by Bruce Catton
Grant was an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not a great man except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep and gifted with courage that never faltered; when the time came to risk all, he went in like a simple-hearted, unaffected, unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt. A social, friendly man, too, fond of a pleasant joke and also ready with one; but liking above all a long chat of an evening, and ready to sit up all night talking in the cool breeze in front of his tent. Not a man of sentimentality, not demonstrative in friendship, but always holding to his friends and just even to the enemies he hated.2
Other men were coming to the same sort of conclusion. Even the New York World, which had attacked Grant so bitterly a little earlier, was beginning to see him in a different light. Its correspondent wrote, almost as if he were saying it against his will:
Gen. Grant still retains his hold upon the affections of his men. His energy and disposition to do something is what they admire in him and he has the remarkable tact of never spoiling any mysterious and vague notions which may be entertained in the minds of the privates as to the qualities of a commander-in-chief. He confines himself to saying and doing as little as possible before his men. No Napoleonic displays, no ostentation, no speech, no superfluous flummery. Thus distance lends enchantment to the view of the man.
Another newspaperman summed him up in more cordial terms. Writing for the New York Times, the correspondent who signed himself “Galway” said that Grant “moves with his shoulders thrown a little forward of the perpendicular, his left hand in the pocket of his pantaloons, an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his eyes thrown straight forward, which, from the haze of abstraction that veils them, and a countenance drawn into furrows of thought, would seem to indicate that he was intensely preoccupied.” Galway agreed that the soldiers trusted him. He went on:
The soldiers observe him coming and rising to their feet gather on each side of the way to see him pass—they do not salute him, they only watch him … with a certain sort of familiar reverence. His abstract air is not so great while he thus moves along as to prevent his seeing everything without apparently looking at it; you will see this in the fact that however dense the crowd in which you stand, if you are an acquaintance his eye will for an instant rest on yours with a glance of recollection, and with it a grave nod of recognition. A plain blue suit, without scarf, sword or trappings of any sort, save the double-starred shoulder straps—an indifferently good “Kossuth” hat, with the top battered in close to his head; full beard of a cross between “light” and “sandy”; a square-cut face whose lines and contour indicate extreme endurance and determination, complete the external appearance of this small man, as one sees him passing along, turning and chewing restlessly the end of his unlighted cigar.3
A doctor on McPherson’s staff wrote that Grant was “plain as an old shoe,” and said that it was hard to make new troops believe that this man in a common soldier’s blouse with a battered felt hat, and with cavalry pants stuffed in muddy boots, was actually the Commanding General. A private soldier said that the army believed Grant never made mistakes: “Everything that Grant directs is right. His soldiers believe in him. In our private talk among ourselves I have never heard a single soldier speak in doubt of Grant.” The men liked Grant’s unassuming ways. Most generals, when they rode the lines, went attended by swanky staffs, usually with a cavalry escort; Grant was customarily attended by no one save a couple of orderlies, to carry messages if need arose. “The soldiers seem to look upon him as a friendly partner of theirs, not as an arbitrary commander. As he passes by, the private soldiers feel as free to greet him as they would to address one of their neighbors when meeting him at home. ‘Good morning, General,’ ‘Pleasant day, General,’ and like expressions are the greetings he meets everywhere. The soldiers when meeting him are never embarrassed by the thought that they are talking to a great general.” Yet they rarely cheered him, and when he rode the lines they did not throw their hats in the air and yell. “A pleasant salute to, and a good-natured nod from him in return, seems more appropriate.”4
The simple fact is that Grant was not quite the same person in the early spring of 1863 that he had been before. He had been growing, developing, finding himself, in the months since Halleck left for Washington. The change is evident through a study of his dispatches, reports and official correspondence. They become crisper, more solid, straight to the point, business-like; the impression gained by studying them is that of a man who has at last mastered the job of running an army, who no longer doubts either his own status or his own powers and who is moving ahead with full confidence.
Sherman commented, years later, on the way in which Grant liked to write his own orders and dispatches. He was jealous, said Sherman, of any secretary’s attempt to write anything for him: “He would sit down and scribble off an order easier than he could tell another what he wanted. If anyone came along and remarked to him, ‘That was a clever order Rawlins put out for you today,’ Grant would say right out, ‘I wrote that myself.’ I presume I have 150 orders and memoranda all in his own hand. Some of them read about like this: ‘Take plenty of shovels and picks up to Rye Bend to clear the way.’ I think that is just how one of them reads. He had been over the ground I was to go on … He knew what was wanted and so sent me word. He may have spoken to me about it before. He was a great man for details. He remembered the most minute details and watched every point.” On a very different level, a private soldier got the same impression, saying: “He will ride along the long line of the army, apparently an indifferent observer, yet he sees and notices everything. He seems to know and remember every regiment, and in fact every cannon in his large army.”5
Grant owed something, undoubtedly, to the change in his relationship with Halleck. The nagging faultfinding of the Donelson-Shiloh-Corinth period was gone. Halleck was treating him now as a tested, fully competent officer, writing gossipy letters to him, giving him friendly advice, offering him the support which a general-in-chief would give to a trusted subordinate. In part, this may have been because none of the other army commanders with whom Halleck was dealing was measuring up: more and more, the tone of Halleck’s letters shows that he was relying on Grant as he never could rely on Burnside, Hooker or Rosecrans—to say nothing of McClellan and Buell. The McClernand tangle had unquestionably brought Grant and Halleck closer together, and it had left Grant with a fuller awareness of his own authority.
