Grant

by Ron Chernow

  As Grant journeyed east, the drumbeat of criticism of Rosecrans swelled in volume. Posted at Chattanooga, Charles Dana plied Stanton with critical comments about Rosecrans, stating that despite his well-known affability, he lacked “firmness and steadiness of will” and should be sacked.90 Dana’s dispatches grew more sardonic, then downright insulting. On October 12, he opined that “the practical incapacity of the general commanding is astonishing, and it often seems difficult to believe him of sound mind. His imbecility appears to be contagious.”91 All the while, Rawlins badgered Grant with reminders of Rosecrans’s “general spirit of insubordination.”92 Lincoln grew convinced that Rosecrans had to be cashiered, but for political reasons wanted to wait a short while. The popular Rosecrans hailed from Ohio, and Lincoln preferred to temporize until after the Ohio gubernatorial election on October 13, which Republicans won.

  When Grant reached Cairo on October 16, leaning on a crutch, he learned that an unnamed War Department official planned to meet him at the Galt House in Louisville. Setting off for Kentucky, he changed trains at Indianapolis and was about to leave the station when a messenger rushed up to notify him that Stanton and Governor John Brough of Ohio had arrived on an adjoining track. While Grant and Stanton had communicated via telegraph, they had never set eyes on each other. Short of breath, asthmatic, snuffling with a heavy cold, the short, stout Stanton barged brusquely into Grant’s car, eyed the officers present, then began to pump the hand of a bearded man with an army hat whom he assumed was Grant. “How do you do General Grant?” he cried. “I recognize you from your pictures.”93 Stanton was embarrassed to learn he was shaking hands with Grant’s medical director, Dr. Edward Kittoe. If Grant was amused by the confusion, Stanton was badly flustered, and it darkened his mood for the rest of the journey to Louisville with Grant. Stanton later admitted that in guessing which officer was Grant, he had eliminated the real Grant because he looked much too ordinary and wasn’t the prepossessing figure he had imagined.94

  The war secretary presented a picturesque foil to the general. With thick spectacles that he wiped incessantly and a long gray-tinged black beard that almost seemed to rest on his chest, Edwin McMasters Stanton was easy to admire, hard to love. Heedless of political pressure, impatient with special pleading, he was a snappish, short-tempered man who enjoyed barking orders at terrified subordinates. He had been something of a surprise choice to replace Simon Cameron a year before. Back in 1855, Lincoln, a junior lawyer, was brought in to defend a client in a patent suit and had tangled with Stanton, a high-priced Pittsburgh practitioner who acted as one of the main defense attorneys. Stanton was contemptuous of Lincoln and made no attempt to conceal it. “Why did you bring that d—d long armed Ape here,” Stanton allegedly asked his chief co-counsel; “he does not know anything and can do you no good.”95 Later on, he added “the original gorilla,” “a low, cunning clown,” and “that giraffe” to his litany of colorful epithets for Lincoln.96 A Democrat who served briefly as attorney general under President Buchanan, Stanton seemed to have the wrong résumé for Lincoln’s cabinet, but the War Department under Cameron was tarred with corruption allegations, and Stanton was exactly the scourge needed to clean it up.

  To introduce bureaucratic transparency, Stanton stood behind a high desk in a public space in the War Department, delivering stern lectures to shady contractors or self-promoting officers. He came across as an unstoppable force with an overbearing sense of mission that brooked no dissent. If many people thought him an ogre, nobody ever questioned his incorruptible honesty or ruthless efficiency. His memory was prodigious, as was his capacity for work and scrupulous attention to detail. He was the managerial genius of a war that made stupendous logistical demands on the northern army, with its long supply lines, extensive rail and telegraphic networks, and distant factories. He developed a surprisingly good relationship with Lincoln because he got things done and was not especially concerned with legal niceties. He could be tyrannical in exercising power and heedless of civil liberties. “If I tap that little bell,” he pointed out to one visitor, “I can send you to a place where you will never hear the dogs bark.”97 Stanton cared little for the feelings of others. Grant was fascinated by how Lincoln got his way through charm and sensitivity while Stanton prevailed through uncompromising truculence.

