Two Miserable Presidents

by Steve Sheinkin

Davis tried to go back to work, but it was useless. He threw down the papers he was supposed to read, crying, “I must have this day with my little son!”

  Like Lincoln two years before, Davis had lost a child. And like Lincoln, Davis had very little time to grieve. Another year of fighting was about to begin, and the South needed a plan.

  As always, Robert E. Lee was itching to attack, and he had something to tell his officers:

  “We have got to whip them! We must whip them!”

  Ulysses S. Grant

  Robert E. Lee

  But Lee and Davis agreed that risking a major attack was not the best strategy for the South at that moment. The Union was going to have a presidential election in November—and this was the key to the South’s strategy. Lincoln was running for reelection, but he was looking pretty weak. People up north were sick of the endless bloodshed and were longing for peace. So it was very possible that voters might elect a new president, one who was willing to end the war by giving the South its independence.

  The next six months were everything. The Confederate army had to make it through the next six months without losing any major battles. That way, when it was time for the election in November, the end of the war would still be nowhere in sight. Northern voters would blame Lincoln for this—and they would boot him out of office.

  All of this brought up an important question: Would Union war strategy change now that Grant was in charge of Union forces? Definitely, said the Confederate general James Longstreet. A college friend of Grant’s (and a guest at his wedding), Longstreet had followed Grant’s career closely. And he warned his fellow officers to prepare for nonstop action: “That man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war.”

  That’s exactly what Grant was planning to do.

  The Bloody Road to Richmond

  What is it like to march into your own nightmare? Union soldiers found out in May 1864, as they moved south into the dark and tangled Virginia forest known as the Wilderness. The year before in this place they had been whipped in the battle of Chancellorsville. Now they were marching past the remains of soldiers killed in that fight: twisted skeletons and white skulls that seemed to be staring up at them. Union soldiers knew they were about to face another big battle in these spooky woods—and they had a bad, bad feeling about it.

  Grant’s Pretty Simple Plan

  In the spring of 1864 there were two main Confederate armies. One was in Virginia, under the command of Robert E. Lee. The other, in Georgia, was led by Joseph Johnston. Grant decided to attack both of these armies at the same time.

  The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman described Grant’s plan like this:

  “He was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was his plan.”

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Okay, so it wasn’t a fancy plan. But Grant knew that he and Sherman had twice as many soldiers as Lee and Johnston. Grant’s strategy was to use this advantage to “hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy.” He was convinced that the larger Union forces could pound their way to victory.

  But could Union forces win a big victory before the presidential election in November? If not, Lincoln was going to lose—and the South would gain its independence.

  The future of the United States would be decided on the battlefield in the next few months.

  Once More into the Wilderness

  That explains why Grant stuffed so many cigars into the pockets of his pants and jacket before leaving his tent each morning—chew—ing and smoking cigars helped him handle the terrible pressure he was under.

  Grant began his part of the plan by leading his army south into Virginia in early May 1864. While Union troops were tripping through the heavily wooded Wilderness, Lee’s army attacked. This sparked one of the war’s most confusing battles—and that’s saying something.

  “No one could see the fight fifty feet from him,” said the Union soldier Warren Goss. “It was a blind and bloody hunt to the death.”

  Men on both sides were ordered to charge at the enemy. Slight problem: no one could see the enemy through the twisted bushes and vines and trees. The only way to find the enemy was to stumble forward and crash into him. After being shot in the leg and captured, one Texas soldier shouted, “You Yanks don’t call this a battle, do you? Our two armies ain’t nothing but howling mobs!”

  Thorns ripped soldiers’ clothes and sliced their skin as they drove each other through the woods. Exploding bombs set trees on fire, and the wind blew smoke and unbearable heat back and forth across the battlefield. “The men fought the enemy and the flames at the same time,” Warren Goss remembered. “Their hair and beards were singed and their faces blistered.”

  Grant spent most of the battle of the Wilderness sitting on a log, listening to reports from his officers and puffing cigars so furiously that his head disappeared in a cloud of yellow smoke. He went through twenty cigars in one day (a personal record), and with good reason—like every other Union general who had marched into Virginia, Grant was taking a whipping from Robert E. Lee. Grant’s forces suffered more than 17,000 casualties in the Wilderness, compared to about 8,000 for Lee’s army.

  Grant was off to a terrible start.

  No Turning Back

  When the Wilderness fighting ended, Grant walked into his tent and collapsed face-first on his cot. Some witnesses said he burst into tears. Others said he just took a nap. Either way, by the time he came back outside, he had made a major decision.

  Grant ordered his army to pack up and prepare to move. Here we go again, thought discouraged Union soldiers. Every year so far they had marched into Virginia, fought Lee’s army, lost, and retreated back to the North.

  But as this march began, the men noticed that they weren’t heading north. They were marching farther south. They were continuing their drive toward Richmond.

