by Ron Chernow
With the election safely behind him, Grant permitted himself a flying visit to Burlington, bringing in tow Samuel Beckwith to guarantee uninterrupted telegraphic contact with his army. His train pulled into the Burlington station after dark, and he was flustered and embarrassed that he had no idea where to go. “They say I live here,” he confessed to two men on the platform, “but I don’t know where.” When the local police chief caught a glimpse of him under a lantern, he exclaimed, “Thunder, it’s General Grant,” and escorted him to his house on Wood Street. Because Grant had no key, he rapped at the door like a stranger, even though it was past midnight. From an upstairs porch, Julia called down: “Is that you, Ulyss?” When he replied, “Yes,” she came down and admitted him to his new home.85
After a brief stay, Grant collected Julia, the children, and Badeau and stopped at the Astor House in Manhattan. For reasons of modesty and possibly security, Grant issued no formal announcement of his arrival—Badeau asked the local press to ignore him—yet the moment he showed up, he caused a sensation. Hundreds of admirers encircled his hotel, staring up at his windows, trying to spot him. When he entered the hotel dining room, arm in arm with the New York governor-elect Reuben Fenton, he received a foretaste of the pandemonium that would greet his postwar appearances. People leapt on chairs and tables, roaring, cheering. Garbed in his threadbare blue army overcoat, Grant toured the city streets for the first time in two decades until crowds recognized him, making strolling impossible. He also rode a streetcar, hanging on a strap and unable to sit down because no passenger believed his escorts that this really was General Grant. As prominent figures trooped to his hotel, Badeau had fresh cause to extol Grant’s unassuming demeanor. “He is a more unselfish man than [George] Washington, and is free from vanity,” he wrote. “I have never seen anyone comparable to him in public life . . . Hundreds of years hence, some actor will be studying his character and ‘making up’ for him instead of Hamlet.”86 For the more cynical Rawlins, Grant seemed to engage in a gaudy show of fake modesty, stage-managed by the limelight-craving Badeau, and he grumbled that Grant should never have permitted Badeau to “ostentatiously announce his desire that his presence should not be noticed.”87
On his way back to City Point, Grant stayed at the Willard Hotel to confer with Lincoln. Stanton felt poorly from overwork and, in the election’s aftermath, some enemies schemed to oust him. Lincoln promised Grant that, if any change occurred, he would be consulted about his successor. Gruff though Stanton was, Grant transcended petty politics and judged the war secretary on his true merits. “I doubt very much whether you could select as efficient a Secretary of War as the present incumbent,” Grant assured Lincoln. “He is not only a man of untiring energy and devotion to duty, but even his worst enemies never for a moment doubt his personal integrity and the purity of his motives.”88 With election-year politics over, Grant submitted a list of eight major generals and thirty-three brigadiers whom he wanted drummed out of the service. Some were political generals, including Franz Sigel, John McClernand, and Carl Schurz, whose military ability Grant had long questioned, and he would pay dearly after the war for their enmity. Some names on the list frankly surprised Lincoln. “Why, I find that lots of the officers on this list are very close friends of yours; do you want them all dropped?” Grant’s response was patriotic: “That’s very true, Mr. President; but my personal friends are not always good generals.”89
When Grant bestowed his seal of approval on Sherman’s march to the sea, it was premised on the idea that George Thomas would handle the army of John Bell Hood that Sherman had left behind. However disabled Hood was—he had an injured arm and an amputated leg and stumped about on crutches strapped to his saddle—Grant still deemed him a formidable threat. On November 30, at the battle of Franklin, south of Nashville, a portion of Thomas’s army savaged Hood, producing seven thousand Confederate casualties, triple the number of federal victims. Despite the severe damage, Hood was undeterred, and by December 2 he confronted Thomas and the Union defenses at Nashville. A resolute commander with a faulty strategic sense, Hood hoped to defeat Thomas, take Kentucky and Tennessee, then possibly link up with Lee’s army or turn north to the Ohio River. Implausible though this scenario might be, Grant began to pester Thomas to show no mercy to Hood’s army, the Lincoln administration being hugely alarmed by its progress. To his extreme frustration, Thomas said he needed to await the arrival of more cavalry before taking on Hood, and he planned in the interim to hunker down in a defensive posture.
