Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  There were a few pleasant moments even in the old tent. It was clean and cozy and Lee had a split-bottomed chair that he sometimes took outside where he donned his spectacles and sat to pore over newspapers from North and South. On quiet days he could hear a few chickens kept for eggs as they pecked around his nearby ambulance, one cock being a special favorite that had been with him for some time, despite his returning that other gift rooster in 1862.70 Occasionally he got iced buttermilk, and on June 30 he could take a few minutes to write to Mary on their anniversary.71 “Do you recollect what a happy day thirty three years ago this was?” he asked her. “How many hopes & pleasures it gave birth to?” In spite of all, God had been merciful and kind to them, leading Lee to muse on “how thankless & sinful I have been.” He prayed that there might be a little peace and rest in store for them before they went to the better world.72 Mary’s health continued to trouble him, especially after she took a bad fall in July. When she left Richmond for a safer and less humid residence at the country home of a cousin, he felt some relief, though it made their visits infrequent. Christmas found him by himself at headquarters, but that hardly mattered. “I am unable to have any enjoyment of that kind now,” he wrote her. He was happy just to be able to attend church that day.73 It was a chance to acknowledge what “Him who alone controls the destiny of nations” had done for them, just as Lee did in publishing the president’s proclamation of November 16 as a day for worship, suspending all but vital military duties to allow the men to worship.74

  Such respites were few, however. “Grant seems so pleased with his present position that I fear he will never move again,” Lee wrote Mary on July 10, but of course he knew he would.75 There had been too many close calls thanks to the disparity of strength between them. “Where are we to get sufficient troops to oppose Grant?” he asked his son Custis a fortnight later. Lee offhandedly dismissed Grant’s style of command by saying “his talent & strategy consists in accumulating overwhelming numbers,” neatly ignoring the fact that regardless of manpower, Grant had more than once outthought him.76 Yet that might not matter if only Lee could achieve something like parity in strength. “Unless some measures can be devised to replace our losses, the consequences may be disastrous,” he warned Seddon in August. “No man should be excused from service.” They must conscript more, and put arms in the hands of noncombatant soldiers. With only a few thousand new men he could hold his defenses, and use his veterans to deliver a real blow. “Without some increase of our strength, I cannot see how we are to escape the natural military consequences of the enemy’s numerical superiority.”77

  Lee was receptive to any expedient. Barely a week after stopping Grant’s assaults on Petersburg, he conceived the novel idea of sending the Maryland troops in his army north to the Potomac. There they would be ferried across to make an amphibious landing at Point Lookout, Maryland, to attack the Union prisoner of war camp maintained there and free more than 12,000 Confederate soldiers to return to his ranks. He believed that the prison garrison was almost all black soldiers, and assumed that the officers of such troops “would be poor & feeble” and offer little resistance.78 Once free and armed with their captors’ weapons, the prisoners and their liberators could then march around Washington and cross the Potomac somewhere upstream. Lee was hardly given to impractical schemes, yet this was easily the most fanciful idea he conceived during the war. It revealed his desperation, and his willingness to disenthrall himself of the conventional if it would solve his problem.

  Later that summer he proposed to Davis that all men currently in the military but serving in rear-echelon positions should be sent to the front, their places to be filled with hired slaves and free blacks. “I think measures should be taken at once to substitute negroes for whites in every place in the army,” he said, meaning use as teamsters, cooks, hospital orderlies, and the like. He did not suggest actually arming them as soldiers, or not yet, but that might be the logical extension of his argument. As further evidence of his desperation and improvisation, he also asked the president to call out the overage reserves and county home guard in Virginia and North Carolina, again to man defenses and garrisons so that his veterans could be available and ready to strike when opportunity afforded.79

