by Ron Chernow
In time, Badeau emerged as the authorized historian of Grant’s military campaigns and was mesmerized by the huge riddle of Grant’s personality. He detected a subtle tension between the inner and outer man, a “suppressed intensity,” while “the whole man was a marvel of simplicity, a powerful nature veiled in the plainest possible exterior.”59 Long before Grant penned his Memoirs, Badeau noted his concise style of expression: “In utterance he was slow and sometimes embarrassed, but the words were well-chosen, never leaving the remotest doubt of what he intended to convey.”60 Grant’s thoughts could seem closed and impenetrable until battle came and his entire mind sprang into action. Then his “utterance was prompt, the ideas were rapid, the judgment was decisive . . . the whole man became intense as it were with a white heat.”61
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ONCE NAMED LIEUTENANT GENERAL, Grant knew his foremost objective was to vanquish Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, which he deemed “the strongest, best appointed and most confident Army in the South.”62 The confrontation would be squeezed into the well-worn, hundred-mile strip between Washington and Richmond that had witnessed impassioned fighting for three years. On April 9, Grant focused Meade’s thinking with a crystal-clear directive: “Lee’s Army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes there you will go also.”63 Grant’s only doubt was whether to cross the Rapidan River above or below Lee’s camp. His final decision represented a political no less than a military strategy: he would cross the Rapidan above Lee, cutting him “off from all chance of ignoring Richmond and going North on a raid.”64 Grant knew Lincoln and Stanton would be relieved that the Army of the Potomac, while proceeding south, would block any escape route by which Lee could strike at Washington.
The war’s climactic phase came down to a fateful showdown between Grant and Lee. For the jinxed Army of the Potomac, Lee was more than a brilliant Confederate general: he was a man endowed with almost supernatural powers, having decisively licked Pope at the second battle of Bull Run, Burnside at Fredericksburg, and Hooker at Chancellorsville. To anyone who cared to listen, Rawlins blustered that Meade had already defeated Lee at Gettysburg. The New York Times interjected a timely reminder that “if it be true that Grant has never fought Lee, it is equally true that Lee has never met Grant.”65 Still, the fearsome aura of Lee haunted the Army of the Potomac. In New York, George Templeton Strong noted that Grant’s path was “whitened by the bones of popular reputations that perished because their defunct owners did not know how to march through Virginia to Richmond.”66
Southern soldiers consoled themselves that Grant’s six predecessors had foundered against Lee and fooled themselves into imagining that the western theater of war, where Grant had flourished, was a less severe testing ground. Confederate general Evander M. Law said the “universal verdict” among rebel soldiers asserted that Grant “was no strategist and that he relied almost entirely upon the brute force of numbers for success.”67 Awaiting the spring campaign, one of Lee’s officers smugly assured his family that Grant would “shortly come to grief if he attempts to repeat the tactics in Virginia which proved so successful in Mississippi.”68
The lone Confederate officer warning against dangerous complacency was Grant’s old friend James Longstreet. When one of Lee’s officers said Grant could be easily defeated, Longstreet countered any such premature gloating. “I was in the corps of cadets with [Grant] at West Point for three years,” he objected. “I was present at his wedding, I served in the same army with him in Mexico, I have observed his methods of warfare in the West, and I believe I know him through and through; and I tell you that we cannot afford to underrate him . . . that man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of this war.”69
Facing such self-confident foes, Grant’s main task was partly psychological: to shatter the Lee mystique, bury the bad memories of Union defeats in Virginia, and stop his own men from magnifying Lee’s powers in their minds. While Grant respected Lee, he was never intimidated by him and rated Joseph Johnston the superior general. In his Memoirs, Grant referred to Lee as “the acknowledged ablest general in the Confederate army.”70 In private, though, his criticisms of Lee grew more waspish as the postwar notion took hold that Lee had fought with elegant finesse while he, a brutal plodder, fell back on sheer numbers. “Lee was a good man, a fair commander, who had everything in his favor,” Grant recollected in 1879 with a touch of wounded vanity. “He was a man who needed sunshine. He was supported by the unanimous voice of the South . . . Everything he did was right. He was treated like a demi-god. Our generals had a hostile press, lukewarm friends, and a public opinion outside.”71 If Grant sounded grudging, Lee reciprocated the sentiment. When queried after the war about the best Union general, Lee gave his highest accolade to a man thoroughly derided by historians: “McClellan, by all odds.”72 In a wartime letter to one son, Lee subscribed to the stereotypical southern view of Grant: “His talent and strategy consists in accumulating overwhelming numbers.”73
