Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  On October 16, Lincoln, retaining Meade as commander of the Army of the Potomac, made him virtually a divisional commander by naming Grant over him, with the title of commander of the Grand Army of the Republic (evoking Napoleon’s Grand Army, and it was now of equivalent size, with probably comparably competent middle officers). Grant was not Napoleon, but he was a very determined and capable general, as Lee knew. The western region was awarded by Lincoln and Grant to another general about to make world history, William Tecumseh Sherman.

  The balance of the year yielded more good results for the North. Scott’s Anaconda Plan of five points was now more than half complete: the naval blockade of the South was tight and effective; Grant was about to put maximum pressure on Lee; and the Union held all the Mississippi, and Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas were cut off from the seven other Confederate states. (Tennessee had been largely occupied already.) At the Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20), the Union commander, William Rosecrans, drew against General Braxton Bragg and the Union took 17,000 casualties and the Confederacy 18,000. George H. Thomas, appointed commander of the Army of the Cumberland, won at Chattanooga (Lookout Mountain-Missionary Ridge, November 23–25) against Bragg and Longstreet, with each side suffering about 6,000 casualties. The South was pushed almost completely out of Tennessee. Sherman prepared to march across Georgia from northwest to southeast, cutting four more states out of the Confederacy—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida—in the fourth phase of Scott’s Anaconda Plan. Grant and Lee prepared for intense and bloody combat, total war, in the approaches to Richmond. As the Union’s armies grew, its best generals came to the top, and the Confederacy was hacked down. Both sides fought with Lincoln’s attempted reelection in November 1864 in mind. The defeat of the president was the Confederacy’s last throw.

  Following these victories, Adams told the British foreign secretary, Russell, that if the ironclad warships Britain was building for the Confederacy were delivered, it would be considered an act of war by the United States. The same message was conveyed to Napoleon III—about six naval vessels being built in French yards for the Confederacy. Britain and France (now that France had an interest in Mexico) were not prepared to bring down on their local interests the wrath of a nation that now deployed an immense, courageous, and brilliantly commanded army, and a considerable navy as well, and the contested ships were sold to neutral powers. The North had won the diplomatic wars; the South would receive no recognition from important foreign countries.

  5. GRANT BEFORE RICHMOND, SHERMAN IN GEORGIA, AND THE 1864 ELECTION

  Grant’s drive toward Richmond, and Sherman’s march through Georgia, both among the famous military campaigns of all history, began at the end of the first week of May 1864. Grant attacked toward Richmond while Butler approached it from the southeast. The Union armies had 140,000 men to 96,000 for Lee and Beauregard. In the Battle of the Wilderness, the agile Lee outmaneuvered Grant and inflicted 18,000 casualties to 10,000 of his own. Grant moved to go round Lee’s flank at Spotsylvania, an action that cost another 12,000 Union casualties, about twice as many as Lee lost. Grant was not indifferent to casualties, but he did not believe Lee could stop him, and he thought he could force a battle at Richmond, where he could destroy or terminally enervate the Confederate Army. He pressed on south to Cold Harbor, only 20 miles east of Richmond, and attacked entrenched positions from June 1 to 3, losing 12,000 men on June 3 alone. After a month, he had lost 60,000 casualties, the size of Lee’s entire army (not counting the 36,000 Beauregard deployed for the final defense of Richmond); but Lee had lost 30,000, half his army, and Grant could replace his losses and Lee could not.

  Grant turned west, moving south of Richmond to cut it off from the rest of the Confederacy, and he laid siege to Petersburg, less than 20 miles south of Richmond, taking but inflicting heavy casualties and forcing Lee at all times to defend hard-pressed positions and preventing him from executing his skill at maneuver and imaginative and swift reconfigurations of formations. He planned to move past Richmond and take it from the rear, as he had Vicksburg. As the heavy slogging at Petersburg continued through the summer of 1864, Confederate cavalry general Jubal T. Early defeated Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley and came within five miles of Washington before troops sent back by Grant deflected Early, and the new commander of the Army of the Shenandoah, General Philip H. Sheridan, drove Early out of that valley and scorched it as he went. This group of army commanders, Grant with Sheridan under him on the Shenandoah, Sherman in the west with Thomas under him at the head of the Army of the Cumberland, were the senior command team to whom was entrusted the general offensive to end the war and the insurgency. They were a very strong group, as skilled as Lee, Johnston, Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, had he lived. (Union armies were named after rivers, Confederate armies after states.)

