by Bruce Catton
In December of 1863 he had set forth his program, which was essentially an effort to get both seceded persons and seceded states back into the Union with the least possible difficulty. Pardon and restoration of full rights would go to any Confederate (with certain stated exceptions) who would swear to support the Constitution and the Union of the states and to abide by all of the Federal government’s acts and pronouncements in respect to slavery. And a state itself could return to its old position in the Union whenever as many as ten per cent of the state’s voters should re-establish a loyal Union government within that state. In effect, he was trying to get the citizens of southern states to make at least a start in the direction of rebuilding the old Union.
There were difficulties. Radical Republicans were asserting that the southern states, by the act of secession, had in effect committed suicide; they would have to be rebuilt anew, and the agency that must say how and when they could be rebuilt must be the Federal Congress, not the President. Furthermore, the first steps which Lincoln so greatly desired could be taken, obviously, only in such southern states as were already largely occupied by the Union army. The most conspicuous of these was Louisiana, a large part of which had been effectively held since the middle of 1862. Here was the logical place to make a beginning. Yet Louisiana had been ruled for a time by Ben Butler, with whom even the most Union-minded of Southerners would hesitate to co-operate; and after Butler’s removal there was divided Federal authority in the state, with purely military problems competing for attention with the problems of reconstruction, and the work went forward very slowly.
Nevertheless, the start was being made, and Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, that devoted politician and maladroit strategist, was in charge of it. As the winter progressed, Banks was calling for elections — election of a civilian governor and election of delegates to a convention that should create a new constitution. (In Washington, bitter-enders like Thaddeus Stevens and Ben Wade were sputtering furiously against all of this, but the work was going forward.) The basic complication lay in the fact that Banks’s effort to reconstruct Louisiana politically was going hand in hand with an effort to conquer another section of the Confederacy by force of arms, and under Banks’s handling the two projects got in each other’s way. Banks was to lead a military expedition up the Red River toward Texas. This would complete the occupation of Louisiana, would enable a Union army to move down toward the Texas border — thereby, presumably, putting the fear into Napoleon III of France, who had been ostentatiously fracturing the Monroe Doctrine by installing luckless Maximilian on the throne in Mexico — and just incidentally it should scoop up considerable quantities of cotton for the hungry textile mills of New England, with whose problems General Banks was closely familiar.
So Banks was a busy man in this winter of 1864, and Louisiana was buzzing with activities which unfortunately were not entirely compatible. In the end, none of these ventures would actually come to anything; Wade and Stevens and their cohorts would scuttle Lincoln’s cherished “ten per cent plan,” and there were armed Confederates in waiting to defeat the Red River expedition, and the whole program would come to look like an eccentric thrust, a diversion of effort away from the main channels of the war program. Yet it did represent a valiant attempt to shape the war with post-war ideals in mind; an effort to reassert control over those events that thus far had been out of control. Every other ounce of attention had to go simply to the task of making victory certain. Here, at least, was a try at looking beyond victory. It would not work, finally, for a variety of reasons, among them the grim fact that war lays down its own rules, but the motives back of it were good. Not unless it was forced upon him would Lincoln accept the war as a complete uprooting and overturning.1
Meanwhile there was the war itself; and in March 1864 the Federal government took the decisive step. Congress created the post of lieutenant general in the regular army and Lincoln gave the job to U. S. Grant; solid insurance, finally, that the war would be fought remorselessly and methodically until the South was capable of no further resistance.
Now Grant was the top northern general, and Halleck was reduced to the position of chief of staff. Broadly speaking, Grant would have a free hand. He could make his headquarters where he chose, and within wide limits he could do as he pleased with the country’s armies, with White House and War Department pledged to give him full support. He was the fourth man to hold this position during the war, and he stood in odd contrast to the generals who had gone before.
