The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

A genuine hero emerged there in the unlikely figure of Ulysses S. Grant.60 In 1843 he graduated twenty-first in his West Point class of thirty-nine; as a student he was best at drawing and horsemanship and worst at tactics. He was fearless in battle even though he sickened at the sight of blood, let alone masses of gruesomely killed and wounded men. Although assigned to the quartermaster corps during the Mexican War, he repeatedly not just joined but led attacks and was twice breveted for bravery. He was forced out of the army in 1854 for being drunk on duty. Over the course of the next seven years, he failed as a businessman, farmer, rent collector, and real estate agent. When the war broke out he was a clerk in his father’s store in Galena, Illinois. He was lean and of medium height, with reddish-brown hair and blue-gray eyes. Indifferent to his appearance, he was often described as seedy and rumpled. The man who commanded vast armies and later became president of the United States was not just taciturn but painfully shy and hated to speak in public. However, behind closed doors he was a devoted, affectionate husband and father. For vices he chain-smoked cigars and at times drank to excess. He repeatedly fell for shysters with get-rich-quick schemes even though he was burned each time. Throughout his life he failed at all but one of his ventures, including being president. The exception was that he was a master of the art of war.

  As Grant explained it, this art was profoundly simple: “Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can and as often as you can and keep moving on.” No man knew Grant better than Gen. William Sherman, who shared insights into how his friend waged war: “He fixes in his mind what is the true objective and abandons all minor ones. If his plan goes wrong he is never disconcerted but promptly devises a new one and is sure to win in the end.” Grant’s dogged refusal to give up and continual search for a better way was epitomized by his attitude after the first day’s fighting at Shiloh. The rebels took him by surprise, inflicted heavy casualties, and pushed back his army. Even such brilliant generals as Sherman and James McPherson believed they had been defeated and had to withdraw. To this Grant replied, “Not beaten yet. Not by a damn sight. . . . Retreat? No, I propose to attack at daybreak and lick them.”61

  Grant’s memoirs are a classic of military history, prose, and psychology that honestly reveal his fears and mistakes as well as triumphs. In his first action of the Civil War, he provided an insight into himself and the nature of war. In northern Missouri then-Colonel Grant was ordered to march his regiment to attack an enemy regiment. His fear grew as he led his men closer to the enemy position, followed by relief when they found only a deserted camp: “It occurred to me that [rebel Colonel] Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.”62

  Grant first made headlines after fighting the battle of Belmont on November 7, 1861. He commanded seventeen thousand troops split between two strategic sites: Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and Paducah, Kentucky, forty-five miles up the Ohio and just three and fifteen miles, respectively, downstream from the mouths of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Twenty miles down the Mississippi from Cairo, Gen. Leonidas Polk was dug in with twenty thousand troops at Columbus, Kentucky. Seeking to probe Polk, Grant packed 3,114 troops aboard riverboats and steamed down to Belmont, Missouri, just across from Columbus. After his troops scattered a small rebel force, Grant deployed them to meet seven thousand Confederates that Polk sent across the river. The Union troops stood their ground and repelled several rebel attacks before Grant withdrew them to the steamboats and back to Cairo. His troops inflicted more losses—642, including 175 prisoners, four spiked cannons, and two captured cannons—than the 485 they sustained. More importantly, this bold raid boosted Grant’s confidence and skills to try increasingly ambitious campaigns in the future.63

  In early 1862 Grant scored twin victories that let Union forces overrun most of central and western Tennessee. Fort Henry and Fort Donelson stood a dozen miles apart guarding the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, respectively. On February 2 Grant packed seventeen thousand troops aboard transports that followed seven gunboats commanded by Capt. Andrew Foote up the Tennessee River. He led his army ashore just beyond range of Fort Henry’s cannons on February 6. Faced with overwhelming odds, Fort Henry’s commander withdrew his twenty-eight hundred troops to Fort Donelson. After garrisoning Fort Henry, Grant marched his army toward Fort Donelson while the flotilla steamed there. Grant deployed his army in a crescent west of Fort Donelson on February 8. Foote’s flotilla arrived on February 13 and opened fire. The next day the rebels attacked Grant’s lines but were repulsed. Reinforcements swelled Grant’s army to twenty-seven thousand troops. The Confederate commander was Gen. Simon Buckner, Grant’s old friend from West Point. Sentiment played no role in what happened next. When Buckner asked that his army be paroled, Grant replied, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Buckner protested the “unchivalrous and ungenerous terms” but surrendered his 17,000-man army; only 14,623 troops actually went into captivity, as Gen. Bedford Forrest escaped during the night with 2,500 men.64

