by Ron Chernow
The day before Christmas, the USS Louisiana, bulging with gunpowder, drifted close to Fort Fisher, but true to Grant’s prediction, the explosion inflicted little harm, leading to much merriment at Butler’s expense. Most of the blast’s explosive shock dissipated in the air. When Porter unleashed a furious cannonade at the fort, many shells landed with a harmless thud in surrounding soil. On Christmas morning, he sprayed the fort with ten thousand rounds of shot and shell, which was supposed to be followed by a spirited infantry assault from the fort’s land side. Unfortunately, Butler, observing Confederate artillery on the parapet, got cold feet and called off the mission. An irate Porter blasted Butler for “not attempting to take possession of the forts, which were so blown up, burst up, and torn up that the people inside had no intention of fighting any more . . . It could have been taken on Christmas with 500 men, without losing a soldier.”5 Porter may have overstated his case: while he had ravaged the fort’s water side, many heavy guns on the land side had survived his onslaught.
Joining Porter in blaming Butler, Grant now had sufficient cause to fire him and demanded his removal as “an unsafe commander for a large Army.”6 Having won reelection, Lincoln no longer feared political reprisals from Butler and approved. Butler was replaced at the helm of the Army of the James by a West Point graduate, General Edward O. C. Ord.
Butler was not one to leave quietly. As his parting shot, he explained to his soldiers what he discerned as the true reason for his dismissal: “I have refused to order the sacrifice of . . . soldiers and am relieved from your command—The wasted blood of my men does not stain my garments.”7 Ord asked Grant whether he should suppress this inflammatory statement. Perhaps thinking this vengeful farewell would hurt Butler more than help, Grant allowed its release. Butler rushed off to protest to a congressional committee that he had wisely called off the Fort Fisher attack and been victimized for his courage. Well into his postwar career, Butler spewed venom at Grant, telling one friend before Grant became president that he had been “the most unpopular soldier in the whole Army” and was “the weakest feeblest creature . . . that ever was thought of for any public office.”8
Prodded by Lincoln, Grant prepared for a second action against Fort Fisher, where he would enjoy “the largest naval force ever assembled,” said Welles.9 Having demonstrated the power of land and sea operations throughout the war, Grant advised General Alfred Terry, a classically educated lawyer, of the paramount need for “unity of action” with Admiral Porter.10 On January 6, 1865, the new expedition set sail for Fort Fisher, only this time the seamen and marines hit the ground running; following a heavy navy bombardment, they grabbed the fort and took more than two thousand prisoners. This dramatic turning point in the war ended the heyday of blockade runners and left Galveston the sole port open to the shrinking Confederacy. Reeling from the Fort Fisher debacle, the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, mourned it as “one of the greatest disasters that had befallen our Cause from the beginning of the war,” and Confederate desertions in North Carolina leapt dramatically.11 Once again Grant hovered as the tutelary spirit behind a major victory. “Grant stands very much higher for the Fort Fisher affair; it showed the stupid world what it had forgotten that he really controls the armies of the U.S.,” Badeau told James Wilson. “They are just beginning to realize that all these stupendous combinations which have resulted so splendidly are the fruit of one master mind.”12
Despite the fort’s capture, Admiral Porter chose to criticize Grant mercilessly in a letter to Gideon Welles that castigated Grant for allowing Butler to accompany the first expedition. He portrayed Grant as ungrateful for the signal role played by the navy at Fort Fisher, reviling him as a shallow opportunist “always willing to take the credit when anything is done, and equally ready to lay the blame of the failure on the navy, when a failure takes place.” Porter also claimed Grant had always stolen credit from him and that without his help, Grant “never would have been Lieutenant-General.”13 When Grant, as president, nominated Porter to be a full admiral, this blistering letter was published, and Julia Grant claimed it hit her unprepared husband hard. “General Grant felt dreadfully hurt, as he really thought a great deal of Porter,” who “vowed he never wrote the letter, but there it was in his own handwriting.”14 Implausibly Porter pretended to have no recollection of writing the letter, telling Grant he regretted “exceedingly the loss of your friendship.”15