  Throughout that winter he made trip after trip to Richmond trying to motivate the War Department, and especially the quartermaster and commissary bureaus, to do something about his dwindling army and its miserly supplies. When he returned to his headquarters he groaned repeatedly that no one listened, and that members of Congress actually interrupted his conferences with the president and secretary of war to petition for furloughs for constituents, when he felt they should have been taking care of the army.80 On the rare occasions when he could have dinner with Mary and his daughters in the house they rented in November on Franklin Street, he paced the parlor ranting that while his men starved, Congress thought it had nothing better to do than eat peanuts and chew tobacco.81 When a senator from Texas petitioned him to send one of the best brigades in the army home to the Lone Star State just as operations were on the eve of commencing, Lee responded that “such is our great want of men, that the absence of even four hundred would be severely felt, especially four hundred of our best troops.” What he needed was for some of the many thousand soldiers lying largely idle west of the Mississippi to be brought east to him. Grant had brought many of the units that fought with him in the West, and Lee declared that “I think we must do the same with ours.”82

  Encouragements were few, though many came from his men when they passed resolutions that winter reaffirming their commitment to fight on. When that same Texas brigade sent him such resolves, he responded that “if our people will continue to sustain our soldiers as they have hitherto done, and face loss of property and deprivation of comfort with the unflinching fortitude that distinguishes their sons and brothers in the field, our success is neither doubtful nor remote.” They must expect setbacks ahead, but the Yankees would only win if the people lost confidence and relaxed their commitment. “I trust that the noble sentiments of the army will pervade the country,” he told the Texans, “and am confidant that under the blessing of God, all will be well.”83 “If our people will sustain the noble soldiers of the Confederacy, and evince the same resolution and fortitude under their trials which have characterized the army,” he wrote a Virginia brigade, “I feel no apprehension about the issue of this contest.” So long as those sentiments animated his soldiers, “our overthrow is beyond the power of the enemy.”84 For a change, he wrote intending for such letters to appear in the press.

  Having dismissed the fighting capability of black soldiers in his Point Lookout plan, Lee nonetheless slowly came to endorse the ultimate expedient of enlisting blacks in the army. “We must choose between employing negroes ourselves, and having them employed against us,” he warned Davis in September, though he was not yet speaking of using them as combatants.85 The Confederate debate on using slaves as soldiers began almost immediately after the war started, but gained no traction until early 1864, and even then few gave it support. By that winter, however, the situation was so desperate that it emerged in legislation in Congress, and Lee was asked for his views. Little had changed in his feelings toward slavery and blacks. If “controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment,” slavery was the best relationship that could exist between white and black when they inhabited the same country, he replied. “I would deprecate any sudden disturbance of that relation.” Ideally, he preferred to depend on white men to make their armies strong enough to counter the Federals, but he now believed that the white population simply was not enough. He had seen that slaves freed by enemy advances only swelled Yankee numbers as the males enlisted to help destroy slavery “in a manner most pernicious to the welfare of our people.” Their own slaves would be used to hold them in place while the enemy completed his conquest.

  “Whatever may be the effect of our employing negro troops, it cannot be as
mischievous as this,” he argued. “If it end in subverting slavery it will be accomplished by ourselves, and we can devise the means of alleviating the evil consequences to both races.” Whites would still be in full control. If they lost, then Northern abolitionists would be in charge, slavery abolished, and society overturned, threatening white supremacy. It came down to a simple question. “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which must be produced upon our social institutions.” He argued that they should be employed without delay. They had the physical strength and endurance, and “long habits of obedience and subordination, coupled with the moral influence which in our country the white man possesses over the black, furnish an excellent foundation for that discipline which is the best guaranty of military efficiency.” All that was wanting was a reason for them to fight, and Lee argued that it should be immediate freedom for the soldiers, freedom for their families at war’s end, and “the privilege of residing in the South.”