  Grant’s capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, and the destruction of the Memphis and Ohio Railroad bridges south of those forts, forced Gen. Albert Sidney Johnson, the region’s rebel commander, to withdraw his forces across the region. Grant wanted to follow up his victories promptly by steaming Foote’s flotilla up the Cumberland River to capture Clarksville and Nashville, while he pursued and destroyed Johnson’s army. Tragically, Gen. Henry Halleck, the Department of the West’s commander, forbade him from doing so.

  Nonetheless, Grant’s victories opened the way for the Federal takeover of the region from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, who commanded the Army of the Ohio, had languished at his Louisville headquarters despite repeated orders from Washington to advance, including a pointed one from the commander in chief himself on January 7.65 Buell’s affliction with the “slows,” as Lincoln called it, aggravated the president nearly as much as McClellan’s. With the adjacent lower Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys cleared of rebels, Buell finally felt secure enough to lead his own army southward. Union troops marched into Clarksville, the site of the Confederacy’s largest iron works after the Tredegar complex in Richmond, on February 21, and into Nashville, the state’s capital, on March 1, without fighting a battle along the way as small groups of rebels withdrew before them. But, to Buell’s shame and anger, he found that Grant, contrary to orders, had gotten there ahead of him to occupy those strategic sites and secure huge stores of rebel supplies before they were destroyed or withdrawn. On the Mississippi River, Gen. John Pope led an expedition downstream to occupy Columbus, Kentucky, which General Polk hastily evacuated after the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, and to capture Island Number Ten with its seven thousand defenders on April 7 and Fort Pillow with its one thousand men on May 10, disembarking at an undefended Memphis on June 7.

  Meanwhile Grant faced enemies among his “brothers in arms.” His victories provoked jealousy in lackluster generals. Halleck actually relieved him on March 6, with several politically motivated excuses, including that by capturing Fort Donelson he had intruded into Army of the Ohio’s region, that he had visited Nashville without orders to do so, and that he had failed to send Halleck reports for two weeks after he captured Fort Donelson. Actually Grant had dutifully sent a series of reports, but a telegraph operator with rebel sympathies at Cairo did not forward them. Halleck also appears to have instigated the rumor that Grant had resumed his old, “vile habits” of drunkenness. Lincoln was astonished that anyone would attack Grant just because he happened to win a decisive victory and v
isited a captured enemy state capital in another army’s region. He then found out about the diverted reports and, on March 13, ordered Halleck to reinstate Grant.66

  Farther west the Union won another victory. In early March Gen. Samuel Curtis and eleven thousand Union troops were encamped along Pea Ridge in northwestern Arkansas. Gen. Earl Van Dorn marched up from Fayetteville and curled around the Union army to sever its supply line and attack its rear on March 7. Curtis maneuvered his troops to repel that first of a series of assaults. The next morning Curtis ordered a charge that routed the rebels. This battle cost each side thirteen hundred casualties but secured the region for the Union after Curtis marched his army into Fayetteville.

