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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Lincoln reasoned that, in lieu of a dramatic Union victory, he needed either a Radical Republican on the ticket to quiet the base, or, contrarily, a Southern Union loyalist who could facilitate reconstruction and win crossover Democratic voters. Barring that, perhaps a loyal, successful general would do—to weaken either his right or left flank and restore his sinking military credibility. After the firing of Chase, the selection of the nondescript Andrew Johnson as his new vice presidential candidate pleased very few.13

  Despite the criticism from the radical abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln himself had not changed much. He had not altered fundamentally his recent intent of serially abolishing slavery everywhere in the Union after the war in the interest of reuniting the country. But he had also not won the war after more than three years, and he could not adequately explain, in military terms, how he hoped to achieve victory as 1864 wore on—or why, as the South grew weaker, Union casualties mounted in each new month of the year. The country was $2 billion in debt. It was spending over $2 million a day on the war. Lincoln had desperate plans to call up another half a million northerners, in part by providing enough cash bonuses and incentives to ensure that veterans reenlisted after their three-year commitments expired. He was gambling on one final big surge to win in 1864 before his own political support vanished for good. A dramatic, timely victory by Grant would prove Lincoln and his agenda inspired after all, even as one more bloody defeat like Cold Harbor would confirm his incompetence.

  From the beginning of 1864, Northern fortunes had deteriorated on the battlefield. Since spring 1861, about a quarter million Union soldiers had died in combat or from disease; almost two million Northern men had been taken from their jobs and enrolled in the Union Army. By 1864, a disturbing number of Northern voters no longer had any strong ideological beliefs other than to ally themselves with the winning political side—and the suspicion grew that by August 1864, Lincoln could not afford the mounting costs to defeat the Confederacy. From that one fact of military deadlock grew all of the doubts that Lincoln would not be president after March 1865.14

  Changing Strategies (March–August 1864)

  In August, another frequent visitor to the White House, the Pennsylvanian Alexander McClure, remarked of his visit with the president, “His face, always sad in repose, was then saddened until it became a picture of despair.” Still the war went on. Yet the public did not appreciate that the advantages were still with the Union. No foreign powers had recognized the Confederacy. The Southern economy was slowly being strangled. The Union was producing new armies and war matériel at an astonishing rate—even as the North still could not defeat Lee’s army, and was still having little luck on the battlefield beyond Virginia.15

  The South saw that the rising antiwar mood of 1864 up north was the key to victory. If large areas of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia were under Northern control, the majority of the Confederacy, especially its large cities, was still unoccupied. Paradoxically, while the Confederacy was robbed of agricultural land, manpower, and some industry in its lost territories, the South also had more men to defend less ground, while the Union was forced to occupy and hold vast swaths of territory—the age-old military paradox that so plagued invaders from Napoleon and Hitler in Russia to the Koreans and Chinese who sought to cross the 38th Parallel and reach Pusan. The emperor Justinian may have had grand visions of a new Mediterranean Rome. Yet the reality for him as well was that more occupied land had to be guarded by always fewer troops.

  The Confederacy—even in its reduced size, still far larger than most Western European nations—grasped that its new hope was to make the struggle so costly to northerners that various peace parties would defeat Lincoln in 1864 and vote in reasonable compromisers who would sue for an armistice. Riots and social chaos followed from the voracious manpower needs of Union generals, while the South had somehow, with far less domestic violence, managed to call up seven hundred thousand despite its much smaller population base.

  Robert E. Lee, with his crack Army of Northern Virginia behind near-impenetrable barricades, finally began to understand that he was waging a political war. He no longer had to go north, losing thousands of men in search of the elusive big victory. Instead, survival meant success: Each month that his army endured and inflicted casualties on Grant’s Army of the Potomac, the North became a little more likely to reject Lincoln and to grant an armistice in hopes of national reunification with slavery intact. As Lee put it, “Should the belief that peace will bring back the Union become general, the war would no longer be supported, and that after all is what we are interested in bringing about.”16

  The Killing Fields (Summer 1864)

  Lincoln’s political problems by August 1864 arose not from bad news at a particular theater, but from terrible reports from all fronts. Grant and Meade were being bled white by Lee in Virginia. Benjamin Butler was humiliated by far smaller enemy forces near the James River. An incompetent Nathaniel P. Banks almost lost his army in Alabama. And a slow-moving Franz Sigel got nowhere in the Shenandoah Valley.

  Ostensibly the aim of these diverse operations was simultaneously to apply such pressure to the shell that at some point it would shatter and suffer a general collapse. The problem, however, with such a strategy was that Union armies were scattered for thousands of miles around the Confederate periphery, whose ever shortening interior lines made transference of troops and supply from one army to another suddenly far easier. In addition, too many of the Northern generals in charge of these offensives—such as Butler, Banks, and Sigel—were either militarily inexperienced politicians or utterly incompetent, or both. Finally, Grant was allotting precious Union troops to distant theaters of questionable importance under the command of known mediocrities, when a concentration of force was needed to take either Richmond or Atlanta.17

  Indeed, the critical struggle remained between Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, as both fought between, and sometimes above and below, the respective capitals at Richmond and Washington. Yet Lincoln’s desperate “On to Richmond” strategy—to pour men into Grant’s army so that he might either defeat Lee before the November election, or at least take the Confederate capital—had instead led to a bloody quagmire. The Union suddenly needed to take risks to show progress before the November election, but not so many risks as to lose the Army of the Potomac altogether. Such a bleak scenario was not unlikely.