  With his imperturbable calm, Grant was a little leery of Stanton’s high-strung, domineering nature, yet the two men struck up an excellent working accord. “I don’t think that Stanton was what I might call a cordial friend,” Grant explained. “He was always courteous. Our friendship grew very slowly. I liked him very much better than he liked me, I think; but I must say, as Secretary of War he was extremely loyal and true.”98 Especially important to Grant was the ample leeway Stanton gave him: “He has never dictated a course of campaign to me,” Grant testified, “and never inquired what I was going to do.”99 Grant stood in awe of Stanton’s efficiency. “He was a man who never questioned his own authority, and who always did in war time what he wanted to do. He was an able constitutional lawyer and jurist; but the Constitution was not an impediment to him while the war lasted.”100 Until the end of his life and despite many strains that later marred their relationship, Grant deemed Stanton “one of the great men of the Republic” and a “martyr” to the Union cause.101

  Throughout the train ride, Grant and Stanton remained locked in a deep, searching conversation. By the time they pulled into Louisville that night in “a cold, drizzling rain,” Stanton had handed Grant two orders from Lincoln.102 One created a brand-new Military Division of the Mississippi that consolidated the Armies of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee. Grant was placed atop this grand structure, giving him power over a huge western territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, with the exception of Banks’s southwest command. With his headquarters in the field, there was no chance Grant could vegetate in an office. Sherman became head of the Army of the Tennessee and Burnside kept the Army of the Ohio. As for the Army of the Cumberland, Stanton gave Grant the option of replacing Rosecrans with George Thomas.

  People flocked to the Galt House in Louisville to glimpse Grant, and some were taken aback that he seemed so much smaller in life. “I thought he was a large man,” proclaimed a puzzled observer. “He would be considered a small chance of a fighter if he lived in Kentucky.”103 Grant, still lame, leaned on a crutch or cane, but was so comfortable in the saddle that one reporter believed “even in his feeble condition it would require a strong effort on the part of a horse to unseat him.”104 After a day of intense consultation with Stanton, Ulysses and Julia Grant took the evening off to attend the theater. Their short-lived leisure was interrupted by an emergency summons from Stanton, who had been frantically trying to locate Grant. When Grant arrived at the hotel at about eleven o’clock, he found Stanton, with a severe cold, “pacing the floor rapidly in his dressing-gown.”105 His agitation had been precipitated by a letter from Dana, saying Rosecrans planned to abandon Chattanooga unless stopped from doing so. Grant thought a retreat would be catastrophic, surrendering a strategic spot and threatening the loss of an entire army with irreplaceable artillery. At this critical juncture, he assumed official command of the Military Division of the Mississippi, replaced Rosecrans with Thomas, and told the stalwart Thomas to cling to Chattanooga at all hazards. Thomas sent back a message that throbbed with determination: “We will hold the town till we starve.”106

  After numerous mistakes in selecting generals, Lincoln and Stanton had weeded out the weak reeds and began to assemble the team that would win the war. Grant’s ascent was simply stunning. As Rawlins told his fiancée, “This is now the most important command in the United States, involving immense labor, unceasing watchfulness and anxiety . . . I feel a confidence in General Grant’s ability to master the whole and turn again as heretofore the tide of defeat and disaster.”107 The general public was amazed by Rosecrans’s swift fall from grace. “Rosecrans is superseded by
Grant!” the diarist George Templeton Strong exclaimed in New York. “The change astonishes everyone—its alleged reasons are still more startling. Opium-eating, fits of religious melancholy, and gross personal misconduct at Chickamauga are charged by newspaper correspondents.”108 Increasingly sure-footed in military strategy, Lincoln displayed growing toughness in hiring and firing generals. As the journalist Noah Brooks observed, “It is hard to give up a popular idol . . . no man in the nation was more pained at the necessity of the removal of General Rosecrans than was the President himself.”109 Whatever his earlier fondness for Rosecrans, Grant grew withering in his contempt for him, telling Halleck a year later that any general “will be better than Rosecrans” and advising Dana that Rosecrans should be shipped off to “the northern frontier with the duty of detecting & exposing rebel conspiracies in Canada.”110 Rosecrans turned into an impassioned foe of Grant, later penning a venomous article entitled “The Mistakes of Grant.”

