by Ron Chernow
The glad tidings brightened the mood of Lincoln, who had been so worried about Vicksburg that his eyelids drooped and dark rings encircled his eyes. He was studying a map of Mississippi when a beaming Gideon Welles pranced in with a telegram from Admiral Porter fluttering in his hand. He executed a little jig and threw his hat into the air: “I have the honor to inform you that Vicksburg has surrendered to the U.S. forces on this 4th day of July.”16 With a double dose of fantastic news from Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Lincoln, nearly euphoric, embraced Welles, proclaiming, “I cannot, in words, tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!”17 Lincoln directed Halleck to inform General Meade of what had happened, hoping it might inspire him to complete the demolition of Lee’s army. The news produced such jubilation in official Washington that work ground to an abrupt halt. In government buildings, wrote the journalist Noah Brooks, “the announcement of the news was received with cheer upon cheer from the crowds of officers and clerks, and I do not believe that there was much work done . . . during the rest of the day.”18 When a band serenaded Lincoln at the White House that evening, he toyed with a theme he would later rework into the Gettysburg Address: the idea of a war that would deliver on the unfinished promise of the Declaration of Independence.
Until Vicksburg, the western theater had been something of a sideshow. Now Ulysses S. Grant, an uncomplaining man of proven competence, found a new place in Lincoln’s affection. “He isn’t shrieking for reinforcements all the time,” Lincoln said. “He takes what troops we can safely give him . . . and does the best he can with what he has got.”19 The lesson of self-reliance Grant had learned before the war, when circumstances forced him to depend entirely on himself, now came in handy. “Grant is my man,” the president insisted, “and I am his the rest of the war.”20
Perhaps the highest honor bestowed on Grant was the privilege of direct correspondence with the president. Previously their communication was mediated through Halleck and others. On July 13, thankful for Vicksburg, Lincoln composed a noble letter to Grant: “I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country.” Lincoln admitted magnanimously that he had faulted Grant’s strategy, believing that, after crossing the Mississippi, he should have moved south and hooked up with Banks instead of shooting northeast toward Jackson. “I feared it was a mistake—I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong. Yours very truly. Abraham Lincoln.”21 This lovely letter forged a bond between the two men that only grew stronger. With Grant, Lincoln no longer had to second-guess maneuvers or play the armchair general. Had he traveled west and gotten to know Grant personally, he might well have speeded up Grant’s ascent to the top post and spared himself his frustrated dealings with several inept eastern generals.
Chaplain John Eaton met twice with Lincoln and reported back to Grant on the president’s cordial feelings toward him, how he quoted from his dispatches and propped up a map of his operations on a tripod in his office. In a secondhand report from Dana, Lincoln had heard that Grant claimed he could not have taken Vicksburg without the Emancipation Proclamation, and the delighted president wished to have that verified. Once again Grant’s sympathy with the broad political aims of the war formed no minor part of his attraction in Washington.
The magnitude of Grant’s Vicksburg triumph helped to quiet temporarily the drinking issue. Admiral Porter told how Grant came aboard his ship at Vicksburg. “Wine was served but Grant took none, only a cigar, and let me say here that this was his habit during all the time he commanded before Vicksburg.”22 Lincoln dubbed Grant his “fighting general” and told Eaton of a congressional delegation that had lobbied for his ouster. “I asked why, and they said he sometimes drank too much and was unfit for such a position. I then began to ask them if they knew what he drank, what brand of whiskey he used, telling them most seriously that I wished they would find out . . . for if it made fighting generals like Grant, I should like to get some of it for distribution.”23 (Lincoln himself questioned the authenticity of this famous statement. “That would have been very good if I had said it,” he told a cipher operator in the War Department, “but I reckon it was charged to me to give it currency.”24) When Lincoln met General John Thayer, he quizzed him about Grant’s drinking habit. “I have seen him often, sometimes daily,” Thayer reassured him, “and I have never noticed the slightest indication of his using any kind of liquor . . . The charge is atrocious, wickedly false.”25 Lincoln felt supremely vindicated by his implicit faith in Grant: “No man will ever know how much trouble I have had to carry my point about him. The opposition from several of our best republicans has been so bitter that I could hardly resist it.”26
The grand victory at Vicksburg also retired all residual doubts about Grant’s skills as a general. Whether dealing with overall strategy or tactical minutiae, he had excelled. Vicksburg was a comeuppance for skeptics who had derided him. Halleck, having perversely turned against Grant after earlier victories, was swept along in the chorus of praise. “In boldness of plan, rapidity of execution, and brilliancy of results,” he announced to Grant, the Vicksburg “operations will compare most favorably with those of Napoleon at Ulm.”27 (In the Bavarian town of Ulm, Napoleon had trapped the Austrian army, which surrendered without a fight.) Even so waspish a critic as Henry Adams lauded Vicksburg as “a military scheme such as Napoleon himself might have envied.”28 In retrospect, Grant asserted that he could have improved upon every one of his Civil War campaigns save one: Vicksburg. Many military historians rate it his masterpiece, the preeminent campaign waged by any general during the war.