  In little more than three days of the so-called Wilderness Campaign (May 4–7), Grant’s army suffered nearly 18,000 dead, wounded, missing, or captured soldiers. But unlike McClellan after Antietam, he pressed on against Lee. That obstinacy would impress subsequent military historians, but at the time, it was considered near-suicidal bloodletting. Next, in fierce fighting around Spotsylvania between May 10 and 21, Grant lost nearly another eighteen thousand men. Yet to prove to Lincoln that he was no McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, or Meade, who had all eventually retreated in the face of mounting dead, Grant boasted, “I propose to fight on this line if it takes all Summer”—another often-praised quote, but one that if uttered today would ipso facto spark an entire antiwar movement. Lincoln’s problem was that a growing majority in the North feared that in fact the butcher Grant might just keep his promise and so cost them another 36,000 casualties with little to show for it.18

  And he did. Grant’s obstinacy was grounded in a strategy: He had done the proverbial awful arithmetic of inflicting substantial casualties that Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia could, in the long term, not sustain. The idea was that Lee, while in these successive battles suffering a percentage of losses against his overall strength similar to Grant, had far fewer reserves than did Grant and would thus quit first. But such calculations were in some sense still academic by mid-1864. In the here and now, the unexpected bloodletting—after the good news of 1863—had created a far greater hysteria in the North than in the South. The Northern public no longer cared about Lee’s army. I
t only wanted an end to Grant’s terrible losses. Perhaps the early retreats after stalemates by former generals were preferable to Grant’s continued bloody impasse.

  No matter—Grant kept it up. At Cold Harbor, between June 1 and 3, he nearly rendered the Army of the Potomac combat ineffective, through futile head-on charges against Lee’s defensive works. In the slaughter—it seemed more like murder to those involved—he suffered another twelve thousand casualties. Grant’s army had lost more than forty thousand soldiers dead, wounded, and captured in just thirty days. He pressed on to Petersburg. There, incompetence by subordinate generals led to a failed assault on the city and another eleven thousand casualties without gaining any traction in taking Richmond. A nine-month siege followed that would eventually cost the Union another forty-two thousand casualties.

  In theory, “casualties” meant dead, wounded, missing, and known captured. But unlike modern war, a high percentage of the wounded perished or were so maimed as to be rendered unable to return to the front. The captured died in droves in Southern prisoner-of-war camps. The missing, if deserters, rarely returned, but just as likely they numbered those who had been ground up by artillery and never identified. In short, forty-two thousand “casualties” were nearly equivalent to the number of soldiers who disappeared from Grant’s ranks for good.

  Worse still, while the Army of the Potomac was locked in a death grip with Lee around Richmond, there was, for the moment at least, no effective Union army blocking Confederate advances through the Shenandoah Valley to the north of Washington. As a result, a confident Robert E. Lee ordered General Jubal Early to move northward up the Shenandoah Valley and to descend on Washington from the unprotected northwest. Early did so, and by July 11–12 he was on the outskirts of the city with nearly twelve thousand Confederate troops. A hesitant Early lost his brief chance of raiding inside the city proper, and he began withdrawing on the thirteenth. But the proximity of Confederate troops to the White House, while Grant was stalled outside Richmond and with little news at all from the west, confirmed the public feeling that something had gone terribly wrong. It was now 1864 and a Confederate army had gotten closer to the capital than at almost any time during the entire war. The president himself had come under enemy fire; the mood of the North was almost back to Bull Run again.

  Amid such news, by August 23, President Lincoln reportedly remarked to a Republican supporter, “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten, but I do, and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.” Yet out west there was at least hope of a breakthrough before the election. A final Union victory in November 1863 at the vital rail hub of Chattanooga had secured southern Tennessee and left northern Alabama and Georgia open to invasion. William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding the three armies of the Military Division of the Mississippi, saw an opening. Sherman thought he could march freely into Georgia, then cut off or even take Atlanta—a key transportation hub and symbol of the secure interior of the Confederacy. He would outmaneuver the Southern armies, and perhaps by autumn split the Confederacy asunder—and thereby improve Lincoln’s election chances even if Grant did not take Richmond.

  By late summer, it became clear that Grant had little chance of entering the Southern capital before November. The stage was set for a growing paradox: As the nation looked to Grant outside Richmond to save Lincoln, the president’s only possible salvation was with Sherman, whose operations in Georgia were less well known to the Northern public. Yet Sherman was a different, more unpredictable sort than Grant—an unlikely savior, given Sherman’s reclusive nature and hatred of both politics and the press.19

  Sherman Moves South (May 1864)

  Well before the terrible Union summer in Virginia, William Tecumseh Sherman had planned to avoid the set battles that he feared might nearly wreck General Grant and his Army of the Potomac. Sherman had taken command of the Military Division of the Mississippi on March 18, succeeding Grant with the understanding that the two generals would be working in tandem, east and west, to crush the rebellion before the war-weary Northern public called it quits. Sherman thought that he could direct his western armies to outmaneuver, rather than charge head on against, his adversary General Joe Johnston and the Army of Tennessee. Such a strategy was far better suited to the wide-open spaces of Georgia than the narrow corridor between Washington and Richmond.

