by H. W. Brands
Lincoln was most pleased. “Well done,” he replied. “Many thanks to all.” Yet the president immediately added, “Remember Burnside.” Halleck seconded both sentiments. “I congratulate you on the success thus far of your plans,” he wrote Grant. “I fear that General Burnside is hard pressed and that any further delay may prove fatal. I know that you will do all in your power to relieve him.”
Grant thought he was doing all in his power to help Burnside, by defeating Bragg. The successes of Monday and Tuesday positioned him for what he believed would prove the decisive action of Wednesday. On one part of the battlefield, however, the decision came sooner than he expected. Bragg, reckoning that he couldn’t defend Lookout Mountain any longer, withdrew his troops between Tuesday nightfall and Wednesday dawn. “At daylight on the 25th, the Stars and Stripes were discerned on the peak of Lookout,” Montgomery Meigs recalled. “The rebels had evacuated the mountain.”
The weight of the fighting shifted to Missionary Ridge. Grant ordered Sherman to attack at dawn, driving against Bragg’s right on the ridgetop. Hooker would cross over from Lookout Mountain to hit the Confederates in the left or rear. Thomas, awaiting Hooker’s arrival, would move against Bragg’s center. Grant and Thomas prepared to watch from Orchard Knob, one of the promontories captured on Monday.
The day broke clear and sunny. “The whole field was in full view from the top of Orchard Knob,” Grant remembered. “It remained so all day. Bragg’s headquarters were in full view, and officers—presumably staff officers—could be seen coming and going constantly.”
Bragg, likewise, could see Grant. “The enemy kept firing shells at us,” Charles Dana, with Grant on Orchard Knob, recounted. “They had got the range so well that the shells burst pretty near the top of the elevation where we were, and when we saw them coming we would duck—that is, everybody did except Generals Grant and Thomas and Gordon Granger.” Granger was one of Thomas’s corps commanders, and he took the Confederate shelling personally. “Granger got a cannon,” Dana related. “How he got it I do not know. And he would load it with the help of one soldier and would fire it himself over at the ridge.” Grant’s adjutant John Rawlins didn’t like this at all. “Rawlins was very much disgusted at the guerrilla operations of Granger, and induced Grant to order him to join his troops elsewhere.”
The fighting in Sherman’s sector was heavy all morning. Grant expected Hooker to ease the pressure on Sherman, but the Confederates, in their retreat from Lookout Mountain, had burned the one bridge over Chattanooga Creek. Hooker spent most of the morning trying to get his troops across. Grant had intended to wait on Hooker before throwing Thomas against the Confederate center, but Sherman’s condition appeared critical and so he issued the order. Nothing happened. Somehow the chain of command had broken. Grant gave the order again, this time directly to one of the division commanders who would carry it out. The embarrassed officer dashed away, and in what seemed mere moments Thomas’s men charged forward shouting. His skirmishers fired at Confederates in front of rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge. “The rebel pickets discharged their muskets and ran into their rifle pits,” Montgomery Meigs, observing with Grant from Orchard Knob, recalled. “Our skirmishers followed on their heels. The line of battle was not far behind, and we saw the gray rebels swarm out of the long line of rifle pits in numbers which surprised us, and spread over the base of the hill. A few turned and fired their pieces, but the greater number collected into the various roads which creep obliquely up its steep face, and went on to the top.”
The troops’ orders were to pause and regroup after taking the first line of the enemy’s defense, but the passion of the moment impelled many of them forward. “Some regiments pressed on and began to swarm up the steep sides of the ridge,” Meigs recounted. “Here and there a color was advanced beyond the line. The attempt appeared most dangerous, but the advance was supported, and the whole line ordered to storm the heights, upon which not less than forty pieces of artillery, and no one knew how many muskets, stood ready to slaughter the assailants. With cheers answering to cheers, the men swarmed upward. They gathered to the lines of least difficult ascent, and the line was broken. Color after color was planted on the summit, while musketry and cannon vomited their thunder upon them.”
