The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  Lincoln consulted his cabinet and received advice that ranged from executing Forrest and the others responsible for the killings, should they be caught, to executing prisoners randomly chosen from Confederates previously captured, should Jefferson Davis not disavow Forrest’s action. Lincoln drafted an order that an unspecified number of Confederate officers in Union custody be held as hostages against future massacres. But the order was never sent, and amid the larger slaughter of the Wilderness campaign, the subject was pushed aside.

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  THE BLOODLETTING AT COLD HARBOR CAUSED GRANT TO RECONSIDER his strategy for cornering Lee and capturing Richmond. “I now find, after more than thirty days of trial, the enemy deems it of first importance to run no risks with the armies they now have,” he wrote Halleck. “They act purely on the defensive, behind breastworks, or feebly on the offensive immediately in front of them and where, in case of repulse, they can instantly retire behind them. Without a greater sacrifice of human life than I am willing to make, all cannot be accomplished that I had designed outside of the city.”

  A change was required. Grant determined to extricate his army from its close quarters with Lee and move south across the James River. “Once on the south side of the James River,” he told Halleck, “I can cut off all sources of supply to the enemy except what is furnished by the canal”—the James River Canal, to Richmond’s west. He would then attack the canal and complete Lee’s encirclement.

  The new strategy lifted the gloom of Cold Harbor for Grant and, he thought, his men. “Our army is not only confident of protecting itself, without entrenchments, but that it can beat and drive the enemy whenever and wherever he can be found without this protection,” he told Halleck.

  Yet for one as used to fighting as Grant, not fighting came as a challenge. Moreover, disengaging from the Confederate lines and marching south through hostile territory entailed the risk that Lee would attack him at his most vulnerable. “But the move had to be made,” Grant reflected later. “And I relied upon Lee’s not seeing my danger as I saw it.”

  What Lee saw was his own danger. He had to keep Grant off balance and off the James River, his outlet to the sea. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to James River,” Lee told Jubal Early, one of his generals. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”

  But Grant was too quick and clever for Lee. To cover his southward move he dispatched Phil Sheridan west to strike against the Virginia Central Railroad. “Every rail on the road destroyed should be so bent or twisted as to make it impossible to repair the road without supplying new rails,” he told Sheridan. At the same time he ordered General David Hunter, currently in the Shenandoah Valley, to move against the railroad and then the James Canal. “The complete destruction of this road and of the canal is of great importance to us,” Grant said. He expected his order to reach Hunter between Staunton and Lynchburg. “Immediately turn east by the most practicable road until you strike the Lynchburg branch of the Virginia Central road. From there move eastward along the line of the road, destroying it completely and thoroughly until you join General Sheridan.” Hunter should then drive for the canal. “Lose no opportunity to destroy the canal.”

  Grant meanwhile readied to move his main army south. He shared his plans with a mere handful of officers, reasoning that broader distribution would inevitably alert Lee. As a result, when the order to march went down the line on the evening of June 12, the rank and file could only guess where they were bound. The advance guard forded the Chickahominy and dispersed the Confederate pickets there; Grant’s engineers threw over pontoon bridges for the others to cross upon. Lee didn’t miss Grant from the Cold Harbor front till the next morning when Grant’s army was halfway to the James. That river posed a more serious obstacle, being nearly half a mile wide at Grant’s point of crossing. But the engineers again came through, building a hundred-pontoon bridge in seven hours. At once the infantry, led by Winfield Hancock’s corps, headed across.

  Grant observed the operation as it proceeded the next morning. “His cigar had been thrown aside, his hands were clasped behind him, and he seemed lost in the contemplation of the spectacle,” Horace Porter remembered. “The great bridge was the scene of a continuous movement of infantry columns, batteries of artillery, and wagon trains. The approaches to the river on both banks were covered with masses of troops moving briskly to their positions or waiting patiently their turn to cross.… Drums were beating the march; bands were playing stirring quicksteps.… The bright sun, shining through a clear sky upon the scene, cast its sheen upon the water, was reflected from the burnished gun barrels and glittering cannon, and brought out with increased brilliancy the gay colors of the waving banners.”