  “Our spirits rose,” said a Union soldier. “The men began to sing.”

  A newspaper reporter asked Grant if he had any message for Abraham Lincoln. Yes, Grant said: “If you see the president, tell him, from me, that whatever happens there will be no turning back.”

  Spotsylvania Horrors

  Robert E. Lee was not surprised. “General Grant will not retreat,” Lee predicted after the battle of the Wilderness. “He will move to Spotsylvania.”

  Lee rushed his soldiers south to Spotsylvania—and got there just in time to prepare for another massive attack by Grant’s army. At first Union soldiers started gaining ground. Lee rode to the front of his army and prepared to lead a charge himself.

  But his men refused to budge. Southern soldiers would do anything for General Lee—except allow him to get shot.

  “General Lee to the rear!” someone shouted.

  Then all the soldiers, young men who had never given an order in their lives, were suddenly bossing around their commander. “General Lee to the rear!” they yelled. “General Lee to the rear!”

  Lee replied: “If you will promise me to drive those people from our works, I will go back!”

  The men cheered in agreement. Then they charged forward, and drove “those people” back.

  The battle of Spotsylvania raged on day after day, and soldiers who had seen years of combat said it was the most terrifying battle yet. The two armies blasted and stabbed at each other from just a few feet away, while rain poured down and wounded men slowly sank into the bloody mud. “I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors at Spotsylvania,” said a Union officer.

  After a week of these horrors, Grant called off the attack. Once again, he had lost far more men than Lee. And once again, he packed up and moved his army south. One more big attack, Grant thought, and he could smash his way through to Richmond. “Lee’s army is really whipped,” Grant said.

  He had never been more wrong in his life.

  June 3: I Was Killed

  While walking through camp on the night of June 2, a Union officer noticed something very st
range:

  “The men were calmly writing their names and home addresses on slips of paper and pinning them on the backs of their coats, so that their bodies might be recognized and their fate made known to their families at home.”

  Horace Porter

  Grant’s men were camped at a place called Cold Harbor. Their orders were to attack Lee’s army before sunrise. Grant was confident this attack would succeed—but his soldiers seemed to know better. They knew Lee was out there, ready and waiting for them.

  One young soldier actually skipped ahead one day in his diary and wrote: “June 3, 1864. Cold Harbor. I was killed.”

  The Union attack began at four-thirty the next morning. “We started with a yell,” said a Massachusetts soldier named Harvey Clark.

  “To your guns, boys—they’re charging!” shouted Southern soldiers.

  Harvey Clark was one of about 60,000 Union men charging right toward those guns—and the entire army slammed face-first into what Clark described as a “solid sheet of fire.”

  “It seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle,” said another Union soldier.

  Nearly 8,000 Union soldiers were shot, most of them in the first ten minutes of fighting. “The dead covered five acres of ground about as thickly as they could be laid,” a Confederate officer later said. Among the dead was the soldier who had predicted his own death in his diary the night before.

  “I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered,” Grant told his officers that night.

  He was even more depressed when he read what Northern newspapers were saying about him now. “They call me a butcher,” Grant grumbled.

  The Ticking Clock

  So let’s review: Grant’s plan was a miserable, bloody disaster. Except for one small detail: it was working.

  Even after the slaughter at Cold Harbor, Grant continued fighting his way south. New soldiers arrived from the North, so Grant’s army was still twice as large as Lee’s. And by the end of June, Grant had Lee’s army nearly surrounded in the town of Petersburg, just twenty-five miles from Richmond.

  Meanwhile, down in Georgia, General William T. Sherman pushed Confederate forces all the way to the edge of Atlanta. Home to weapons factories and key railroad lines, Atlanta was a city the South simply could not afford to lose.

  Now it was all a question of timing. As the summer sped past, Sherman tried to fight his way into Atlanta. And Grant was still stuck outside of Petersburg. The Union needed a big victory, and the clock was ticking.

  Not that Southern soldiers were enjoying the summer. In Petersburg, Lee’s soldiers were living in filthy trenches, in constant danger from Union bullets and bombs. Food shortages got so bad that the men were regularly given bags of rotting corn filled with squirming worms. One soldier remembered the men getting hunks of bacon that were “scaly” and “spotted” and gave off “a stinking smell when boiled. You could put a piece in your mouth and chew it for a long time, and the longer you chewed it the bigger it got. Then, by desperate effort, you would gulp it down.”

  The South was running out of food. But the North was running out of time.

  Waiting for News

  Lincoln was so anxious for some good news, he was hardly able to sleep at night, and he walked around the White House with black bags under his eyes. An artist who was painting a picture of Lincoln at this time said of the president’s face: “There were days when I could scarcely look into it without crying.”

