by Jack Hurst
But at least he was no longer the Sherman of Tunnel Hill, paralyzed by his son’s death. His men remained ill clothed and badly shod, but, having received Grant’s order on November 30, he immediately began driving them hard toward Knoxville. A day out, Burnside dispatched that Sherman was no longer needed—which Sherman soon saw for himself. He and Granger rode on into the city on December 6 to find that, three days after Burnside’s supplies were expected to be gone, they were nowhere near depleted. Hearing of the Confederate disaster at Chattanooga, Longstreet had assaulted Burnside, been repulsed, and faded off into upper East Tennessee. And all along, Burnside’s troops at Knoxville had been better off than Sherman’s and Granger’s at Chattanooga. At Knoxville the two visiting generals found pens full of fat cattle and a garrison largely free from enemy threat. Burnside himself was ensconced in a mansion, eating like a lord on fare supplied by local loyalists.60
For Confederates, the Chattanooga-Knoxville campaign was a psychological, martial, and geographical disaster. At Chattanooga, they reported losing 40 cannon and 6,600 casualties, two-thirds of whom were captives. Grant reported taking 7,000 stands of small arms and 6,100 prisoners, 2,000 more than Confederates claimed they had lost. Desertion from Bragg’s army had been so high that Confederate officers possibly believed many of their missing had simply gone home. The Federal losses had not been much less; Grant tallied Union casualties for the Chattanooga battles at 757 killed, 4,529 wounded, and 330 missing.The totals at Knoxville were more favorable. The Confederates had lost 1,296 in killed, wounded, and captured; the Federals, 681.61
But the Confederate losses, large as they were, comprised but a small fraction of what Grant and his troops had gained for the Union at Chattanooga. Immediately, in the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad they had captured Richmond’s most direct rail route to the Deep South, and in lifting the threat to Burnside at Knoxville, they had liberated the heart of the most profoundly unionist region in the Confederacy. Even that was nowhere near half the plunder. More important, they had captured the rail gateway to the Deep South, transforming East Tennessee from a Confederate staging area for such northern offensives as Bragg’s alarming Kentucky campaign of 1862 into a Union one for a thoroughgoing invasion of Georgia. They had laid open such vital Southern industrial centers as Rome, Etowah, Augusta, and Macon and made it possible for Sherman soon to take pivotal Atlanta. His fiery March to the Sea would follow, burning the last sustenance and spirit out of Southern secession.
In two and a half hard and dogged years, the Ohio tanner’s son had kicked Dixie’s door down at Fort Donelson and captured one of its armies. He then took another in the masterful Vicksburg campaign that had opened the Mississippi River and cut the Confederate States of America in two. Now at Chattanooga he had set the stage for the final phase: the destruction of every remaining railroad track, industry, and agricultural field that kept the South in the war.
Victory’s writing was finally on the wall, and it was signed “US Grant, Major General Commanding.”
