by Bruce Catton
Over in the Army of Northern Virginia, James Longstreet was quietly warning people not to underestimate this new Yankee commander: “That man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war.” 7 Nobody in the North heard the remark, but the quality which had called it forth had not gone unnoticed. Here was the man who looked as if he would ram his way through a brick wall, and since other tactics had not worked perhaps that was the thing to try. At Fort Donelson and at Vicksburg he had swallowed two Confederate armies whole, and at Chattanooga he had driven a third army in headlong retreat from what had been thought to be an impregnable stronghold, and all anyone could think of was the hard blow that ended matters. Men seemed ready to call Grant the hammerer before he even began to hammer.
Yet if there were many who uncritically expected much, there were some who had corrosive doubts. Congress had passed an act creating the rank of lieutenant general, knowing that if the act became law no one but Grant would be named, knowing that in passing the act it was doing only what the situation and the country demanded. Yet Congress had had one worry all the while it was acting—a worry expressed in the simple, vulgar question: If we turn the country’s armies over to this man, will he stay sober?
The question was never debated publicly and never forgotten in private. Never before had there been anything quite like this uneasy concern that the nation’s survival might hang on one man’s willingness to refrain from drinking too much. Along with the legend of victory, there had arisen about Grant this legend of drunkenness—bad days in California, forced resignation from the army, hardscrabble period in Missouri and Illinois, surprise at Shiloh. All of these were items in the legend, and men who knew nothing whatever about it had at least heard of President Lincoln’s offhand crack that he would like to buy for his other generals some of Grant’s own brand of whisky. Men looked at Grant and saw what they had been led to see. Some saw quiet determination, and others, like Richard Henry Dana, saw “the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink,” and considered that there was an air of seediness and half pay about the fellow.
The question had finally been resolved in Grant’s favor, of course, but not without much soul searching on the part of those who had to resolve it. And as a hedge against a chancy future, Congress had created for the lieutenant general the post of chief of staff, and into this post there had come the thin, impassioned, consumptive little lawyer from Illinois, John A. Rawlins.
Rawlins knew no more about military matters than any other lawyer, except for what had rubbed off on him through three years with Grant, but that did not matter. He ran Grant’s staff capably enough, although high policy sometimes got away from him and he was hesitant about asserting himself where officers of the Regular Army were concerned, but what was really important about him was the fact that he had a mother hen complex. He was devoted to the Union with a passion that was burning the life out of him, but he was even more devoted to U. S. Grant, and his great, self-chosen mission in life was to guard the general’s honor, well-being, and sobriety. In elevating Grant the government had in effect elevated Rawlins as well. Unformulated but taken for granted was the idea that he was the man who would save the man who would save the country.8
There was a good deal of needless worry in all of this. Grant was no drunkard. He was simply a man infinitely more complex than most people could realize. Under the hard, ruthless man of war—the remorseless soldier who hammered and hammered until men foolishly believed him raw strength incarnate—there was quite another person: the West Point cadet who hated military life and used to hope against unavailing hope that Congress would presently abolish the military academy and so release him from an army career; the young officer who longed to get away from camp and parade ground and live quietly as a teacher of mathematics; a man apparently beset by infinite loneliness, with a profound need for the warm, healing, understanding intimacy that can overleap shyness. Greatly fortunate, he found this intimacy with his wife, whom he still loved as a young man loves his first sweetheart, and when he was long away from her he seems to have been a little less than whole. On the eve of every great battle, after he became a famous general, with the orders all written and everything taped for the next day’s violence, and the unquiet troops drifting off into a last sleep, he would go to his tent and unburden himself in a long, brooding letter to this woman who still spoke of him, quaintly, as “Mister Grant.”
So it could happen badly with him, when he was alone and cut off and the evils of life came down about him. Marooned in California, far from his family, tormented by money problems, bored by the pointless routine of a stagnant army post under a dull and unimaginative colonel, he could turn to drink for escape. He could do the same thing back in Missouri as a civilian, working hard for a meager living, all the luck breaking badly, drifting into failure at forty, Sam Grant the ne’er-do-well. Deep in Tennessee, likewise, sidetracked by a jealous and petty-minded superior, the awful stain of Shiloh lying ineradicable on his mind, his career apparently ready to end just as it was being reborn, the story could be the same. There was a flame in him, and there were times when he could not keep the winds from the outer dark from blowing in on him and making it flicker. But it never did go out.
In any case, the Army of the Potomac was hardly in a position to look down its nose on officers who drank. It had an abundance of them, and they had been seen in every level from army commander down to junior lieutenant. There had been times when the sleep of enlisted men had been broken by the raucous noises coming from the tents of drunken officers. There had been one notable occasion this past winter when a famous corps commander got drunk, walked full-tilt into a tree in front of his tent, and was with difficulty restrained from court-martialing the officer of the guard on charges of felonious assault. A little Quaker nurse in a II Corps hospital, commenting on the fact that both a corps and a division commander had been drunk during a recent battle, wrote bitterly: “I don’t care what anyone says, war is humbug. It is just put out to see how much suffering the privates can bear, I guess.” Perfectly in character was the tale told of a major who commanded an artillery brigade, a heavy drinker despite the fact that he came from prohibitionist Maine. This man had a birthday coming up and he wanted to celebrate, and he called in his commissary officer and asked how much whisky they had in stock. The officer said there might be as much as two gallons, and the major was indignant.
