Adam Badeau, Grant in peace: from Appomattox to Mount McGregor, a personal memoir

It was hard to drive Sherman out of the army or compel him to oppose his friend—to force these men into such positions, who had done what they had for the country—all for the sake of enabling Johnson to triumph over the will of the people who had won in the war—Johnson too, who was only by chance, or by assassination, in his place. The strain between Grant and Sherman was terrible; the feeling, pitiable.

Sherman's letter to the President was as emphatic as that to Grant. He declared: ‘If I could see my way clear to maintain my family I would not hesitate a moment to resign my present commission and seek some business wherein I could be free from these unhappy complications that seem to be closing about me.’ He implored a revocation of the order, and continued: ‘By being placed in Washington I will be universally construed as a rival to the General-in-Chief, a position damaging to me in the highest degree. Our relations have always been most confidential and friendly, and if unhappily any cloud of difference should arise between us, my sense of personal dignity and duty would leave me no alternative but resignation. I shall proceed to arrange for it as rapidly as possible, so that when the time does come, as it surely will, if this plan is carried into effect, I may act promptly.’ He ended by pronouncing ‘the blow one of the hardest I have sustained in a life somewhat checkered by adversity.’

Neither the feeling nor the conduct of Sherman at this crisis can be fully appreciated without remembering that he did not approve the course of Congress in many respects, and would certainly have preferred a more lenient policy toward the South. But questions like these were now far in the background, and the devices of Johnson were such as Sherman never could have indorsed. There were, indeed, many honorable and loyal men who believed that the course