Part 21 (2/2)
Accordingly, after two days of fretting and fuming, as the boat drew near Memphis on March 10 he dashed off an answer to Grant's ”more than kind and characteristic letter,” thanking him in McPherson's name and his own, but protesting: ”You do yourself injustice and us too much honor in a.s.signing us so large a share of the merits which have led to your high advancement.... At Belmont you manifested your traits, neither of us being near. At Donelson also you ill.u.s.trated your character; I was not near, and General McPherson [was] in too subordinate a capacity to influence you. Until you had won Donelson, I confess I was almost cowed by the terrible array of anarchical elements that presented themselves at every point; but that victory admitted the ray of light which I have followed ever since.... The chief characteristic in your nature is the simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in his Saviour. This faith gave you victory at s.h.i.+loh and Vicksburg. Also, when you have completed your best preparations, you go into battle without hesitation, as at Chattanooga; no doubts, no reserve; and I tell you that it was this that made us act with confidence. I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come-if alive. My only points of doubt were as to your knowledge of grand strategy and of books of science and history, but I confess your common-sense seems to have supplied all this.”
Having disposed thus of the disclaimers and the amenities, the volatile redhead pa.s.sed at once to the main burden of his letter. If Grant stayed East, Sherman almost certainly would be given full charge of the West, and yet, although personally he wanted this above all possible a.s.signments, he was unwilling to secure it at the cost of his friend's ruin, which was what he believed would result from any such arrangement. ”Do not stay in Was.h.i.+ngton,” he urged him. ”Halleck is better qualified than you are to stand the buffets of intrigue and policy. Come out West; take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley. Let us make it dead sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and Pacific sh.o.r.es will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk. We have done much; still much remains.... For G.o.d's sake and your country's sake, come out of Was.h.i.+ngton! I foretold to General Halleck, before he left Corinth, the inevitable result to him, and I now exhort you to come out West. Here lies the seat of the coming empire, and from the West, when our task is done, we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond and the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.”
Within a week he found his warning had been too late. Arriving in Memphis next day he received on March 14 a message from Grant arranging a meeting in Nashville three days later. If Sherman took this as evidence that his chief did not intend to make his headquarters in the East, he soon learned better. In Nashville on the appointed date, invested with the rank of lieutenant general and command of all the armies of the Union, Grant informed him that the Virginia situation required personal attention; he would be returning there to stay, and Sherman would have full charge of the West. However, what with the press of visiting dignitaries, all anxious for a look at a man with three stars on each shoulder, there was so little time for a strategy conference that it was decided the two generals would travel together as far as Cincinnati on Grant's return trip east. That way, it was thought, they could talk on the cars; but the wheels made such a clatter, they finally gave up trying to shout above the racket and fell silent. In Cincinnati they checked into the Burnet House, and there at last, in a private room with a sentry at the door, they spread their maps and got to work.
”Yonder began the campaign,” Sherman was to say a quarter century later, standing before the hotel on the occasion of a visit to the Ohio city. ”He was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was his plan.”
ALSO AVAILABLE BY SHELBY FOOTE.
FOLLOW ME DOWN.
In Jordan County, Mississippi, a murder trial is drawing to a close. The victim is a young woman who has been found strangled and weighed down with concrete blocks at the bottom of a lake. The defendant is a G.o.d-haunted farmer old enough to be her father. The trial is a formality, because Luther Eustis has already confessed. But as Shelby Foote re-creates the murder of Beulah Ross-and the annihilating pa.s.sion that drew her to her murderer-he generates a suspense full of tension and foreboding. Drawing on themes as old as the Bible and investing them with the chilling dignity of a mountain folk song, Follow Me Down immerses us in lives obsessed with sin and redemption, desire and vengeful retribution. It transports us to a territory of the imagination that is touching, sometimes terrible, but always deeply recognizable: a place that only the best fiction ever penetrates.
Fiction/978-0-307-77928-1 JORDAN COUNTY.
The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siecle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. In prose of almost Biblical gravity, and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives-and sometimes warps them beyond repair- Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor but that is resolutely unique.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-77927-4 LOVE IN A DRY SEASON.
Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families- the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses-are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the pa.s.sions he so casually ignites. Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command fo the grotesque, Foote's novel turns a small cotton town into a s.e.xual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or s.h.i.+loh-and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-77925-0 s.h.i.+LOH.
Shelby Foote's monumental three-part chronicle of the Civil War was hailed by Walker Percy as ”an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholars.h.i.+p of the historian and the high-readability of the first-cla.s.s novelist.” s.h.i.+loh warrants similar praise, for while it is a powerful novel-a spare, unrelenting account of two days of battle in April 1862-it is also a stunning work of imaginative history, conveying not only the b.l.o.o.d.y ch.o.r.eography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants' hearts and minds. Through the eyes of officers and illiterate foot soldiers, heroes and cowards, s.h.i.+loh creates a dramatic mosaic of a critical moment in the making of America, complete to the haze of gunsmoke and the stunned expression in the eyes of dying men.
Fiction/978-0-307-77926-7
VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY.
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
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