Grant
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For all his horseback heroics at Corinth, Rosecrans committed a costly error by not pursuing the retreating Confederates, whose escape was slowed by the Hatchie River. Instead of dashing in hot pursuit, Rosecrans waited fifteen hours, took the wrong road, then got bogged down by an unwieldy wagon train, allowing the enemy to escape. This began Grant’s progressive disillusionment with Old Rosy, who had twice allowed Confederate armies to get away. Rosecrans didn’t take well to direction and always fancied himself in command. Fortunately for Grant, Halleck soon transferred Rosecrans to the Army of the Cumberland in eastern Tennessee, replacing Buell. Julia Grant remembered the day her husband came back “smilingly holding up a slip of paper” that announced the transfer.16
By trouncing the enemy in northern Mississippi, Grant had inflicted a smashing blow against the Confederacy. “I congratulate you and all concerned on your recent battles and victories,” Lincoln telegraphed Grant in their first direct communication.17 Grant had also walled off western Tennessee from further northward encroachment, shutting down offensive Confederate operations in the Mississippi Valley for the rest of the war. Momentarily reverting to wild optimism, he told his sister Mary, “It does look to me that we now have such an advantage over the rebels that there should be but little more hard fighting.”18 Even though insufficient troops forced him into temporary inaction, he had ensured the safety of the area under his jurisdiction and began to covet the bigger prize of Vicksburg. As the South comprehended how much had been sacrificed at Iuka and Corinth, rage fastened on Van Dorn. As one southern politician observed, “He is regarded as the source of all our woes . . . The atmosphere is dense with horrid narratives of his negligence, whoring, and drunkenness.”19 A court of inquiry exonerated him of charges of being drunk at Corinth.
Grant rose on an upward trajectory that carried him ever higher. On October 16, he was appointed to command the Department of the Tennessee, with headquarters in Jackson, Tennessee. This enormous district encompassed parts of western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and southern Illinois. Now replenished with troops, Grant was firmly on the offensive, his natural element, as his thoughts turned toward the Confederate citadel at Vicksburg, Mississippi. He conceived a plan for a major offensive that would sweep south from Grand Junction, just across the state line in Tennessee, moving down along the Mississippi Central Railroad. To his great dismay, some soldiers engaged in widespread looting that eroded military discipline. The march to Grand Junction, said an appalled journalist, “was marked nearly every mile of the way by burned buildings and fences, and was literally shown by clouds of smoke in daylight and pillars of fire by night. It had an immense concourse of camp followers who stole horses, mules and vehicles along the route for their own transportation, and robbed houses of everything they fancied.”20 An indignant Grant lambasted soldiers who violated civilian property: “Such acts are punishable with death by the Articles of War and existing orders. They are calculated to destroy the efficiency of an army and to make open enemies of those who before if not friends were at least noncombatants.”21
Assisted by promised reinforcements, Grant set his army in motion with his usual pugnacious, hard-driving spirit. Returning to Mississippi, he pushed south down the railroad tracks. He knew this was a perilous operation, for the farther south he penetrated, the longer the supply lines left behind; conversely, the Confederates, when falling back, collected all the garrisons that had formerly safeguarded railway stops. He also had to parry nocturnal guerrilla raids that constantly menaced his march. “I told the inhabitants of Mississippi . . . that if they allowed their sons and brothers to remain within my lines and receive protection, and then during the night sneak out and burn my bridges and shoot officers, I would desolate their country for forty miles around every place where it occurred. This put an end to bridge-burning.”22 In the march toward Vicksburg, Grant made steady progress and after five weeks had gotten as far south as Grenada.
Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee, emboldened by Second Manassas, contemplated a daring raid against the North, taking the war to the enemy heartland. When crossing the Potomac into Maryland, his often-shoeless army had the appearance of an unwashed rabble. One Frederick resident watched in disgust as they marched by: “I have never seen such a mass of filthy strong-smelling men . . . They are the roughest looking set of creatures I ever saw, their features, hair and clothing matted with dirt and filth, and the scratching they kept up gave warrant of vermin in abundance.”23 They encountered Union troops, led by McClellan, in the town of Sharpsburg, as the two armies faced off across winding Antietam Creek. On September 17, 1862, they clashed in a battle of staggering ferocity that produced more than twenty thousand casualties, making it the single deadliest day in American history. If by most measures the battle was a draw, it foiled Lee’s plans to invade the North and banished him from Maryland, giving Unionists cause to celebrate. Though he had shamefully let Lee’s army slip away across the Potomac, Little Mac could not refrain from crowing: “Those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly and that it is a masterpiece of art.”24 In truth, McClellan had missed a magnificent chance to destroy a badly outnumbered army and it soon ended his military career.
Antietam represented an important juncture in the war. On the eve of battle, the British and French had seriously entertained recognizing the Confederacy, and an indisputable triumph by Lee might have tilted the scales toward such a decision. Now Confederate diplomacy was frozen in its tracks. Still more momentous was that Lincoln seized on the quasi-victory as the occasion to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, with the Confederate states given until January 1 to renounce rebellion or see their slaves freed. At Secretary of State Seward’s suggestion, Lincoln had awaited good news from the Union army to make this decision public, lest it appear a sign of desperation. Although slavery in the border states remained untouched by the proclamation, the war aims now expanded to include emancipation. The conflict had edged past the point of no return, making compromise impossible. To Grant, Halleck telegraphed the seismic shift: “We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them . . . Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat.”25
Every northern commander was sucked into the vortex of the fugitive slave issue, none more so than Grant in the heart of the cotton kingdom. As plantation owners fled his advancing army, thousands of slaves raced to freedom in Grant’s camps. Temporary towns of makeshift dwellings, overcrowded with frightened black refugees, sprang up on the fringes of army posts. The slaves’ lamentable condition demanded urgent attention. “There were men, women, and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude, often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escapes,” wrote John Eaton, who saw slaves dropping by the wayside. “Sometimes they were intelligent and eager to help themselves; often they were bewildered or stupid or possessed by the wildest notions of what liberty might mean . . . Some radical step needed to be taken.”26
At first Grant was perplexed by these masses of dislocated people. “Citizens south of us are leaving their homes & Negroes coming in by wagon loads,” he wired Halleck, adding plaintively, “What will I do with them?”27 Many northerners feared an abrupt influx of blacks, making it essential to employ them in the South. Nobody stood under any illusions about the extent of northern bigotry. On November 13, 1862, Grant took his first historic step in dealing with runaway slaves, naming Eaton as superintendent of contrabands for the Mississippi Valley—“contraband” of war being the term of art for runaway slaves coined by General Benjamin Butler in 1861 as a way to bypass the Fugitive Slave Act, then still in effect. A farmer’s son, born in New Hampshire, Eaton had graduated from Dartmouth College and served as school superintendent in Toledo, Ohio. After attending Andover Theological Seminary, he was assigned as chaplain to the Twenty-Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry. A caring, passionate advocate for the former slaves, he faced the daunting need to
shelter, employ, and prepare them for the demands of freedom. He set up large contraband camps where slaves could be educated, treated for medical problems, and set to work picking cotton as hired hands. Eaton felt awed by the godlike responsibility thrust upon him—“There was no plan in this exodus, no Moses to lead it”—and sensed it would be “an enterprise beyond the possibility of human achievement.”28
When Eaton first met Grant at La Grange, Tennessee, he expected to find “an incompetent and disagreeable man” whose weather-beaten face would betray signs of dissipation.29 Instead, he was pleasantly surprised to discover Grant’s innate modesty, simplicity, and sobriety. Other than the shoulder straps that signified a major general, Grant was indistinguishable from his officers. Grant knew that the deeper his army penetrated into cotton country, the more he would have to grapple with the destiny of a slave population fast emancipating itself. Eaton was stunned that Grant’s thinking already “far outstripped” the “meager instructions” he had received from Halleck.30
In fact, Grant’s imagination had charted the entire arc of the freed slaves from wartime runaways to full voting citizenship. This man who had so recently balked at abolitionism now made a startling leap into America’s future. To Eaton, Grant delineated a lengthy list of useful tasks that “contrabands” could perform, with the men building bridges, roads, and earthworks or chopping wood for Mississippi steamers, while women worked in kitchens and hospitals. But this merely served as prelude to something much bigger. “He then went on to say that when it had been made clear that the Negro, as an independent laborer . . . could do these things well, it would be very easy to put a musket in his hands and make a soldier of him, and if he fought well, eventually to put the ballot in his hand and make him a citizen. Obviously I was dealing with no incompetent, but a man capable of handling large issues. Never before in those early and bewildering days had I heard the problem of the future of the Negro attacked so vigorously and with such humanity combined with practical good sense.”31 This sudden enlargement of Grant’s thinking and concern for the ex-slaves shows how the war had reshaped his views on fundamental issues.
