by Ron Chernow
At this perilous moment for Grant’s reputation, Lincoln kept the faith and saved him for future service. Long before setting eyes on him, Lincoln was steadfastly loyal and fair-minded to Grant, perceiving his sterling courage, competency, and unusual willingness to do battle. This was to prove an essential partnership needed to win the war. As Washburne informed Grant, “When the torrent of obloquy and detraction was rolling over you . . . after the battle of Shiloh, Mr. Lincoln stood like a wall of fire between you and it, [and was] uninfluenced by the threats of Congressmen and the demands of insolent cowardice.”81
Perhaps the most remarkable anecdote about Lincoln’s trust in Grant came from Colonel Alexander K. McClure, who told of a late-night chat at the White House. The anecdote’s accuracy has been questioned, but it appears to reflect Lincoln’s thinking at the time. McClure said he tried to impress upon Lincoln “with all the earnestness I could command the immediate removal of Grant as an imperious necessity to sustain himself . . . When I had said everything that could be said from my standpoint, we lapsed into silence. Lincoln remained silent for what seemed a very long time. He then gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget: “I can’t spare this man, he fights.”82
Grant always interpreted Shiloh as a northern victory. The New York diarist George Templeton Strong speculated it would “probably turn out an important national victory with heavy loss”—a verdict most historians endorse.83 Grant bristled at the campaign of abuse against him, believing southern generals had the immense advantage of a favorable press while northern generals were hounded by poison-pen reporters. With the stoicism of a true soldier, however, he kept up an imperturbable facade. “Your paper is very unjust to me,” he told one correspondent, “but time will make it all right. I want to be judged only by my acts.”84
While feigning indifference to the journalistic onslaught, Grant was terribly agitated, nothing in his life having prepared him for such strident criticism or the harsh glare of publicity. Earnest by nature, a stickler for truth, he was unaccustomed to people playing fast and loose with facts. Even before Shiloh, he resented unjust charges that he was corrupt, telling Julia, “It annoys me very much when I see such barefaced falsehoods published and then it distresses you.”85 Writing frankly to Washburne, Grant said he was tormented by the pain inflicted on his family by press libels: “To say that I have not been distressed at these attacks upon me would be false, for I have a father, mother, wife & children who read them and are distressed by them and I necessarily share with them in it.”86 Julia’s cousin William Wrenshall Smith noted of Grant and the drinking stories: “He never grew angry concerning such malicious lies about himself, but he felt it very deeply on account of his family.”87 In this bruised state, Grant fantasized about moving out West, where the eastern press could never touch him. “I am not going to lay off my shoulder-straps until the close of the war,” he told a journalist, “but I should like to go to New Mexico, or some other remote place, and have a small command out of the reach of the newspapers.”88
Although Grant did not dignify press attacks with responses, his father harbored no such misgivings. On April 21, Hillyer wrote to Jesse Grant and denied that Grant’s army was taken by surprise at Shiloh, blaming thousands of soldiers who had “ignominiously” fallen back to Pittsburg Landing for spreading false reports.89 It was almost certainly Jesse who had this letter published in the Cincinnati Commercial along with a letter Ulysses had written to him. Compounding this indiscretion, Jesse sent a tirade to Governor Tod of Ohio, blaming “five thousand cowards” who had thrown down their arms and fled to safety at Shiloh to explain why Ulysses received bad press.90 Such actions by his father infuriated Grant. In one letter, he lectured him, “I do not expect nor want the support of the Cincinnati press on my side.”91 In still stronger language, he wrote: “I would write you many particulars but you are so imprudent that I dare not trust you with them; and while on this subject let me say a word. I have not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts in my defense. I require no defenders and for my sake let me alone.”92 It was a measure of Grant’s new wartime strength that he could sternly lecture his father not to meddle in his life instead of just swallowing his anger.