Born in Stratford Hall, Virginia, Lee had a blue-blooded pedigree. His father, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, had distinguished himself as a cavalry officer under George Washington before becoming a Virginia governor and congressman. Reckless, improvident, Henry Lee was addicted to speculation and ended up imprisoned for debt. This scandalous history left his son with a stern sense of rectitude and a burning desire to rehabilitate the family name. At West Point, he received not a single demerit and graduated second in his class, enabling him to enter the prestigious Army Corps of Engineers. Both in the Mexican War and in engineering projects on the Mississippi River, he compiled an outstanding record. Adding to his social prominence was his marriage to Mary Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. From Mary’s father, the couple inherited a stately Arlington mansion, stuffed with George Washington memorabilia and worked by nearly two hundred Custis slaves. For three years, Robert served as West Point’s superintendent, affording him a chance to study closely Napoleon’s campaigns.
A handsome man with a gray beard, the fifty-seven-year-old Lee was proudly patrician with impeccable dignity and unshakable poise. He belonged to that breed of generals whose command over soldiers emanates from their firm command over themselves. An abstemious man who seldom drank, he was not likely to sympathize with Grant’s history with alcohol. Unlike Grant, he had a dignity that discouraged familiarity and could seem aloof. For all that, he shared many traits with Grant. Though more formal, Lee also wore simple uniforms and didn’t flaunt his rank; was motivated by an unyielding sense of duty; showed a minute attention to detail; radiated confidence even in the darkest moments; had tremendous tenacity in battle; and was essentially reserved. In desperate situations, both Lee and Grant showed daring and imagination and never wanted to retreat. Both were reluctant warriors who seemed happiest with their families.
It is often said that Lee defected to the Confederate cause not from ideological support for slavery or secession but from duty to his native Virginia. He acknowledged that slavery was “a moral and political evil,” but he also exhibited a paternalistic form of racism that condoned it. Slavery, he claimed, was “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race . . . blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare and lead them to better things.”74 He hoped slavery would wither away thanks to Christian charity and contested those who sought to abolish it through political action.
So highly regarded was Lee at the war’s onset that he was offered command of the U.S. Army with the rank of major general, but couldn’t bring himself to accept it. “I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States,” he stated before resigning from the federal army to return to Virginia.75 He was distraught over the Union’s dismemberment. Throwing in his lot with the South, he would later be placed in command of all armed forces in Virginia. His maiden military effo
rts in western Virginia faltered, and he was thought such a rule-book commander that one southern politician groused that Lee was “too much of a red-tapist to be an effective commander in the field.”76 Not yet burnished with victories, he was skewered in the southern press with a spate of nicknames—“Granny Lee,” “King of Spades,” the “Great Entrencher”—that mocked his cautious nature. Before long, Lee became military adviser to Jefferson Davis and didn’t return to the battlefield until June 1862 when he took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia. While that army had lingering doubts about their new leader’s appetite for risk, one officer vouched for Lee’s courage: “His name might be Audacity. He will take more desperate chances, and take them quicker, than any other general in this country, North or South.”77 At Fredericksburg, Second Manassas, and Chancellorsville, Lee amply vindicated that faith.
In the contest between Grant and Lee, Grant had the edge in manpower and resources, but Lee boasted many other advantages. He fought mostly on home turf in Virginia, enjoying intimate knowledge of the geography, not to mention a spy network of local residents. In the upcoming campaign, he would fight on the defensive, throwing up fortifications at a time of major advances in such warfare, and Grant would be repeatedly stymied by them. The replacement of smoothbore weapons by more accurate rifles favored soldiers hunkered down behind barriers. “We had the advantage in the Virginia campaign of being on the inside and knowing [the] ground,” said James Longstreet. “We could concentrate double the troops in half the time that Grant required.”78 Military theory taught that offensive forces had to be up to three times larger than dug-in defensive ones, meaning that Grant’s numerical advantage can easily be overstated. “The army operating against the South . . . had to protect its lines of communication with the North, from which all supplies had to come to the front,” Grant observed. “Every foot of road had to be guarded by troops stationed at convenient distances apart.”79 In the two notable instances where Lee fought offensive operations on unfamiliar soil—Antietam and Gettysburg—he suffered crushing setbacks. By the time he encountered Grant, he had renounced broad offensive strikes.
