Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Brady snapped a perceptive photograph of Grant, leaving the upper third of the canvas bare and placing his subject slightly below the picture’s center, accentuating his short stature. There was no strutting, no bombast, no false bravado. Grant sat with one arm resting on a table, his hand dangling in the air, while the other hand curled loosely into a fist. His hair was swept back carefully, his beard relatively well trimmed. He had been posed with a somewhat stiff, upright carriage, but his pale, sad eyes seem to brood over years of military casualties.

  As Grant moved about Washington, he was mobbed by crowds elated to catch a glimpse of him. He knew his promotion would tie him to Washington for a long time, scuttling plans to move to the Pacific Coast someday. “General Grant is all the rage,” Senator Sherman reported to his brother William. “He is subjected to the disgusting but dangerous process of being lionized. He is followed by crowds, and is cheered everywhere.” The senator feared the pure-hearted Grant would be spoiled by fulsome flattery. William defended Grant from such insinuations, even though he experienced similar fears. “Grant is as good a leader as we can find,” he wrote back. “He has honesty, simplicity of character, singleness of purpose, and no hope or claim to usurp civil power . . . Don’t disgust him by flattery or importunity. Let him alone.”78

  Shortly after returning to Washington, Grant established his headquarters in the field at Culpeper Court House and quickly prepared for the upcoming campaign against Lee. One of his first orders was to commission a map from Halleck showing with red lines the front occupied by Union forces at the start of the war and at present, while an ambitious blue line marked the territory he planned to occupy. As he labored, he was invited to attend a White House reception with Julia, but too engrossed to go, he dispatched Julia and Admiral Farragut instead.

  In many ways, Julia Grant was more worldly and socially adept than her husband and could tutor him in the elevated circles in which he now traveled. She knew the intense scrutiny he would undergo and worked hard on his appearance. As Badeau wrote, “With a feminine insight she comprehended both the petty craft and the important ambitions that underlie so many of the ceremonies of official life at Washington as well as in aristocratic capitals.”79 Badeau escorted her to the White House and recounted how on the receiving line Lincoln overlooked her name until Badeau repeated more loudly, “Mrs. General Grant, Mr. President.” At that point, “the tall, ungainly man looked down upon his visitor with infinite kindness beaming from his ugly, historic face; then placed both his hands on Mrs. Grant’s and welcomed her more than warmly.”80 When Lincoln asked where her husband was, Julia answered with studied diplomacy: “I begged the General to remain and accompany me, but he said he must go to the front and he was sure the President and Mrs. Lincoln would excuse him.”81 Julia championed her husband unapologetically. When a group of ladies asked whether he would take Richmond, Julia replied, “Yes, before he gets through. Mr. Grant always was a very obstinate man.”82

  Every week Grant traveled to Washington and sat down with Lincoln and Stanton for lengthy talks. Almost immediately, he developed a harmonious working relationship with the president. That Lincoln felt perfectly compatible with Grant politically was demonstrated one evening when an Illinois visitor alluded to party operatives pushing Grant for president. Lincoln replied, “He is fully committed to the policy of emancipation and employing negro soldiers; and with this policy faithfully carried out, it will not make much difference who is President.”83 Grant was profoundly influenced by Lincoln, who buttressed his idealism and his view that slavery was fundamental to the Union fight. “There had to be an end of slavery,” Grant later explained. “Then we were fighting an enemy with whom we could not make a peace. We had to destroy him.”84

  By this point in the war, Lincoln looked haggard and woebegone. His high forehead, dark hair, high cheekbones, and long chin made his appearance as unforgettable as Grant’s was nondescript. With his ever-flowing fund of yarns, Lincoln might have seemed unlike Grant, but Grant, too, could be a wry, charming storyteller. Lincoln was more openly driven than the sometimes indolent Grant, displaying an irrepressible ambition and lifelong thirst for learning as he strove to feed his eager mind.85