  There was some news in July, but it wasn’t too good. A small Southern force had fought its way inside the borders of Washington, D.C., and was now just a few miles from the White House. Lincoln went out to have a look at the fighting. He stood on the wall of a fort as bullets zoomed past. Standing six foot four, with a tall black hat, he was the most obvious target in the city.

  “Mr. President, you are standing within range of five hundred rebel rifles,” cautioned a Union soldier.

  Another soldier was more direct: “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!”

  Lincoln got down.

  The Southern soldiers were chased from the capital, but soon there was more bad news—this time from Grant.

  This story begins in Petersburg, Virginia, where the enemy armies were living in trenches just 150 yards apart. In one of the Union trenches, a few Pennsylvania soldiers looked out at the Confederate fort protecting Petersburg. These guys were coal miners—experts at digging tunnels. And now one of them had an idea:

  “We could blow that fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.”

  The Pennsylvania boys got permission to give it a try. And in just four weeks they pulled off one of the great engineering feats of the war—a 511-foot tunnel that ended twenty feet below the Confederate fort. They opened up a huge room at the end of the tunnel and filled it with 320 barrels of gunpowder. Then they attached a long fuse to the gunpowder.

  The fuse was lit at 3:15 a.m. on July 30. Thousands of Union soldiers crouched nearby, ready to attack right after the explosion. The fuse should have reached the gunpowder in fifteen minutes. But fifteen minutes passed, then thirty, then forty-five …

  A soldier named Harry Reese volunteered to enter the tunnel and find out what had gone wrong. He saw that the fuse had burned out. He relit it—and ran for his life.

  Moments after Reese dove out of the tunnel opening, soldiers heared a low rumble that sounded like distant thunder. “Suddenly the earth trembled beneath our feet,” a Union soldier remembered. Then red flames shot up from cracks in the ground, and a massive section of earth lifted up into the air and seemed to float there like an island in the sky.

  The blast woke up thousands of Confederate soldiers—many of them were in the air at the time. One man remembered opening his eyes while flying through the air and seeing his own arms and legs swinging wildly. He passed out, landed hard, and lived.

  But more than 250 Confederate soldiers were killed in the blast, and thousands more panicked and ran. This was the opportunity of a lifetime for the Union army. But the Northern soldiers just stood there. They were just as shocked as the Southerners by the gigantic explosion and the huge crater that now lay at their feet. Even worse, the Union general who was supposed to lead the attack got scared and hid in a ditch and started guzzling rum. By the time the Union soldiers finally attacked, they were too late and too disorganized. Another 4,000 Union men were killed or wounded—and the Union army accomplished nothing.

  Grant called the Battle of the Crater “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.”

  Lincoln was not too pleased about it, either.

  “Deader Than Dead”

  Many Northerners were now convinced that they could not win this war. And they were furious with Lincoln for continuing to send young men to fight and die. A woman named Sarah Butler summed up this anger:

  “What is all this struggling and fighting for? This ruin and death to thousands of families?”

  Sarah Butler

  Former presidents spoke out against Lincoln. Newspapers called for him to drop out of the presidential race. A Democratic Party newspaper reported with glee: “Lincoln is deader than dead.” Even Republican leaders turned against him. “I told Mr. Lincoln that his re-election was an impossibility,” a top Republican said. “The people are wild for peace.”

  What could be worse for Abe Lincoln? How about this: it looked as if he was going to lose his job to none other than George McClellan. That’s right, the former Union general who had once referred to Lincoln as “the original gorilla.” McClellan was chosen to be the Democratic candidate for president in 1864. He promised to bring a quick end to the war.

  “I am going to be beaten,” Lincoln said in August. “And unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.”

  Some Great Change Takes Place

  William T. Sherman could not sit still—or shut up. “The most restless man in the army” was how one officer described Sherman. Men who served with him said it was always exciting when he
entered the room, and always a great relief when he left.

  For a man who never stopped talking, Sherman needed only a few words to announce the biggest news of the war so far. On September 3, 1864, he sent a telegram to Washington saying: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”

  Yes, after months of marching and fighting in Georgia, Sherman’s army had just captured the key city of Atlanta. With the elections coming up, this changed everything. Suddenly it looked as if the Union actually could win the war.

  “Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me,” said Mary Chesnut of South Carolina. “We are going to be wiped off the earth.”

  Election Day, 1864

  November 8, Election Day, was cool and rainy in Washington, D.C. After work, Abraham Lincoln walked from the White House to the telegraph office in the War Department building. While waiting for news from around the country, Lincoln served plates of fried oysters to his cabinet members. And he kept everyone calm by telling funny stories that began with lines such as, “You know, that reminds me of a feller I knew in Illinois …”

  Then the election returns started coming in, and the news was good:

  Abraham Lincoln

  (Republican)

  George McClellan

  Democrat)

  Electoral Votes: 212 21