By December 1864, Grant had tightened the noose around Richmond, severing its southern rail links and isolating the town. Sheridan was able to transfer his entire corps from the Shenandoah Valley to Petersburg. As it grew clear that final victory glimmered in the distance and as snow fell thickly and temperatures dipped below zero, summer tents at City Point headquarters gave way to durable log huts. Grant’s wooden quarters consisted of an office in the front portion, a private area in the rear. Horace Porter described the atmosphere as neat and spartan: “An iron camp-bed, an iron wash-stand, a couple of pine tables, and a few common wooden chairs constituted the furniture. The floor was entirely bare.”16 In the dank, gloomy days before Christmas, Grant was laid up with a stomach disorder and hemorrhoids, his condition troubling enough that he made the ultimate sacrifice: he briefly renounced cigars. He shouldered so much responsibility that he was upset at being confined to bed and confessed to Julia how much he relied on sheer willpower: “I know how much there is dependent on me and will prove myself equal to the task. I believe determination can do a great deal to sustain one and I have that quality certainly to its fullest extent.”17
On Christmas Day, Fred appeared and immediately saddled up for a ride with his father. Julia lingered in Burlington with the other children until January, when she joined her husband at City Point. The Grants were now a celebrated couple with many worldly temptations dangled before them. They were delighted by the gift of a fully equipped house in Philadelphia, given to them by several dozen grateful citizens. Neither then nor later was Grant nagged by the possible impropriety of such gifts, regarding them as a reward commonly bestowed upon victorious generals. Indeed, such gifts were then seen not as nefarious but as generous gestures to patriotic heroes for the sacrifices they had made. Still, such gifts would accumulate in the future and raise uncomfortable questions about Grant’s judgment in accepting them. For the most part, Grant had a well-developed ethical sense, as evidenced by his response when offered a free stake in shady oil properties. “I have a perfect abhorrence of having any interest in anything which might prove speculative at the expense of a confiding public,” he wrote back.18
When Julia joined him in January, she domesticated the rough-hewn cabin where her husband lived and worked, much as she had at Hardscrabble, and took her meals on equal terms with his officers. She brightened up the table by draping a makeshift cloth over it and had a way of cheering the men with her vivacity and attending to anyone who was ailing. Having spent much of the war apart from Ulysses, she didn’t mind the austere military milieu. “I am snugly nestled away in my husband’s log cabin,” she confided to a friend and told of long nocturnal chats with him. “Am I not a happy woman?”19
It was also clear that she stood guard over her husband’s drinking. Right before she arrived at City Point, Henry W. Bellows of the U.S. Sanitary Commission visited Grant and speculated privately that he might have taken “just a little too much soup”—a wording that suggests he was tipsy.20 Gideon Welles, that inveterate chronicler of invidious gossip, recorded in his diary on December 29 that Grant had recently sailed back to Virginia from Washington, accompanied by Senator Zachariah Chandler, and the boat’s skipper, a Captain Mitchell, had related that “both Grant and Chandler were very drunk. Grant got into Mitchell’s berth and slept off the fumes. Chandler was continuously and all the time drunk.”21 As always when Julia was around, rumors of Grant’s drinking vanished on the spot.