  Sherman’s forces instead would seek to trap and perhaps get to the rear of Johnston’s army as it retreated southward. Then at some opportune moment, with his back to Atlanta, Johnston would be forced to either abandon the city or fight a numerically superior force under unfavorable conditions. Sherman would humiliate the South by freely traversing its homeland on the assumption that in the election year of 1864, perceptions of winning were nearly as important as piling up enemy corpses.20

  In some histories of the so-called Atlanta campaign of spring and summer 1864, Sherman is still criticized for not seeking, in Clause-witzian fashion, the destruction of the main enemy forces under General Johnston, or for not heading in a beeline for Atlanta from the outset. But again, like Belisarius, he wished to avoid the sort of set battles that could ruin his army deep in enemy territory. If Grant was waging war directly against Lee’s army in the field, Sherman, in contrast, would fight the Southern infrastructure that sustained its armies—and in the next year he would adduce lengthy explanations why this was the more efficient and even more moral course. Even if the Union could endure more of the sort of losses that would soon nearly destroy the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln’s reelection chances surely would not survive simultaneous carnage in Georgia like that in Virginia. Of course, Sherman had explicitly assured Grant that he would not let elements of Johnston’s army go eastward to reinforce Lee’s forces protecting Richmond. But such a vague directive gave him ample latitude to wage his own strategic campaign in Georgia.21

  Well before he set out on his road to Atlanta, Sherman had discussed with Grant, who had just assumed supreme command of Union forces, the rough outlines of their new grand partnership. Sherman, in Grant’s words, was “to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up, and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” Once Grant and Sherman took the offensive at about the same time, in theory neither Lee nor Johnston could reinforce each other. That had unfortunately happened at the Battle of Chickamauga in late September 1863, when General Longstreet had arrived with more than two divisions after a nearly eight-hundred-mile railroad trip from the east in time to help defeat Union forces there.

  Grant did not order Sherman explicitly to go after either Joe Johnston’s Confederate army or Atlanta itself. Apparently the aim in the spring planning of 1864 was mostly to keep all reinforcements and attention away from Lee by causing havoc elsewhere in the Confederacy—as well as being a sort of Gallipoli campaign on the periphery that could divert attention from the mayhem in the trenches and might in and of itself lead to some sort of ultimate strategic advantage. Sherman at any rate assumed that his task was to tie down forces, ruin infrastructure, and seek to avoid losses while inflicting psychosocial mayhem on the Southern populace. He knew, however, that Atlanta was much farther from his base of operations than Richmond was from Grant’s, and that his incremental advance would not immediately reassure the public that dramatic victories were imminent.22

  As Sherman set out from Tennessee on May 7—roughly in time with Grant’s own offensive in the Wilderness against Lee—the odds seemed against him. True, Sherman had more than a hundred thousand troops in his combined forces, the largest number of men he had yet commanded. He could rely on gifted subordinate generals like George Thomas (Army of the Cumberland), James McPherson (Army of the Tennessee), and John Schofield (Army of the Ohio)—far better commanders than most of those who served under Grant. Many of their regiments were made up from crack troops from the Midwest, especially homesteaders from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. They saw themselves as a
different sort from many of the replacements filling up the ranks of the reconstituted Army of the Potomac. Or, as Liddell Hart once characterized Sherman’s force as it left Atlanta for the sea, “the finest army of military ‘workmen’ the modern world has seen.”23

  Sherman’s army was more comfortable at camping out and living off the land than was the Army of the Potomac, which had fought mostly on the border, never quite in the heart of the Confederacy. One eastern veteran, Rice Bull, remarked of the casual swagger of Sherman’s western troops, “They all wore large hats instead of caps; were carelessly dressed, both officers and men; and marched in a very irregular way . . . We found their boast was that they ‘put on no style.’ They were a fine type of westerners; it was easy to see that at any serious time they would close up and be there . . . They expressed their opinion that we were tin soldiers. ‘Oh look at their caps. Where are your paper collars? Oh how clean you look, do you use soap?’ ”24

  Sherman understood that his numerical superiority could easily be offset by a skilled Confederate defense, bad weather, and rough terrain: “I also reckoned that, in the natural strength of the country, in the abundance of mountains, streams, and forests, [the enemy] had a fair offset to our numerical superiority, and therefore endeavored to act with reasonable caution while moving on the vigorous ‘offensive.’ ” For most of May and June, Sherman’s army in fact entrenched in mud and slept among downpours, incurring losses to illness and exposure—yet in the soldiers’ eyes, these were still preferable risks to head-on charges against fixed enemy positions and bulwarks.25