The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Prior to Shiloh, Sherman had referred to himself as a Jonah and confessed to contemplating suicide. Afterward, he had the confidence to appreciate that his own unique ideas about conflict in the industrial age were far more sophisticated and apt than those of most of his fellow Union generals, who mostly failed throughout 1862–63 to defeat their Confederate counterparts. In short, the horrific battle of Shiloh saved the career of William Tecumseh Sherman.2

  Sherman had left the army in 1853, after most of his own generation from West Point had seen service in the Mexican War—Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, James Longstreet, George McClellan—and would go on to win prominent positions on both sides on the eve of the Civil War. But had Sherman really failed at all? In terms of professional employment, financial success, and reputation, he most surely had. Indeed, he could not even support his growing family in a permanent residence, and he counted on family acquaintances for any job he could find. But in the larger scope of learning the diverse requisite skills necessary to lead a hundred thousand men into Georgia, a young Sherman had not stumbled at all.

  Quite unknowingly, by taking on and losing job after job, he had been engaged in a three-decade-long course of practical and formal preparation for generalship in a new age of mobile and total warfare. At one time or another, Sherman had refined his formal education at West Point with jobs as diverse as college administrator, banker, businessman, farmer, lawyer, and trader. He had visited and been deployed throughout much of the United States even as he was written off as a hopeless failure. At one point, Sherman confessed, “I was afraid of my own shadow.”3

  Sherman knew what it was to be broke, disgraced, and ridiculed; the Cincinnati Commercial had declared him “insane” after he resigned his command in Kentucky. Yet in all of his setbacks and abbreviated careers, Sherman had conducted himself honorably and was often a victim of circumstance—a fiscal panic and his bank directors’ graft caused his financial demise in California. Secession and the looming war unexpectedly ended his bright career as a college administrator in Louisiana. By summer 1864, as commander in the west, he held no fear that either the public or his peers might not like him, much less think his ideas unconventional. Even in triumph at the war’s end, Sherman raised controversy. In the viewing stand of the victory parade in Washington, he refused to shake the hand of the secretary of war, in rebuke to Edwin Stanton, who had unfairly castigated him for supposedly tolerating racist conduct toward emancipated slaves. But what did Sherman—who long ago had felt that he had nothing to lose—care about court scandal?

  Marching thousands of soldiers and their supply train through the woods of Georgia to Atlanta required formal training in artillery, engineering, and mathematics, as well as acquaintance with the nature and costs of transportation, both by wagon and rail. Sherman’s formal education allowed him to write clear letters and communiqués and to organize supplies and capital for his vast army. Dozens of menial jobs had given him firsthand familiarity with the resentments and anger of the common classes. There could have been no better résumé for leading a huge army into the woods of Georgia than that of the checkered career of William Tecumseh Sherman, bitterly though such requisite experiences had been earned.4

  The Butchery (August 1864)

  What a difference just a year and a half made. By late summer 1864, Northern excitement over the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had long vanished. Instead, angry Northern abolitionists were at loggerheads with President Lincoln. Copperhead Confederate sympathizers in the North hated both their president and his radical abolitionist critics—and often each other.

  Few in a divided North remembered why in spring 1864 the public had worshipped the brilliant newcomer Ulysses S. Grant—the superman Grant who on that wonderful July 4, 1863, more than a year earlier, had brought them the magnificent victory at Vicksburg that cut the Confederacy in half, after nonstop victories at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh. News of the taking of the key stronghold on the Mississippi at Vicksburg, along with the surrender of thirty thousand Confederates, had capped the celebration of the bloody repulse of General Lee a day earlier at Gettysburg.