Charles Dana by this time was willing to credit Grant with gifts of military genius. But the attack on Missionary Ridge required explanation of a different sort, he said. “The storming of the ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in military history. No man who climbs the ascent by any of the roads that wind along its front can believe that eighteen thousand men were moved in tolerably good order up its broken and crumbling face unless it was his fortune to witness the deed. It seemed as awful”—that is, awe-full—“as a visible interposition of God.”
After the battle, Dana found Philip Sheridan, one of the corps commanders whose troops made the spontaneous assault. “Why did you go up there?” Dana asked.
“When I saw the men were going up,” Sheridan replied, “I had no idea of stopping them. The rebel pits had been taken and nobody had been hurt, and after they had started I commanded them to go right on. I looked up at the head of the ridge as I was going up, and there I saw a Confederate general on horseback. I had a silver whiskey flask in my pocket, and when I saw this man on the top of the hill I took out my flask and waved my hand toward him, holding up the shining, glittering flask.” Sheridan’s men interpreted this as an order. “The whole corps went up.”
“Glory to God!” Dana reported to Edwin Stanton that afternoon. “The day is decisively ours. Missionary Ridge has just been carried by the magnificent charge of Thomas’s troops, and the rebels routed.”
Grant was slightly more circumspect. “Although the battle lasted from early dawn till dark this evening, I believe I am not premature in announcing a complete victory over Bragg,” he wrote Halleck that night. “Lookout Mountain top, all the rifle pits in Chattanooga Valley, Missionary Ridge entire have been carried and now held by us. I have no idea of finding Bragg here tomorrow.”
Grant’s announcement was not premature; Bragg withdrew what remained of his battered army to Georgia. But Grant was already looking past Chattanooga. “The next thing now will be to relieve Burnside,” he wrote Sherman. Grant appreciated the hundreds of miles Sherman’s army had marched already, and he initially sent Gordon Granger north to Knoxville. But when Granger moved too slowly for Grant’s tastes, he called on Sherman again. “I made this change knowing Sherman’s promptness and ability,” he explained to Halleck. “If Burnside holds out a short time, he will be relieved.” To Burnside, Grant dispatched another stiffening message: “Do not be forced into a surrender by short rations. Take all the citizens have, to enable you to hold out yet a few days longer.”
Sherman sent a cavalry column up the Tennessee Valley ahead of his main army to let Burnside know help was on the way. Sherman’s information indicated that if Burnside didn’t receive help by the first days of December he would have to surrender. The cavalry reached Knoxville during the night of December 3, delivering moral support and word that Sherman’s main army was close behind.
Sherman’s arrival persuaded James Longstreet to lift the siege. As the Confederates pulled back, Sherman rode into the city. “Approaching from the south and west, we crossed the Holston on a pontoon bridge,” he remembered. “And in a large pen on the Knoxville side I saw a fine lot of cattle, which did not look much like starvation. I found General Burnside and staff domiciled in a large, fine mansion, looking very comfortable.” Sherman was puzzled, and more so that evening. “We all sat down to a good dinner, embracing roast turkey. There was a regular dining table, with clean tablecloth, dishes, knives, forks, spoons, etc., etc. I had seen nothing of this kind in my field experience, and could not help exclaiming that I thought ‘they were starving.’ ” Burnside admitted that the siege of the city had never been complete and that he had been well supplied from the valley settlements throughout. He didn’t exp
lain the reports to the contrary. Sherman held his tongue at the moment, but he later reflected, with unusual understatement: “Had I known of this, I should not have hurried my men so fast.”
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THE WESTERN VICTORY. CONFIRMATION OF THE GLORIOUS NEWS. BRAGG’S OVERWHELMING DEFEAT. HIS ARMY CRUMBLING AWAY AND SURRENDERING BY SQUADS. THE REBEL TROOPS CANNOT BE MADE TO RALLY. IMMENSE ADDITIONS TO OUR CAPTURES.