On April 11, with Grant still languishing under a cloud, Henry Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing to take personal command of the army there. One officer recorded this impression of him: “He was carefully dressed in a new uniform, wearing his sword, and carrying himself erect, with a distant and somewhat austere manner . . . as he walked down the steamer’s gangplank.”93 Clad in a spiffy uniform, Halleck stood out in a muddy atmosphere produced by days of rain and was shocked by the chaos he discovered in the aftermath of battle. When General John Pope arrived with his 30,000-strong Army of the Mississippi, Halleck merged it with the Army of the Ohio under Buell and the Army of the Tennessee to create a unified force of 110,000 soldiers. On April 30, he suddenly demoted Grant to second in command of the whole, a thankless job that dealt a serious blow to his pride, leaving him to twist in a cruel limbo without clear authority. Although Grant brooded, he did not complain openly at first about this painful humiliation. As in his prewar business dealings, Grant was again deceived about his true friends.
Grant was already in a subdued mood after the death of his former West Point commandant, General Charles Smith, who never recovered from his boat injury. “In his death,” Grant told his widow, “the nation has lost one of its most gallant and most able defenders.”94 However deeply Grant mourned Smith, his death eliminated a talented commander and potential rival in the western theater of war, and Sherman later speculated that “had C.F. Smith lived, Grant would have disappeared to history after [Fort] Donelson.”95
Grant’s sudden elevation had proven a mixed blessing for Halleck. To the extent it boosted his prestige, he delighted in it, but he also feared the emergence of a competitor. Halleck pretended to be Grant’s champion while subtly stabbing him in the back. For all his bookish knowledge, Halleck had not experienced the slashing realities of war, whereas the intuitive Grant was now steeped in combat experience. Sherman thought that Halleck, being distant from battle, was too tough on Grant, yet a deeper gulf separated the two men. Obsessed with bureaucratic forms, Halleck could not appreciate the fighting skill of the slovenly, disorganized Grant. “Brave & able in the field,” Halleck wrote of Grant, “he has no idea of how to regulate & organize his forces before a battle.”96 In Halleck’s topsy-turvy world, it was more important to look and act the part of a general than to win battles and crush the enemy. In professorial fashion, he gave Grant a stinging critique of his management style aboard his headquarters ship. One officer recalled Halleck, in a black civilian suit, pacing back and forth and “scolding [Grant] in a loud and haughty manner.” All the while, Grant “sat there, demure, with red face, hat in lap, covered with the mud of the field, and undistinguishable from an orderly.”97 Halleck showed scant respect for Grant, freezing him out of high-level strategic planning and talking alone to other commanders.
Grant lacked the air of a major military man, which counted against him with Halleck and others. One correspondent wrote of Grant after Shiloh that he “has none of the soldier’s bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He has no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks . . . A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and square forehead, of short stature and thick-set.”98 The journalist Henry Villard observed of Grant that his “ordinary exterior . . . made it as difficult for me as in the case of Abraham Lincoln to persuade myself that he was destined to be one of the greatest arbiters of human fortunes.”99
By late April, Halleck was ready to march his vast force, the largest assembled in the war, southwest toward the Confederate railroad hub at Corinth. He divided his army into three sections, under Generals Geor
ge Thomas, Buell, and Pope. Conspicuously missing was Grant, who found his “advice neglected and sneered at by those in authority,” Pope related.100 Halleck’s soldiers slogged ahead in muggy weather along rainy country roads, their woolen uniforms clinging to sweating bodies. So slow and laborious was this cumbersome army that it lumbered along at one mile per day. Albert Sidney Johnston had raced north along the twenty-mile route to Shiloh in two days, whereas Halleck took a month to accomplish this in reverse. Where Grant sometimes seemed heedless of danger, the fearful Halleck made his men dig defensive trenches every night. Unable to escape fears of another Shiloh, he roused his men before dawn and had them stand guard to avoid surprise attacks. Whatever the wisdom of this approach, it gave the rebel army plenty of time to brace for his arrival. As one reporter wrote, Halleck’s “grand army was like a huge serpent . . . Its majestic march was so slow that the Rebels had ample warning.”101 Moving south through a desolate landscape, Grant absorbed glimpses of the poverty inflicted on the southern populace. “I pity them and regret their folly which has brought about this unnatural war and their suffering,” he told Julia.102