  Indeed, Grant’s appointment to come east to command the Army of the Potomac in March 1864 had at once enthralled the nation. The rough-looking westerner seemed invincible and would bring a new toughness to the defenders of Washington. He certainly would not back down from Robert E. Lee as had past Union generals, who sounded like lions before, but kittens after, battle. Given his reputation for victories in the west, in spring 1864 the quiet Grant enjoyed celebrity status anywhere he went in Washington. Yet all that Grant mania was months—and nearly a hundred thousand Union dead, wounded, and missing—in the past. Besides the daily attrition of the Army of the Potomac through skirmishing and illness, a series of catastrophic set battles and sieges had changed the reputation of Grant the savior into the butcher of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. By June, even First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln had lashed out to her husband, “Grant, I repeat, is an obstinate fool and a butcher.”5

  By August 1864, consensus spread that Grant’s superior, Abraham Lincoln—who, after some initial doubt, had easily secured the Republican Party’s renomination in June—in little over four months would lose to the likely Democratic nominee in the fall election. That rival winner was most likely to be General George McClellan. President Lincoln had unceremoniously put him on ice after McClellan squandered numerous opportunities to move on Richmond following the marginally successful battle of Antietam in 1862. But the wily McClellan—removed from command of the Army of the Potomac in 1862 and given no subsequent important responsibility—had not resigned his commission. Instead, he had done his best to offer military credibility to the notion growing in the northern Democratic Party that an absolute defeat of the secessionists was either impossible or not worth the ensuing costs. The prospect of McClellan, the military expert, running against Lincoln, the novice—during times of horrific Union casualties—was gaining public appeal, especially since McClellan’s losses of 1862 were ancient history and Lincoln’s mishaps current events. Former generals can usually give up on wars far more easily, and with far less criticism, than other politicians. More important in the new antiwar narrative, the relieved McClellan had once gotten far closer to Richmond in May 1862—within seven miles during the Peninsula Campaign—and at less cost than had Grant in 1864.

  If McClellan were elected in November, the war might well end with a negotiated armistice. Ideally, the Confederacy would agree to stop fighting once it understood that it could rejoin the Union without further acrimony—and retain slavery. Issues such as the expansion of slavery into the new western states could be readjudicated at some future date. Americans could end their rancor and agree that whatever differences they had over slavery paled in comparison to the mass slaughter of the last three years. The entire bloody Civil War, in this growing Democratic view, could be written off as a horrific tragedy brought on by intransigent New England abolitionists and die-hard Southern plantationists. Both extremists had unnecessarily dragged the majority of Americans, North and South, into a pointless war over their own respective obsessions with slavery—an institution that no doubt in the century ahead would eventually have withered away and died. President McClellan would heal the wounds of his predecessor’s unnecessary war. The nation would become reconciled to the idea that, although millions of African slaves would have to continue their servitude for a while, at least there would be no more mass internecine killing. McClellan was too wise, at least initially, to be an open Copperhead who favored an immediate cessation of arms and the de facto granting of Confederate independence. But he seemed unaware that by 1864, the war had evolved into something far more than the original Northern effort to reunite the Union, but had come to be aimed also at ending slavery on all American soil. His early September acceptance letter to the Democratic Party that nominated him in late August 1864 is a textbook illustration of naïveté. McC
lellan promised simultaneously to reunite America, to increase the chances of ending the war, and to accept any Southern state back into the Union that wished to rejoin—without mentioning abolition as requisite for readmittance—as if, after three years of brutal fighting, most Northern states would allow slavery or any Southern states would wish to reenter without it.6

  Yet McClellan sounded hawkish in comparison with his new and often embarrassing allies, the Copperhead “Peace” Democrats whom he represented. They were championed, most notably, by the seditious former congressman and newspaper editor Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. The latter barnstormed the Midwest crying Lincolnism to be “defeat, debt, taxation and sepulchers.” By early 1864 a minority in some Midwestern states was at times thwarting the Union effort, encouraging draft resistance, sending out private emissaries to the Confederacy, and turning a blind eye to budding conspiracies to free Confederate prisoners. The word “miscegenation” first widely appeared in an American campaign as the Copperheads screamed that Lincoln favored not merely abolition, but a new mixing of the white and black races and permanent disenfranchisement of Southern whites.7

  Since the states mustered their own militias to be incorporated into the Union army, a Copperhead legislature or governor could, in theory, insidiously curtail funding and hold back on its required military contributions. And while the Copperheads themselves, or their quiet sympathizers, did not have the votes to win national office, their support for a McClellan ticket might put the Democratic anti-Lincoln forces in power. That was especially likely if the Republicans were to continue to remain deeply divided, as news from the front got worse. The pulse of the war in Virginia governed all the politics of spring and summer. In general, as mostly westerners, the Copperheads were as much in sympathy with the enemy rural South, as with the supposedly allied industrial North with its fervent abolitionists. At other times, the more extreme Copperheads dreamed of seceding to form their own new western republic.