  Sherman’s march through Georgia, with 100,000 men facing Johnston’s 60,000, set out from Chattanooga. Johnston conducted a very capable, Fabian action of maneuver and harassment and managed even, lightly, to defeat Sherman at Kenesaw Mountain on June 27, about 100 miles south-southeast of Chattanooga. But Sherman’s army was unstoppable and Sherman himself was too aggressive a commander to leave much for Johnston to attack, and on July 17 he arrived within 10 miles of Atlanta. Jefferson Davis foolishly replaced the cunning and unflappable Johnston with the impetuous John Bell Hood. Hood stood and fought before Atlanta on July 20 and 21, and was defeated and had to retire within Atlanta. Sherman invested the city, forced its evacuation on September 1, and occupied it the next day. On September 2, Sherman signaled Lincoln: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” To the North, the enemy’s greatest city had fallen. In southern lore, after victory was impossible and martyrdom was the objective, Atlanta was represented, in Gone with the Wind and elsewhere, as a Paris of the South wantonly desecrated and destroyed by northern war criminals. Sherman’s rough-and-tumble notions of total war made such charges plausible. Sherman ordered Atlanta evacuated of civilians on September 7. Hood had ordered Confederate government buildings destroyed. Atlanta had only 14,000 people, but it was convenient to both sides to imply that it was a great metropolis. It was a rail and trans-shipment center and an important crossroads of the South, but the Lincoln reelection campaign represented its capture as breaking the back of the South.

  The casualties of Grant’s armies were not disguised from the public and were dismaying, and Lincoln, who was never overburdened by optimism, feared he might not be reelected. On July 4 he had pocket-vetoed (refused to sign) the Wade-Davis Bill, which proposed a radical and repressive reconstruction of the South and the treatment of its leaders as traitors. Lincoln had always planned as conciliatory an end as possible, as long as there was no ambiguity about the Union’s victory and the South recommitted itself formally to the federal cause. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, an erratic man who at first had wanted to let the South go, published an attack upon Lincoln by the authors of Wade-Davis. Lincoln refused to allow uncertain electoral prospects to influence his conduct and ignored the obstreperous and insubordinate conduct of the radical members of his own party.

  But it was clear that the Union was not far from victory. Sherman’s seizure of Atlanta, signaling his intention to slice the South in two again, and Admiral Farragut’s fine naval victory at Mobile Bay on August 5 (“Damn the torpedoes!” Farragut sank what was left of the Confederate Navy and landed soldiers who seized the last important Confederate Gulf port) again legitimized the Scott-Lincoln Anaconda strategy Grant pinned down Lee while the naval constriction tightened and Sherman and Thomas tore the guts out of the Confederacy.

  The Republican Party had met at Baltimore on June 7, and claimed to unite with the war Democrats and to call itself the National Union Party, as if it were a coalition. For this reason, Hamlin was not renominated for vice president, and was replaced by Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Democratic senator who had remained loyal to the Union. Lincoln’s slogan was “Don’t change horses in the middle of the s
tream.” The Democrats met at Chicago on August 29, and even though Sherman captured Atlanta while the convention was in progress, it adopted a “Copperhead” (defeatist and instant peace) platform seeking the immediate cessation of hostilities “on the basis of the Federal Union of the states,” a preposterous flim-flam job. As their candidate to stand on this platform the Democrats chose General George B. McClellan, whom Lincoln had fired for not following up on his victory of Antietam. While McClellan claimed to disavow the feeble and cowardly platform, he certainly tried to exploit war weariness and pessimism. The tradition of a peace party had been carried with great integrity and rigor by De Witt Clinton for the Federalists against Madison in 1812, and by Henry Clay for the Whigs against Polk in 1844, but this was a dishonorable candidate standing on a dishonorable platform.