On New Year’s Day 1865, Grant issued orders to observe a day of peace with nearby rebel sol
diers and refrain from firing upon them unless fired upon first. For Thanksgiving, donors in New York had shipped eighty thousand pounds of turkey for distribution among Union troops and Lee had allowed them to enjoy it in peace; now Grant repaid the courtly gesture. “We are never to be outdone,” Rawlins wrote proudly, “either in fighting or magnanimity.”22
With 124,000 well-fed soldiers at his disposal, Grant felt hopeful about his prospects against Lee’s dwindling force of 57,000 men. Normally not inclined to boast, Grant wrote on January 2, “We now have an Army of Soldiers such as the world never saw before.”23 The high rate of Confederate desertions—entire squads now melted away—strengthened his confidence. Lee’s officers would have begged to differ, one affirming that Lee had “60,000 of the best soldiers in the world and they have unbounded confidence in him . . . we will storm Grant in his breastworks if they were twice as strong.”24 But this was so much whistling in the dark and some Confederate officers began to voice hitherto taboo feelings. “The wolf is at the door here,” said a staff officer in Richmond. “We dread starvation far more than we do Grant or Sherman. Famine—that is the word now.”25 The manifold attacks by Grant against railroads, canals, and ports had impoverished the Confederate supply chain. Lee, fearing his army would fall apart from hunger, railed at the dangerous complacency of southern politicians. After returning from a visit to Richmond, he strode his room in agitation and vented his spleen to his son. “I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem able to do anything except eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving. I told them the condition my men were in, and that something must be done at once, but I can’t get them to do anything.”26
In early January, Grant was made privy to a plan, sanctioned by the president, to have Francis P. Blair Sr., an old Jacksonian Democrat, pass through City Point en route to secret talks with Jefferson Davis. In all likelihood, Grant heard from Blair what was afoot, Blair having come up with a chimerical scheme to reunite North and South by having them engage in a joint operation to eject the French from Mexico. If Lincoln scoffed at the idea, he was curious to see what it might yield. Jefferson Davis, a proud and testy man, assumed Lincoln would stick by his old demand for “unconditional surrender.” Still, he thought the southern populace might be reinvigorated by Lincoln’s intransigence and peace proponents discredited, and so he authorized Blair to inform Lincoln of his willingness to “enter into conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries.” Lincoln communicated his readiness to enter into informal talks “with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.”27 For his negotiating team, Davis chose three prominent figures to proceed to Washington: Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, president pro tem of the Senate Robert M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell. All had occupied high positions in the old federal government. All three had also expressed dissatisfaction with Confederate conduct of the war and couldn’t be dismissed as mere flunkies or pliant tools of Jefferson Davis.
On Sunday, January 29, the three emissaries crossed the outer perimeter of Petersburg’s defenses under a flag of truce. After years of grueling warfare they were hailed as messengers of peace, and a surprisingly festive mood reigned as their carriage rolled from Confederate to federal lines, both sides greeting the ambassadors with “prolonged and enthusiastic applause” and ecstatic cries of “Peace! Peace!”28 To cheers from their respective armies, the southern band played “Dixie” and the northern band “Yankee Doodle,” before young men on both sides responded with mutual appreciation to “Home, Sweet Home.” Because Grant was at Fort Fisher, the three emissaries indicated to a Lieutenant Colonel Hatch that Grant had been forewarned of their journey to Washington as peace commissioners. Hatch contacted Ord, who contacted Stanton, who said to await Lincoln’s instructions. In a quandary over what to do, Hatch returned to the three commissioners and blurted out, in what may have been a delaying tactic, “that Grant was on a big drunk and it might be some time before there was any reply.”29 The next morning, the three men directed a letter to Grant himself.
Back at City Point on January 31, Grant sent Lincoln a copy of the letter, which expressed the commissioners’ wish to confer with him in Washington. Shortly afterward Grant got a telegram from Stanton alerting him that Major Thomas T. Eckert was on his way to Virginia, bearing presidential instructions. That night Grant had Colonel Orville Babcock escort the three commissioners to his log cabin, where they found him scribbling at a small table in the glow of a kerosene lamp. When Babcock tapped at the door, Grant called out “Come in” in a cordial voice that Alexander Stephens said he would never forget.30
Chatting with the three men, Grant conspicuously avoided any political talk. He treated them in a courteous manner that concealed his deep indignation at what the South had wrought. “For my own part I never had admitted, and never was ready to admit, that they were representatives of a government,” he wrote in his Memoirs. “There had been too great a waste of blood and treasure to concede anything of the kind.”31 Nevertheless, Grant hospitably installed the three men in well-appointed staterooms on the steamer Mary Martin, where they remained for several days. Grant assigned no guards to watch over them, invited them to dine with his officers, and allowed them to saunter about freely, fostering tremendous goodwill. He bore little resemblance to the fearsome ogre conjured up by the southern press.
