Grant
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Despite the carnage, Lincoln never wavered in support of Grant or doubted his strategy. Two weeks after Cold Harbor, at a Philadelphia banquet, a gaunt, hollow-cheeked Lincoln quoted Shakespeare, telling listeners it could fairly be said “the heavens are hung in black.”64 Nevertheless, he refused to withdraw his belief in Grant. “I have never been in the habit of making predictions in regard to the war, but I am almost tempted to make one . . . If I were to hazard it, it is this: That Grant is this evening . . . in a position from whence he will never be dislodged until Richmond is taken.”65
Enough people shared Lincoln’s high regard for Grant that when Republicans—now called the National Union Party to garner more political support—convened their convention in Baltimore on June 7–8, Missouri’s delegation cast its twenty-two votes for Grant. Before the final vote was announced, delegates switched their votes to Lincoln to make his nomination unanimous. Grant discouraged such political jockeying and tried to dispel the idea that he yearned for office. “I am not a candidate for any office,” he quipped, “but I would like to be mayor of Galena long enough to fix the sidewalks, especially the one reaching my house.”66 Grant’s apolitical stance surely endeared him to Lincoln. When entertained by a brass band after his renomination, the president gave him an unqualified endorsement: “What we want, still more than Baltimore conventions or presidential elections, is success under General Grant.”67 To strengthen Union sentiment in the border states and among War Democrats, the convention picked Andrew Johnson, the Democratic military governor of Tennessee, as its vice presidential nominee, a choice fertile with consequences for Grant’s political future.
Everyone knew the presidential race would pivot on battlefield events. Grant, Sherman, and their fellow Union generals had to convince skeptical voters that Lincoln should be reelected and that the current military strategy would succeed. The Democrats, slated to gather in August, planned to nominate someone on a platform of a negotiated peace acceptable to the South. Scattered voices feared Grant would be that Democratic nominee and cater to the Copperhead vote. Grant had no such plans. The Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill made a prediction to Elihu Washburne that proved startlingly accurate, saying if Grant remained lieutenant general and did not run, he would retain Republican Party loyalty “and four years hence will be their candidate and President for eight years. Nothing more certain.”68
Before Grant left Cold Harbor, Mathew Brady, or someone in his studio, took a classic photo of the lieutenant general at his headquarters. Wearing rumpled, baggy pants and an unbuttoned coat, he stands with one arm resting against a pine tree, the other fist poised akimbo at his waist. His hat is pushed back slightly on his head while one foot is thrust forward. The contracted brow reflects the grim intensity of the Overland Campaign. It is an unusually candid shot of Grant, who seems a touch restless and unsettled, while still presenting the tough Grant the world knew: flinty and undeterred by setbacks. Although the photo was taken a little more than a week after Cold Harbor, he hardly looks defeated.
At this juncture, Grant executed a stunning volte-face in strategy. As shown by his prewar business speculations, he loved to gamble. He knew Lee would never emerge from his fortifications and that further frontal assaults would generate a suicidal rate of casualties, leaving him no choice but to adopt the slower course of a siege. It would be less romantic work, for which he was temperamentally unsuited, but it struck no less terror into Lee, who knew he couldn’t survive a siege indefinitely. Grant had driven Lee into a box from which he could not escape easily as he defended Richmond and Petersburg.
Grant worried Lee might swoop down on Butler and the Army of the James before he could rescue them. For that reason, he elected to make a swift, secret movement to his left, taking his 115,000 men to a point south of the James River. There he would hook up with Butler’s forces and be supplied by water. Grant had envisioned this from the beginning. If he could seize the vital railroad junction of Petersburg, twenty miles below Richmond, he could sever southern railroads that sustained Lee’s army. With the surrounding countryside stripped bare of supplies, Lee depended heavily on produce sent by rail. As the hub for five railroads, Petersburg was the crucial portal for Richmond. If Petersburg fell, Richmond and Lee’s army fell, and the war would hasten to a speedy conclusion. For that reason, before moving his army south, Grant sent cavalry west under Sheridan to wreck the Virginia Central Railroad, eliminating that supply source for Lee. To complete his isolation, Grant ordered David Hunter’s force in the Shenandoah Valley to disable the James River Canal, another wellspring nourishing the Confederate army.