Grant gave Eaton orders to establish the first contraband camp at Grand Junction, Tennessee, where thousands of former slaves had congregated. A central aim was to have newly liberated blacks work on abandoned plantations, picking cotton and corn that could be shipped north to assist the war effort. “We together fixed the prices to be paid for the negro labor,” Grant recalled, “whether rendered to the government or to individuals.”32 It was a remarkable moment—the sudden advent of a labor market for former slaves, who would now be rewarded for picking cotton. Grant found himself overseeing a vast social experiment, inducting his black charges into the first stages of citizenship. Taking the proceeds from their labor, he created a fund that was “not only sufficient to feed and clothe all, old and young, male and female, but to build them comfortable cabins, hospitals for the sick, and to supply them with many comforts they had never known before.”33 This brand-new Grant never wavered in his commitment to freed people. It would be army commanders in the field, not Washington politicians, who worked out many of the critical details in caring for the recently enslaved. Frederick Douglass never forgot the service Grant rendered to his people, arguing that General Grant “was always up with, or in advance of authority furnished from Washington in regard to the treatment of those of our color then slaves,” and he cited the food, work, medical care, and education Grant supplied in the months before the official Emancipation Proclamation.34
In the fall elections, Lincoln paid a fearful price for that impending proclamation. Berating Republicans as “Nigger Worshippers,” Democrats conjured up fantastic “scenes of lust and rapine” in the South and “a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers” in the North as the likely consequences of emancipation.35 Although Republicans retained their hold over Congress, they surrendered twenty-eight House seats to Democrats and lost governorships in New York and New Jersey as well as statehouses in Indiana and Illinois.
Lincoln’s woes as a liberator were compounded by the ongoing disaster of Union military performance in Virginia. With elections safely behind him, he acted swiftly to sack George McClellan, who had responded neither to gentle nudges nor outright pressure to become more aggressive. Without referring to McClellan by name, Grant later made a comment that seems to allude to him: “The trouble with many of our generals in the beginning was that they did not believe in the war . . . They had views about slavery, protecting rebel property, State rights—political views that interfered with their judgments.”36 It was Grant’s stalwart faith in Lincoln’s war aims, coupled with his military acumen, that made him the ideal commander.
To head the Army of the Potomac McClellan was succeeded by Ambrose Burnside, a West Pointer from Rhode Island, a balding, congenial man with fluffy side-whiskers that jutted from his face and formed a mustache across his upper lip. A military lightweight, Burnside was in way over his head, betraying as much self-doubt as Little Mac had flaunted conceit. Grant had a certain fondness for Burnside, even though he saw him as unsuited to command an army. “No one knew this better than he did,” Grant remarked.37
Lincoln continued to be cursed in his choice of generals. On a frigid day in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, Burnside sent wave after wave of Union soldiers to their death against the well-fortified positions of Robert E. Lee’s army. If there was one Union loss during the war that looked like outright suicide, this was it. In the one-sided battle, nearly thirteen thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded. A distraught Burnside had the decency to admit responsibility, while Lincoln, Halleck, and Stanton were all blamed by a northern public fed up with shocking losses. In the resulting demoralization, cabinet members began to plot against one another. “If there is a worse place than hell,” Lincoln admitted to a visitor, “I am in it.”38 On January 25, 1863, Lincoln axed Burnside and replaced him with Joseph Hooker, dubbed “Fighting Joe,” another general who would be undone by overweening self-confidence. A weary despair fell over Union ranks. “Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak,” a New York corporal wrote home. “I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”39 Repeated Union failures in the East opened the way for a military hero to emerge in the West.