  Well aside from the November election to come, the House of Lincoln was collapsing in every direction. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln had exceeded her White House decoration budget by several thousand dollars. Worse still, she had diverted public funds to her own use through fraudulent bookkeeping. For most of the year, Mary Lincoln was desperately and stealthily seeking wealthy supporters to cover her debts in exchange for her husband’s political patronage—offenses that would have led to impeachment attempts against a contemporary president. Graft was not far from the president himself.8

  Lincoln was not in a good state of mind. In February, he told his close friend, the dying Illinois congressman and staunch abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, “This war is eating my life out. I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see it through.” Lincoln may have suffered a mild case of smallpox in 1863, and not have regained his full strength. Neither Lincoln nor his wife, Mary, had ever quite recovered from the deaths of two of the four Lincoln sons in childhood. Disaster at the front only added to the burdens of personal tragedy and ill health.

  There certainly had been disturbing incidents all year long, like the mysterious arson attack on the White House stables in February. A few months later there was an apparent foiled assassination attempt, as well as constant rumors of Confederate-inspired kidnapping plots. Little wonder that Lincoln seemed to go into periods of deep depression—finally to the point of having his cabinet sign letters of resignation that he placed in a White House safe.

  If in early 1864, Lincoln had feared that he would not be renominated by the Republicans, after his June nomination he was increasingly convinced that he would not be reelected. By July the president was out on the ramparts at Fort Stevens during Jubal Early’s Washington raid, almost intentionally, it seemed, exposing himself to Confederate sniper fire.9

  Then there was the press. By early 1864, the attacks transcended political opposition and centered on Lincoln himself, calling him a naïf, incompetent, tyrant, butcher, baboon, freak—and far worse. The New York newspapers, other than the Republican Times, were the most vicious. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune simply reflected the pulse of the battlefield: a rare Union victory in 1864 won from him a sudden endorsement of Lincoln, while the increasing bad news from Virginia earned hysterical condemnation of the administration—often within a few weeks of earlier praise. Greeley, in the manner of a modern electronic commentator, was notorious not just for his fickleness, but also for the vehemence with which his present judgments contradicted his past assertions. Any rumor of military setback seemed to prompt a call for Salmon Chase, John C. Frémont, or Ulysses S. Grant to save the Union from Lincoln’s ineptness and to run for the presidency on a united Republican victory ticket. Greeley himself spent the summer intriguing with McClellanites. Finally he was meeting even with Confederate emissaries in Canada in hopes of ending the war immediately.

  The New York Herald under James Gordon Bennett was the largest newspaper in the North and by 1862 not so unpredictable as the Tribune—it blasted Lincoln without exception. Along with the less influential Manton Marble’s pro-Democrat New York World, Bennett could influence critical public opinion in the banking capital of the North, whose financiers’ support for Lincoln’s war was critical. In an age without the cell phone, Internet, e-mail, radio, or television, the New York papers, along with the monthly and weekly magazines and perhaps the Chicago Tribune, enjoyed almost a monopoly on the news. The only reason why the press had not yet prevented Lincoln from being renominated was that Union politics were at an impasse: as yet, no Republican or independent candidate had offered any better plan to stop the killing without rendering meaningless the past sacrifice of tens of thousands of Union soldiers. Continue the war and there would be more Gettysburgs; quit it and the hallowed sacrifice of Gettysburg would be in vain. Defeating a Southern army was one thing; defeating and occupying a vast area the size of Western Europe was quite another.10