The winter had been difficult. None of the schemes to bring the army into a good fighting position had worked. Yet Grant was confident, as the last of the Yazoo ventures faded out, and he proudly told Washburne “we are going through a campaign here such as has not been heard of on this continent before.” At Donelson and Shiloh, Grant could cry out that he did not know what Washington wanted of him: now that note is gone, he knows what he wants and he knows, deep within himself, that what he wants will be what Washington wants. The Grant of April, 1863, is at last the Grant who knows precisely what he is about.6
Nobody was quite ready to say that Grant was a great man: nobody, at the same time, failed to realize that when you touched this stoop-shouldered, unassuming little man you touched somebody very special. The reputation that had been built up around Grant—hard-drinker, butcher, blundering man who knew nothing much except killing—still existed, and people were forever being pleasantly surprised to find that when they got at the man himself nothing of this nature was visible. Some devoted women came down the river this winter, dreading what they were going to see when at last they met this slouchy little general: they met him, and found that nothing that they had heard about him came close to the truth, and their hearts beat faster when they realized that this soldier was the kind of person they had doubted but dreamed about. Mary Livermore led this delegation from the
Sanitary Commission down to Milliken’s Bend, as the winter of 1863 ended, and she and the others who came with her had heard all of the stories—Grant boasted that he would take Vicksburg if it cost him three quarters of his army, Grant would turn the Mississippi out of its course and leave Vicksburg high and dry, Grant was a conscienceless drunkard who had to be put to bed at night by sorrowing juniors—and here, in a cramped room on a steamboat, they were talking with the man. They looked at him, these women who ahead of their generation knew men and their frailties and the bad things that could happen in a womanless army, and Mrs. Livermore wrote down what they saw:
“Grant was not a drunkard—that was immediately apparent to us. This conviction gave us such a joy that had we been younger we should all, men and women alike, have tossed our hats in the air and hurrahed. As it was, we looked each other in the face and said heartily, ‘Thank God!’ … The clear eye, clean skin, firm flesh and steady nerves of General Grant gave the lie to the universal calumnies then current concerning his intemperate habits and those of the officers of his staff. Our eyes had become practiced in reading the diagnosis of drunkenness.”
There were several things Mrs. Livermore wanted from the General, beside the chief thing—confidence, and an understanding—but when she saw him alone she realized that he was pressed for time, so she asked for only one favor. There were twenty-one desperately sick soldiers, whose names she had on a bit of paper, who needed to be discharged from the Army but who could not be discharged because somehow their papers had been lost so there was nothing on which Army routine could act. Twenty-one lives, which would very soon be lost unless something was done, and the doctors and officers she had talked with had raised difficulties … Lady, you don’t know the Army, we can’t do things this way, if the man’s papers aren’t straight he is out of luck.…
So Mary Livermore got into the cabin on the steamboat where Grant was working. The place was wreathed in heavy cigar smoke, and the table where Grant sat was stacked high with papers. Grant, when this woman came in, “seemed the most bashful man I ever encountered.” He got up in a hurry, tried to shove half a dozen chairs forward for her to sit in, took his cigar out of his mouth and his hat off of his head and then replaced both without knowing that he was doing it, and asked what he could do. She explained the matter of the 21 soldiers who were going to die. Grant mumbled something to the effect that this was a case for the medical director; she blurted out that it was time to cut a little red tape; Grant muttered that he would let her know about it … and the next day a staff officer came to Mary Livermore from Grant with the signed papers that sent the soldiers home with discharges, men who now had a chance to live again. From that moment, as far as this woman was concerned, Grant was a great man.7
The old attacks continued, to be sure. In the middle of the winter Murat Halstead, editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, forwarded to Secretary Chase a despairing letter from a correspondent at Vicksburg: “There never was a more thoroughly disgusted, disheartened, demoralized army than this is and all because it is under such men as Grant and Sherman.” The letter repeated all of the old allegations about sickness, about inefficiency of the medical department, about sick men who lacked care “while drunken doctors ride from barrooms to whore houses in government ambulances,” and Halstead inquired: “How is it that Grant who was behind at Ft. Henry, drunk at Donelson, surprised and whipped at Shiloh and driven back from Oxford, Miss., is still in command? Gov. Chase, these things are true. Our noble army of the Mississippi is being wasted by the foolish, drunken, stupid Grant. He can’t organize or control or fight an army. I have no personal feeling about it, but I know he is an ass.”8
Even worse was an attack which came from a former friend of Grant’s, Brigadier General C. S. Hamilton. Hamilton and Grant had known one another in the Old Army, Hamilton had fought well at Iuka and Corinth, and when Grant went down the Mississippi he left Hamilton in charge of the district of West Tennessee. Hamilton wrote Grant cordially, wishing him well and adding: “I hope you will be entirely successful in your undertaking. The taking of Vicksburg is your right, and I hope it may be added to the laurels which belong to you as the most successful general of the war.” But although he wrote in this friendly fashion, Hamilton was growing bitter. Others were being promoted past him—McPherson, among them—and Hamilton suspected that it was because of favoritism. He had been brooding for a long time, and on February 11—two days after writing that friendly letter to Grant—he wrote to his friend, Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin, in quite a different vein:
You have asked me to write you confidentially. I will now say what I have never breathed. Grant is a drunkard. His wife has been with him for months only to use her influence in keeping him sober. He tries to let liquor alone but he cannot resist the temptation always. When he came to Memphis he left his wife at LaGrange & for several days after getting here was beastly drunk, utterly incapable of doing anything. Quimby and I took him in charge, watching him day & night & keeping liquor away from him & we telegraphed to his wife & brought her on to take care of him.