There is no question that Robert E. Lee was a masterly tactician in individual battles, showing a keen relish for war. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he famously commented at Fredericksburg. “We should grow too fond of it.”80 Accustomed to winning gigantic gambles, he displayed an uncanny ability to intuit the responses of opposing generals, projecting himself into their inmost thoughts and figuring out what they would hazard next. Like Grant, he had lightning-fast reflexes and could improvise in the heat of combat, jumping on enemy mistakes. He also had terrific rapport with even lowly soldiers, merging them into a single fighting unit that moved with speed and agility. Sometimes, as at Gettysburg, Lee became too wedded to a battle plan and was deaf to warning voices. Sometimes he trusted too much to subordinates, presiding over them with a light touch and giving vague instructions, but such flaws were inseparable from his deep soldierly bond with his officers.
If Lee was master of the individual battle, it was Grant who excelled in grand strategy. For all his brilliance as a general, Lee’s vision was narrowly focused on his beloved Virginia. In one tearful outburst at an 1862 Confederate cabinet meeting, he blurted out, “Richmond must not be given up; it shall not be given up!”81 His attachment to this real estate was perhaps more personal than strategic. Lee had no real plan to end the war other than to prolong it and make the cost bloody enough that the North would weary of the effort. Grant, by contrast, had a comprehensive strategy for how to capture and defeat the southern army, putting a conclusive end to the contest. The caricature of Lee as elegant and faultless whereas Grant was a clumsy butcher misses the point that Grant had much the harder task: he had to whittle down the Confederate army and smash it irrevocably, whereas Lee needed only to inflict massive pain on the northern army and stay alive to fight another day.
Grant was the strategic genius produced by the Civil War. He set clear goals, communicated them forcefully, and instilled them in his men. While Lee stuck to Virginia, Grant grasped the war in its totality, masterminding the movements of all Union armies. It was Grant who best apprehended the strategic interactions of the eastern and western theaters. The major victories of Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas in 1864–65 would occur under Grant’s direct supervision, yet he is frequently denied credit for his overall guidance of the Union war effort. His epic confrontation with Lee in 1864–65 was just one facet of his farsighted leadership. “Grant’s strategy embraced a continent; Lee’s a small State,” wrote Sherman. “Grant’s ‘logistics’ were to supply and transport armies thousands of miles, where Lee was limited to hundreds.”82
By April 1864, Lee had been worn down by protracted warfare, suffering lumbago attacks the previous winter and probably experiencing the early stages of heart disease. He hoped upcoming battles against the Army of the Potomac would be therapeutic, stating in early April that “we have got to whip them, we must whip them, and it has already made me better to think of it.”83 Lee’s army was beset by extreme shortages of meat, bread, clothing, shoes, and blankets, forcing him to operate in a circumscribed sphere. His most pressing need was for manpower, requiring the expansion of conscription to almost all able-bodied southern males. As John Jones, a War Department clerk in Richmond, wrote, “Old men, disabled soldiers, and ladies are to be relied on for clerical duty, nearly all others to take the field.”84 In his diary, Jones described the sight of conscripts in chains being carted off to fight for Lee and the bleak atmosphere that reigned in a Confederate capital forced to ration everything: “The FAMINE is still advancing, and his gaunt proportions loom up daily, as he approaches with gigantic strides . . . Every day we have accounts of robberies, the preceding night, of cows, pigs, bacon, flour.”85 Lee tried to set an austere example, allowing meat to be served only twice weekly to his staff. “His ordinary dinner consists of a head of cabbage, boiled in salt water, and a pone of corn bread,” Jones wrote.86
On March 31, Grant left Washington aboard a steamer and journeyed to Old Point Comfort, Virginia, to confer with Major General Benjamin F. Butler at Fort Monroe. Grant brought an entourage that included Julia, Rawlins, Comstock, and Congressman Washburne. Placed at the mouth of the James River, the stone citadel seemed an ideal place for Grant to discuss with Butler the part his Army of the James would enact in the forthcoming drama. Whether Butler would be his ally or nemesis was to preoccupy Grant in the coming months.
