Grant
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The most immediate issue demanding Grant’s attention after Pemberton’s surrender was what to do about slaves kept by rebel officers. A member of Pemberton’s staff informed Grant that some slaves desired to return home to their masters and that forcing them to separate was “like severing families.” Grant believed the decision should rest entirely with the blacks affected and “that no compulsory measures would be used to hold negroes. I want the negroes all to understand that they are free men.”53 If slaves decided to return to their masters, Grant thought, there might be collateral benefits as they told others how Yankees offered to set them free—something that might incite further rebellion in the South. Grant’s policy was revoked when Confederate officers openly coerced their slaves into returning home, and it became clear that no free choice was involved. “Give instructions that no passes are to be given to negroes to accompany their masters on leaving the City,” Grant ordered.54
For his services to the black community, Grant began to bask in some of the adulation lavished upon Lincoln. A few days after Vicksburg fell, a northern woman, Annie Wittenmyer, a sanitary agent from Iowa, invited Grant and McPherson to dine in a house that had been damaged by Union shells. That morning, she recalled, the colored children “danced a jubilee” when they found out Grant was coming and began to throng around the house. “Black faces were peeping out from the near houses and the fences were black with colored people. It was perhaps the one chance of their lives to see their deliverer, the great captain who had opened the prison-house of Vicksburg, and given liberty to all the people.”55 By the time Grant and McPherson left the house, every black person in the neighborhood knew that the shorter man was their hero.
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ULYSSES S. GRANT was a man of action par excellence for whom idleness remained an enemy. Not content merely to hold conquered territory or retreat into summer quarters, he meditated fresh schemes for further campaigns, including an attack on Mobile, but he had to bow to certain realities that stalled his progress. For one thing, his weary troops could not manage extended marches in midsummer heat. For another, Lincoln and Halleck retained separate priorities, including checking European pretensions in Mexico and foreign meddling in the war. This meant that, for the sake of foreign policy, Grant had to divert an entire division to Nathaniel Banks to beef up the Union presence in Texas. In consequence, the restless Grant had to “settle down and see myself put again on the defensive as I had been a year before in west Tennessee. It would have been an easy thing to capture Mobile at the time I proposed to go there.”56
The temporary lull in fighting afforded him an opportunity to see the public adulation his success had generated. In late August, he went to Cairo to spend time with Julia before she placed their three eldest children in school in St. Louis. Grant seemed aglow with his new military renown, boasting to brother-in-law Fred Dent that “I feel younger than I did six years ago” when business troubles smothered his spirits.57 Paying homage to Grant’s talents, Memphis honored him with two dinners on consecutive nights. At the first, Grant responded with pitch-perfect brevity to a toast offered in his praise, having a staff officer reply crisply, “General Grant believes that he has no more than done his duty, for which no honor is due.”58
For the rest of his life, banquets posed a challenge to Grant, who had to shield himself from alcoholic temptation. At the second Memphis dinner, John Eaton watched Grant handle this threat, especially when the mayor grew tipsy, spilled soup on Lorenzo Thomas, then splashed Grant while uncorking a champagne bottle. Amid the revelry, Grant made a point of abstaining from drink. “His wine glasses and those of General Rawlins, his chief of staff, remained inverted throughout the dinner,” noted Eaton, “although there was even more than the usual freedom in the use of wines among the other guests.”59 Grant again showed himself a master of pithy expression, acknowledging a toast with just two lines: “I thank you, gentlemen, for your kindness. All that will add to your prosperity, that it is in my power to do, I will grant you.”60 At the same time Julia was being regaled as a newfound celebrity. Staying at a St. Louis hotel, she was entertained by serenaders and a huge crowd burst into uproarious cheers when she appeared on the balcony. The one family member who tried to exploit Grant’s renown was, predictably, his father, who had been barred from doing deals in his son’s district after the notorious meddling that provoked General Orders No. 11. Now, in a virtual replay of that egregious incident, Jesse had the gall to lobby General Nathaniel Banks to yield commercial rights to a Mr. L. Block, “one of a firm of five Brothers doing business in Cincinnati.”61 It seems unlikely Grant knew of this latest example of his father’s unsavory business affairs.