The extent of the achievement of Grant and his army at Chattanooga dawned quickly on the North. Lincoln’s first message had been cryptic: “Well done. Many thanks to all. Remember Burnside.” But on December 7, having learned that both Knoxville and Chattanooga were safely again part of the Union, the president sent Grant and the army his “profoundest gratitude for the skill, courage and perseverance with which you and they, over so great difficulties,” had rescued East Tennessee. Two weeks later, Congress passed a joint resolution thanking Grant and his troops. It ordered a gold medal struck in Grant’s likeness for presentation to him. Lincoln himself promoted the project. On December 24, a New York lithographer wrote Congressman Elihu Washburne proposing that the medal put images of Lincoln and George Washington alongside Grant’s.62
The reference to the Father of the Country was apt. Grant began to find himself rising toward Washington’s lofty pinnacle in the public mind. On December 7, Washburne, the primary pusher for recognition of Grant’s achievements, introduced a bill in Congress to revive the rank of lieutenant general. Its only previous holder had been Washington (Winfield Scott had also held it, but only by brevet), and while Washburne’s bill did not name Grant, its beneficiary was obvious. On the day Washburne introduced it, a leader of the Ohio Democratic Party’s war-supporting wing—as opposed to the other, peace-promoting faction—wrote Grant asking permission to nominate him for president at a convention in Cincinnati on January 8, 1864. Grant’s response was polite, immediate, and emphatic:The question astonishes me. 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. . . . I shall continue to do my duty, to the best of my ability, supporting whatever Administration may be in power, in their endeavor to suppress the rebellion and maintain national unity, and never desert it because my vote, if I had one, might have been cast for different candidates. . . . Your letter I take to be private. Mine is also.63
Grant had written similarly to Washburne, and Lincoln was gratified to hear from the congressman that Grant appeared immune to the presidential bug. The commander in chief could continue to elevate his new favorite general without endangering his own reelection. Not satisfied with the performance of Major General George G. Meade, Gettysburg’s methodical victor, the president and Secretary Stanton began to press Grant further to come east to the Army of the Potomac. Grant responded with unfeigned reluctance. Parrying, he suggested Sherman, who knew something of national politics, or General Baldy Smith, who had been such an indispensable advisor at Chattanooga. Perhaps because he hoped to keep Sherman alongside him in the west, his firmest recommendation was for Smith.64
Looking back, something he rarely cared to do, the tanner’s son would have seen that he had come a seemingly impossible distance. In less than three years since leaving his father’s employ, he had risen from second choice for command of the Twenty-first Illinois to a none-too-eager candidate for the Federal top command. In addition to myriad Confederates, he had roundly overcome the poverty that nearly swamped his family in the late 1850s. Yet he was essentially unchanged. A visitor who had seen Grant hardly more than a week before the battle of Chattanooga—Pittsburgh resident William Wrenshall Smith, a cousin of Julia’s—informed his diary on November 13 that he had arrived at headquarters on that day and been greeted “cordially” by the general. Smith, who likely did not know of the iciness between Thomas and Grant, noted that his host seemed happy to have a friend to talk to. Grant gave his guest the run of his headquarters and horses, engaged him in extensive conversation, and regaled him with information about the Grant children.
He also talked about his finances. Since coming back into the army, he had invested $ 5,000 in federal bonds, bought some of the property of Julia’s father in Missouri, and now was trying to arrange collateral to purchase $ 5,000 worth of stock in a Chicago interurban railway. He had been as honestly aggressive about building a brighter future for his family as he had been about salvaging that of his country. He had, Smith wrote, been “saving all the money he could for the future, not knowing when his fortunes might change and he be thrown out of his office.” Now that he was a regular army major general, of course, he would be harder to oust. The rank was for life.65
Yet this toast of the Union remained essentially the same man he had always been—and an all too human one.
As always, Grant’s closest associates had to worry about his inner demons. The day after Julia’s cousin arrived at Chattanooga, a member of Grant’s staff hosted—in the cousin’s words—“quite a disgraceful party.” Smith gives no indication that Grant participated in the drinking, adding that Grant himself broke up the event at 4 a.m. and was “much offended at” the staffer responsible, Colonel Clark Lagow. Another long-term visitor to Grant at Chattanooga, Federal General David Hunter, said he saw Grant virtually every hour for three weeks, during the entirety of which Grant took two drinks. Dana described the headquarters party organizer, Lagow, as “
a worthless, whiskey-drinking, useless fellow.” Smith expected Grant to fire him, and he soon did.