Grant had long criticized Thomas for dilatory behavior and Nashville only strengthened his case. As always, Grant thought it wrong to await reinforcements when the enemy might perfect his defenses in the interim. “Time strengthens [Hood] in all probability as much as it does you,” he warned Thomas.90 He burned with the conviction that Thomas already had enough men to “annihilate [Hood] in the open field.”91 In Grant’s opinion, the hapless Hood had committed an egregious blunder in trying to take Nashville, and he wished to capitalize on it. Later on, Grant contended that, had he been Hood, “I would have gone to Louisville, and on north until I came to Chicago. What was the use of his knocking his head against the stone walls of Nashville? If he had gone north, Thomas never would have caught him.”92
Until December 6, despite persistent coaxing of Thomas, Grant only suggested that he attack Hood posthaste. Now, in an uncharacteristic fit of pique and fearful Hood would make a dash for the Ohio River and the North, Grant gave direct orders to attack at once. When Thomas did not comply the next day, Grant, his ire mounting, told Halleck to get ready to supplant him with General John M. Schofield. “There is no better man to repel an attack than Thomas,” Grant wired Halleck, “but I fear he is too cautious to ever take the initiative.”93
On December 8, Grant ratcheted up the pressure on Thomas with an impassioned telegram. By this point he fairly breathed fire: “Now is one of the fairest opportunities ever presented of destroying one of the three Armies of the enemy. If destroyed he can never replace it.”94 The next day, Thomas swore he was set to attack when “a terrible storm of freezing rain” immobilized him. From Halleck, Thomas knew of Grant’s wrath, telling the latter stoically, “I can only say I have done all in my power to prepare, and if you should deem it necessary to relieve me I shall submit without a murmur.”95 Regarding Thomas as a man of rock-solid rectitude and ability, Grant wrestled with a quandary. He was eager to salvage the pride of this valiant warrior but he also didn’t wish to let slip a major chance to destroy a southern army. The Petersburg siege could only have heightened his yearning for a dramatic victory. “I was never so anxious during the war as at that time,” Grant wrote, and Porter confirmed the “mental torture” Grant endured.96 In these trying days, he seemed short-tempered, but even as his emotions simmered at a slow boil, he decided to give Thomas one last chance.
On December 13, caving in to anxiety, Grant ordered Major General John A. Logan to proceed to Nashville with instructions to relieve Thomas unless he had already attacked Hood, in which case the order was nullified. Stretched on a rack of worry, Grant couldn’t relax, which was unusual for him with his outwardly even temper. “His uneasiness of mind was revealed in his drawn features,” recalled Beckwith.97 Finally, on December 14, Grant made a snap decision to relieve Thomas in person in Nashville. “Beckwith,” he ordered, “you’ve got just fifteen minutes to pack your knapsack and get on that boat. Hustle.”98 Filling his pockets with cigars, Grant left City Point by a special dispatch boat, intending to talk with Lincoln and then grab a train to Nashville. Though reluctant to second-guess Thomas, Lincoln didn’t stand in Grant’s way.
As Grant tarried in Washington, the War Department received a late-night telegram that Thomas had initiated the long-delayed attack, slammed into the enemy force, and thoroughly routed it. “It was along toward midnight when [Grant] returned to the [Willard] hotel, and I noticed that his face wore a smile of satisfaction that betokened good tidings,�
� said Beckwith. “He came to me directly and there was a note of cordiality in his voice that had been missing for many a day as he said: ‘Beckwith, I guess that we won’t go to Nashville after all. Thomas has licked Hood.’”99 An overjoyed Stanton bustled off to the White House where a “highly delighted” Lincoln pored over the victory news by candlelight, standing in his nightshirt.100 A potential threat had been averted and irreparable harm inflicted on a major rebel force.