The unholy trinity of circumstances that inevitably challenged Grant—inactivity, a side trip to a distant town, and relaxation after the unbearable pressures of a major campaign—occurred on September 2 when he journeyed to New Orleans to confer with Banks, stopping at the St. Charles Hotel. The visit’s purpose was to review proposed operations west of the Mississippi. Grant’s stay started with a magnificent reception for him at the Banks residence. “For hours streams of people poured through the spacious parlors,” reported a local paper. “Grant received the ‘storming party’ with as much coolness and calmness as he conducted those which assaulted the stout walls of Vicksburg.”62 The next day, Grant hired a carriage with “two spanking bays” and drove Banks around the city at an exhilarating clip, leaving both horses drooping by the end.63
On September 4, Banks staged a grand review in Grant’s honor in the nearby suburb of Carrollton. By all accounts, it was a poignant moment for Grant, who at first trotted so briskly by the assembled troops that other generals had difficulty keeping pace. Then he paused on horseback in the shade of an oak tree, wearing his black felt hat and drawing on a cigar. As he surveyed passing troops, regiments carried banners inscribed with the names of his famous victories and Grant tipped his hat to the veterans flashing by. Once the review was over, Grant and other participants repaired to “a handsome déjeuner—music, wine, choruses, etc.,” and the wine mentioned may have been his undoing.64
Perhaps aware of Grant’s reputation for taming frisky animals, Banks gave him a spirited but unbroken mount for the festivities, praising it as “the fleetest and best.” Grant characterized the steed as “vicious and but little used.65 One observer noted the ominous detail that when the horse was first presented to Grant, it “took two men to hold” it.66 Afterward, Grant and other generals rode back to New Orleans on a road rutted by passing artillery, which had carved a gaping hole. Despite this, Grant’s horse “grew quite unmanageable and flew like the wind,” said an observer.67 According to one version of what happened, Grant and the others engaged in a horse race with Grant sprinting ahead of the pack. Then came disaster. “General Grant’s horse in jumping that hole in the road fell and threw the general clear over his head,” said Lieutenant Frank Parker. “Grant fell on his head and shoulders and lay flat out on the ground. We thought he was dead.”68 In Grant’s recollection, his horse reared at a shrill whistle issued by a locomotive. “This frightened the animal so that he plunged into a carriage that was coming from the opposite direction and was thrown to the ground with me under.”69 Ever the agile rider, Grant remained welded to his saddle as he fell, possibly aggravating the damage. His leg lay crushed and immobile, and his hip may have been dislocated. Yet another account asserted that a speeding horse came up behind Grant and trampled him severely. Whatever the case, he was knocked unconscious and carted on a litter to a nearby inn where he was confined to bed, unable to move his leg. “My leg was swollen from the knee to the thigh, and the swelling, almost to the point of bursting, extended along the body up to the arm-pit,” he recalled. “The pain was almost beyond endurance.”70 Grant would rely on crutches for two months and tapped Sherman as his preferred deputy in an emergency.