By June 12, the weather had turned cool and windy. That night, after dark, Grant began to march his army toward the James. Staff officers noticed the tense way Grant relit cigars constantly and reacted with monosyllables. “Yes, yes,” or “Go on—go on.”69 On this splendid night full of moonlight, the tramp of feet lifted swirling dust that soon obscured the stars. By the next morning, in a logistical masterpiece, the Army of the Potomac had vacated the Cold Harbor trenches. Lee was completely fooled by the exodus and thunderstruck to discover that Grant’s entire army of 115,000 men had vanished in the night. While he had a hunch that Grant would swerve toward the James River, he could not be certain. To confound Lee further, Grant ordered some units to conduct diversionary feints toward Richmond.
Meanwhile, Grant’s main army crossed the Chickahominy River and reached the formidable James River barrier. Grant needed to take his massive army across a waterway two thousand feet wide and eighty-four feet deep. To Julia, he described the operation as “one of the most perilous movements ever executed by a large army” since it involved “crossing two rivers over which the enemy has bridges and railroads whilst we have bridges to improvise.” Ever the optimist, he shook off the settled gloom of Cold Harbor. “I am in excellent health and feel no doubt about holding the enemy in much greater alarm than I ever felt in my life.”70
On the morning of June 14, Grant’s engineers began to span the majestic James with a pontoon bridge measuring 2,100 feet in length and 13 feet in width, making it the longest such bridge in military annals. It was anybody’s guess whether such a lengthy bridge, buoyed by 101 floats, could withstand tidal currents or gusts sweeping inland from Chesapeake Bay. Miraculously, the entire bridge was completed shortly after midnight. The next day, his hands joined behind his back, Grant gazed silently from a bluff on the river’s north side as cavalry and artillery trains moved rapidly across the river. “He wore no sword or other outward trapping except his buttons and plain shoulder straps,” one soldier had observed a day earlier. “His pants were tucked inside of a pair of long dusty boots and his whole attire looked dirty & travel stained.”71
Grant officiated at one of the war’s most stirring spectacles. On this cloudless day, brilliant sunshine sparkled off the water, gun barrels, and cannon trundling across the bridge. To the crisp beat of marching bands, troops stepped briskly onto ferry boats that plied the river at a dizzying pace. Nearby gunboats kept a watchful eye on any threatening enemy movements. Before the operation was over, an enormous herd of cattle swam across the river. From the capital, Lincoln applauded Grant, telegraphing at 7 a.m. on June 15: “I begin to see it. You will succeed—God bless you all!”72 By around midnight the next day, the last remnants of Grant’s army had crossed the river. Incredibly, Lee still had no idea Grant’s army had slipped across the James in an operation so stupendous even one Confederate general dubbed it “the most brilliant stroke in all the campaigns of the war.”73
On the day the pontoon bridge was laid down, Grant and Rawlins traveled by steamer up the James to Bermuda Hundred to consult with Ben Butler. As a general, Butler hadn’t covered himself with glory, but as a noted Democratic politician, he was too useful for Lincoln to scrap. Grant found Butler covering the Appomattox River with another amphibious bridge to carry his men on a raid into Petersburg, only six miles away. Grant hoped to take Peters
burg before Lee was alerted to his whereabouts.
On the evening of June 15, Baldy Smith and Winfield Scott Hancock achieved startling success when they overran the outer defensive rim of northeast Petersburg, seizing rifle pits, artillery, and several hundred prisoners. General Beauregard fielded a meager force to defend the town. Had Smith marched straight into the defenseless city, he might have scored a radical breakthrough and altered the war’s course. Grant always believed that with such a move, “Lee would have at once been obliged to abandon Richmond.”74 Instead Smith tarried, spent the night in the same spot, then allowed his men a leisurely breakfast the next morning. He felt poorly, while Hancock was still ailing from an old Gettysburg wound. As Beauregard later reflected, “Petersburg at that hour was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it.”75 The instant Lee learned of the attack by telegraph, he began loading troops onto railroad cars and sped them to the imperiled city. By June 16, rebel reinforcements filtered into Petersburg and soon reclaimed trenches taken by federal forces.