Butler had legions of both admirers and enemies. Shrewd and scheming, he was half reformer, half demagogue. Born in New Hampshire, he lost his father early and spent his adolescence in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his widowed mother ran a boardinghouse. After being rejected for West Point, Butler graduated from Waterville College, earned rich fees as a Boston lawyer, and championed progressive reforms, including a shorter week for blue-collar workers. While a Democrat in the Massachusetts legislature, he sank money into a lucrative woolen mill in Lowell. After Fort Sumter, as Lincoln wooed “political generals” from the Democratic side, he named Butler a major general of volunteers, even though he had actively championed Jefferson Davis for the Democratic nomination in 1860 and voted for John C. Breckinridge. Before the war, Butler had little time for abolitionists, cheering the Dred Scott decision. Although he lost the Massachusetts gubernatorial race in 1860, it established him as a political force. Lincoln executed a delicate balancing act with Butler, keeping him happy while trying to deny him control of a major Union army. He was the sort of wily politician whom people learned to handle gingerly.
The short and pudgy Butler had a notably ugly face that usually wore an imperious scowl. He had a broad, bald pate, with lank hairs falling to the side, a walrus mustache, and a strange, cross-eyed stare that boded ill for anyone who defied him. His lids drooped heavily, as did bags below his eyes, so his eyeballs seemed to recede into thick nests of flesh. Mark Twain once said Butler was so “drearily homely�
�� that when he smiled, it was “like the breaking up of a hard winter.”87 One soldier, revolted by Butler’s unsightly form, wrote of him: “Call before your mental vision a sack full of muck . . . and then imagine four enormous German sausages fixed to the extremities of the sack in lieu of arms and legs.”88
In 1862, when he acted as military governor of New Orleans, Butler’s rule was so draconian that residents maligned him as “Beast Butler.” He gained lasting infamy when he issued an order that local females, who were emptying chamber pots on passing Union soldiers, should be treated as “women of the town plying their avocations.”89 Whether true or not, an aura of corruption pervaded his New Orleans tenure. Incensed at his alleged misdeeds, Jefferson Davis issued a proclamation that any Confederate officer who collared Butler would be entitled to hang him posthaste. Despite southern abuse, many northern observers hailed Butler for efficient, even honest, management of the town, in addition to organizing black regiments. Northern liberals also applauded early in the war when Butler coined the term “contraband” to cover slaves who defected to Union lines, providing a legal rationale for protecting them when the Fugitive Slave Act was still in force.
As general in chief, Grant hoped to oust Butler until Lincoln and Stanton made clear that they could not alienate so powerful and vindictive a politician. Perhaps left unspoken was that Butler harbored presidential ambitions and might assay a run against Lincoln in the fall. Grant had grudging respect for Butler as an enterprising general of “courage, honor and sincere convictions” but was painfully aware that he lacked a “military education.”90
In the fall of 1863, Lincoln elevated Butler to command what became the Army of the James. Grant now gave him instructions for this army as he sought to harmonize all military actions in Virginia. While Grant and the Army of the Potomac would drive from northern Virginia toward Richmond, he wanted Butler and his thirty-thousand-man force to travel up the James River, establish a base at City Point, then strike at Richmond’s soft underbelly from the southeast. Grant was realistic enough to know he could not vanquish Lee’s army all at once. Rather he would pound away at it, eroding its strength, and finally bottle it up inside Richmond, which he would then encircle. Eventually he sought to unite his army and Butler’s on the James River. Grant wanted Butler to take Petersburg, due south of Richmond, and slash away at its railway links that connected Richmond to Petersburg and points south and west. Once cut off from these sources of supply, Lee and the Confederate government could not survive.