident."
[Illustration: PONTOON BRIDGE ACROSS THE TENNESSEE RIVER AT DECATUR, ALA.
Built by the Sixteenth Army Corps in the spring of 1864, Major-General G.
M. Dodge commanding. Copy of painting made at the time by an enlisted man
and presented to General Dodge.]