On July 7, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant was named major general in the regular army, placing him firmly in control of his own military destiny. For a man drummed out of the regular army in disgrace a decade earlier, the move completed the spectacular transformation of his life. The promotion held deep psychological reverberations for the forty-one-year-old Grant as a West Pointer and career military man, who called it the “only promotion that I ever rejoiced in.”29 After a lifetime of chronic insecurity, the promotion conferred recognition, a comfortable salary, and a lifelong cushion of financial support. Grant had long entertained the notion of taking Julia and the children to California someday, and being made a major general emboldened him to think he might do so after the war. Wartime hardship had dispersed his family. In the autumn he thought of sending his two oldest sons to a boarding school in St. Louis, while Nellie stayed with Mrs. Boggs. “This breaking up of families is hard,” he lamented after Vicksburg. “But such is War.”30
That the Vicksburg conquest coincided with Lee’s bloody defeat at Gettysburg leaned the war toward the Union side. No longer could Jefferson Davis seek legitimacy in European capitals. Vicksburg possessed deeper strategic meaning—Sherman called it the war’s “most decisive event”—but Gettysburg received more extensive coverage in the eastern press, leaving a more durable imprint on northern opinion.31 The mystique of Robert E. Lee was dealt a heavy blow at Gettysburg. Spoiled by success, succumbing to hubris after Chancellorsville, he had come to believe the myth of his own invincibility. Unlike his Virginia battles, his foray into Maryland and Pennsylvania had forced him to fight on enemy territory. For once it was the northern army that staked out an advantageous defensive position and Lee who had to improvise. It was hard to see how even a string of southern victories could defeat the North if Lee sustained such heavy losses. Confederate forces were being whittled down and could not be replaced by the South’s smaller population. The sheer weight of northern numbers began to tell. Although Lee assumed full responsibility for his baffling failure at Gettysburg, his reputation definitely suffered. After Vicksburg and Gettysburg, northern soldiers were no longer quite so petrified of their southern foes.