  On October 20, Grant proceeded as expeditiously as possible to Chattanooga, making the first leg of his journey by train. Passing through Nashville, he saw that Grant mania had overtaken the army, with soldiers crowding the tracks and craning their necks to spot him. He disembarked from the train to meet a man who would figure significantly in his future: Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee. The laconic Grant had his first experience of Johnson’s long-winded style. As they stood together before the St. Cloud Hotel, Johnson delivered a lengthy welcome speech while Grant, by his own admission, stood “in torture . . . fearing something would be expected from me in response. I was relieved, however, the people assembled having apparently heard enough.”111 Grant charmed the throng by admitting he had “never made a speech in his life, and was too old to learn now.”112

  Far from enjoying his glory, Grant sometimes exhibited a melancholy air, as if burdened by responsibility. After spending the night in Nashville, he boarded a train, and, as it slid through Tennessee, a soldier named Harvey Reid saw Grant sitting alone, wrapped in thought. “He had on an old blue overcoat, and wore a common white wool [hat] drawn down over his eyes, and looked so much like a private soldier, that but for the resemblance to the photographs that can be seen on every corner in this town, it would have been impossible to have recognized him . . . He was either tired with riding all night, or had something on his mind for he appeared almost sad as he looked vacantly without seeming to see anything that he was passing.”113

  By early evening, Grant reached Stevenson, just across the border from Tennessee in northern Alabama. With difficulty, he dismounted from the train and stood on the platform, resting on his crutches and awaiting a train that would bear the disgraced Rosecrans. One Union soldier noted the absence of any grand aura surrounding Grant: “An army slouch hat with bronze cord around it, quite a long military coat, unbuttoned no sword or belt, and there was nothing to indicate his rank . . . When the boys called for a speech, he bowed and said nothing.”114 While at the train station, Grant conferred with Rosecrans, who energetically disputed Dana’s accusation that he planned to desert Chattanooga. Far from being despondent, Grant found Rosecrans “very cheerful . . . as though a great weight had been lifted off his mind.”115 Rosecrans outlined plans to supply his isolated army, and Grant found it a highly productive meeting with the demoted general laying out “some excellent suggestions as to what should be done. My only wonder was that he had not carried them out.”116

  At Stevenson, Grant also met General Oliver Otis Howard, who had lost an arm in Virginia the year before and was nicknamed the “Christian General” for his piety and aversion to alcohol. Howard was surprised by the slight, diminutive Grant, finding him “rather thin in flesh and very pale in complexion, and noticeably self-contained and retiring.”117 Grant spent the night sharing Howard’s tent, which was pitched on a muddy flat. Howard remembered one comical, if slightly awkward, moment: “When [Grant] first came in there was hanging against the wall of my tent an empty liquor flask. His eyes twinkled and I saw a faint smile creep over his face. Before he could speak, I said, ‘General, that flask is not mine. It was brought here by an officer from Chattanooga. I do not drink.’ Grant answered quietly, ‘Neither do I,’ and surely at that period of his career he was not drinking, and I never knew him to take even a glass of wine during the Chattanooga campaign.”118 Howard came away enormously impressed with Grant. “He is modest, quiet, and thoughtful,” he informed his wife. “He looks the picture of firmness.”119

  The last sixty miles to Chattanooga had to be made on horseback and constituted the most harrowing ride of Grant’s life. Rawlins portrayed the trail as “the roughest and steepest . . . ever crossed by army wagons and pack mules.”120 This wretched mountain road, which constantly rose and fell, was the only supply route still open linking the besieged Union army in Chattanooga with the outside world. Grant had to be lifted onto his horse—Rawlins deposited him gently “as if he had been a child”—with his crutches strapped to the side.121 Heavy rains stirred up the road into a froth of knee-deep mud, and in some places the path was washed away by mudslides. At the worst spots, Grant had to be taken off his horse and lifted over hurdles, an ordeal he endured with stoic fortitude. He also had to contend with the appalling sight of smashed wagons everywhere and the potent stench of thousands of dead mules and horses, which had been killed by rebel bayonets or starved to death. As the cavalcade approached Chattanooga, torrential rains left the beleaguered party “dark, wet and hungry,” as Dr. Kittoe told Julia Grant.122 Just as they made their way into Chattanooga, Grant’s horse tipped over and fell flat on his side, but by a miraculous stroke of luck, he was spared further injury.123

