Grant’s policy on the treatment of black soldiers by fellow whites required that only one standard should apply regardless of color. In the weeks before the fall of Vicksburg he preferred that white and black units be kept apart as much as possible, especially in their camps, to minimize bullying or worse from white soldiers.21 The government having freed and armed the blacks, he saw no justice in “permitting one treatment for them, and another for the white soldiers.”22 When an officer was charged with whipping a white soldier who had abused the new recruits, Grant dismissed the charges.23 He applied that same policy in dealing with the special concern over treatment of captured blacks, for if outraged Confederates did not shoot them immediately, they ran the risk of being returned to slavery as presumed runaways like the freemen taken by Lee’s army in Pennsylvania. Hearing that black prisoners might have been hanged after the battle of Milliken’s Bend, he informed local Confederate authorities that if this was their policy, he would reply in kind by hanging white prisoners until the abuse stopped.24
Early in October 1864 Lee proposed a massive prisoner exchange in the interests of relieving the captives of their hardships—and to return thousands to his army—but when Grant raised the issue of the Union’s black soldiers, Lee could only say that those not believed to be runaways would be exchanged, while the rest were still lawful property and must go back to their masters. Denying that the Union recognized any difference in status within its black soldiery, or between black and white, Grant refused the exchange.25 Later that month when Confederates forced captured black soldiers to work on the Petersburg defenses under fire, Grant put an equal number of captured Confederates to work on Butler’s front. “I shall always regret the necessity of retaliating for wrongs done our soldiers,” he wrote Lee. But when Lee attempted to argue in a lengthy legalistic defense that there was precedent for so employing those “who owe service or labor to citizens,” carefully avoiding using the word “slaves,” Grant dismissed it and informed him that “I have nothing to do with the discussion of the slavery question.”26 Only when the equitable treatment of all captured black soldiers was settled did Grant resume exchanges.
He was also quite aware of the manpower potential theoretically available to the Confederacy should it mandate enlisting slaves and free black males in its military. He told Thomas in December that he felt some apprehension on that score, and wrote an old friend that the enemy was so hard up for recruits that it could scarcely replace a thousand men “unless they resort to the darkey,” adding that “him they are affraid of and will not use him unless as a last desperate resort.”27 By February 1865 he instructed Major General E. R. S. Canby to enlist all the blacks he could in Louisiana before the Confederates forced them into their own ranks.28
Regardless of his personal feelings about blacks, which seem to have been the prevailing attitudes of his time and place, Grant never questioned their worth to the Union, both as soldiers in the cause and as labor denied the enemy. “Arming the negroes,” he had told Banks in July 1863, “will act as a two edged sword cutting both ways.”29 Yet with the close of the war approaching, his policy of treating them as entitled to equal treatment while in uniform, and the growing laurels they earned in field and combat under his eye, were subtly changing his perceptions of where the black man might stand as a citizen in peacetime.
A great deal of his time not spent supervising the campaign in his front went to Grant’s duties as general-in-chief, a position he filled actively. He studied organization and recommended reconfiguring some geographic departments for greater command efficiency, as well as to eliminate generals in whom he had no confidence. He created a new military division that included the Shenandoah Valley and put Sheridan in charge because, as he told Sherman, the man would “push the enemy to the very death.”30 He withheld ordering active operations in other areas when he doubted the aggressiveness of the officer in charge. He faced yet again the problem of Rosecrans, who he told Julia with some exaggeration “never obeyed an order in his life that I have yet heard of.”31 In October his one-time friend repulsed a haphazard invasion of Missouri by an army of ragged cavalry under Sterling Price. Meanwhile, Confederate general John Bell Hood had succeeded Johnston in command of the Army of Tennessee, and was then invading central Tennessee. On October 29 Grant ordered Rosecrans to send substantial reinforcements to bolster Thomas in stopping Hood. Knowing Rosey well, Grant specified that “immediate and prompt compliance with this order, is required.” Grant even sent Rawlins to Rosecrans’s headquarters to make sure of action, and with direct authority to issue the necessary orders if Rosey did not.32 For a change Rosecrans cooperated and soon had the men in motion, but apparently not fast enough for Grant, who repeatedly recommended relieving him from command, and early in January 1865 actually suggested to the War Department that Rosecrans be dismissed from the service for violation of military articles.33 No doubt Grant felt he had just cause. No doubt his own antipathy toward the man urged him to use it.