  The Confederacy ought to implement “a well-digested plan of gradual and general emancipation.” It would make the blacks who served more loyal, knowing that their families were to be free. It would also reduce the temptation of those at home to run away, not knowing if they would ever be able to return to their homeland, another reason for Lee’s subtle suggestion of guaranteeing continued residence in the South. Accepting that the end of slavery was inevitable if the war lasted much longer, and certain if the Yankees won, Lee argued that they might as well adopt their own emancipation immediately. This would deny the enemy one of its most powerful weapons in world opinion, and make it incontestable that the Confederates’ struggle was one for independence and not perpetuation of slavery.86 Even before the law’s passage in March 1865, Lee encouraged Davis to put it in effect immediately. They might not raise a large force at once, but if he could forestall Grant a few months, black regiments under white officers might become numerous given time.87

  Time, of course, is what he no longer had.

  16

  MEETING AGAIN

  “THEY WILL DYE HARD but dye they must,” Grant wrote his father that summer of 1864. It appeared from deserters that the Confederates were putting old men and boys into the army now. “Their next resort for reinforcemen[t]s must be the womb,” he quipped, “for they have already gone to the cradle.”1

  He enjoyed wonderful health that summer, the only one in his headquarters not sick a day since the campaign began.2 That was well, because the physical and mental demands on him were considerable. Some days he spent a dozen hours writing in addition to the correspondence his military secretary and other staff handled.3 The lion’s share went to Halleck, Stanton, Meade, and Burnside, but addressees ranged the full extent of Union blue, even to the Pacific Coast. Julia always relieved his weariness, and he very much wanted her with him, but the summer heat and the uncertainty of his movements kept her mostly at Burlington, New Jersey, and he could not get away. “You know that of all persons I am the last one who can leave,” he told her in September. Meanwhile, she cast about for some more permanent roost for the family. The citizens of Chicago wanted to raise money to give the Grants a house, and Philadelphia actually did, though it would not be ready before the end of the year. Grant preferred Chicago but since duty would require him in the East even after war’s end, Philadelphia was the better choice. He hoped that when this campaign was over he could spend most of the winter there enjoying the home-cooked meals that he missed terribly. He might also spend the cold months visiting the other armies, leaving Meade in charge around Petersburg.

  Philadelphia would also keep him in easy reach of army headquarters. “I have a horror of living in Washington and never intend to do it,” he told her, but he could stand visits.4 Looking to the future, he began planning investments designed, he hoped, to yield them an income of $6,000 a year, enough for his family live on comfortably even if something should happen to him.5 He also invested in land that held the promise of oil, the old entrepreneur in him still alive and well. But when the other buyers asked to capitalize on his fame in attempting to resell the land with some hint of a certainty of its riches, he recoiled, replying that “I have a perfect abhorence of having any interest in anything which might prove speculative at the expense of a confiding public.”6

  Meanwhile, he dealt with that growing celebrity. “It is a terrible bore to me that I cannot travel like a private citizen,” he complained after being almost mobbed in Philadelphia that fall.7 Like Lee, he disliked being in the press, but unlike him, he began to find himself on a footing that Lee rarely faced. “Gen. Grant has met the fate that usually befalls celebrities,” a Rhode Island editor wrote early in June. “He is in the hands of the anecdote mongers, and the newspapers teem with stories of his sayings and doings.” It rather embarrassed him, especially since some of the anecdotes echoed Jesse’s stories that made him out a bumpkin. “Anecdotes are like poems: they are either good or good-for-nothing,” wrote that editor, and Grant largely agreed.8 Hasty biographies appeared with titles like Tanner-Boy, A Life of General Grant, and The Hero Boy. Even the more serious like F. W. H. Stansfield’s The Life of Gen’l U. S. Grant ran title pages attributing to him such prescient boyhood aphorisms as “Can’t is not in the dictionary.” If asked he refused to furnish information to prospective biographers. “It would be egotistical,” he protested, “and I hope egotism is not to be numbered among my faults.”9 Worse, anecdotes appeared connecting him to the embarrassing biographies. A peddler selling one such book was supposedly accosted on a train by one of Grant’s staff, who told him he could sell a copy to a nondescript-looking fellow sitting quietly off by himself. The peddler handed a copy to the prospect, who looked at it, then asked, “Who is it this is all about?” The incredulous salesman shot back, “You must be a darned greeny not to know General Grant,” whereupon the man bought a copy. Needless to say, the buyer was Grant himself.10

