Read Online Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War by Charles Bracelen Flood - Free Book Online Page A

and carrying an old bag that had little in it. The Jo Daviess Guards were being sent off in a large and enthusiastic parade through town and across the bridge to the railroad depot, where the recruits would board the train for Springfield to join the many volunteer companies converging there. Grant watched from a sidewalk as different organizations—the Masonic Assembly, the city’s fire companies with their horse-drawn engines, the Odd Fellows, the mayor and various civic groups, all interspersed with brass bands—paraded down the street, followed by the hundred newly uniformed recruits he had equipped, many of them waving high-heartedly to the cheering crowds. As the last of the Jo Daviess Guards passed, the brother of the company’s captain watched Grant standing there on the sidewalk. A man to whom he later spoke of the moment remembered him describing how Grant “fell in behind the column and quietly, with head pensively drooping, marched in their wake across the bridge, and entered the train for Springfield.”
    When Grant arrived with the Jo Daviess Guards at Springfield sixteen days after Fort Sumter was fired on, he found a military nightmare. He knew that the Volunteer companies, units of a hundred recruits apiece, had elected their officers, who might or might not lead them well, but now Grant found many men at the state capital, some with no military experience, seeking political appointments to be commanders of the ten regiments whose formation the Illinois legislature had authorized. This meant that, although even colonels were nominally elected by ballot, “candidates” named by the governor of Illinois would lead regiments composed of ten Volunteer companies, each regiment having a thousand men. With the Regular Army still trying to keep many of its officers with their prewar Regular regiments, the new Volunteer regiments desperately needed qualified commanders, wherever they might come from, but Grant was appalled by the inadequacy of the applicants he saw. To his father he wrote, “I might have got the Colonelcy of a Regiment possibly, but I was perfectly sickened at the political wire-pulling for all these commissions, and would not engage in it.”
    Grant took a civilian job that Congressman Washburne found for him in the office of the state adjutant general, where he efficiently processed paperwork for the mobilization of the Illinois regiments, using forms that were in some cases the same ones he had often filled out during his army service. He would soon write a letter to Washington, trying to get back into the Regular Army, and it was known that, although he would not enter the political dogfight, he wanted command of one of the Illinois regiments. The elected captain of the Jo Daviess Guards, who saw him working “at a little square table, of which one leg was gone and which had been shoved into a corner to keep it upright,” said that Grant, wearing his “one suit that he had worn all winter, his short pipe, his grizzled beard and his old slouch hat did not … look a very promising candidate for the colonelcy.”
    When, frustrated and discouraged, Grant finished his various duties involving mobilization and was once again unemployed, he took a train for Cincinnati and appeared at the office of Major General George B. McClellan, who had been three years behind him at West Point and whom he had known during the Mexican War. In 1855, McClellan had been one of three United States Army officers sent to Europe to observe the war being fought on the Crimean Peninsula between Russia on the one hand, and the armies of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Turks on the other. Then a captain, McClellan had been present during the siege of Sebastopol, and during his year abroad had the opportunity to study other European armies as well; his modification of the Hungarian saddle used by the Prussian army became known as the McClellan Saddle that the army adopted in 1859 and would use for generations. In