Then there was the problem of General Thomas and the Army of the Cumberland. After the fall of Atlanta in September, Hood’s late fall invasion got to the outskirts of Nashville. Whatever the cause of Grant’s reservations about Thomas, they had not gone away. Grant liked quick and decisive action. Thomas was deliberate, not slow so much as overly methodical, yet that approach did not suit the general-in-chief. Forced to slow his advance on Petersburg to send reinforcements to protect Washington and root out Early—“that Maryland raid upset my plans” he confessed to Washburne—he was not anxious to have to send more even farther away if Thomas let Hood get the upper hand.34 “I have said all I could do to force him to attack without giving the possitive order,” Grant grumbled to Sherman on December 6. “To-day however I could stand it no longer and gave the order.”35 That order was unmistakable. “Attack Hood at once,” it said, and Grant planned to replace Thomas quickly if he did not obey.36 In fact, Thomas did not move for over a week. Grant tried persuasion. “Now is the time,” he said, for before him was a chance to destroy one of the enemy’s three main armies. Grant withdrew the relief order and tried to explain to him that “it has seemed to me that you have been slow.” Then again Grant tried the peremptory. “Delay no longer,” he wired on December 11.37 Then he sent General Logan with orders to relieve Thomas, and left for Nashville himself on December 15.
En route he learned that Thomas had finally attacked. With the result of the fight yet unknown, Grant wired ahead for Thomas to push Hood hard as far and as fast as possible, not to wait for his supply trains to get organized to follow, but to live off the land.38 For Grant that was the measure of a field general. He had withheld an assignment from one general that summer because he did not believe the man could manage an army isolated from its lines of communication.39 “What is wanted is a Commander who will not be afraid to cut loose from his base of supplies,” he told Canby, “and who will make the best use of the resources of the Country.”40 That was not Thomas. “It has been hard work to get Thomas to attack Hood,” Grant wrote Sherman three days later.41 Then when Grant tried to get the Army of the Cumberland to campaign actively in Alabama in concert with Sherman’s march east from Atlanta, Thomas slowed down again. Resigned to the fact that the general was “slow beyond excuse,” Grant worked around him by reassigning significant parts of his army to other commands and ordering Thomas’s cavalry to cooperate in a move to take Mobile. For three weeks Thomas did nothing, and then Grant finally ordered him to prepare for an overland campaign into southwest Virginia and on to Lynchburg. He knew Thomas would never actually launch such a campaign, but at least he might have the preparations in hand so that at the proper moment Grant could replace him with someone more determined, probably Sheridan.42 Perhaps he should have relieved Thomas, but that general’s army loved him and Grant knew how important that was to morale. Thomas was popular in the North thanks to the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga. With the war’s end not yet in immediate sight, wisdom said to endure a plodding hero.
Amid such challenges, men like Meade offered great relief, and none more than Sherman. He left Sherman to himself in planning and executing his spring campaign, and the taking of Atlanta was exactly what Grant had hoped for, though he grieved at the death of McPherson, the only army commander the Union lost in action. “To know him was but to love him,” Grant told the bereaved family.43 Meanwhile, he almost boasted that “I am glad to say that I appreciated Sherman from the first feeling him to be what he has proven to the World he is.”44 After Atlanta he complimented Sherman that “You have accomplished the most gigantic undertak[ing] given to any General in this War,” then began talking of another campaign barely a week later. “We want to keep the enemy continually pressed to the end of the war,” he wrote, suggesting an overland march across Georgia to Savannah as one option. Within a few weeks Sherman had the campaign planned and Grant gave his approval and left him to it.45 So deeply did he believe in the value of Sherman’s service that he began a movement for the citizens of Cincinnati to buy a house for him after the war. When Sherman took Savannah on Christmas Day, Grant had his final assignment ready for him: to march north across the Carolinas and, if possible, move into south-central Virginia to cooperate against Lee if he and his army were still intact.