Where Vicksburg had produced an acknowledged hero in Grant, Gettysburg produced a more dubious hero in George
Gordon Meade, who had wanted to withdraw before Pickett’s Charge but was overruled by his generals, then failed to follow up against the badly routed Confederates, allowing them to escape across the Potomac. Perhaps underestimating the difficulties involved, the president was furious at the missed opportunity. “If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself,” he insisted. “Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand and they would not close it.”32 To make sure Meade got the message, Halleck wired him “that the escape of Lee’s army without another battle has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President.”33 Curiously enough, Grant, who followed up victories aggressively, sympathized with Meade’s sluggish response after Gettysburg and emphasized charitably that he had been placed in charge of the Army of the Potomac only days before the battle. “If [Meade] could have fought Lee six months later, when he had the army in his hand . . . I think Lee would have been destroyed . . . He was new to the chief command. He did not know how the army felt toward him, and, having rolled back the tide of invasion, he felt that any further movement would be a risk.”34
Lincoln and Stanton thought of elevating Grant to the helm of the Army of the Potomac. But aside from his attachment to the western armies, Grant feared he would be ostracized as an interloper in the cliquish world of Virginia generals and, encouraged by Sherman, stoutly resisted the move. As Grant told Dana on August 5, “It would cause me more sadness than satisfaction to be ordered to the command of the Army of the Potomac. Here I know the officers and men and what each Gen. is capable of as a separate commander. There I would have all to learn. Here I know the geography of the country, and its resources. There it would be a new study.”35 Grant also feared leading an army that had ruined the career of a string of other generals. “I had seen so many generals fall, one after another, like bricks in a row, that I shrank from it,” he commented in hindsight.36
From the time he emerged into the national spotlight, Grant disavowed political ambition as alien to his nature. “I am pulling no wires, as political Generals do, to advance myself,” he attested. “I have no future ambition.”37 Yet Vicksburg conferred instant fame that could be parlayed into political success. According to some sources in the nation’s capital, Congressman Washburne touted Grant for president with the same assiduity with which he had promoted his military career. General Benjamin Butler heard reports from Washington that Washburne was “making a business already of committing men to Grant for the Presidency . . . I hear good men say he will go into the nominating convention stronger than Lincoln went.”38 Washburne did nothing to dampen the boomlet, telling a friend that “after old Abe is through with his next four years, we will put him [i.e., Grant] in.”39 The impetus for this came entirely from Washburne, not Grant, who wanted none of it. Perhaps it was the fear of advancing Grant’s presidential prospects that made Lincoln hesitate in bringing him east as chief general in a more timely fashion.
Grant worried that his firing of John McClernand still rankled Lincoln. A wily, persistent politician, McClernand stood ready to discredit Grant in government circles. To counter that, in late July, Grant dispatched his alter ego, John Rawlins, to deliver his Vicksburg report to the cabinet. Since Lincoln had never set eyes on Grant, Rawlins served as his proxy and during a two-hour presentation swayed the cabinet with his intelligence, sincerity, and self-evident passion. Incapable of guile, Rawlins disarmed skeptics. “His honest, unpretending and unassuming manners pleased me—the absence of pretension and I may say the unpolished and unrefined deportment of this earnest and sincere patriot and soldier interested me more than that of almost any officer whom I have met,” Secretary of the Navy Welles told his diary.40 Rawlins satisfied Lincoln that McClernand had obstructed operations at Vicksburg. Grant’s timing here was superb: Lincoln could hardly indulge McClernand at the expense of the victor of Vicksburg. According to an officer who accompanied Rawlins, Lincoln paid an outstanding tribute to Grant: “That man Grant has been of more comfort to me than any other man in my army . . . [He] has few enemies and he is not a politician. It don’t [sic] matter where he turns up, he is on the side of victory . . . Things move wherever he is.”41 Around this time, Grant sent in Rawlins’s name for promotion to brigadier general of volunteers, claiming no officer had won “a more honorable reputation.”42 Rawlins duly received the appointment that August, testimony to his military skills and special protective relationship with Grant, and he also officially became his chief of staff.
After Vicksburg fell, Rawlins discovered love in an unlikely place. Grant had set up headquarters in the roomy home of merchant William Lum and his wife, Anna, who had taken in a governess from Danbury, Connecticut, Mary E. Hurlbut, always known as Emma. She had traveled south with friends before the war, entering the Lum household. Rawlins was a rather prudish man who had now been a widower with three children for two years. He became captivated by the “ringlets” and “laughing nature and rich good sense” of Miss Hurlbut, who blushed furiously and fluttered her eyelids around him.43 She professed her loyalty to the Union, perfecting the romantic portrait for Rawlins, who married her in Danbury before Christmas. Unfortunately, the event that promised to restore happiness to Rawlins’s life coincided with a continuing bout of bad health for him. By now he had developed a rasping cough and other bronchial symptoms, contracting pleuropneumonia during the Vicksburg siege. Whether from stoicism or escapism, Rawlins refused to acknowledge the illness and remained on active duty. For a long while, as the disease lengthened its tragic shadow over his life, Rawlins explained away his symptoms as something minor.