Though he established rapport with all three men, Alexander Stephens, a pale, wizened little man with a keen mind and boyish face, was especially enchanted by Grant. “I was instantly struck with the great simplicity and perfect naturalness of his manners, and the entire absence of everything like affectation, show, or even the usual military air . . . of men in his position.”32 The observant Stephens noted Grant’s economical speech and the exceptional intelligence that lay behind his taciturn style: “I saw before being with him long, that he was exceedingly quick in perception, and direct in purpose, with a vast deal more of brains than tongue, as ready as that was at his command.”33 Despite Grant’s circumspection, Stephens discerned that he wished peace talks to occur and was “exceedingly anxious for a termination of our war.”34 Stephens decided that Grant was “one of the most remarkable men” he had ever met and would someday “exert a controlling influence in shaping the destinies of this country.”35
The next afternoon, Major Eckert arrived and Secretary of State Seward made his way separately to Fort Monroe. Eckert was instructed to send the three peace commissioners to meet Seward only if they agreed they had come “with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.”36 Not surprisingly, the three men winced at this explosive formulation, which violated the “two countries” position dictated by Jefferson Davis. That night, Eckert wired Lincoln that the three commissioners refused to comply with his terms. When he met Seward the next morning, he informed him the commissioners wouldn’t be able to come.
Just as it looked as if the peace talks had struck an insurmountable obstacle, Grant did something entirely out of character that bespoke his increased trust and intimacy with the president. He wired Stanton that his talks with Stephens and Hunter persuaded him that “their intentions are good and their desire sincere to restore peace and Union . . . I fear now their going back without any expression from any one in authority will have a bad influence.”37 Clearly Grant trespassed into the forbidden sphere of public policy, even subtly reproaching Lincoln and Stanton for their intransigence. The supposedly bloodthirsty man of war craved peace. The telegram hit the bull’s-eye, confirming Grant’s sound political instincts and new intimacy with Lincoln. About to recall Eckert and Seward, Lincoln not only scratched that notion but decided, on the strength of Grant’s message, to travel to Fort Monroe to meet with the commissioners even though he doubted anything productive would ensue. Grant promised Lincoln not to relax military pressure as the talks progressed.
By the time Lincoln and Seward met the commissioners on Februa
ry 3 aboard the steamer River Queen, anchored at Hampton Roads, the war’s calculus had been altered by congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. On January 31, the final vote in the House of Representatives was received with tumultuous cheers and applause. Hats were hurled in the air, ladies in the galleries flapped handkerchiefs. At the White House, Lincoln lauded the amendment as “a king’s cure-all for all evils.”38 To try to kill the vote, amendment opponents had pointed to rumored peace talks, but Lincoln saved the day by stating ambiguously that there were no peace commissioners “in the city [Washington] or likely to be in it”—true as far as it went.39 The stirring Republican victory strengthened the northern commitment to blotting out slavery and made any backsliding on the issue unthinkable. Lincoln also hoped the vote would alert southerners that their struggle to save slavery was now doomed.
For several hours Lincoln and Seward parlayed with the commissioners in the River Queen’s saloon. As a member of the military, Grant was expressly excluded. “There was a determination on the part of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton to exclude the military authorities altogether from the final settlement, after submission should be secured,” wrote Badeau.40 No notes were taken, no secretaries allowed. Lincoln respected the head of the delegation, Alexander Stephens, having once praised a speech he made against the Mexican War as “the very best speech of an hour’s length I ever heard.”41 But Lincoln, no pushover, immediately made clear he had three nonnegotiable conditions: permanent restoration of the Union; an end to slavery; and no cessation of hostilities until all rebel forces were disbanded. The peace commissioners had expected concessions and were taken aback by these unbending terms. The North was winning the war and Lincoln knew he played a strong hand. Hunter interjected: “Mr. President, if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Is that not about what your words imply?” Lincoln didn’t sugarcoat the truth. “Yes. You have stated the proposition better than I did. That is about the size of it.”42 Nonetheless, at moments Lincoln sounded more conciliatory, expressing a willingness to compensate southerners for forfeited slaves. While Seward objected to this, Lincoln persisted: “If it was wrong in the South to hold slaves, it was wrong in the North to carry on the slave trade and sell them to the South.”43 Despite such statements, it grew clear that an unbridgeable gulf now yawned between Lincoln and the commissioners and that the talks had encountered a dead end.