  Lincoln’s fractious cabinet was more bitterly divided than ever. His political wisdom of early 1861 of bringing in a “team of rivals” of presidential hopefuls to keep an eye on their ambitions had come to seem like folly as the cabinet fell into a sort of chaos. Secretaries such as Edward Bates (attorney general), Montgomery Blair (postmaster general), Salmon P. Chase (secretary of the treasury), William Seward (secretary of state), and Edwin Stanton (secretary of war) were either intriguing with Lincoln’s opponents, plotting to take Lincoln’s job, fighting with one another, or indiscreetly lamenting to the press that their rustic commander in chief simply was not up to the task of winning a war in the east. The cabinet secretaries also knew that no American president had managed to be reelected since Andrew Jackson in 1832. Conventional wisdom certainly suggested that the amateur Lincoln was not the sort to pull off what others far more competent and experienced had not for more than thirty years.11

  Things got even worse. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, a longtime influential abolitionist and increasingly disloyal to his boss, for months had been politicking on the sly with Radical Republicans, the most extreme wing of the party. Chase dreamed of wresting the nomination from Lincoln and winning the November election against the Peace Democrats on a more fiery platform of immediate universal abolition and a harsh occupation to be imposed on the rebel Confederates. Some of Chase’s radical supporters wanted even more—perhaps a sort of permanent military subjugation and occupation of the South, or even repopulating the defunct Confederacy by poor Northerners, freed Southern blacks, and new immigrants. If more conservative critics wished a scaling down of the war, abolitionists urged a renewed existential struggle, one in which the culture of the losers would be obliterated, that of the winners made all-powerful.

  Draconian punishment for Southern secession was also a backdoor way for abolitionists to gain permanent control of the U.S. Congress: Ex-Confederates would be denied voting rights; freedmen, as the sole representatives from a reconstructed South, would vote their thanks for Northern abolitionists by joining a now entrenched and permanent radical R
epublican majority. Both Northern Democrats and Republicans agreed that Lincoln was without a constituency—unable to offer leadership necessary to win the war, bring the slaughter to a close, or create the political consensus to slog on.

  Only the unseemliness of a cabinet minister openly scheming against his own president had derailed Salmon Chase’s efforts to subvert Lincoln. By June, Lincoln finally had enough and accepted Chase’s pro forma resignation. In a near state of shock at the acceptance of his latest offer to resign—his three previous ones had been refused—the treasury secretary at last left the administration. But the evolving threat from the Radical Republicans far transcended Chase’s own presidential aspirations. The abolitionist cause had already been taken up by the frontier hero and “pathfinder” John C. Frémont. The erratic Frémont was nominated on May 31 by a breakaway group of radical Republicans and war Democrats under the banner of the Radical Democracy Party. The unstable and conniving Frémont was mostly a symbolic protest presidential candidate. Yet he, too, might do his part to so weaken Lincoln and divide the Republicans that McClellan could win by uniting the Democrats.

  While Chase, Frémont, and McClellan schemed on, Lincoln was worried about other Union generals coming to the fore. At various times, he sent out feelers to Ulysses S. Grant’s friends to ensure that the once wildly popular general had no presidential aspirations before he was given the reins of all Union armies in March. Lincoln even inquired whether the incompetent, but still influential, radical General Benjamin Butler might be interested in replacing Hannibal Hamlin as his vice president. Hamlin, in fact, by June would not be renominated—and perhaps felt relieved. He had little influence with Lincoln anyway. Now, just in time, he could exit what seemed to be a losing ticket in the autumn.

  By February 1864, flyers began circulating—the most prominent were entitled “The Next Presidential Election” and “The Pomeroy Circular”—listing high-ranking Republicans who had gone on record opposing Lincoln’s nomination. These clumsy broadsides would not win Salmon Chase the Republican nomination. But once more, they contributed to the insidious narrative of a beleaguered Lincoln, whose former friends and supporters were as hostile as his proven enemies. In July, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the notorious Wade-Davis bill. The measure was a clumsy attempt to ensure a Radical Republican blueprint for postwar reconstruction that sought to destroy the remnants of antebellum Southern culture. By August there was a massive pro-McClellan rally in New York City. Observers noted that the worse the news of the war became, the better “Little Mac” looked.12