Meanwhile, Grant paid attention to the other armies large and small, and suggested several command changes or reorganizations, some on concerns over competent generals, and others for reasons of efficiency. He asked that the Departments of the Northwest, Missouri, and Kansas be consolidated into one, and had no problem recommending the out-of-favor General Pope to relieve Rosecrans, because he would bring to bear “subordination, and intelligence of administration.”46 He also gave special attention to General Canby, who had replaced Banks in Louisiana, to whom Grant’s old pet project of taking Mobile now fell. Beyond high-level concerns, he left conduct of operations very much to the individual commanders, adhering to his old assumption that no one knew the situation better than the man on the scene. Throughout, Grant continued to use his staff as eyes and ears, and even to exert his own authority. He sent Rawlins to try to budge first Rosecrans and then Thomas, and Horace Porter to confer with Sherman in planning the new campaign.47 Looking completely across the continent, he feared that Confederate sympathizers in southern California might cross into French-occupied Mexico to organize and equip themselves to return as invaders. Should they do that, Grant authorized his commander on the Pacific to drive them back and follow them across the border. In fact, in his only contemplated incursion into international affairs, Grant suggested that any Mexican territory harboring the invaders ought to be occupied until its authorities provided an indemnity that this would not happen again. Beyond that, Grant expressed his opinion—though not an order—that “direct assistance on our part” ought to be given to expel French forces and their leader the emperor Maximilian to return Mexico’s government to its people.48
Once Sherman began his scorching advance through South Carolina, Grant’s optimism impelled him to tell Congressman Washburne that “a few days more of success with Sherman will put us where we can crow loud.”49 Even before that, Grant felt like crowing over the war machine that he, Lincoln, and the Northern people had built. “We now have an Army of Soldiers such as the world never saw before,” he told a friend in January 1865. That said, he turned immediately to the inevitable peace, adding that “when we get this little job settled I hope there never will be occation for seeing so much of it again.”50
Grant’s most delicate challenge was dealing with Meade and the Army of the Potomac. He knew Meade in Mexico, and that officer thought well of him. “I think his great characteristic is indomitable energy and great tenacity of purpose,” Meade wrote in December 1863 on learning of Grant’s promotion, but he added that Grant had yet to face a general of Lee’s capability.51 When Grant came east he showed solicitude for the irascible Meade’s feelings in a difficult situation, and thanks mainly to him, favorable relations between them commenced almost instantly. “You may rest assured he is no ordinary man,” Meade told his wife in March. “Grant is emphatically an executive man, whose only place is in the field.”52 For his part, Grant sympathized over the way the press and Washington had treated Meade following the battle of Gettysburg. Further to bolster his confidence, Grant at first gave virtually no orders for the army and stayed out of its administration, yielding to Meade on almost every suggestion for planning the coming campaign. “I cannot but be rejoiced at his arrival,” Meade concluded on the eve of action, “because I believe success to be the more probable.”53
Grant also wisely stayed out of the army’s internal politics, which had always been its besetting sin. Several subordinates tried to deal directly with him rather than through Meade, but he routinely referred them to him, putting all on notice that “the rising sun,” as Meade called him, would not be politicked.54 “Grant is not a striking man,” thought Meade, who found him reticent, unworldly, and somewhat ill at ease in the presence of strangers. Nevertheless, “at the same time, he has natural qualities of a high order, and is a man whom, the more you see and know him, the better you like him.” Grant reminded him of their Mexican-American War general Zachary Taylor, “and sometimes I fancy he models himself on old Zac.”55