Several—though hardly all—of the officers present attributed Grant’s accident to drinking. “I a
m frightened when I think that he is a drunkard,” Banks told his wife. “His accident was caused by this, which was too manifest to all who saw him.”71 No less damaging in historical annals was a letter General William B. Franklin, a former West Point classmate of Grant’s, subsequently wrote to McClellan about Grant’s visit. “He at once got into the most tremendous frolic, was drunk all over the city for forty-eight hours.” After reviewing troops and eating lunch, Grant had “galloped over an exceedingly dusty road full split, tumbled head over heels & was badly hurt.”72 This report reverberated through the years and as late as 1885 Mark Twain reported that “Franklin saw Grant tumble from his horse drunk while reviewing troops in New Orleans.”73 In another letter, Franklin blamed Grant’s lapse on Julia’s absence. “When I saw Grant in Vicksburg about Aug. 1, he was perfectly straight & told me that he had drunk nothing during the war. I was as you can imagine somewhat surprised when I saw him in New Orleans. But Mrs. Gr[ant], a cross-eyed very ugly woman was at Vicksburg, and there was no such woman at New Orleans.”74 Sylvanus Cadwallader, the unreliable journalist who embellished Grant’s drinking at Satartia, remembered gossip swirling around Grant’s headquarters that he was “thrown from his horse on his return from a review of Gen. Banks’s troops” and that it “was solely due to his drinking.”75
As with many Grant drinking stories, the most lurid versions emanated from generals hostile to Grant. Franklin was a protégé of McClellan and had bungled two battles in the eastern theater before Lincoln banished him to Louisiana for scheming to get McClellan reinstated. Friendlier generals, such as Cadwallader Washburn (sic), made no allusion to drinking, even when writing to his brother Elihu about the fall. And if Grant was drunk, how did he have enough self-command to remain in the saddle? What lends most credence to the tale that Grant had been drunk was that John Rawlins heard it from people present and believed it. A couple of months later, suspecting a new drinking spree, he sent his fiancée an exasperated letter: “I had hoped but it appears vainly his New Orleans experience would prevent him ever again indulging with this his worst enemy.”76 The episode stands out because Grant usually had enough self-control to drink only in private, far from inquisitive eyes, whereas the New Orleans incident occurred in full view of high-ranking officers, some of them sworn rivals.
While the accident handicapped Grant for a couple of months, it did not interfere with any battles. Propped up by hotel pillows, Grant smoked, read a humorous book, and soldiered on with his usual equanimity, but mostly he lay flat on his back, unable to leave bed without assistance for several weeks. By September 16, taken back to Vicksburg, he settled in an upstairs bedroom of the beautiful Lum mansion, enjoying a fine view of the river. Here Julia and their youngest boy, Jesse, lent a hand, Julia taking up nursing duties beside his bed and fanning him in the oppressive heat. Not until the end of the month did Grant start to maneuver with crutches. During this period of enforced rest, an overriding concern was the formation of black regiments, and he urged Eaton to create a “colored military force” that would “resist attacks from the bands of guerillas that infested the country and threatened the plantations.”77 From these bedside discussions arose the Sixty-Third and Sixty-Fourth United States Colored Infantry Regiments, enhancing the status of black soldiers in the Union army.
While Grant recuperated, momentous events were reshaping the war in eastern Tennessee. On September 2, Ambrose Burnside captured Knoxville, and William Rosecrans took Chattanooga on September 9. These twin victories seemed to fulfill Lincoln’s dream of prying loose eastern Tennessee from the enemy. Confederate leaders decided to contest this terrain vigorously, and Jefferson Davis expanded Braxton Bragg’s army by transferring from Virginia two divisions under James Longstreet. On September 19, this strengthened force clashed with the Army of the Cumberland under Rosecrans at Chickamauga Creek, near Chattanooga, in northwestern Georgia. At first the battle seemed a furious, bloody struggle, devoid of strategic design, “a mad, irregular battle . . . in which one army was bushwhacking the other, and wherein all the science and the art of war went for nothing,” said a Union general.78 Then, on September 20, Union resistance crumbled as Confederates pierced a gap that opened in the enemy line. The dispatch that Charles Dana filed with Edwin Stanton evoked the enormity of the disaster that had befallen Union forces:
My report today is of deplorable importance. Chickamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run . . . Never in any battle I have witnessed was there such a mass of cannon and musketry. [Confederate troops] came through with resistless impulse . . . Before them our soldiers turned and fled. It was wholesale panic. Vain were all attempts to rally them . . . the road is full of a disordered throng of fugitives . . . We have lost heavily in killed today. The total of our killed, wounded, and prisoners can hardly be less than 20,000 and may be much more.79
Besides the rebels’ capture of more than eight thousand Union prisoners, a rich trove of weaponry tumbled into their hands. For the federal side, the sole redeeming feature came when the quietly determined General George H. Thomas and his men refused to buckle under Confederate assault. For his bravery Thomas chalked up legendary status as “the Rock of Chickamauga.”