  Lincoln and Grant shared much common ground. They were both westerners, awkward in their movements, rough and uncouth in manners. Both had domineering fathers and ambitious wives. Both had married into slaveholding families that evinced insufferable conceit about their standing in the world. Both were fastidious and had grown up refusing to hunt or swear; Lincoln also eschewed tobacco, alcohol, and gambling. These two prairie figures also suffered the condescension of toplofty easterners. Criticism of Lincoln took a peculiarly harsh tone, editorial writers ridiculing him as a coarse country fellow. He had grown up in deeper poverty than Grant but had attained more security. Nevertheless, before succeeding as an attorney and a politician, he had bounced from job to job, serving as a riverboat man, store clerk, and blacksmith, a checkered past that made him loyal to people who had faltered in life. Even in the 1850s, Lincoln sometimes arrived in his law office wrapped in impenetrable gloom. Afflicted by nightmares, seized by periodic depression, he had an innate melancholy that contrasted sharply with his moods of uproarious mirth. While Lincoln seemed more extroverted than Grant, appearances could deceive. At heart, he was enough of a loner that his friend David Davis called him “the most reticent, secretive man I ever saw or expect to see.”86

  Lincoln was fascinated, if somewhat bemused, by Grant, whose unpretentious style he appreciated. He’d had his fill of egomaniacal generals, professional braggarts, and blowhards, such as McClellan and Hooker. One day, Lincoln’s secretary, William O. Stoddard, found his boss stretched out on a sofa and asked for his impressions of Grant.

  Well, Stoddard, I hardly know what to think of him altogether. I never saw him myself until he came here to take command. He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw . . . makes the least fuss of any man you ever knew. I believe, two or three times, he has been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here . . . The only evidence you have that he’s in any place is that he makes things git! Wherever he is, things move!87

  Lincoln’s one early brush with military service came briefly as a militia captain during the Black Hawk War of 1832, when, he admitted, he fended off more mosquitoes than bullets. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had undertaken a crash course in the art of warfare, borrowing military manuals from the Library of Congress and staying up late to devour them. He also studied reports from the field and quizzed every general and admiral he could find. The miracle was that Lincoln ended up a fine military strategist who was, in many ways, superior to the chief generals who preceded Grant. Not only was he free from West Point dogma but he wasn’t beholden to generals from the old regular army. His military sagacity was a triumph of native intelligence and supreme willpower. Lincoln had developed operating theories that dovetailed perfectly with Grant’s views: that the Union army should destroy Confederate armies, not take cities or territory; that it should exploit its massive resources by simultaneous attacks against the enemy across many fronts; that military decisions were inseparable from political goals; and that only one final, savage, protracted burst of fighting could end the conflict. The Lincoln whom Grant met in March 1864 was a more mature military thinker than the callow, fumbling president of April 1861 and fully prepared for the remorseless warfare patented by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.

  Lincoln was smart enough to see that he and Stanton had been forced to act as armchair generals, second-guessing military leaders in the field, whereas now was the time to recede. “You and I, Mr. Stanton, have been trying to boss this job, and we have not succeeded very well with it,” Lincoln said. “We have sent across the mountains for Mr. Grant, as Mrs. Grant calls him, to relieve us, and I think we had better leave him alone to do as he pleases.”88 Grant was the antithesis of everything Lincoln had deplored in his predecessors—as eager to fight a
s they were reluctant; as self-reliant as they were dependent; as uncomplaining as they were petulant. Grant did not badger or connive for more troops or scapegoat others. There would be no more grumbling from Lincoln about dilatory generals as Grant converted the Union army into a scene of ceaseless activity. With his zest for combat, Grant was itching for a fight.