Grant entreated Thomas to follow up on victory and punish his foe further. “Push the enemy now and give him no rest until he is entirely destroyed.”101 Astride his horse, in the rear of the action, a chastened Hood reflected that “I behold for the first and only time a Confederate army abandon the field in confusion.”102 Just as Grant hoped, Hood’s Army of the Tennessee was whittled down from forty thousand to fewer than twenty thousand men and was pummeled into such panicky disarray that it effectively ceased to exist as a single army. To celebrate Thomas’s achievement, Grant ordered a two-hundred-gun salute, topping the one-hundred-gun standard of earlier victories.
At the time Sherman left Atlanta, Grant predicted Hood would refuse to follow him and turn north into Tennessee and that Thomas would then vanquish him. The sequence of events made Grant again look startlingly prophetic, and the demise of Hood’s army left the battered Confederacy with only one truly powerful army in the field—Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In congratulating Thomas, Grant revealed the motive behind his urgency to defeat Hood. He had long operated on the theory that the southern army could only shrink in size, but now Davis and Lee had floated the idea of arming slaves. “Let us push and do all we can before the enemy can derive benefit either from the raising of Negro troops or the concentration of white troops now in the field,” Grant implored Thomas, who came away from the December events with bruised feelings that never entirely healed.103
Though they had temporarily lost telegraphic contact, Grant never forgot that Sherman and his men were charging toward the seacoast, and he made a point of keeping Lee trapped in Petersburg and Richmond, unable to detach troops to prevent it. “My own opinion,” Grant wrote, pinpointing his foe’s strategic flaw, “is that Lee is averse to going out of Va. and if the cause of the South is lost he wants Richmond to be the last place surrendered.”104 But if Lee moved south to block Sherman, Grant was prepared to trail his army down to Georgia. Whenever Lincoln expressed jitters about Sherman, Grant assuaged his fears, saying, “There was no danger but [Sherman] would strike bottom on Salt Water some place. That I would not feel the same security, in fact would not have entrusted the expedition to any other living commander.”105
From the rebel press, Grant gleaned shards of information about Sherman’s whereabouts and in late November read a proclamation by General Beauregard in a Savannah newspaper, summoning Georgia residents to block his progress: “Arise for the defense of your native soil. Rally around your patriotic government and gallant soldiers, obstruct and destroy all roads in Sherman’s front, flank and rear and his Army will soon starve in your midst.”106 Even as Sherman was demonized in the South, the black community welcomed him as their liberator. White folks might stare with stony contempt at the endless columns of northern troops striding through their towns, but their slaves, wrote Sherman, “were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name, they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style, which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of such scenes.”107 Many rapturous blacks saw Sherman’s army as an instrument of the Lord, come to deliver them from bondage. “Us looked for the Yankees,” one said, likening them to “de host of angels at de second comin’.”108 Sherman feared that if too many former slaves joined his march, they would encumber it, and he noted apprehensively that “fifty negroes and footsore soldiers” seemed to follow every regiment.109 In all, an estimated twenty thousand slaves deserted their plantations to travel on the edges of Sherman’s army.110
By mid-December, Grant deduced from southern newspapers and a dispatch from Sherman’s army that reached Washington that his colleague was closing in on Savannah. He pondered what Sherman should do when the town fell. At first he wanted him to establish a coastal base, then embark by sea with a large portion of his troops, traveling north to join him on the James River. Then, on December 16, with Savannah under siege, Sherman wrote to Grant and described the spectacular success of his novel strategy of living off the land. He depicted his ruddy troops gorging on sweet potatoes and cornmeal, as well as turkeys, chickens, sheep, hogs, and beef. Having started out with five thousand head of cattle, his army, as if by some miracle, arrived outside Savannah with ten thousand, having seized many along the route. “Our whole Army is in fine condition as to health, and the weather is splendid.”111