  Grant took quiet pride in the operation. “Since Sunday we have been engaged in one of the most perilous movements ever executed by a large army, that of withdrawing from the front of an enemy and moving past his flank, crossing two rivers over which the enemy has bridges and railroads whilst we have bridges to improvise,” he wrote Julia on June 15. “So far it has been eminently successful and I hope will prove so to the end.” To Halleck he wrote: “The enemy show no signs of yet having brought troops to the south of Richmond. I will have Petersburg secured if possible before they get there in much force.”

  Halleck sent Lincoln a copy of Grant’s message. Grant had withheld his intentions from the president as from the rest of the administration. Lincoln now learned of the operation with appreciative pleasure. “I begin to see it,” he wrote Grant. “You will succeed. God bless you all.”

  Grant considered Petersburg, a rail junction on the Appomattox River twenty miles south of Richmond, to be an outer work of the Confederate capital; seizing its rail lines would help him starve Richmond and Lee’s army. Grant guessed that Petersburg was poorly defended, and he ordered an attack as his army approached the town. General William F. Smith drove back the defenders, who indeed were few and inexperienced, consisting primarily of old men and young boys. But then he paused, awaiting reinforcements, which through a miscommunication were slow to arrive. By the time the second assault occurred, Lee had gotten more of his own troops into place. Two days of heavy fighting left the Confederates in control of Petersburg and several thousand Union troops dead or wounded.

  Grant lamented the opportunity lost. “I believed then, and still believe, that Petersburg could have been easily captured,” he wrote later. There was nothing to be done now except mount a siege. “We will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein can be struck,” he told Meade.

  Grant judged that his move south of the James marked the beginning of his endgame with Lee. He had tried to slug it out in the Wilderness and at Cold Harbor and discovered he couldn’t bear the cost. So he would settle for a siege, a more deliberate but no less certain version of the war of attrition he had commenced at the Rapidan. “Our work progresses here slowly and I feel will progress securely until Richmond finally falls,” he wrote Julia from City Point, where he established his headquarters.

  With Lee contained near Richmond and Sherman dogging Johnston in Georgia, victory was inevitable, Grant thought. All that was required was patience on the part of the Union’s advocates. “You people up North must be of good cheer,” he wrote Chicago acquaintance Russell Jones. “Recollect that we have the bulk of the Rebel Army in two grand Armies both besieged and both conscious that they cannot stand a single battle outside their fortifications with the Armies confronting them. The last man in the Confederacy is now in the Army. They are becoming discouraged, their men deserting, dying and being killed and captured every day. We lose too but can replace our losses. If the rebellion is not perfectly and thoroughly crushed it will be the fault and through the weakness of the people North. Be of good cheer and rest assured that all will come out right.”

  But good cheer was scarce in the North in the summer of 1864. The Virginia campaign thus far had been singular for its slo
w progress and sobering casualties. In killed, wounded and missing, Grant had lost some sixty thousand since crossing the Rapidan, and he was only marginally nearer Richmond than when he started. Lee looked no closer to surrendering than he had in May; if anything, the Confederate performances at Cold Harbor and Petersburg suggested that the rebel troops had more fight left in them than Grant’s troops did. Northern newspapers wondered how long the army would follow Grant; even members of the Lincoln administration began to register doubts. “The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all,” Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, wrote in his diary. “The hospitals are crowded with the thousands of mutilated and dying heroes who have poured out their blood for the Union cause.”

  Lincoln shared Welles’s concern, and he decided to pay Grant a visit. He traveled by river steamer down the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay and up the James to City Point. Grant greeted him at the wharf. “I hope you are very well, Mr. President,” he said.

  “I am in very good health,” Lincoln replied. “But I don’t feel very comfortable after my trip last night on the bay. It was rough, and I was considerably shaken up.”