Downcast, embittered by his fallen status, Grant sulked that “I have had my full share of abuse” and decided he couldn’t stand it any longer.103 As he explained in his Memoirs, he felt demeaned to an “observer” of the unfolding campaign: “Orders were sent direct to the right wing or reserve, ignoring me, and advances were made from one line of entrenchments to another without notifying me.”104 On May 11, Grant wrote to Halleck to request that his command be restored or he wished to be relieved from further duty. He explicitly absolved Halleck of responsibility for his plight, blaming “studied persistent opposition to me by persons outside of the army.”105 Since Grant had meditated returning to the West Coast, his aides maneuvered futilely to obtain a command for him there, which would have removed him from serious action for the rest of the war. Grant informed Julia he would apply for a leave of absence unless he were reassigned to a new command. Grant was talked out of this wrongheaded decision by two persuasive people: Rawlins and Sherman. By now Rawlins had attained extraordinary power on Grant’s staff. As Grant wrote admiringly, he had “become thoroughly acquainted with the routine of the office and takes off my hands the examination of most all papers. I think he is one of the best men I ever knew.”106 Besides protecting Grant from drink, Rawlins gave his staff some semblance of the management order Halleck found so woefully lacking.
But it was Sherman’s intercession that conclusively dissuaded Grant from resigning. Once he learned from Halleck that Grant had gotten permission to leave the department the next morning, he spurred his horse to Grant’s tent and saw his camp chests and papers all bound up for departure. The embattled Grant was “seated on a camp-stool, with papers on a rude camp-table; he seemed to be employed in assorting letters, and tying them up with red tape into convenient bundles.”107 Distressed by a sense of injustice, Grant disclosed that he was heading to St. Louis. “You know that I am in the way here. I have stood it as long as I can, and can endure it no longer.”108 He added morosely, “If I can’t command a brigade or a division, I can carry a musket.”109 Sherman pointed out the danger of going and said Grant might miss a chance to regain favor in the same way he, Sherman, had redeemed himself after newspapers asserted he was crazy. He pleaded with Grant to withhold his resignation for two weeks. When his appeal worked, Sherman rejoiced: “[Grant] certainly appreciated my friendly advice, and promised to wait awhile; at all events, not to go without seeing me again, or communicating with me.”110 Grant stayed in the army and within two weeks Sherman fell under his command, staying there throughout the war. Sherman said flatly that his advice to Grant had been “the turning point of the war.”111 Few things secured the fate of the Union as much as the bond of loyalty struck between these two generals who believed themselves wronged by the world’s estimation of them.
By May 28, Halleck’s huge army had pulled within a mile of Corinth’s defenses. Halleck loved the archaic art of the siege and proceeded to institute one with textbook precision. When Grant suggested that, with a well-timed bluff on the left and center of their lines, the right wing of the army could easily overrun Corinth, “General Halleck received the suggestion coldly and treated it as being entirely impracticable,” wrote Augustus Chetlain.112 Grant’s suspicion of Confederate weakness was vindicated on the night of May 29–30, 1862, when Beauregard’s army, ravaged by disease and struggling with Shiloh amputees, evacuated Corinth before Halleck could attack. They stole away to Tupelo while duping Union troops with fake guns, dummy cannon, and scarecrows stuffed into rebel uniforms. When Halleck saw towering columns of smoke curling above the town, he imagined Beauregard was being reinforced, whereas Grant drew the correct inference that the Confederates were fleeing, destroying anything that might fall into Union hands.