  With that said, it must not be imagined that enthusiasm for the purposes of the war was universal. Attempts to conscript Union forces were not overly successful, and the armies were mainly filled by volunteers. There were four separate drafts, in July 1863, and March, July, and December 1864; but those allowed draftees to gain an exemption by paying $300 or recruiting a substitute. A total of 1,500,000 men were drafted, reduced by credits for having volunteered or having accepted alternate employment to 941,000, of which 776,000 were actually conscripted. Of these, 161,000, or 21 percent, failed to report, and 311,000 were exempted for physical or other reasons, another 38 percent; 87,000, or 11 percent, bought exemptions, and the number replaced by substitutes reduced the number of draftees who actually served to 43,000, or 6 percent. But 834,000 men volunteered, and the total number who served, as volunteers, substitutes, and draftees, was 997,000. At the first draft in July 1863, just 10 days after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, there were four days of draft riots in New York City, with widespread looting and the lynching of several African Americans, which required the infusion of several regiments of Meade’s Army of the Potomac to restore order. The rioters were mainly Irish. While there were great working-class reservations about the war, and also by northerners with close southern connections, the response of volunteers was immense. The famous songwriter Stephen Foster composed a song about Lincoln’s request for 300,000 men in 1863 with the refrain: “We’re coming, our Union to restore; Coming Father Abraham, 300,000 more.”

  Lincoln’s policy was hard-pressed at times, in the population, in the Congress, and in foreign capitals, but he always managed enough support to have the manpower to conduct the war, and enough success to prevent being shackled by radicals in his party and to deter direct foreign confrontations. His strategic management was masterly at every phase, as the secession crisis grew, as he split the Democrats in the debates with Douglas, took the Republican nomination from under the nose of Seward, arranged for the South to attack the Union, folded emancipation into the main war aim of preservation of the Union, and implemented Scott’s strategy by identifying and promoting gifted commanders from well down in the ranks when the war began, all the while out-maneuvering domestic opposition and foreign scheming, and speaking and writing publicly of the country’s war aims with unforgettable eloquence. So unassuming and free of egotism was he, that like a great circus performer, it was only obvious after he had left the stage how brilliant his strategic conceptions, command decisions, and tactical initiatives had been. That, coupled to the nobility of his cause, his infallible mastery of English, and his profoundly sympathetic personality, explains and justifies Lincoln’s immense and universal prestige.

  McLellan took Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio for vice president, but by the time their convention adjourned, it appeared to be clear that Lincoln was winning the war and would win the election. And he was reelected, 2.218 million votes, including over 70 percent of members of the armed forces who voted, to 1.813 million. The overall margin was 55 percent to 45 percent. No one else had ever run for president of the U.S. in the middle of a war that had begun in his term, and it was a very respectable result. The only sequel would be Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, and he defeated Thomas E. Dewey by a slightly narrower percentage (though few members of the armed forces, 10 percent of the whole population, who would have voted strongly for Roosevelt, were able to vote (Chapter 11)).

  6. THE END OF THE WAR AND THE DEATH OF LINCOLN

  The election sounded the death-knell for the South. Sherman ordered that Atlanta be burned to the ground on November 7 (the day after the election), the city having been evacuated, but was persuaded by the city’s leading Roman Catholic clergyman (Sherman was a semi-Roman Catholic and he had a son who became a Jesuit priest) to spare the city’s churches and hospitals. It was still a dramatic, and for the South, traumatizing conflagration. It conformed to the grim and stern Lincoln-Grant-Sherman view that nothing less than a comprehensive and total defeat would eliminate in spirit as well as fact the vocation to independence of the South. Sherman departed the smoking ruins of Atlanta (about 70 percent of it was razed) on November 14 with 60,000 men stretched out on a front 60 miles wide, to march the 300 miles to the sea at Savannah. Sherman’s orders were to “forage liberally on the land and destroy anything of military use to the enemy.” Practically everything was destroyed—crops, buildings, roads, railways, bridges. Sherman occupied Savannah on December 22, having scorched to ashes and utterly destroyed most of Georgia. Savannah was not disturbed, and Sherman strictly reimposed discipline, having turned a blind eye to the most rapacious looting on the five-week march. The reality of what the war had become shocked even some northerners, startled the world, and profoundly shook what was left of southern morale.