  A messmate of Grant’s with unusual powers of procurement stepped forward. “Try a glass of champagne, Mr. President,” he said. “That is always a certain cure for seasickness.”

  Lincoln demurred. “No, my friend, I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very stuff.”

  Grant offered to escort the president along the Union lines. Lincoln accepted. Horace Porter grinned at the sight of the president on horseback. “Like most men who had been brought up in the West, he had good command of a horse,” Porter said. “But it must be acknowledged that in appearance he was not a very dashing rider.… By the time he had reached the troops he was completely covered with dust, and the black color of his clothes had changed to Confederate gray. As he had no straps, his trousers gradually worked up above his ankles, and gave him the appearance of a country farmer riding into town wearing his Sunday clothes. A citizen on horseback is always an odd sight in the midst of a uniformed army, and the picture presented by the President bordered on the grotesque.”

  Yet the troops appreciated his coming. They gathered around and offered cheers to “Uncle Abe.” Most appreciative were the black troops who had fought at Petersburg. They saluted Lincoln as their commander but revered him as their liberator. They crowded close, some merely to touch his coat or his horse. Lincoln was obviously moved. “The President rode with bared head,” Porter recalled. “The tears had started to his eyes, and his voice was so broken with emotion that he could scarcely articulate the words of thanks and congratulation which he tried to speak.”

  Lincoln spent the evening in front of Grant’s tent on a bluff above the James. He told stories of life in Illinois and among the political classes of Washington. As the shadows lengthened he sank deeper into his camp chair till his torso all but disappeared and he seemed entirely legs and arms, with the latter waving here and there to emphasize his anecdotes. He retired to his boat on the James and returned the next day to Washington.

  Brief though it was, Lincoln’s visit established a new level of trust and understanding between the president and his commanding general. “They parted with unfeigned regret,” Porter said. “Both felt that their acquaintance had already ripened into a genuine friendship.”

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  LINCOLN NEEDED ALL THE FRIENDS HE COULD GET. THE 1864 ELECTION loomed, and voters were restive that the war continued inconclusively more than three and a half years after its start. The Republican party reconfigured itself, with the addition of pro-war Democrats, as the National Union party and nominated Lincoln for a second term. The president eased Vice President Hannibal Hamlin off the ticket in favor of Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson, whom he had previously appointed military governor of the Volunteer State. Johnson’s background was as humble as Lincoln’s, but while life broadened Lincoln it seemed to narrow Johnson, who grew stubborn and suspicious as an adult. Yet his stubbornness favored the Union, and it disposed Lincoln to overlook Johnson’s rough edges.

  The Democrats who maintained their party identity had difficulty deciding what to do. A few sought to nominate Grant despite his repeated denials of interest. Their efforts went nowhere. A larger group looked to another soldier, George McClellan. Grant had never figured out how to employ McClellan since assuming command of the Union armies, and the underoccupied general concluded that he should replace Lincoln as president. The delegates to the Democratic national convention, held at Chicago, nearly all thought the war had gone on too long, and they nominated McClellan on a platform demanding that “immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” McClellan put some distance between himself and the platform, but he made clear that a vote for him was a vote against the war policies of the present administration.

  McClellan ran formally against Lincoln but implicitly against Grant. The two generals—McClellan didn’t bother resigning his commission to run for office—competed for the favor of voters and, via the voters, for the right to determine the fate of the Union. Each battlefield success for Grant was a boon to Lincoln and a setback for McClellan; each reversal for Grant was a blow to Lincoln and a gain for McClellan.

  Grant rarely commented on politics except to decry the absence of spine in certain elected officials. And he would have been outraged at any accusation that he made military decisions for political reasons. But he understood that his army existed and persisted by the will of the people of the Union. “Be of good cheer,” he had said to his Chicago friend in urging that the people of the North continue to support the war. Grant understood that Lee might beat him yet if the Northern will to continue the fight flagged. And it might indeed flag if he couldn’t show greater progress than he had shown since spring.