  In the east, the Union navy scored some key victories. On November 7, 1861, a flotilla of seventy-seven vessels commanded by Flag Officer Samuel DuPont steamed into Port Royal Sound, located about halfway between Charleston and Savannah, pounded two forts to rubble, and disembarked twelve thousand troops to occupy Port Royal. That small port served as the blockading fleet’s base for this stretch of coast. Farther north, long, slender, sandy islands shelter North Carolina’s coast from the Atlantic Ocean. Behind these barriers are two vast bays, Albemarle Sound northward and the far larger Pamlico Sound southward. Smugglers sailed from a half-dozen small ports around each sound for the open ocean and distant foreign markets, where they sold cotton and bought war supplies and luxury goods for resale in the Confederacy. A fort on Roanoke Island defended the entrance to Albemarle Sound. On February 7 Gen. Ambrose Burnside landed seventy-five hundred troops just beyond cannon shot of this fort. The following day his troops attacked and, at the cost of 264 casualties, forced rebel general Henry Wise to surrender with his 2,675 troops. Using the fort as a base, Burnside led expeditions that captured Elizabeth and Edenton on Albemarle Sound, then steamed down to Pamlico Sound and captured New Bern. This expedition at once sharply curtailed smuggling and provided bases from which to march westward into North Carolina’s interior.

  Shortly thereafter a battle changed the history of warfare and thus the world.67 The rebels converted a captured warship, the uss Merrimack, into an iron-platted vessel named the CSS Virginia. On March 8 the Virginia attacked the Union fleet anchored at Hampton Roads in Chesapeake Bay and sank two warships before returning to its anchorage for more fuel and ammunition. When the Virginia steamed out the next morning, the iron-platted uss Monitor was waiting. The contrast in design was striking. The 264-foot Virginia could be compared to a barn roof with a dozen cannons studding each sloped side. The 172-foot Monitor was a cheese box with two cannons in a revolving turret atop a deck just above the waterline. The battle was a draw, as each vessel pounded the other without inflicting more than dents. The Virginia withdrew.

  The advent of iron warships rendered wooden vessels forever obsolete. The opposing naval secretaries, Gideon Welles and Stephen Mallory, deserve full credit for having the vision and drive to launch this revolution. In July 1861 Welles approved engineer John Ericsson’s proposal to build the Monitor in the Brooklyn Naval Yard and got Congress to underwrite the project with a $1.5 million appropriation. Fortuitously, the Monitor was finished and steamed south just in time to counter the Virginia as it began a second day of rampaging against the American fleet.

  Once back in command, Grant led his 42,682-man Army of the Tennessee up the Tennessee River to Pittsburg Landing on the west bank, where they camped and awaited Buell’s 40,000-man Army of the Ohio; Shiloh church stood near the Union line’s center. Once joined, the two armies would march under Grant’s command twenty miles south to Corinth, where General Johnson had massed 40,335 troops.

  Johnson had retreated to Corinth all the way from Bowling Green, Kentucky, when the armies of Grant and Buell advanced on either side of his own. Deserters brought him word of the enemy plan. This spurred him to strike Grant before Buell reinforced him. He led his army north and unleashed it against Grant’s early on the morning of April 6. The attack caught the Union troops by surprise. Some regiments broke and fled while others held their ground or slowly gave way. Gen. William Sherman and his division were among those later acclaimed for their fierce defense. That night Buell’s army arrived and bolstered Grant’s line. The following morning Grant ordered the combined armies to attack. In late afternoon the rebels retreated to Corinth. Grant’s victory came at a huge cost, with the Union suffering 13,447 casualties to the Confederate’s 10,699; Johnson was among the dead. Shiloh was bloodier than all the war’s previous battles combined.

  Once again Grant was the center of controversy. His enemies pilloried him for not detecting the rebel advance and whispered that he was drinking to excess. Lincoln was the most prominent of those who lauded his victory; he dismissed the critics by insisting, “I can’t spare the man, he fights.”68 Yet Grant was temporarily eclipsed.

  Halleck hurried down from his St. Louis headquarters and on April 11 took command of the two armies that, with reinforcements, reached one hundred thousand troops. Fearful of a surprise attack, he crept his troops toward the enemy at Corinth, twenty miles south. The army progressed less than half a mile a day, partly because of the nearly incessant rains that turned roads into quagmires, but mostly because Halleck kept his men busy mostly fortifying their camps rather than marching. Facing that snail-paced juggernaut were seventy thousand rebels led by Gen. Pierre Beauregard. On May 25 Beauregard and his men abandoned Corinth and withdrew to Tupelo, Mississippi, fifty miles south. The Union army marched into the enemy’s deserted entrenchments the next day. Halleck had taken nearly eight weeks to move his troops from Shiloh to Corinth, a distance that with a dry road and no resistance could have been hiked in a day. Grant lamented that Halleck had deprived him of the opportunity “that Corinth could have been captured in a two days’ campaign commenced promptly on the arrival of reinforcements after the battle of Shiloh.”69 Halleck compounded his folly by dispersing his army in defensive positions throughout the region rather than pursuing Beauregard.