That day, Grant toured captured areas and was impressed by the strength of the Petersburg citadel, with its thick earthworks, deep moats, sharpened tree branches, and tangled telegraph wires. That night Union forces resumed their attacks, fighting in moonglow, but the main opportunity had already been squandered and only sporadic gains were recorded. Perhaps distracted by the James River crossing, Grant was not as deeply engaged at Petersburg as he should have been. True to his hardheaded style, he launched recurring attacks against the enemy, but lost more than twelve thousand men in four days without prying open Confederate defenses.
At noon on June 18, Meade ventured a last attempt to marshal his men against Petersburg’s earthworks, but it miscarried. The haggard men had tired of blunt operations against the enemy and balked at more punishment. As the artillerist Charles Wainwright complained, “The attack this afternoon was a fiasco of the worst kind. I trust it will be the last attempt at this most absurd way of attacking entrenchments by a general advance in line . . . even the stupidest private now knows that it cannot succeed.”76 As the day progressed, Lee and his army appeared in full force, rendering further Union efforts futile.
Coming on the heels of Cold Harbor, the dismal failure at Petersburg disheartened Grant’s soldiers. “Why have these lives been sacrificed?” Charles Francis Adams Jr. wondered. “Grant has pushed his Army to the extreme limit of human endurance.”77 Recognizing his men’s exhaustion, Grant bowed to their human limitations: “We will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein has been struck.”78 The Army of the Potomac had sacrificed sixty-five thousand men killed, wounded, or missing since crossing the Rapidan on May 4, far exceeding anything experienced in the past. Averse to more frontal assaults, Grant now changed the war’s character in Virginia, setting his men to work with pick and ax to construct defenses as expansive as those that guarded Petersburg. Whenever Grant extended his lines, Lee would have to match him and vice versa. The two would be locked into a partial siege of the city, a deadly stalemate that would test the nerves of both commanders. Grant would try to deny Lee’s army freedom to strike and maneuver, guaranteeing bloody warfare at close range.
Grant established his headquarters on a high bluff over the James at the boat landing known as City Point, which soon evolved into the nucleus of the war effort. He selected the spot because it marked the crossroads of the James and Appomattox Rivers; provided easy water routes to Washington; sat at the eastern terminus of an important railway line; and stood ten miles northeast of Petersburg and twenty miles southeast of Richmond, enabling him to strike either city. Everybody commented on the spot’s scenic beauty and the panoramic vista of river traffic. Within a year, the sleepy village would be transformed into one of the world’s busiest ports. Grant attributed much of the logistical wizardry to Rufus Ingalls: “Through his supervision the Army of the Potomac has been supplied in a manner no army in the world has ever been supplied before.”79 Not only did City Point wharves teem with ships, but it had barracks, a hospital, railroad yards, fields of tents, bakeries, and a post office. Grant erected a signal tower 175 feet high, and Fred remembered mounting it with his father “to look upon the spires of Petersburg and Richmond.”80
Initially Grant worked from a hospital tent atop the bluff, shaded by old trees, before moving to the middle of a humble row of log cabins. Stationed outside his door to ward off assassins was Ely Parker, a revolver at his side. Security was compromised by a plague of sightseers who descended as Grant became a local tourist attraction. Visitors reached him by mounting a long wooden staircase rising from the steamboat landing. This more fixed abode would allow Julia to spend a goodly portion of the summer with Grant, restoring a modicum of normality to their lives. On two occasions she went off to Burlington, New Jersey, to arrange schooling for their children, but she was otherwise able to provide emotional sustenance for her husband. That spring she had stayed with Colonel Dent in St. Louis as she grew accustomed to life without slaves. “Our colored people had all left,” she recalled, “but their places were readily filled by German and French men and women, who were most excellent substitutes . . . We had a great deal of company, and then it was we missed the old family servants.”81 However brief the time allotted to family matters, Grant followed his children’s affairs closely. The day after Cold Harbor, he wrote to eight-year-old Nellie, encouraging her study of German and hoping Fred would learn French to ease his way into West Point.