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  —

  Above the Clouds

  WHEN GRANT REACHED the headquarters of General George Thomas on the dark, rainy night of October 23, he was spent and bedraggled from his arduous journey. To those who set eyes on the sodden general, he seemed to be stoically grappling with pain. “As he arose and walked across the floor,” said a spectator, “his lameness was very perceptible.”1 Grant’s initial encounter with the Rock of Chickamauga was frosty. As the two men sat wordlessly beside a fireplace, Grant smoked a cigar and hunched forward quietly, water trickling from his mud-spattered clothes, forming a puddle beneath his chair. Thomas, who was loyal to Rosecrans and thought Grant had treated him disgracefully, seemed unconcerned with his new commander’s wretched state. “Rawlins . . . was white with anger at the cool reception the general and staff had received,” said James H. Wilson. “They had made a long and tiresome ride and were soaking wet, but as yet nothing had been done to relieve their discomfort.” Wilson piped up. “General Thomas, General Grant has been on the road two days . . . he is wet and suffering from a bruised leg; besides, he is tired and hungry. Can’t you get him some dry clothes from one of your staff and order some supper to be provided for him?” Reminded of his duty, the courtly Virginian replied, “Of course, I can,” and he extended dry clothes and an ample supper to Grant.2

  Grant’s rough-hewn style had an impact upon a man destined to be a key aide: Captain Horace Porter, who had graduated third in his West Point class in 1860. The images he had seen of Grant made him envision “a burly beef-contractor,” not the gentle, “slightly stooped” man, who stood five foot eight and weighed 135 pounds. Porter picked up many subtle traits: how Grant thoughtfully stroked his beard; the “perceptible twinkle in his eyes” when he was about to utter something amusing; the “square-shaped jaws” that expressed his willpower; the creased brow that disclosed a “serious and somewhat careworn” mood behind an otherwise cheerful facade; his surprisingly clear, melodious voice; his slow, rolling gait; and how he behaved civilly to everyone, never snubbing those of lesser rank.3 But it was the mind, beautifully organized and well prepared, that most dazzled Porter as a torrent of ideas suddenly issued from this reputedly silent man. A keen listener and close observer, Grant “began to fire whole volleys of questions at the of
ficers present. So intelligent were his inquires, so pertinent his suggestions, that he made a profound impression upon every one by the quickness of his perception and the knowledge which he had already acquired regarding important details of the army’s condition.”4 Grant’s instant grasp of complicated logistical issues astounded Porter.

  With a reticence reminiscent of Grant, Thomas had a cool relationship with him. The commander of the forty-five-thousand-strong Army of the Cumberland had a broad, meaty face, bushy beard, tensely arched brows, set mouth, and stern gaze. With his dignified manner, commanding appearance, and superb judgment, “he had more the character of George Washington than any other man I ever knew,” said Dana.5 Unlike Robert E. Lee, the heavyset Virginian had decided that the treasonous nature of secession surpassed loyalty to his home state and stayed with the Union. As Grant recalled from West Point, Thomas had been tarred with the name “Old Slow-Trot”—he had a spinal injury that forced him to gallop slowly—which got to the heart of Grant’s dilemma with him. Thorough in preparation for battle, dogged on defense, Thomas swung into action reluctantly. “He is possessed of excellent judgment, great coolness and honesty, but he is not good on a pursuit,” concluded Grant, who often said, “Thomas is too slow to move, and too brave to run away.”6 Despite an absence of personal warmth between them, Grant carefully paid homage to his colleague in public, later calling him “one of the great names of our history, one of the greatest heroes in our war, a rare and noble character, in every way worthy of his fame.”7

  The morning after his arrival in Chattanooga, Grant mounted his horse and scouted the terrain with Thomas and his chief engineer, Brigadier General William Farrar “Baldy” Smith. (Surprisingly enough, riding in the coming days completely healed Grant’s leg and he soon dispensed with a cane.) Lincoln assigned high priority to retaining the town, viewing it as an entryway to the industrial heartland of the South, the booming arsenals and factories of Georgia and Alabama. Things looked pretty ghastly as Grant took stock. Chattanooga stood at the northern end of a valley bounded by Missionary Ridge, a steep slope that rose as high as 400 feet, to the east, and Lookout Mountain to the southwest, which soared 1,400 feet above the valley floor. With both heights manned by Confederates, Union troops were bottled up down below without ammunition for a single day’s fighting. As Baldy Smith observed, the rebel army “believed that they held the [Union] army at their mercy, and its destruction was only a question of time.”8 Grant could see why: “It looked, indeed, as if but two courses were open; one to starve, the other to surrender or be captured.”9