Even as Grant bemoaned the stifling heat, dust, and drought of Mississippi in July, he oversaw the final phases of the Vicksburg Campaign. To Sherman he had assigned the task of dismantling Joseph Johnston’s army and eliminating any supplies and rolling stock it might possess. Grant’s relations with Sherman had grown even more harmonious, and Sherman told visiting dignitaries how he had wrongly opposed Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign. “Nothing could be more generous than his treatment of me,” said Grant, who successfully recommended Sherman for brigadier general in the regular army.44 Meanwhile, Sherman’s foraging parties stripped the countryside of “Corn, Cattle, Hogs, Sheep, Poultry . . . and the new growing Corn.” Driven by ideological zeal, previewing a muscular style for which he became notorious in the South, Sherman informed Grant, “The wholesale destruction, to which this country is now being subjected, is terrible to contemplate,” but the moralistic Sherman blamed the South for not employing the “learned and pure Tribunals” established by America’s forefathers to settle their grievances lawfully.45 He wanted northern armies to impose military rule on the South, teaching it a lesson it would never forget.
On the night of July 16, after days of heavy shelling by Sherman, Johnston evacuated Jackson and fled east with his demoralized army, leaving Grant in undisputed control of the Mississippi heartland. “Jackson, once the pride and boast of Mississippi,” Sherman observed, “is a ruined town.”46 Less truculent than Sherman, though widely in agreement with his goals, Grant took a more lenient view of how to treat the local populace: “Impress upon the men the importance of going through the State in an orderly manner, abstaining from taking anything not absolutely necessary for their subsistence while traveling. They should try to create as favorable an impression as possible upon the people.”47 To this end, Grant distributed food and medicine to needy residents.48
While both Grant and Sherman proved overly optimistic about the potential contrition of southern citizens, the North experienced a vicious backlash against emancipation during New York City draft riots in mid-July. In March, Congress had enacted legislation that allowed men to escape the draft by hiring substitutes or paying $300 bounties to the government. Those eligible for the draft in New York’s poor Irish Democratic neighborhoods vented their class rage against Republicans rich enough to evade the war and racial prejudice against free blacks who threatened them with economic competition. The ugliest
aspect of the riots, which took more than one hundred lives over four days, involved the outright murder of blacks on New York streets and the horrendous burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum. Lincoln refused to rescind the draft and brought troops fresh from victory at Gettysburg to restore order.
The New York riots magnified the glaring need to recruit more black soldiers, a policy Grant embraced with growing fervor. Once Vicksburg fell, he set about arming black soldiers with captured weapons and assigned them to reinforce the city’s earthworks, collect and capture Confederate property, and police the city. Far from questioning their ability, Grant extolled them, telling Halleck that “negro troops are easier to preserve discipline among than our White troops and I doubt not will prove equally good for garrison duty. All that have been tried have fought bravely.”49 Grant had gotten religion on the issue. “I am anxious to get as many of these negro regiments as possible and to have them full and completely equipped,” he told Lorenzo Thomas. “The large amount of arms and equipment captured here will enable me to equip these regiments as rapidly as they can be formed.”50 Grant’s conversion to this cause reflected his commonsensical approach to things: he had tested and observed black troops and was honest enough to credit their high-caliber performance.
Also focusing Grant’s mind on black recruitment were steady reminders from Washington. Now that he enjoyed direct correspondence with the president, Lincoln’s priorities impressed themselves even more forcibly upon his mind. On August 9, Lincoln told Grant that black recruitment was “a resource which if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest—It works doubly, weakening the enemy & strengthening us.”51 With the Mississippi open to commerce, Lincoln hoped one hundred thousand black soldiers could be assembled along its shores. In reply, Grant brought his views in exact conformity with national policy and presidential direction. “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support,” he assured the president. “This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.”52 Lincoln was so pleased with this statement that he quoted it in a letter read aloud at a mass rally in Illinois in September, deepening the political bond between the two men. Intent on furthering Lincoln’s vision, Grant planned to send an expedition into Louisiana to gather black recruits. As the results of the draft showed more people than expected buying their way out of service or flunking physicals, the drive to arm and equip black soldiers acquired fresh urgency.