  Hood gave up fighting Sherman and moved to Sherman’s west all the way back into Tennessee, thinking he might strangle Sherman’s communications (not that it would have much mattered, as his armies took what they wanted on their route of march). It was a mad and desperate plan. Hood encountered Union general John Schofield in an engagement won by the Union, and then his errant, purposeless army came face-to-face with Thomas’s seasoned Army of the Cumberland at Nashville, where Sherman had sent Thomas to rid him of Hood. Hood’s army was completely destroyed and fragmented into disparate groups of stragglers and deserters and guerrillas. More than 20,000 Confederates were removed from the war in one way or another. Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia were now separated from the Confederacy and Tennessee entirely occupied by the Union. The Confederacy was now reduced to Virginia and the Carolinas. Grant was south of Richmond and grinding Lee’s army in the siege of Petersburg, and in the final phase of the Anaconda Plan, the dreaded Sherman turned north and drove into the Carolinas, wreaking even greater havoc than he had in Georgia. Lee reversed Davis’s error and brought back the South’s most talented general, next to Lee himself, Joseph Johnston, with the unenviable task of halting Sherman’s juggernaut with much inferior forces. The Union navy employed amphibious forces to seize Fort Fisher and shut the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, in January and February 1865, and what was left of the Confederacy was racked by riots and demonstrations against shortages, speculation, skyrocketing prices, evaporation of income, and heavy casualties.

  Sherman had eliminated South Carolina as a functioning state by the end of February and fought and won his last battle with Johnston at Bentonville, North Carolina, on March 19 and 20. But Johnston fought admirably and retired in good order despite Sherman’s lack of reluctance, unlike Union generals earlier in the war, to give chase and set reserves on the retreating enemy. Grant’s nine-month siege at Petersburg, as he had planned, had finally almost strangled Lee’s army. Grant was deploying 115,000 battle-hardened veterans to Lee’s 54,000, many of them new recruits. On April 1, Lee attacked at Five Forks, near Petersburg, but was repelled by Sheridan, and Lee had Davis called out of a church service and advised that he had ordered the immediate abandonment of Richmond and Petersburg. (At the Hampton Roads Conference on February 3, Lincoln himself met with Confederate vice president Stephens, an initial opponent of secession in 1861. Davis had instructed Stephens to insist on recognition
of southern independence as a condition for peace, a mad delusion at this point, and the conference ended after a couple of hours.)

  Davis fled his capital as Lee went to Lynchburg and prepared to try to embark his army, now reduced to 30,000 men, by rail to North Carolina to meet with Johnston for a final stand against the overwhelming encircling forces of Grant and Sherman. Grant moved like a cat on his trail and Sheridan blocked Lee’s routes to the west and south. The Army of Northern Virginia was almost out of food and ammunition. Sheridan telegraphed Lincoln: “If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.” Lincoln instantly replied to Grant, quoting Sheridan’s telegram and adding: “Let the thing be pressed”

  Grant, his armies now sensing victory so keenly that, as he wrote, the infantry foreswore rest and rations and “marched about as rapidly as the cavalty,”88 invited Lee to surrender. Lee asked for terms, and the two met at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. As befits great generals and exemplary gentlemen, it was without histrionics or even negotiation, and was entirely courteous. They reminisced discursively about “the old army,” and on request by Lee, Grant gave his terms and then wrote them, and Lee accepted straightforwardly. His army was now crumbling from famine and desertions, including the colonel, sole survivor of his regiment, and owner of the house where Grant was billeted, who dropped out near his home and surrendered personally to the Union commander. Grant permitted Confederate officers to retain their horses and sidearms and did not ask for prisoners. All weapons of war and ammunition were surrendered, the Army of Northern Virginia ceased operation, and all officers gave their word that no one would resume hostilities. The commander of the Union Armies ordered that 25,000 full rations be issued at once to their late and distinguished enemy. The Army of Northern Virginia self-demobilized and its survivors returned home, after visiting the Union quartermaster and commissary exactly as Union troops would. Grant ordered an end to what began as a 100-gun salute of victory, and ordered there be not the slightest gesture of exultation nor any act disrespectful of, as he put it, “a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” 89