“Two gallons!” he repeated. “What is two gallons of whisky among one man?” 9
To do the army justice, it did not worry about Grant’s drinking. A general who never got drunk was a rarity—so much so that his sobriety was always mentioned in his biography, as a sign that he stood above the common run. What troubled the officer corps—and, to an extent, the enlisted man as well—was the fact that Grant came from the West. The West seemed to be a side show where a general could win a reputation without really amounting to much. (After all, there had been John Pope.) Federal troops in the West were thought to be an undisciplined rabble. Also—which was what really mattered —they had never been up against the first team. They had never had to face Robert E. Lee.
Lee was the one soldier in whom most of the higher officers of the Army of the Potomac had complete, undiluted confidence. Among the many achievements of that remarkable man, nothing is much more striking than his ability to dominate the minds of the men who were fighting against him. These men could look back on several years of warfare, and what they saw always seemed about the same—the Army of the Potomac marching south to begin an offensive, well-equipped and full of confidence, and, within days or weeks, fighting doggedly and without too much confidence to escape annihilation. Twice the army had won a defensive battle, letting its enemies go away unmolested afterward, but when it took the offensive it invariably lost the initiative. Its own plans never seemed to matter, because sooner or later both armies moved by Lee’s plans. Grant was untried. His record probably meant nothing. Just wait until he tried tangling w
ith Lee!10
As it happened, this attitude worked both ways; if soldiers in the East had a low opinion of soldiers in the West, the Westerners returned the feeling with interest. A Federal general in one of the Western armies, reading the sad news from Chancellorsville the preceding spring, had remarked that “we do not build largely on the Eastern army,” and continued: “When we hear, therefore, that the Eastern army is going to fight, we make our minds up that it is going to be defeated, and when the result is announced we feel sad enough but not disappointed.” Westerners believed that the Army of the Potomac had never been made to fight all out and that when all was said and done there was something mysteriously wrong with it. The Westerners had had no Antietam or Gettysburg, but they had had a Shiloh and a Stone’s River, and they felt that they had seen the Confederates at their toughest. When the IX Corps was sent to Tennessee in the fall of 1863, Western troops greeted the boys with the jeering question: “All quiet along the Potomac?” and announced caustically: “We’ll show you how to fight.” 11
So there were mutual doubts, and the effect was unfortunate. The officers of this army not only viewed Grant’s advent with strong skepticism; in many cases this skepticism verged on outright hostility, so that it was ready to burst out with a bitter, triumphant “I told you so!” if the new general should run into trouble. Grant’s presence here was an implied criticism of the army’s prior leadership and strategy. Through him, the administration was striking its final blow at the whole complex of emotions and relationships which had come down from McClellan—and McClellan remained, next to Lee, the man in whom most of the veteran officers still had implicit confidence.
Among the private soldiers there was mostly a great curiosity. It was noticed that of a sudden the enlisted man had become a student of newspapers and magazines, reading everything he could find about the new general in chief. Men made themselves familiar with Grant’s campaigns, and it was not uncommon to see campfire groups drawing maps in the dirt with sticks to demonstrate how Vicksburg and Chattanooga had gone. At the worst, there was resigned acquiescence. One man summed up his company’s opinion by saying: “He cannot be weaker or more inefficient than the generals who have wasted the lives of our comrades during the past three years.” He concluded that “if he is a fighter he can find all the fighting he wants.”12
Ohio and Pennsylvania soldiers, huddling together on a picket post, talked it over:
“Who’s this Grant that’s made a lieutenant general?”
“He’s the hero of Vicksburg.”
“Well, Vicksburg wasn’t much of a fight. The Rebels were out of rations and they had to surrender or starve. They had nothing but dead mules and dogs to eat, as I understand.”
The men nodded, and one said that Grant could never have penned up any of Lee’s generals that way. Longstreet or Jeb Stuart “would have broken out some way and foraged around for supplies.”13
An impressionable newspaper correspondent might describe Grant as “all-absorbed, all-observant, silent, inscrutable,” a man who “controls and moves armies as he does his horse,” but the enlisted man wanted more evidence. He liked the fact that Grant went about without fuss and ceremony, and he was ready to admit that “a more hopeful spirit prevailed,” but for the most part he went along with the company officer who said that only time would tell whether this new general’s first name was really Ulysses or Useless.14
Yet there was a change, and before long the men felt it. There was a perceptible tightening up, as if someone who meant business had his hands on the reins now. Orders went forth to corps and division commanders to make a radical cut in the number of men who were borne on the returns as “on special, extra, or daily duty,” and attention was called to the discrepancies between the numbers reported “present for duty” and those listed as “present for duty, equipped.” In brigades and divisions the inspectors general became busy, and where equipment had been lacking it suddenly materialized. Long trains of freight cars came clanking in at Brandy Station, to unload food and forage, uniforms and blankets, and shelter tents and munitions. Men found that they were working harder now than in the past. Subtly but unmistakably, an air of competence and preparation was manifest.