  Lincoln felt a huge weight lifted from his shoulders. When William O. Stoddard asked whether Grant was the man to embolden the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln pointed his long forefinger at him and exclaimed, “Stoddard, Grant is the first general I’ve had! He’s a general! . . . You know how it has been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, he’d come to me with a plan of campaign and about as much as say, ‘Now I don’t believe I can do it, but if you say so, I’ll try it on,’ and so put the responsibility of the success or failure on me. They all wanted me to be the general. It isn’t so with Grant. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.”89

  By now Grant had piled up so many victories that any lingering prewar insecurity had vanished, and he wasn’t fazed by the vast power delegated to him. He and Lincoln developed a deep mutual trust that transcended petty egotism or rivalry. Grant was not only the most competent of Lincoln’s generals but the most trustworthy, following no covert agenda. “I was never interfered with,” Grant reminisced. “I had the fullest support of the President and Secretary of War. No general could want better backing, for the President was a man of great wisdom and moderation, the Secretary a man of enormous character and will.”90 The pieces were now in place for a gigantic turn in the direction of the stalemated eastern war.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  —

  Ulysses the Silent

  BY THE TIME Grant became the top general, the larger population of the North versus the South counted heavily in the war, making it a battle of attrition for northern commanders. Grant’s new command was colossal: he presided over twenty-one army corps, spread over eighteen military departments, with a total of 533,000 battle-ready troops. “Over this force,” wrote Badeau, “Grant was as absolutely supreme, as free to dictate its every movement, as any general . . . who ever took the field.”1 The North had the luxury of having more than twice as many men under age thirty as the Confederacy. Hence, Grant’s strategy depended on simple but gruesome math: the South could not replace fallen soldiers while the North could. A month before Grant came east, Lincoln had ordered an additional 500,000 men drafted for three-year service, assuming the war lasted that long. The week after his arrival, Lincoln summoned another 200,000 draftees. That February, in a sure sign of southern desperation, the Confederacy extended conscription to all white males between seventeen and fifty as the critical shortage of men extended to the officers’ corps. At the war’s outset, the Confederacy had been richly endowed with gifted generals, but here, too, the ranks were being rapidly thinned by the death of such irreplaceable commanders as Stonewall Jackson.

  Before Grant became chief general, the Union’s military effort had been fragmented and disjointed, deprived of a single supervisory mind to govern the whole enterprise. “Eastern and Western Armies were fighting independent battles, working together like a balky team where no two ever pull together,” Grant recalled.2 Now he mapped out an overarching design that encompassed all Union armies, marshaling their resources to capture Lee’s army in Virginia and Johnston’s in Georgia. This comprehensive approach, imparting a new sophistication to American warfare, was roundly applauded by Sherman. “That we are now all to act in a Common plan, Converging on a Common Center looks like Enlightened War,” he wired Grant.3 Such centralized decision making was facilitated by modern technology, notably the telegraph, which gave Grant instantaneous power to command multitudes, expanding his reach across the country.

  Unlike McClellan, Grant would pursue a policy of “desperate and continuous hard fighting,” inflicting massive casualties and applying unrelenting pressure.4 “I look upon the conquering of the organized armies of the enemy as being of vastly more importance than the mere acquisition of their territory,” he instructed his generals.5 Gone was the gentility of his predecessors. Adopting a modern style of combat, Grant would speed up the war’s tempo, following up on victories and creating a sense of unending activity. By concentrating his forces, he would create two or three large armies so that his soldiers would never be, in Rawlins’s words, “whipped in detail.”6 Most important, Grant would use his scattered forces simultaneously so the enemy could not shift troops to one threatened point without jeopardizing another. Union forces would pin down Confederate units that might otherwise have succored their colleagues. “Oh, yes! I see that,” Lincoln responded gleefully to this strategy. “As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does.”7 By spring 1864, the Confederacy had shrunk to a more compact area, allowing a greater concentration of Union forces on southern soil.

  For three years, the Army of the Potomac had fought the same army in the same places along the same Virginia rivers. Grant devised an ingenious plan to reorient its mission. He would take a large section of it, perhaps as many as sixty thousand men, march it down to North Carolina, and menace railroad links that sustained Lee’s army in Virginia. This would pull Lee’s men down into North Carolina, leaving Richmond exposed to a Union takeover. Halleck, better attuned to Lincoln’s and Stanton’s thinking, argued strenuously against this plan. He noted that Lee, instead of rising to the bait, might march instead on Washington, where there were only eighteen thousand troops, or lunge at Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia. Union forces in North Carolina might then have to hurry north to defend a helpless federal capital.