Hamilton was full of bitterness. He asserted that General Hurlbut, who commanded at Memphis, was another drunkard; that McPherson had done nothing to deserve his recent elevation to Major General; and that McClernand was not to be trusted. (In an earlier letter, Hamilton had explained that Gordon Granger, a major general in the Army of the Cumberland, was “an ignorant, drinking, blatant, obscene loafer” and that Rosecrans was probably mixed up in cotton deals and, despite his reputation as a devout Catholic, was a very profane man and a hard drinker to boot.)9
There is nothing to show that Grant knew anything about what Hamilton was saying, either then or later. He did know, however, that Hamilton was scheming to replace McPherson in command of the 17th corps, and Grant wrote to Halleck to protest about it; and a little later, when Hamilton found himself unable to get along with Hurlbut and offered his resignation, Grant promptly sent the resignation along with the recommendation that it be accepted. The War Department agreed, and Hamilton ceased to be a problem.
The point is that things were a little different now. Washington had been told, over and over again, that Grant was a drunkard. The fact that these stories—the detailed, seemingly circumstantial ones, at any rate—nearly always came from men who had been having a fight with Grant, or who found some order of his oppressive, may have taken a little of the sparkle off of the charges; in any case, they were beginning to collapse of their own weight, they were no longer raising a sensation. Washington was beginning to see that this general was an entirely different sort of man. The one quality in Grant which was becoming more evident than any other was a quiet, unshakable strength of purpose which made him wholly reliable, a man who could be counted on, a man who had a sort of inevitability about him—and this, of all human qualities imaginable, is the last thing to be found in an alcoholic.
It was just a little later this spring that Chaplain Eaton, who had “all of those darkies on his shoulders,” went to Washington to report to the President on the work he was doing. He found that Lincoln had come to his own conclusion. Lincoln told him how a delegation of Congressmen had come to the White House to urge Grant’s removal on the ground that he drank too much. As Eaton remembered the conversation, Lincoln said: “I then began to ask them if they knew what he drank, what brand of whiskey he used, telling them most seriously that I wished they would find out. They conferred with each other and concluded they could not tell what brand he used. I urged them to ascertain and let me know, for if it made fighting generals like Grant I should like to get some of it for distribution.” Eaton recalled that when he went to see Grant at the beginning of the spring he had been warned that the man was showing the signs of hard work, “looking like half a dozen men condensed into one”; he found it so, seeing Grant clad in an old brown linen duster and a battered slouch hat, with his trousers worn through by constant rubbing against saddle leather—“His very clothes, as well as the crows’ feet on
his brow, bore testimony to the strenuousness of the life he was leading.”10
If the Vicksburg campaign was getting a bad press in the North, much of the blame undoubtedly belonged to Sherman. No American soldier ever disliked reporters more than Sherman did. The going-over he had received while commanding in Kentucky in the fall of 1861 had permanently embittered him; he considered newspapermen liars at best and Confederate agents at worst, and, quite literally, he would have been delighted to hang some of them if he could have found a proper excuse. This winter Sherman had been having a bitter passage at arms with Tom Knox of the New York Herald. Knox had written highly critical articles about the fight at Chickasaw Bayou and had recited the old charges that Sherman was insane, or on the edge of insanity. Sherman ranted that Knox was “a spy and an infamous dog,” asserted that his dispatch had given the Confederates information about Union strength and tactics before Vicksburg, and had the reporter court-martialed as a spy. The court-martial dragged on for days, refused to convict Knox of espionage, but did order him sent outside the army’s lines, under penalty of imprisonment if he returned. In Washington, the press rallied in Knox’s support, a delegation called on President Lincoln, and on March 20 Lincoln issued orders revoking the sentence of the court-martial; Knox could return to the Vicksburg area, said the President, and could stay there, “if General Grant shall give his express assent.”