That was not good enough for John Rawlins, though. Rawlins wrote his fiancée on November 17 that the party had forced him to change plans to visit her. His continued presence was absolutely required, Rawlins explained, “by the free use of intoxicating liquors at Head Quarters which . . . had reached to the general commanding. I am the only one here (his wife not being with him) who can . . . prevent evil consequences. . . . I had hoped, but it appears vainly, his New Orleans experience would prevent him ever again indulging with this, his worst enemy.”66
The same day, Rawlins put in writing the kind of blistering message Grant would tolerate only from him or, presumably, Julia. It warned his revered boss and friend that his behavior risked “the bitterest imprecations of an outraged and deceived people struggling in blood to preserve their liberties and their nationality.” In a comment perhaps reflecting his former life as a Galena lawyer, Rawlins added, “Indulgence in intoxicating liquors . . . becomes criminal . . . where it unfits one for the discharge of the obligations he owes his country, family, and friends.”67
Rawlins’s concern is admirable, but his anguish at that moment was groundless. A major battle loomed. His friend had consumed, if any, no more than two drinks in the carousal. For the rest of his life, one presumes, Ulysses Grant would now and then binge and disappoint loved ones. Never, though, when given a chance to fight.68
EPILOGUE
HARD ROADS ONWARD
FORREST: 1864–1877
Nathan Bedford Forrest would serve out the balance of America’s Civil War on the conflict’s western margins. His physical and mental cunning would earn him the sobriquet “Wizard of the Saddle” throughout the South. Increasingly, however, his war would concern race.
In April 1864, at Fort Pillow in West Tennessee, Forrest became a headlined “butcher” by incompletely following the Confederacy’s authorized, yet unacknowledged, policy of executing captured black troops and any whites fighting alongside them. His 1,500 troopers overran 580 Federals, white and black, killing one-third of the former and two-thirds of the latter. Large numbers of both had surrendered only to die afterward, many heinously. African American units would soon get on their knees in Memphis, swearing to “remember Fort Pillow,” and they would make good the pledge. Taking a Confederate cue, they became less and less likely to take prisoners.
Over the next year, the backcountry western war played itself out bloodily. After Robert E. Lee capitulated in Virginia and Joseph Johnston followed suit in North Carolina, Forrest disdained politicians’ calls to fight on. Branding as a lunatic anyone who still wanted to fight, he said, “You may all do as you damn please, but I’m a-going home.”
Home, however, was scarcely recognizable. The barbarous social system that had made and sustained Southern riches for 240 years had vanished, along with Forrest’s fortune. As for the people whom he had made much of his money buying and selling, they were now free—and resentful. Tennessee’s postwar government would disenfranchise ex-Confederates, and Forrest soon followed former comrades into the budding Ku Klux Klan, which strove to win back the vote and white supremacy. Reputedly electing him its first chief, the Klan would spearhead vicious intimidation of blacks and moderate whites to earn reenfranchisement of ex-Confederate Tennesseans in 1869. The terror campaign would return to similar intimidation that had helped snatch the state from the Union in 1861, as well as to longstanding antebellum punishments for incipient abolitionism.1
Forrest’s efforts to recoup financially would all fail. But trying to succeed in the New South in business—insurance and railroading—or some less obvious motivation, began to change him. He would make speeches welcoming Northern investors to the former Confederacy. He seemed to grow conciliatory in other respects as well. He would never admit to membership in the Klan (he could hang if he did) and soon publicly repudiated its proliferating violence. Finally, in 1875, as he began to bow ominously to chronic dysentery and other war-related illnesses, the Memphis Appeal reported that he had made a short speech to an African American political rally for the Democratic Party. He told his audience he came despite “the jeers of some white people, who think that I am doing wrong.” He had disregarded the scoffing, he said, because he believed he could “exert some influence . . . in strengthening fraternal relations.” He added something Abraham Lincoln himself had never said: he would “do all in my power to elevate every man—to depress none. I want to elevate you to take positions in law offices, in stores, on farms, and wherever you are capable of going.”2
Was this egalitarian rhetoric sincere or just more wily wizardry? Likely the former. Forrest had always been deferential to religion and now, in advancing age, seemed to exhibit fear of the hereafter. He had encouraged ministers in his wartime ranks to hold their services in his camps, but unlike many comrades high and low, he had been unwilling to make pious promises that he suspected circumstances forbade keeping. Now, with the Reaper approaching, the inner conflagration that had ruled him would burn out. Tearfully pronouncing himself the man who had, in Christ’s parable, built his house on sand, he would join the Cumberland Presbyterian Church of his wife and his mother. A wartime intimate would be astonished to observe that his old commander had become “as gentle as a woman.”3
Death finally freed Forrest from infirmity at age fifty-six. Thousands would trail the hearse. They would include that leading exemplar of Dixie’s elite, Jefferson Davis, as well as hundreds of African Americans, many doubtless there to see him gone.
