HEADQUARTERS FIFTEENTH ARMY CORPS,
Camp on Walnut Hills, June, 17, 1863.
Lieut. Col. JOHN A. RAWLINS,
Assistant Adjutant-General, Department of the Tennessee:
SIR: On my return last evening from an inspection of the new
works at Snyder's Bluff, General Blair, who commands the Second Division of my
corps, called my attention to the inclosed publication in the Memphis Evening
Bulletin of June 13, instant, entitled “Congratulatory Order of General McClernand,”
with a request that I should notice it, lest the statements of fact and
inference contained therein might receive credence from an excited public. It
certainly gives me no pleasure or satisfaction to notice such a catalogue of
nonsense—such an effusion of vain-glory and hypocrisy; nor can I believe
General McClernand ever published such an order officially to his corps. I know
too well that the brave and intelligent soldiers and officers who compose that
corps will not be humbugged by such stuff.
If the order be a genuine production and not a forgery, it
is manifestly addressed not to an army, but to a constituency in Illinois, far
distant from the scene of the events attempted to be described, who might
innocently be induced to think General McClernand the sagacious leader and bold
hero he so complacently paints himself; but it is barely possible the order is
a genuine one, and was actually read to the regiments of the Thirteenth Army
Corps, in which case a copy must have been sent to your office for the
information of the commanding general.
I beg to call his attention to the requirements of General
Orders, No. 151, of 1862, which actually forbids the publication of all
official letters and reports, and requires the name of the writer to be laid
before the President of the United States for dismissal. The document under
question is not technically a letter or report, and though styled an order, is
not an order. It orders nothing, but is in the nature of an address to
soldiers, manifestly designed for publication for ulterior political purposes.
It perverts the truth to the ends of flattery and self-glorification, and
contains many untruths, among which is one of monstrous falsehood. It
substantially accuses General McPherson and myself with disobeying the orders
of General Grant in not assaulting on May 19 and 22, and allowing on the latter
day the enemy to mass his forces against the Thirteenth Army Corps alone.
General McPherson is fully able to answer for himself, and for the Fifteenth
Army Corps I answer that on May 19 and 22 it attacked furiously, at three
distinct points, the enemy's works, at the very hour and minute fixed in
General Grant's written orders; that on both days we planted our colors on the
exterior slope and kept them there till nightfall; that from the first hour of
investment of Vicksburg until now my corps has at all times been far in advance
of General McClernand's; that the general-in-chief, by personal inspection,
knows this truth; that tens of thousands of living witnesses beheld and
participated in the attack; that General Grant visited me during both assaults
and saw for himself, and is far better qualified to judge whether his orders
were obeyed than General McClernand, who was nearly 3 miles off; that General
McClernand never saw my lines; that he then knew, and still knows, nothing
about them, and that from his position he had no means of knowing what occurred
on this front. Not only were the assaults made at the time and place and in the
manner prescribed in General Grant's written orders, but about 3 p.m., five
hours after the assault on the 22d began, when my storming party lay against
the exterior slope of the bastion on my front, and Blair's whole division was
deployed close up to the parapet, ready to spring to the assault, and all my
field artillery were in good position for the work, General Grant showed me a
note from General McClernand, that moment handed him by an orderly, to the
effect that had carried three of the enemy's forts, and that the flag of the
Union waved over the stronghold of Vicksburg, asking that the enemy should be
pressed at all points lest he should concentrate on him. Not dreaming that a
major-general would at such a critical moment make a mere buncombe
communication, I instantly ordered Giles A. Smith's and Mower's brigades to
renew the assault under cover of Blair's division and the artillery, deployed
as before described, and sent an aide to General Steele, about a mile to my
right, to convey the same mischievous message, whereby we lost, needlessly,
many of our best officers and men.
I would never have revealed so unwelcome a truth had General
MCClernand, in his process of self-flattery, confined himself to facts in the
reach of his own observation, and not gone out of the way to charge others for
results which he seems not to comprehend. In cases of repulse and failure,
congratulatory addresses by subordinate commanders are not common, and are only
resorted to by weak and vain men to shift the burden of responsibility from
their own to the shoulders of others. I never make a practice of speaking or
writing of others, but during our assault of the 19th several of my brigade
commanders were under the impression that McClernand's corps did not even
attempt an assault.
In the congratulatory order I remark great silence on the
subject. Merely to satisfy inquiring parties, I should like to know if McClernand's
corps did or did not assault at 2 p.m. of May 19, as ordered. I do not believe
it did, and I think General McClernand responsible.
With these remarks I leave the matter where it properly
belongs, in the hands of the commanding general, who knows his plans and
orders, sees with an eye single to success and his country's honor, and not
from the narrow and contracted circle of a subordinate commander, who
exaggerates the importance of the events that fall under his immediate notice,
and is filled with an itching desire for "fame not earned."
With great respect, your obedient servant,
W. T. SHERMAN,
Major-General, Commanding.
SOURCE: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official
Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 24, Part 1
(Serial No. 36), p. 162-3