The multiple heads on the New York Times story typified the reaction in the North to Grant’s victory on the Tennessee. Lincoln lauded Grant and his army in a public letter of congratulations for the securing of eastern Tennessee. “I wish to tender you, and all under your command, my more than thanks—my profoundest gratitude—for the skill, courage, and perseverance with which you and they, over so great difficulties, have effected that important object,” the president wrote. “God bless you all.”
When the new Congress convened in December, the first resolution of the House, approved unanimously, thanked Grant and his army and called for the striking of a gold medal in his honor; the Senate shortly added its endorsement. Elihu Washburne introduced a bill authorizing the president to revive the rank of lieutenant general, last held permanently by George Washington, and confer it on the commander “most distinguished for courage, skill, and ability.” All in Congress understood that Grant was the sole candidate for nomination, but Washburne made the understanding explicit. “Look at what this man has done for his country, for humanity and civilization,” the Illinois representative declared. “He has fought more battles and won more victories than any living man. He has captured more prisoners and taken more guns than any general of modern times.” Some members of Congress counseled waiting until the war was over to confer the honor; Washburne asserted that to delay would be to forget what military rank was for. “I want it conferred now because it is my most solemn and earnest conviction that General Grant is the man upon whom we must depend to fight out this rebellion in the field and bring this war to a speedy and triumphant close.” The nation demanded no less, he said. “The people of this country now want a fighting and a successful general to lead their armies. They want a man who is willing to risk his own life upon the field. They have seen General Grant successful in every fight from Belmont to Lookout Mountain, and they now wish to see him marshal our whole armies and strike the last, greatest and most deadly blow at the rebellion.”
Inevitably, given American democracy’s admiration for victorious generals, Grant’s name surfaced in discussions of who would be the next president. The Republicans had their candidate, Lincoln, who would run on a platform of completing the task at hand. The Democrats struggled to find both a candidate and a cause. The larger wing of the party, reflecting the party’s Southern antecedents, opposed the war and especially emancipation. But a minority of Democrats rejected the defeatism and surrender to slavery they considered implicit in the antiwar demands of the majority. One of the “War Democrats,” Barnabas Burns of Ohio, wrote Grant in December 1863. “Your successful military career,” he said, “your unfaltering devotion to your country in its darkest hours of trial, your indomitable energy in overcoming all obstacles, your consummate skill and dauntless courage on the field of battle, have all combined to call the public mind to you as the man to whom the affairs of this great nation should be committed at the close of the present incumbent’s term of office.” Would Grant consent to have his name presented as a candidate to a convention of the War Democrats in January?
On reading this letter Grant reflected on what remarkable turns life took. Three years earlier he had had to beg his father for a menial job in the family leather store; now he was being promoted for the most powerful job in America. “The question astonishes me,” he replied to Burns.
Of course he had to decline the offer as unbecoming and wholly unsought. “I do not know of anything I have ever done or said which would indicate that I could be a candidate for any office whatever within the gift of the people,” he said. “I shall continue to do my duty, to the best of my ability, so long as permitted to remain in the Army, supporting whatever Administration may be in power, in their endeavor to suppress the rebellion and maintain national unity.” He wanted Burns to appreciate that this response was no stratagem. “Nothing likely to happen would pain me so much as to see my name used in connection with a political office. I am not a candidate for any office nor for favors from any party. Let us succeed in crushing the rebellion in the shortest possible time, and I will be content with whatever credit may then be given me.”
Grant’s admirers—including those who saw him as a vehicle for their own political hopes—needed more than a single rebuff to be dissuaded. Isaac Morris, a former Democratic congressman from Illinois, wrote Grant urging a reconsideration.
Grant amplified his rejection. “I am not a politician, never was and hope never to be,” he declared. “In your letter you say that I have it in my power to be the next President! This is the last thing in the world I desire. I would regard such a consummation as being highly unfortunate for myself, if not for the country. Through Providence I have attained to more than I ever hoped, and with the position I now hold in the Regular Army, if allowed to retain it will be more than satisfied.… I scarcely know the inducement that could be held out to me to accept office, and unhesitatingly say that I infinitely prefer my present position to that of any civil office within the gift of the people.”