The northern public, having withstood multiple disappointments, was skittish about what was to come. Hoping to assess the state of Grant’s army, Abraham Lincoln, clad in black, arrived with his son Tad at City Point on June 21. He had seldom strayed far from the White House during the war. With its sorrowful gaze, Lincoln’s face registered inner emotion and was the opposite of Grant’s poker face. Nevertheless, the two men enjoyed a fine rapport and Lincoln was warmly deferential toward Grant. When they met at the wharf, Porter remembered, “the President came down from the upper deck . . . and reaching out his long, angular arm, he wrung General Grant’s hand vigorously, and held it in his for some time, while he uttered in rapid words his congratulations” for what Grant had done since their last meeting.82 With a light touch, Lincoln conveyed that he came to learn, not to lecture. “I don’t expect I can do any good, and in fact I’m afraid I may do harm, but I’ll just put myself under your orders and if you find me doing anything wrong just send me right away.”83 Grant cheerfully agreed.
When they sat down for lunch, Lincoln told of the rough journey aboard his steamer, confessed to having been seasick, and complained of an upset stomach. “Try a glass of champagne, Mr. President,” an officer said. “That is always a certain cure for seasickness.” Lincoln’s face crinkled with humor. “No, my friend,” he replied. “I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very stuff.”84 Lincoln’s witty retort provoked laughter. Aware of Grant’s reputation for drinking, he had gracefully sidestepped the issue. After lunch, when Grant suggested the president might want to ride out to see Union troops at Petersburg, Lincoln cottoned to the idea. “Why, yes; I had fully intended to go out and take a look at the brave fellows who have fought their way down to Petersburg in this wonderful campaign, and I am ready to start at any time.”85
Grant asked Lincoln to borrow his large bay horse Cincinnati, while he rode the small black pony Jeff Davis. Still attired in black, Lincoln wore his trademark headgear, a tall silk hat, which was promptly knocked off by a tree branch as they galloped along. The weather was so dry the president was coated with dust when they reached the Union line. “As he had no straps,” wrote Porter, the president’s “trousers gradually worked up above his ankles, and gave him the appearance of a country farmer riding into town wearing his Sunday clothes.”86 Lincoln’s unexpected presence created a sensation among the soldiers, who cheered him lustily as he arrived to lilting band music. He had now drawn near enough
to Petersburg to see church steeples in the distance. No mean politician himself, Grant suggested that Lincoln might want to see the black troops who had behaved gallantly during Baldy Smith’s recent raid on Petersburg. “Oh, yes,” Lincoln replied. “I want to take a look at those boys . . . I was opposed on nearly every side when I first favored the raising of colored regiments; but they have proved their efficiency, and I am glad they have kept pace with the white troops in the recent assaults.”87
When Lincoln reached the camp of black soldiers, he witnessed a scene of overpowering emotion. The men who lined up two deep on each side of the road laughed, cried, and cheered, sending up hosannas for their beloved liberator. “They crowded about him and fondled his horse; some of them kissed his hands,” wrote Porter, “while others ran off crying in triumph to their comrades that they had touched his clothes.”88 Badeau told Edwin Booth that the black troops “had never seemed so to realize the reality of their freedom as when they saw this incarnation or representative of it.”89 Lincoln peeled off layers of emotional reserve. Tears stood in his eyes as he bowed to the black soldiers, and his voice broke as he thanked them for their rapturous reception.90
That evening, Lincoln sat outside Grant’s tent and unwound from the tensions of war, regaling Grant and his staff with humorous anecdotes, employing laughter to relieve the gloom that so often enveloped him. According to Porter, he “sat on a low camp-chair, and wound his legs around each other as if in an effort to get them out of the way, and with his long arms he accompanied what he said with all sorts of odd gestures.”91 Lincoln ate at a common table with the officers and fraternized informally with them in the same egalitarian spirit as Grant. After his frustrated dealings with a parade of intractable generals, Lincoln relaxed in Grant’s amiable company and capable hands.