First there had been Winfield Scott — old, swollen with dropsy, vain and fussy, a stouthearted man and a sound strategist, but so infirm physically he could not mount a horse, could indeed hardly so much as get out from behind his desk without help. Scott had understood the kind of war that was being fought, and he had done his part to get the country off to a good start; his only trouble was that he was fifteen years past his prime, and he had been quietly shelved after a few months, his place taken by the brilliant young McClellan. McClellan, too, had contributed his bit; he had given organization, order, and high morale to the Army of the Potomac, but he had never understood either the war itself or his own place in it; he had become obsessed by his picture of himself as the virtuous hero forever hampered by scheming and treacherous men of ill will, and the capacity for hard driving fighting was not in him. So he had gone, too, and Halleck had come in: Halleck, the book soldier who quickly reduced himself to the role of paper-shuffler, a man fond of details of office work and given to writing long, gossipy letters to his subordinates, pettish and querulous, wholly unfitted for the direction of a war that went by none of the old rules. Now there was Grant.
He had had his ups and his downs, and nobody in his senses would ever give him any of the nicknames that had been given to his predecessors — Old Fuss and Feathers, the Young Napoleon, Old Brains. He was not a man for nicknames, or for striking attitudes, or for impressing other people. A physician on his staff once asked him about the art of war, expecting a dissertation on Jomini or some other world authority. Grant replied that the art of war was really simple enough; at bottom, it meant to “find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”2 This uncomplicated creed he had followed ever since Belmont and Fort Henry, and it precisely expressed the quality that Abraham Lincoln had been looking for in his generals for so long a time. Now Lincoln had the man he wanted; from the spring of 1864 the Federal armies would keep moving on, and sooner or later the end would come.
Grant took over the high command in a little ceremony at the White House on March 9, and he got to work at once. As he sat down to survey the situation and figure out the best way to put his little creed into effect, he could see that in a way his task was quite simple. The Confederacy possessed two principal armies — the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, and the Army of Tennessee, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston. Lee’s army was in camp below the Rapidan River, lean and taut and ready for action; Johnston’s was encamped in northern Georgia, near the town of Dalton. Behind Lee lay Richmond, and behind Johnston lay Atlanta. These armies and the territories they defended were Grant’s destined striking points. To get at them as quickly as possible, hit them hard and keep moving on, was the Federal commander’s main responsibility. If they could be put out of action, the war would be won.
There were side shows: most notably, General Banks’s expedition, of which Grant heartily disapproved, on the twin grounds that it was not aimed at a vulnerable point and that it drew men and effort away from the real targets. Banks was getting progressively deeper into trouble while Grant was taking over his new job; he captured the Louisiana city of Alexandria and pushed forward hopefully enough, but within weeks he was to be so roundly defeated that he would narrowly escape losing his entire army and Admiral Porter’s pet fleet of ironclads along with it. But what he might or might not be able to do would make very little difference. Johnston and Lee were the real antagonists, an
d the war would be won or lost in Virginia and Georgia. It was these points that got Grant’s attention.