Cavalry found that a new day had dawned. The Pleasontons and Kilpatricks were gone, and at the top there was another Westerner—a tough little man named Phil Sheridan, bandy-legged and wiry, with a black bullet head and a hard eye, wearing by custom a mud-spotted uniform, flourishing in one fist a flat black hat which, when he put it on, seemed to be at least two sizes too small for him. Like Grant, he rode a great black horse when he made his rounds and he rode it at a pounding gallop, and it was remarked that he “rolled and bounced upon the back of his steed much as an old salt does when walking up the aisle of a church after a four years’ cruise at sea.”
Cavalry’s camps were better policed, the endless picket details were reduced, and it appeared that Sheridan was going to insist on using his corps as a compact fighting unit. When Sheridan was taken to the White House to meet the President, Lincoln quoted the familiar army jest—“Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?”—and it was obvious that Sheridan was not amused. Meeting a friend at Willard’s a little bit later, Sheridan said: “I’m going to take the cavalry away from the bobtailed brigadier generals. They must do without their escorts. I intend to make the cavalry an arm of the service.”
One trooper complained that people now were checking up on all routine jobs, so that a man grooming his horse had to put in a full sixty minutes at it: “There is an officer watching you all the time, and if you stop he yells out, ‘Keep to work, there!’ ” With all of this came businesslike new weapons: seven-shot Spencer magazine carbines, made regulation equipment by a recently revived Cavalry Bureau.15
Artillerists were put through endless maneuvers, wheeling back and forth in the dust and mud to become letter-perfect in such intricacies as “changing front to the right on the first section,” and banging away in constant target practice. Batteries were taught to come galloping up to a line, halt and unlimber, completely disassemble their pieces until wheels, guns, gun carriages, and limber ohests lay separate on the ground, then at a word of command reassemble the whole business and go galloping away again. One gunner declared that a good gun crew could perform the whole maneuver in several seconds less than one minute, and another grumbled that all of this “was of as much practical use to us as if we had been assiduously drilled to walk on stilts”; and whether it was useful or otherwise the drill was repeated over and over and the gun crews got toughened up for the approaching campaign.16
None of this, naturally, missed the infantry. There were unending drills, and much target practice. The army command had caught on to the notorious fact that some soldiers simply did not know how to shoot. On every battlefield, ordnance officers had collected hundreds of discarded muskets containing anywhere from two to a dozen unexploded cartridges. In the heat of battle men failed to notice that they had not pulled trigger, and reloaded weapons which had not been fired; or, indeed, they were so untaught that they did not even know enough to cap their pieces and so pulled trigger to no effect, failing to realize in all the battle racket that they had not actually fired. A circular from headquarters decreed that every man in the army should be made to load and fire his weapon under supervision of an officer, since “it is believed there are men in this army who have been in numerous actions without ever firing their guns.”17
The bark of the drill sergeant echoed across the hard-trodden parade grounds where new levies were being put into shape. (In the Irish Brigade, an irate non-com was heard shouting: “Kape your heels together, Tim Mullaney in the rear rank, and don’t be standing wid wan fut in Bull Run and the other in the Sixth Ward!”) Transportation was cut down—one wagon to a brigade was the rule now—and many wagon drivers came back to the ranks and shouldered muskets. One of these passed a wagon train one day and heard a mule braying. Fixing his eye on the beast, the man retorted: “You needn’t
laugh at me—you may be in the ranks yourself before Grant gets through with the army.” All in all, it was as a New England soldier wrote: “We all felt at last that the boss had arrived.”18
There were many reviews: no McClellan touch now, with pomp and flourish, but a businesslike marshaling of troops to be seen by the general in chief, who rode by always at a gallop, sometimes on Cincinnati, sometimes on a little black pacer named Jeff Davis, and who for all his speed always seemed able to look each man in the ranks squarely in the eye. The general did not appear to care whether anyone cheered or not. The Iron Brigade was drawn up one day in line of massed battalions, a cold drizzle coming down, and as Grant came along the line regiment after regiment gave him a cheer. Grant was preoccupied, studying the faces of the hard fighters in this famous brigade, and he neglected to give the customary wave of the hat in response, and so the colonel of the 6th Wisconsin at the far end of the line told his men not to cheer but simply to give the formal salute. They obeyed, and as Grant came along he noticed the omission and slowed to a walk. The colors were dipped, and Grant took off his hat and bowed. The Wisconsin boys were pleased, and after the parade broke up they said that “Grant wants soldiers, not yaupers.” 19
What the soldiers liked most of all was the far-reaching hand with which Grant hauled men out of the safe dugouts in Washington and brought them into the army.
The Washington fortifications had been manned for two years with what were known as heavy artillery regiments—oversized regiments mustering around 1,800 men apiece, trained both to act as infantry, with muskets, and to man heavy guns in the forts—and these regiments never had any trouble keeping their ranks filled, because men could enlist in them in full confidence that they would have to fight very little and march not at all. They led what the Army of the Potomac considered an excessively soft life, with permanent barracks, no trouble about rations, and every night in bed.