  The Union scored another resounding victory that spring when Adm. David Farragut led a flotilla a hundred miles up the Mississippi River to New Orleans, destroyed several forts en route, and disembarked fifteen thousand troops commanded by Gen. Benjamin Butler into the undefended city on May 1, 1862. Farragut steamed upstream and captured Baton Rouge but was repelled in an assault on Vicksburg and withdrew to Baton Rouge. The rebels began massing troops and building fortifications at Port Hudson, thereby safeguarding a stretch of the Mississippi River from there two hundred miles north to Vicksburg.

  While all these decisive events unfolded elsewhere, George McClellan made his own leisurely campaign preparations. In response to the president’s queries as to why he was not proceeding quicker, he explained that his duties as both commanding general and general of the Army of the Potomac were enormously time consuming. Lincoln eliminated this excuse when he relieved McClellan as the commanding general on March 11, thus freeing him to concentrate on his campaign; for now, the commander in chief would act as his own general in chief. Another reason for the Army of the Potomac’s glacial decision making and movement was McClellan’s frequent councils with all twelve of his division commanders. Lincoln hoped to cut some of the time needed to reach consensus by ordering McClellan to organize these divisions into four corps. Although deciding what to do and how to do it was clearly easier with four rather than twelve often outspoken generals, the decisions did not arrive much more swiftly. This initially was because three of the four corps commanders that Lincoln appointed—Edwin Sumner, Samuel Heintzelman, and Irvin McDowell—opposed McClellan’s plan, while only Erasmus Keyes approved it. Making critical choices was difficult enough, but implementing them was far tougher. Each corps commander proved to be a mediocre or worse field general and would be replaced during the subsequent campaign.

  Lincoln and McClellan disagreed over just where the Army of the Potomac should go and what it should do when it got there. The general intended to outflank Gen. Joe Johnston’s Army of Norther
n Virginia by sailing his army down the Potomac River into Chesapeake Bay, landing it, and marching it against the rebel capital. His first proposed landing site was Urbana, at the tip of the peninsula north of the York River, 120 miles over water from Washington and 50 miles over land to Richmond. Lincoln worried that that strategy would let Johnston launch his army, deployed around Manassas and Centreville, straight at a nearly undefended capital, thirty miles away. He pressed McClellan to envelop the rebel army in northern Virginia and thus defeat the enemy while protecting Washington. Destroying the enemy’s army rather than capturing the enemy’s capital should be the primary objective.

  Lincoln revealed his superior understanding of strategy in a remarkable letter to McClellan dated February 3, 1862. He asked the general to compare their two plans and then answer a series of very pointed questions. Did not McClellan’s plan take more time, money, and troops? Was his plan any more certain of victory? Would not the president’s plan break the enemy’s supply and communications line easier than the general’s? Should disaster ensue, which plan offered a safer retreat?70 McClellan haughtily dismissed Lincoln’s plan while insisting that his plan was superb, yet he refused to implement it, claiming he lacked enough troops to do so.

  Lincoln was hardly the only person in despair at McClellan’s near-traitorous conduct. The president met with the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, chaired by Radical Republican Benjamin Wade, on March 3. The committee members heatedly expressed a litany of charges against McClellan and urged his dismissal. When Lincoln asked who should take his place, Wade insisted that “anybody” would do. To that Lincoln replied that “anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”71

  Rumors abounded that more than timidity explained the general’s refusal to act. Some claimed that McClellan was a Democrat who did not want to crush the rebel states let alone abolish slavery as liberal Republicans advocated. That rumor was grounded in truth. In a letter he penned in November 1861, McClellan revealed his true feelings: “Help me dodge the nigger. . . . I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union. . . . To gain that end we cannot afford to raise up the negro question.”72