In the West things looked favorable. When he moved east Grant gave Sherman top command in the West, and Sherman kept prodigiously busy during the winter getting his supplies and transportation in shape for the big drive. Technically Sherman was what would now be called an army group commander. Under him there were close to one hundred thousand combat soldiers, more than half of whom belonged to George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland. Then there was Sherman’s old Army of the Tennessee, led now by James B. McPherson — smaller than the Army of the Cumberland, less well disciplined, cockier and faster on its feet. With these there was a third army, led by General John Schofield: the little Army of the Ohio, really no more than an army corps, its leader the young man who had served as very junior assistant to Lyon out in Missouri in the early days of the war. With these three armies, made as ready as the enormous resources of the North could make them, Sherman was waiting for the signal. His instructions were clear and uncomplicated; as he himself put it later, “I was to go for Joe Johnston.”3
As Sherman’s army went for Joe Johnston, the Army of the Potomac was to go for Robert E. Lee, and it was with this army that Grant himself decided to move. It was believed in Washington that this army needed the all-out drive that only the general-in-chief could provide. George Gordon Meade, its own commander, was a solid and conscientious soldier, but neither he nor any of his predecessors had ever quite been able to make the army fight all out. The Virginia theater of operations was the war’s show window, closest to the capital and to the big eastern centers of population, most thoroughly covered by the newspapers, so that it sometimes seemed as if the real war was being fought here and that everything else was a side show; yet the Army of the Potomac, for all the glamor that was attached to its name, was in reality the inglorious hod carrier for the Union cause. It had been blooded at Bull Run, and it had fought on the Virginia peninsula, along the Rappahannock, in Maryland and in Pennsylvania. The evil forces of politics had flickered over it; Robert E. Lee had played cruel games with its generals, deceiving them and leading them on so that they would get many of their men killed to no good purpose. The army had tramped through the choking red dust and the clinging mud of Virginia without seeming to accomplish much, its two victories were purely defensive, and all in all it had never got the habit of triumph. Its men were fatalists, doing the best they could, taking their beatings — Gaines’s Mill, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville — and coming back for more, always ready but never really confident, clinging to fond memories of the departed McClellan, and ready enough to admit that the greatest general of all was the man who commanded the opposing Confederate army, General Lee.
The army tended to be suspicious of Grant when he established his headquarters near Meade’s. Peppery little General Rawlins, Grant’s chief of staff, found the suspicion freely expressed. Officers of the Potomac army would admit that the western troops had done well enough, but would always add: “Well, you have never met Bobby Lee and his boys; it would be quite different if you had.” If any of Grant’s people expressed optimism about the coming campaign in Virginia, someone was sure to wag his head and say: “Well, that may be, but mind you, Bobby Lee is just over the Rapidan.”4
Grant did not have a great deal of time in which to pull this army together; just six weeks from the moment he pitched his tents along the Rapidan to the day when the great offensive would start. They were busy weeks. There were reviews, to let the troops have a look at the new general-in-chief and to let him have a look at them; there was an endless bustle of reorganization and re-equipping, a tightening up of details, a ruthless combing out of the snug, comfortable forts around Washington so that more combat men could be added to the army — this latter a move that was highly popular with the veterans, who rejoiced to see the big heavy artillery regiments deprived of their soft assignments, given muskets, and told to soldier it along with everybody else. Grant reorganized his cavalry, bringing hard little Phil Sheridan in from the West to turn the cavalry corps into a fighting organization. As April wore away, the effect of all of this began to be felt, and the army displayed a quiet new confidence. Lee might be just over the Rapidan, but there was a different feeling in the air; maybe this spring it would be different.
Maybe it would; what a general could do would be done. But in the last analysis everything would depend on the men in the ranks, and both in the East and in the West the enlisted man was called on that winter to give his conclusive vote of confidence in the conduct of the war. He gave his vote in the most direct way imaginable — by re-enlisting voluntarily for another hitch.
Union armies in the Civil War did not sign up for the duration. They enlisted by regiments, and the top term was three years. This meant — since the hard core of the United States Army was made up of the volunteers who had enlisted in 1861 — that as the climactic year of 1864 began the army was on the verge of falling apart. Of 956 volunteer infantry regiments, as 1863 drew to a close 455 were about to go out of existence because their time would very soon be up. Of 158 volunteer batteries, 81 would presently cease to exist.5
There was no way on earth by which these veterans could be made to remain in the army if they did not choose to stay. If they took their discharges and went home — as they were legally and morally entitled to do — the war effort would simply collapse. New recruits were coming in but because Congress in its wisdom had devised the worst possible system for keeping the army up to strength, the war could not be won without the veterans. Enlistments there were, in plenty; and yet — leaving out of consideration the fact that raw recruits could not hope to stand up to the battle-trained old-timers led by Lee and Johnston — they were not doing the army very much good. Heavy cash bounties were offered to men who would enlist; when cities, states, and Federal government offers were added up, a man might get as much as a thousand dollars just for joining the army. This meant that vast numbers of men were enlisting for the money they would get and then were deserting as quickly as possible — which was usually pretty quickly, since the Civil War authorities never really solved the problem of checking desertion — and going off to some other town to enlist all over again under a different name, collecting another bounty, and then deserting again to try the same game in still a third place. The “bounty man” was notorious as a shirker, and the veterans detested him. Grant once estimated that not 12 per cent of the bounty men ever did any useful service at the front.