For fourscore subsequent years, many white Southerners would celebrate his birthday. At least until the 1950s, they likely did so not because the bulk of his frantic life had embodied their near-ubiquitous belief in white supremacy. More probably, they did it to pay tribute to a fellow commoner they were convinced was smarter, more valiant, and more victorious than the elite who had led them to ruin.
GRANT: 1864–1885
Ulysses Simpson Grant did as asked and went east. For more than another year, he and Robert E. Lee battered each other. Grant was statistically no more—or less—a butcher than Lee, yet he attained that reputation by throwing Union lives into hails of Confederate iron and lead. But his grim determination to win despite the costs, combined with the damage he had done in the west, proved fatal to the Confederacy. With the South’s supply lines severed and Lee’s allies in other theaters all but vanquished, the quintessential Southern gentleman surrendered to the tanner’s son.
Six years after his final day of clerking in Galena, Illinois, Grant had become his era’s most popular American. Grateful countrymen named him president in 1868. But reuniting the shattered, debt-ridden nation he had saved proved possible in name only—for more than a century. According to many in the North and South (Grant’s own mother among them), America was forever changed, its two halves divided by the rule of Lincoln’s Republican Party. No wonder they would think so. With Dixie under martial law or, in many of its areas, none, bestial furies on both sides gratified their hates.
The most enduring legacy of the country’s deep divisions would grow out of the racial sadism of antebellum Dixie: the masked, night-riding Klansmen whom Forrest purportedly once led. Grant would fight them with far less success than he had battled the South’s more formal armies, but he would try.
Yet it was Grant’s trusting nature, not the bitter legacy of war, that nearly did him in. Friends corrupted his administration. Perhaps the most celebrated case was that of Secretary of War William W. Belknap, whom a congressional investigation caught taking kickbacks from the military trading post at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Then, around 1880, Ulysses S. Grant Jr. and a partner enlisted heavy Grant investment and partnership in their Wall Street firm; five years later, it failed and bankrupted him. He was able to free his family from the resurrected specter of want only by writing a memoir that, while occasionally self-serving, remains a military and literary masterpiece. In the most heroic victory of
his embattled life, he completed it just days prior to succumbing to throat cancer. The millions of cigars admirers had sent him ever since Fort Donelson killed him.
Lying on the couch that soon became his deathbed, able to communicate only by handwritten note, Grant left a most fitting epitaph for himself with one of his final visitors. With a humility that confirmed him as one of the commonest of American history’s common men, he wrote that a man’s destiny is forever a mystery and that he had embarked toward his with no thought of the possibility of attaining high military rank or preeminence in politics. Had anyone suggested early on that he might become an author, he wrote, he would not have been “sure whether they were making sport of me or not.” Yet, he would note, he had now managed to finish “a book which is in the hands of the manufacturers.
“I ask you to keep these notes very private,” the terminal patient would add, “lest I become an authority on the treatment of diseases. I have already too many trades to be proficient at any.”4
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A large number of generous people have been crucial in making this book possible.
Preeminent on the list have to be adept literary agent Deborah Grosvenor, who expertly guided the crafting of its initial plan and proposal, and first readers Gordon Berg and Timothy B. Smith. Gordon—past president of the Washington, DC, Civil War Roundtable and omnivorous journalistic chronicler of Civil War history and new developments in its continuing evolution—consented to read the first draft and made many salient points that helped form, refine, and push its narrative path. A good friend at the outset, he has become an indispensable one.