As Rosecrans’s ragged, dispirited army retreated to the safety of Chattanooga, his reputation lay in ruins. Grant had shared the general affection for him, telling Halleck the previous year: “There are two men in this army whom I would just as soon serve under as to have them serve under me. One is Sherman, the other is ‘Rosy.’”80 Another time Grant spoke of Rosecrans tenderly as his “warm personal friend” and “one of the ablest & purest of men, both in motive and action.”81 For all that, Rosecrans was weak, vain, and irresolute, lacking Grant’s superlative drive and focus, a terrible procrastinator who constantly clamored for more troops. At Chickamauga, he behaved with such shocking cowardice as he fled the battlefield that even Lincoln sneered he was “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”82 One officer who saw Rosecrans said he would “not soon forget the terrible look of the brave man, stunned by sudden calamity.”83
The situation of his army in Chattanooga, left with only a ten-day supply of rations, was fraught with peril. Enemy forces had seized the commanding heights of Missionary Ridge, on the city’s eastern side, and Lookout Mountain to the southwest, leaving him dependent upon a single, often impassable road through the mountains to sustain his large army. The threat of starvation loomed with winter’s approach. Chattanooga was also a critical railway hub and the Union could ill afford to lose it. Stanton rushed off a telegraph to the bedridden Grant to relieve Rosecrans with all available forces, and he promptly dispatched two divisions. Led by Sherman, one division set off by steamer from Vicksburg to Memphis only twelve hours after Grant got the order. Sherman never forgot this dreadful voyage. He had dragged along his family, including his oldest son, Willy, who became feverish and began to lose strength rapidly. A regimental doctor diagnosed him with typhus, and Willy expired not long after the boat docked at Memphis, leaving Sherman disconsolate. “This is the only death I have ever had in my own family, and falling as it has so suddenly & unexpectedly on the one I most prized on earth has affected me more than any other misfortune could,” he confided to Grant. “I can hardly compose myself enough for work but must & will do so at once.”84 Sherman, though he persevered in his duties, was haunted by the specter of the dead boy. “Sleeping, waking, everywhere I see poor Willy,” he told his wife.85
Stanton placed such a premium on rescuing Rosecrans that he undertook the war’s most strenuous logistical feat to save him. At a late-night War Department meeting, he proposed sending twenty thousand troops from the Army of the Potomac to Tennessee—a proposal of such fiendish complexity that Lincoln laughingly said the army could not “get one corps [from northern Virginia] into Washington in the time you fix for reaching Nashville.”86 In no mood for drollery, Stanton rejoined that “the danger was too imminent and the occasion [too] serious for jokes.”87 With
his formidable energy, Stanton studied railway timetables and proceeded to shift twenty thousand men and three thousand horses to Chattanooga in eleven days. The obstacles were daunting—the troops had to cover 1,233 miles, including crossing the Appalachian Mountains and twice fording the Ohio River—making the successful move a tour de force of military organization.
On October 3, Halleck alerted Grant that Stanton wished him to travel at once to Nashville, via Cairo, and supervise the transfer of troops from the west. It took a week for the message to reach Grant. “I was still very lame,” recalled Grant, who needed help getting on and off horses, “but started without delay.”88 Eaton accompanied him on the six-day steamboat ride from Vicksburg to Cairo and remembered how Rawlins hectored the skipper with manic urgency: “The old river boat was rushed along at a speed which seemed as if it might prove fatal at any moment, and the keel would scrape and grind the river bottom in the most disturbing fashion.”89