There was a draft act, to be sure, but it contained a flagrant loophole. A man who was drafted could avoid service (unless and until his number was drawn again) by paying a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee; better yet, he could permanently escape military service by hiring a substitute to go to war for him. Clever entrepreneurs eager to make a quick dollar set themselves up in business as substitute brokers, and any drafted man who could afford the price — which often ran up to a thousand dollars or more — could get a broker to find a substitute for him. The substitutes who were thus provided were, if possible, even more worthless as a class than the bounty men. Cripples, diseased men, outright half-wits, epileptics, fugitives from workhouse and poor farm — all were brought forward by the substitute brokers and presented to the harassed recruiting agents as potential cannon fodder. The brokers made such immense profits that they could usually afford any bribery that might be necessary to get their infirm candidates past the medical examination, and the great bulk of the men they sent into the army were of no use whatever.
Any regiment that contained any substantial percentage of bounty men or substitutes felt itself weakened rather than strengthened by its reinforcements. The 5th New Hampshire — originally one of the stoutest combat units in the Army of the Potomac — got so many of these people that it leaked a steady stream of deserters over to the Confederacy; so many, indeed, that at one time the Rebels opposite this regiment sent over a message asking when they might expect to ge
t the regimental colors, and put up a sign reading: “Headquarters, 5th New Hampshire Volunteers. Recruits wanted.” It is recorded that a Federal company commander, finding some of his bounty men actually under fire, sharply ordered the men to take cover: “You cost twelve hundred dollars apiece and I’m damned if I am going to have you throw your lives away — you’re too expensive!”6
The war could not be won, in other words, unless a substantial percentage of the veterans would consent to re-enlist, and the most searching test the Union cause ever got came early in 1864, when the government — hat in hand, so to speak — went to the veteran regiments and pleaded with the men to join up for another hitch. It offered certain inducements — a four-hundred-dollar bounty (plus whatever sum a man’s own city or county might be offering), a thirty-day furlough, the right to call oneself a “veteran volunteer,” and a neat chevron that could be worn on the sleeve.
Astoundingly, 136,000 three-year veterans re-enlisted. They were men who had seen the worst of it — men who had eaten bad food, slept in the mud and the rain, made killing marches, and stood up to Rebel fire in battles like Antietam and Stone’s River, Chickamauga and Gettysburg — and they had long since lost the fine flush of innocent enthusiasm that had brought them into the army in the first place. They appear to have signed up for a variety of reasons. The furlough was attractive, and an Illinois soldier confessed that the four-hundred-dollar bounty “seemed to be about the right amount for spending money while on furlough.” Pride in the regiment was also important; to be able to denominate one’s regiment veteran volunteers, instead of plain volunteers, meant a good deal. In many cases the men had just got used to soldiering. A Massachusetts man wrote home, confessing that he had re-enlisted and remarking, “So you see I am sold again,” and then went on to explain why he had done it: “There are many things in a soldier’s life that I don’t like, and we have to put up with privation and hardship that we should get rid of in civil life. But then again there are things in it that I do like, and if it was not for the distinction that is made between a private and a lunk head of an officer I should like it better than I do.” A Wisconsin veteran felt that he and his mates had justified their integrity by re-enlisting: “Out of 614 men present for duty in the Regt., 521 have re-enlisted for three years more. This does not seem to indicate that the soldiers are discouraged, does it?”