  In the end, Grant scrapped the plan as overly hazardous. He later speculated that it could have shortened the war by a year, but it would have entailed excessive risk, and he did not yet know firsthand the capacity of the Army of the Potomac. Instead he adopted a plan for advancing simultaneously on five fronts. He and Meade would make a direct frontal assault on Lee, attempting to drive him back toward Richmond, while Major General Benjamin Butler, stationed on the James River, southeast of Richmond, would advance on Lee from that direction, trapping him in a pincer movement. All the while General Franz Sigel would plow through the Shenandoah Valley, destroying granaries and rail lines that nourished the Confederate army. Meanwhile, Sherman would whirl through Georgia, taking Atlanta, slicing vital railway links to Lee, and draining the South’s interior of precious resources. Lincoln was thrilled by the new plan. “This concerted movement,” he told John Hay, was exactly what he had envisaged “so as to bring into action to our advantage our great superiority in numbers.”8

  For his fifth front, Grant hoped Nathaniel Banks would take aim at Mobile. As a matter of foreign policy relating to Mexico and France, however, Banks was directed that winter to occupy a portion of Texas. In April, he conducted a campaign up the Red River in Louisiana that was, in Sherman’s blunt appraisal, “one damn blunder from beginning to end.”9 By the time he suffered a catastrophic defeat in Mansfield, Louisiana, on April 8, Banks had delayed too long to hazard the move on Mobile Bay that Grant coveted. While Grant wanted to have Banks relieved, he was well connected, a personal friend of the president’s, and something of a political untouchable. Therefore, instead of dismissing him outright, Grant deftly asked Lincoln to move Major General Edward R. S. Canby into a field command, leaving Banks in administrative control of the Department of the Gulf, thus limiting any damage he might commit.

  Grant had a pronounced preference for professional soldiers, and political generals, such as Banks and Butler, were the bane of his life, a special curse on the Union cause. He was furious when they tried to circumvent him by lobbying Congress for more troops, rather than the War Department. “What interfered with our officers more than anything else was allowing themselves a political bias,” Grant was to comment. “Th
is is fatal to a soldier. War and politics are so different.”10 Although he wouldn’t have stated it quite so baldly, he would likely have agreed with Halleck’s statement that April: “It seems but little better than murder to give important commands to such men as Banks, Butler, McClernand, Sigel, and Lew Wallace.”11 Convinced that many generals (not just political ones) were inept, Grant recommended to Lincoln that he fire more than a hundred notorious offenders, and he was willing to take the heat for this move. Lincoln, on the other hand, had to ensure political support for the war, not to mention his reelection, and couldn’t afford to create so many enemies at once. In the end, he fired only a few of the people Grant singled out for punishment.

  In a mark of his magnanimity and professionalism, Grant tried to restore to commands high-ranking generals consigned to inactive roles, including George McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, John Frémont, and Don Carlos Buell. His motivation went beyond a shortage of capable generals and included a desire to unify the North behind the war: “The country belonged as well to the Democrats as to us, and I did not believe in a Republican war.”12 In the last analysis, resistance came from the disgraced, embittered generals themselves, who “were not in a humor to be conciliated,” Grant wrote. “I soon saw my plan was not feasible, and gave it up.”13

  One of Grant’s major innovations was to maximize the number of people on active duty in the field rather than having them man garrisons or protect supply lines. There would be no more shirkers or laggards; everyone would mobilize for war. In a controversial reform, Grant stripped troops from Washington and uprooted startled desk officers. “In all the northern states are many troops, kept mainly that some of our Major Generals might have commands in Peace Departments commensurate with their rank,” Rawlins explained. “These are all being gathered up and brought to the front.”14 Grant was especially eager to transfer black soldiers from the western theater of war and deepen their involvement in the Virginia fighting.