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THROUGHOUT NOVEMBER 1862, Grant maintained his steady progress south along the Mississippi railroad, seizing Holly Springs and constructing a supply depot there before advancing as far south as Oxford, where he established his headquarters in early December. He now stood halfway to his overriding objective, Vicksburg, burrowing deeper into enemy territory. For his army to survive, he had to keep open a railroad 190 miles long, threatened by bitter, hostile residents. Oxford was an oasis, ringed by danger, “an island surrounded by a sea of fire, the enemy in front and rear, opposing progress,” wrote Rawlins.40 Always sensitive to the war’s tragic nature, he described for his sister the Union army’s impact on the cloistered university town: “This city, the seat of science for the South, toward which they pointed with pride and exaltation as the place rivaling ‘Yale’ for the education of their sons and daughters, is now one vast camp, and the University buildings of which they so justly boasted are the hospital for the sick, wounded soldier.”41
With his army deep in the land of cotton, Grant had to deal with swarms of northern traders who maneuvered to cash in on the North’s consuming need for this major export. Southern planters, stymied by the Union blockade, searched for ways to sell their product. Union armies required prodigious quantities of cotton for articles such as tents, and northern mills were starved for the raw material. There was even fear Great Britain might lean toward the Confederacy to keep its textile mills humming. “See that all possible facilities are afforded for getting out cotton,” Halleck instructed Grant. “It is deemed important to get as much as we can into market.”42 Grant was outraged that gold paid for so
uthern cotton might be utilized by rebels to buy arms against his men. After Washington overruled his order to prevent gold from being used in such transactions, he abided by a decision that required cotton traders to possess two permits: one from the Treasury Department, another from the local army.
It proved tough to enforce these rules. Cotton fetched such exorbitant prices in the North that huge fortunes were reaped overnight, and army officers were regularly bribed to wink at smuggling. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana was shocked by the wholesale corruption infecting the Union army: “Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay.”43
Such practices infuriated Grant, who also fretted that traders might transmit military intelligence to the enemy—a special concern with the Vicksburg Campaign under way. Instead of allowing private traders to enrich themselves through price gouging, he wanted the government to purchase cotton at fixed prices. One journalist remembered that “Grant and Rawlins abominated cotton buyers as a class. In private conversations to the end of the war [Grant] always spoke of them as a gang of thieves.”44 Not surprisingly Grant felt a special antagonism against war profiteers, who not only extracted southern cotton but often vended useful articles, such as medicine, flour, and salt, to southern buyers. At a time of rampant anti-Semitism, “Jews” ended up as a shorthand for unscrupulous traders. As Sherman wrote from Memphis, “I found so many Jews & Speculators here trading in cotton . . . that I have felt myself bound to stop it. This Gold has but one use, the purchase of arms & ammunition.”45 Of course, the great majority of those involved in the illicit trade were gentiles, but Jews were much easier to scapegoat.
By early December 1862, Grant had zeroed in on Jewish traders as the source of the trouble. During his southward advance, he issued orders that all traders should stay in the rear of his army, but on December 5 he complained to Sherman that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.”46 In a mood of mounting anger, Grant was not content to chastise Jewish traders: he wanted to banish all Jews. On December 17, he issued the most egregious decision of his career. “General Orders No. 11” stipulated that “the Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department. Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave.”47 It was the most sweeping anti-Semitic action undertaken in American history.