  To that end he authorized another assault on Petersburg. The lines hadn’t moved for over a month—the lines above ground, that is. Below the surface there was more action. Some Pennsylvania miners in Ambrose Burnside’s Ninth Corps mimicked the tunneling Grant’s engineers had done at Vicksburg; they dug a passage that stretched more than five hundred feet to beneath the Confederate lines. Eight thousand pounds of gunpowder were carted into the tunnel and set in place. The fuse was lit shortly after three o’clock on the morning of July 30, and the troops of the Ninth waited anxiously for the explosion. Nothing happened. Two intrepid miners crawled along the tunnel to find out what had gone wrong; they discovered that the fuse had failed at a splicing point. They relit the fuse and hurried out of the tunnel. A bit before five o’clock an enormous explosion rocked the hillside around the tunnel, blasting the Confederate position above it and hundreds of Confederates too.

  But the follow-up was even more disappointing than the comparable effort before Vicksburg had been. Burnside’s men were slow into the crater, and by the time they arrived in force the Confederates had recovered from their shock and repaired the breach in their defenses. They proceeded to beat back the assault, inflicting heavy damage in the process. “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war,” Grant told Halleck. “Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”

  The bungle of the Petersburg crater caused many in the North and some in the Lincoln administration to doubt that Grant was the man to beat Lee. “Admiral Porter has always said there was something wanting in Grant, which Sherman could always supply, and vice versa, as regards Sherman, but that the two together made a very perfect general officer and they ought never to be separated,” Gideon Welles said. “Grant relies on others, but does not know men—can’t discriminate.” Welles feared that Grant might have been given more responsibility than he could shoulder. “God grant that I may be mistaken, for the slaughtered thousands of my countrymen who have poured out their rich blood for three months on the soil of Virginia from the Wilderness to Petersburg under his generalship can never be atoned in this world or the next if he without S
herman prove a failure. A blight and sadness comes over me like a dark shadow when I dwell on the subject, a melancholy feeling of the past, a foreboding of the future. A nation’s destiny almost has been committed to this man, and if it is an improper committal, where are we?”

  As before when Grant stumbled, his critics asserted he was drinking. William Smith, whom Grant had relieved after his failure of nerve at Petersburg, wrote to Senator Solomon Foot of his home state of Vermont to say that his firing had nothing to do with his performance. “I write to put you in possession of such facts in the case as I am aware of and think will throw light upon the subject,” Smith said. “About the very last of June, or the first of July, Generals Grant and Butler came to my headquarters, and shortly after their arrival General Grant turned to General Butler and said: ‘That drink of whiskey I took has done me good’; and then, directly afterward, asked me for a drink. My servant opened a bottle for him, and he drank of it, when the bottle was corked and put away. I was aware at this time that General Grant had within six months pledged himself to drink nothing intoxicating, but did not feel it would better matters to decline to give it upon his request in General Butler’s presence. After the lapse of an hour or less, the General asked for another drink, which he took. Shortly after, his voice showed plainly that the liquor had affected him, and after a little time he left. I went to see him upon his horse, and as soon as I returned to my tent, I said to a staff officer of mine, who had witnessed his departure: ‘General Grant has gone away drunk. General Butler has seen it, and will never fail to use the weapon which has been put into his hands.’ ” Smith proceeded to assert that Grant had wanted to relieve not him but Butler and would have done so if not for Butler’s secret knowledge. “I have heard from two different sources (one being from General Grant’s headquarters, and one a staff officer of a general on intimate official relations with General Butler), that General Butler went to General Grant and threatened to expose his intoxication.” Smith closed his account by saying, “I have not referred to the state of things existing at headquarters when I left, and to the fact that General Grant was then in the habit of getting liquor in a surreptitious manner, because it was not relevant to my case; but if you think at any time the matter may be of importance to the country, I will give it to you.”