  Only in one regard did he cooperate with those wanting to publish any of his own writings. When Lincoln was renominated that summer, supporters asked if the general would allow some of his letters to be used to answer the charges Democrats leveled at the president. Grant heartily agreed, though warned that trying to answer every accusation would be like “setting a maiden to work to prove her chastity.”11 He fully supported Stanton’s path-breaking plan to allow soldiers to vote in the field for the first time that fall, though he made it clear that he did not want stump-speaking politicians from either party flooding the armies, believing that his men knew the issues well enough to make their own choices.12 When Lincoln won handily in November, Grant declared that “it will be worth more than a victory in the field,” not least because it should quiet the constant dissenters in the North whom he believed abetted the rebellion.13 “I try to look at everything calmly,” he told Julia during the campaign, “therefore believe all we want to produce a speedy peace is a unity of sentiment in the North.”14

  From the time of their first meeting Grant and Lincoln got on well, though their personal relations never matched those between Davis and Lee. However, while Lee kept his inner feelings about his president carefully muffled, Grant openly displayed his warm loyalty and admiration. For his part, Lincoln differed more with his general on strategic issues than Davis, but never to the point of imposing his own ideas. It helped that Lincoln had watched Grant’s campaigns and come to admire him before they first met. It helped, too, that both hailed from Illinois. Lincoln’s was the greater intellect, Grant’s the better adjusted personality, but not a glimmer of difference separated their convictions that preservation of the Union was the great issue. Moreover, their views on fighting the war were identical. “Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible,” Lincoln told Grant in August.15 Years later Davis would say of Lee that “he was my friend, and in that word is included all that I could say of any man.”16 Lincoln paid no such encomium to Grant, but repeate
dly in their correspondence acknowledged his willing deference to his general’s prowess. When they differed, Lincoln was big enough to admit when he was wrong. Lee later said virtually nothing in testimonial about Davis, while Grant’s admiration for his president grew for the rest of his life.

  Grant also learned from Lincoln, for the president’s leadership and example more than anything else moved the general from his near-indifference to slavery in 1861 to the point where he viewed emancipation as a great weapon of war itself, and employment of black men as soldiers as a valuable missile in their arsenal. From his first use of black regiments at Milliken’s Bend in the spring of 1863, Grant made it clear that he would carry out his government’s instructions regardless of his own opinions, which he kept to himself. Initially, like most other Union commanders, he envisioned using black units mostly for labor and garrison duty to free white veterans for the field, and later to guard plantations and hold the west bank of the Mississippi when Sherman set out for Meridian in March 1864. Thus when new rifles became available, he gave them to his veterans and passed their used weapons to the black units.17 Nevertheless, such new regiments being Washington’s wishes, he insisted on the work being prosecuted vigorously. Fearing that one general would not conscientiously raise and train blacks, he recommended another in his place who will “take an active interest in this work,” telling Sherman that “a Soldier does not consult his own views of policy when orders from his superiors intervene.”18 By early 1865 he had learned enough about considerations best suited for discipline and morale in the new outfits to order black regiments raised in South Carolina to be stationed near their homes and families.19

  Grant sought white officers best fitted for the special demands of leading these path-breaking soldiers, and after the blacks’ first actions he believed they had performed well and informed Halleck that “all that have been tried have fought bravely.” Immediately after taking Vicksburg he wanted to raise and equip as many regiments of United States Colored Troops as possible. In August 1864 in the Weldon Railroad operations he told Halleck that “the Colored troops behaved handsomely,” and that same month gave them a perhaps unintentional compliment when he averred that one of his trained black soldiers was now worth two of the white militiamen raised in the emergency caused by Early’s raid on Washington.20