Sherman was reluctant to move his army by water to the James River. When he learned that Grant had so few ships to ferry his soldiers northward that the operation would take two months, he touted his plan to march up through the Carolinas and Grant concurred. Aware of being the South’s bête noire, Sherman hoped to take advantage of this terrifying image and foresaw the psychological effect a march would have in demoralizing the enemy. He wanted southerners to “feel the hard hand of war” and realize that, contrary to southern propaganda, the North was winning. To Grant, Sherman talked of visiting havoc on the Carolinas, boasting, “I can go on and smash South Carolina all to pieces.”112 With his former love of southern culture, Sherman both feared and favored a policy of revenge. “The truth is, [my] whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina,” he informed Halleck. “I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.”113
By December 20, 1864, the Confederate garrison evacuated Savannah, leaving behind a large trove of invaluable supplies in their haste to leave. Sherman’s entrance into the city released an outpouring of joy among liberated blacks. “Shout the glad tidings o’er Egypt’s dark sea,” cried an elderly man. “Jehovah has triumphed, his people are free.”114 Sherman’s letter notifying Lincoln of what happened became an instant classic: “I beg to present you as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton. W. T. Sherman, Major-General.”115 Lincoln cherished this holiday gift, remarking that the combined triumphs of Thomas and Sherman “brings those who sat in darkness, to see a great light.”116 Grant transmitted copies of Sherman’s victory telegram to his corps commanders. Henceforth Sherman, once stigmatized as incurably insane in the northern press, would be lionized as “Tecumseh the Great.” Amid all the hoopla and talk of elevating him to a new rank, Sherman admonished his brother, “I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant.”117
Grant remained the presiding genius of the war effort. Sheridan’s successful rampage through the Shenandoah Valley, Thomas’s demolition of Hood’s army at Nashville, Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta and Savannah—all formed part of the scheme he had envisaged when he became general in chief. He had accomplished exactly what he had set out to do, interweaving his far-flung armies so they cooperated in a single strategy and moved with a common purpose, the result being that the Confederacy was sliced into ever smaller pieces. The only stalled part of his scheme was Virginia, but that effort had bottled up Lee and stopped his army from aiding embattled rebel forces in Tennessee and Georgia. Now Grant set his sights on finishing off the most fearsome Confederate army.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
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Her Satanic Majesty
EVEN AS HE masterminded the land campaigns, Grant investigated ways to shut down the few remaining southern ports that defied the Union blockade. A major objective was to capture the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, a move Gideon Welles thought might damage the Confederacy almost as much as losing Richmond. The last major harbor east of the Mississippi River
still available to blockade runners, it provided ammunition and other essential imports that went straight to bolster Lee’s army. Grant cited a compelling diplomatic need to seize Wilmington “because foreign governments, particularly the British Government, were constantly threatening that unless ours could maintain the blockade of that coast they should cease to recognize any blockade.”1 The key obstacle to any operation against Wilmington was Fort Fisher, a mammoth earthwork redoubt guarding the mouth of the Cape Fear River, just below the port. When Grant discovered that Confederate soldiers in North Carolina were being shunted off to fight Sherman in Georgia, he spotted a chance to deprive the Confederacy of its last Atlantic outpost.2
By early December, Ben Butler had concocted a far-fetched scheme for taking Fort Fisher by loading an old vessel with 215 tons of gunpowder, towing it near the fort, then igniting it. Grant was dubious: “Whether the report will be sufficient even to wake up the garrison in the fort, if they happen to be asleep at the time of the explosion, I do not know. It is at least foolish to think that the effect of the explosion could be transmitted to such a distance with enough force to weaken the fort.”3 Lincoln acquiesced to the plan without placing much credence in it, saying mockingly, “We might as well explode the notion with powder as with anything else.”4 Grant couldn’t banish Butler from the expedition, which would occur under the aegis of his Department of Virginia and North Carolina. Rear Admiral David D. Porter gathered an enormous fleet of sixty ships while Butler readied 6,500 men to sail to Fort Fisher under General Godfrey Weitzel. Grant’s confidence in Butler was minimal, and he hoped the twenty-nine-year-old Weitzel would perform the actual fighting, but the headstrong Butler insisted on going along and taking personal control, which boded ill for the venture. Meanwhile, weather-related delays enabled the rebel garrison to replenish its numbers.