Yet the solicitations kept coming. Francis Blair, the Missouri politician turned soldier, sent Grant another inquiring letter. Grant responded, “It is on a subject upon which I do not like to write, talk, or think. Everybody who knows me knows I have no political aspirations either now or for the future.” He wished people would get the message. “I hope to remain a soldier as long as I live.”
Grant’s emergence as his country’s warrior hero amazed many who had scarcely heard of him before Vicksburg and even now couldn’t credit that a man so young could have accomplished so much. Forty-one years old, Grant looked, if anything, younger than he had when the war began. He affected approaching middle age; when a supporter requested that he donate a clipping from his hair to be placed in a locket and sold at a benefit for disabled soldiers, but only if the supply wasn’t growing scarce, Grant responded, “I am glad to say that the stock is yet as abundant as ever, though time or other cause is beginning to intersperse here and there a reminder that winters have passed.” In fact a photograph taken a short while later showed his hair as youthfully dark as ever. During the month after Chattanooga he toured eastern Tennessee, and the locals, mostly Unionists, turned out to see the vanquisher of the Confederates. Grant’s entourage included his chief surgeon, a man in his fifties with graying hair; at more than one stop the crowds mistook the surgeon for the conquering general.
Grant’s apparent reversal of the aging process reflected his unusual comfort with war. At the time of secession he appeared older than his chronological age; a decade of frustration and failure had worn him down. Now he was refreshed by his string of victories. The terrible responsibility of sending soldiers to their deaths didn’t trouble his sleep. His conviction of the rightness of his cause afforded him proof against self-doubt, but so did something that was as much temperamental as political or moral. Other commanders—other leaders—second-guessed themselves: their plans, their preparations, their decisions. Grant, for reasons perhaps partly inborn and partly acquired, rarely revisited choices once made. He planned according to the information at hand; he prepared for all reasonable contingencies; he decided what to do as events unfolded. Then, calm in the conviction that he could have done no more, he accepted what destiny delivered.
His confidence grew with each victory and as he took the measure of his opponents. During the Chattanooga campaign he and others on the Union side inferred that Bragg and Longstreet didn’t trust each other and that Jefferson Davis put little faith in either. Grant respected Bragg as a man, if not especially as a soldier. “Bragg was a remarkably intell
igent and well-informed man, professionally and otherwise,” he later wrote. “He was also thoroughly upright. But he was possessed of an irascible temper, and was naturally disputatious.… As a subordinate he was always on the lookout to catch his commanding officer infringing his prerogatives; as a post commander he was equally vigorous to detect the slightest neglect, even of the most trivial order.” Grant told a story that had circulated in the army before the war. Bragg was stationed at a distant post where he served simultaneously as commander of one of several companies there and as quartermaster of the whole post. In his capacity as company commander he requisitioned certain supplies; in his role as quartermaster he denied the requisition. According to the story, Bragg appealed the decision and then denied his own appeal. When the post commander discovered what was happening, he exclaimed, in uncomprehending exasperation: “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!”
Longstreet was quite a different character, one bound to have trouble with Bragg, Grant thought. “He was brave, honest, intelligent, a very capable soldier, subordinate to his superiors, just and kind to his subordinates, but jealous of his own rights, which he had the courage to maintain. He was never on the lookout to detect a slight, but saw one as soon as anybody when intentionally given.”
As for Jefferson Davis, who had traveled to Tennessee just before Grant’s arrival at Chattanooga, to patch up the quarrel between Bragg and Longstreet, Grant had little but scorn. “Mr. Davis had an exalted opinion of his own military genius,” he said, on the basis of his observation of Davis at the War Department before secession and of Davis’s performance in the Confederate presidency. Grant was content—even pleased—for Davis to hold that opinion. “On several occasions during the war,” he observed afterward, “he came to the relief of the Union army by means of his superior military genius.”