When the fighting began, Grant initially left maneuvers to Meade but gradually got more actively involved. Meade could have resented that, but instead understood that it was all but inevitable.56 Before May was out, however, his persistent anxiety over recognition began to color his opinion of Grant. “I don’t think he is a very magnanimous man,” Meade told his wife late that month, though still he credited Grant with being “above any littleness.” After the battle of Cold Harbor he believed Grant had “had his eyes opened,” and soon expressed disappointment in him.57 Still, Grant’s strengths impressed him. “He is of a very sanguine temperament, and sees everything favorable in a strong light, and makes light of all obstacles,” Meade found by that fall. “Grant is not a mighty genius, but he is a good soldier, of great force of character, honest and upright, of pure purposes.” Above all, Meade saw that “his prominent quality is unflinching tenacity of purpose.” Unintimidated by obstacles, Grant largely ignored them. He was almost too confident, and Meade also feared that his commander’s guilelessness made him susceptible to the unscrupulous. Lacking the craving for approval himself, Grant failed often to see it in others, and unintentionally disappointed them, as he did Meade. Nevertheless, “take him all in all,” said Meade, “he is, in my judgment, the best man the war has yet produced.”58
As much as Grant thrived on the heavy load, he fell ill and bedridden just before Christmas, largely from overwork, sicker than at any time since the outbreak of war. “It would not do for me to get sick at this time when there is so much to do,” he wrote Julia on December 22, “and when we have it in our hands to do so much towards the suppression of the rebellion.”59 Two days later, largely by his own power of will, he was better and back at work. “I believe determination can do a great deal to sustain one,” he told her, adding with no trace of conceit that “I have that quality certainly to its fullest degree.”60 Through it all, his optimism never flagged. “I will work this thing all out right yet,” he told Julia in October.61 Richmond would fall as Atlanta had done. By the dawn of 1865 he believed Lee would never abandon Richmond, even if every other point in the Confederacy should fall.62 Thus when he took the enemy capital, he would take Lee with it, and that would end the rebellion. By mid-February he felt confident as ever that “every thing looks to me to be favorable for a speedy termination of the war.”63
Fearing the same thing, Lee’s anger and animosity toward his foe only hardened during the siege. “How many happy homes have they destroyed, & turned the occupants adrift in the world with nothing,” he lamented. “From how many hearts have they expelled all hopes of happiness forever.” The Yankees planted “darkness & despair where flourished love & happiness before,” and were nothing more than “coward
ly persecutors.”64 He readily believed a rumor that Federals had torn down all the churches around Culpeper Court House, reusing the materials “often for the vilest purposes,” and felt outrage that the pews of one church were hauled away to use in a theater.65 Late in October when he heard a sermon on forgiveness of enemies, he granted that it was right and he ought to make an effort to do so, but told Mary that “it is a hard lesson to learn now,” especially when he heard stories of Confederate citizens being placed on Union trains in northern Virginia as shields to prevent partisans from attacking.66
That anger, the frustration of siege, his inability to awaken Richmond to urgency, his bone weariness, and the near-constant sense of his own time running out all fed Lee’s bent toward melancholy and fatalism. Daily he felt his lagging physical strength and energy. Though he might not admit that Grant had outguessed him more than once, he believed his mental acuity was dulled, and had to wonder if Grant could have matched wits with the Lee of 1862. Several times in the past campaign he almost courted death when he tried to lead men into battle. Meanwhile, the reaper’s scythe had taken his daughter, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. Then in August he learned of the death of his beloved old uncle Williams Carter, who had been so ill-used by the Yankees. Nostalgically, Lee spoke of him as “the last connecting link to the persons whom I enjoyed in my boyhood & who made my days so happy.”67 All of his bonds to happiness were being severed.
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