Halleck hailed Corinth’s fall as a brilliant victory that confirmed his military genius, writing proudly to his wife how the soldiers had dubbed him “Old Brains.”113 Lew Wallace rendered a harsher but more accurate verdict: “Corinth was not captured; it was abandoned to us.”114 The Union army entered a town of burning houses, shattered windows, and rotting food dumped into the streets, all valuable supplies having been taken away or incinerated. Grant commiserated with the townspeople. “Soldiers who fight battles do not experience half their horrors,” he lamented to Julia. “All the hardships come upon the weak . . . women and children.”115 Grant believed Corinth could have been taken two days after Shiloh if Beauregard’s army had been vigorously pursued. If Halleck had possessed the faintest idea of the weakness of the Confederate army holed up there, he thought, he could have marched against it sooner. For Grant, the bloodless fall of Corinth strengthened his belief that only the conquest of Confederate armies, not taking towns, would end the war. It also confirmed his sense that it was better to strike in timely fashion with a smaller force than lose the advantage awaiting reinforcements. Grant was still in a funk, plagued by his old headaches. To treat these, his doctor foolishly gave him brandy, which affected his system powerfully. “He immediately ordered his horse and rode away along the lines,” said William Wrenshall Smith. “I went with him and after a ride of ten or fifteen miles, he returned and was all right.”116
During this anxious period, Grant’s future was being thrashed out in the White House. According to Augustus Chetlain, Lincoln withstood insistent pressure to get rid of Grant. “I can’t stand it any longer,” he proclaimed to Washburne. “I am annoyed to death by demands for his removal.” Washburne retorted that Grant had won more important battles than any soldier in the West. Relenting, Lincoln replied, “Well, Washburne, if you insist upon it, I will retain him, but it is particularly hard on me.”117 Another version of this story has Washburne deserting Grant and Lincoln saving him, winding his long arm around the congressman’s shoulder and saying in soothing tones, “Elihu, it is a bad business, but we must try the man a little longer. He seems a pushing fellow, with all his faults.”118
Grant’s patience was rewarded after federal troops occupied Memphis on June 6. Having been shamed by the artful Confederate escape at Corinth, Halleck climbed down from his high horse and returned to St. Louis, restoring Grant to his old command. Grant asked to move his headquarters to Memphis, and when Halleck approved, he set out for the city on June 21. Halleck’s mercurial reversal had lasting consequences for Grant’s career. As Rawlins explained, Grant’s “reason for selecting Memphis was, that General Halleck said he expected he would have to give him the job of taking Vicksburg.”119 Now that New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis had been overtaken by Union forces, Vicksburg arose as the major fortress on the Mississippi blocking Union domination of the waterway.
Through two days of blistering heat, Grant rode from Corinth to Memphis on horseback, escorted by two dozen men. En route, he stopped at the home of a man named De Loche who had remained loyal to the Union. Grant barely escaped capture by Confederate cav
alry colonel William H. Jackson, then prowling in the vicinity. Jackson’s horses were spent from heavy riding and he therefore thought it fruitless to race after Grant, whom he pictured cantering fast toward Memphis. “Had he gone three-quarters of a mile farther,” Grant recalled, “he would have found me with my party quietly resting under the shade of trees and without even arms in our hands with which to defend ourselves.”120
When a dusty, tired Grant trotted into Memphis on June 23, he entered a turbulent city under the potent sway of secessionists. From the time he was a young man, Grant had been admired for his patient, judicial temperament, which was now tested. “It took hours of my time every day to listen to complaints and requests,” he recalled.121 The city teemed with Confederate spies who wanted to torch the city and with families of rebel officers who shrilly opposed federal rule. Suddenly forced to administer the town, Grant faced fiendishly difficult issues and feared overstepping the bounds of military propriety. “As I am without instructions,” he alerted Halleck, “I am a little in doubt as to my authority to license and limit trade, punish offenses committed by citizens, and in restricting civil authority.”122 He also had to contend with bloody depredations from Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose cavalry conducted daring raids in northern Alabama and middle Tennessee. Grant cracked down on guerrilla activity, holding local communities responsible for damage done by partisans and confiscating their property to pay for it.