Ulysses S. Grant

by Michael Korda

  He moved at once to define and consolidate his position. He intended to command the armies of the East and the West from the field, with the Army of the Potomac, rather than remain in Washington, so he made a grateful Halleck a kind of chief of staff. Grant did not intend to coop himself up in an office or expose himself to visits from importunate members of Congress or officers of the cabinet—Halleck could do all that for him, and do it better, anyway. He quickly made it clear to Meade that despite Grant’s own presence in the field, Meade would remain in command of the Army of the Potomac and did his best to convey his confidence in Meade’s ability—no easy task, considering Meade’s prickly character. In fact, Grant went out of his way not to interfere with Meade, though inevitably the victor of Gettysburg soon became merely a kind of second in command. Meade’s prickliness reached a peak when he had a newspaperman he didn’t like drummed out of camp wearing a large sign around his neck with the word “Liar!” in bold letters, about par for the course when it came to Meade’s sense of public relations—still his competence as a general was never in doubt.

  Grant’s strategy for winning the war must be seen against the political realities that concerned the president. Draft riots in the North (represented in our day on film in Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York) were violent and widespread. It was inevitable that growing numbers of the working-class poor in Northern big cities took unkindly to the idea of being conscripted into the army as cannon fodder in order to liberate large numbers of Negroes who would work for lower wages than themselves. The situation was exacerbated by a system that permitted those who had enough money to avoid the draft by paying for a substitute to take their place, an inequity that somewhat resembled the way in which the children of the middle class could avoid the draft by going to graduate school during the Vietnam War, one hundred years later.

  Grant was aware of all this, and he did not need Lincoln to point out to him that if the pressure on Lee was lack of manpower and supplies, the pressure on him was time. After Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg, there was no longer any realistic possibility of the South winning the war, but if it dragged on too long in a series of bloody battles with lengthening casualty lists and no end in sight, there was still a chance for Lincoln to lose the election of ’64, and even if he did not, there was still a chance for Northern antiwar feeling to become socially divisive (again, think ahead one hundred years to what happened when substantial numbers of Americans lost faith in victory in Vietnam), either of which could produce a compromise peace. Grant would have to fight hard, but he would also have to press forward and finish the enemy off as quickly as possible.

  Previous Union attempts had often been aimed at bypassing the Army of Northern Virginia and taking Richmond—McClellan’s disastrous 1862 campaign in the Peninsula, when Lee first acquired his reputation as the South’s leading general, had been a perfect example of this—but Grant contemplated no fancy footwork or elaborate attempts to outflank Lee. It was not his style.

  Grant had in mind a three-pronged attack on the Confederacy, though in the event, only two of the prongs would do serious damage. He would attack Lee frontally, driving him back on Richmond; the odious but politically powerful Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, who was already on the James River, to the southeast of Richmond, would advance on Richmond itself; while Sherman would march through Georgia, take Atlanta, then march on to the sea, cutting Richmond (and Lee’s army) off from supplies from the west or the south.

  Grant’s was to be the main effort. Sherman, Grant knew, could be trusted to succeed, and to pursue a draconian policy of destruction along the way of his advance—for it was Sherman’s intention to burn and destroy as much as he could on his march. Butler, who had been thwarted again and again in his attacks on Richmond, without seriously inconveniencing Lee, was to make a more determined effort to threaten the town and give Lee at least some reason to fear for what might be happening behind him.

  Butler, true to form, failed to deliver, but Grant, for once, was unable to replace him with a more determined or professional commander, or at least one who was less overbearing and brutally pigheaded—Butler was a politician first and a general second, and Grant was no match for him when it came to political influence that in Butler’s case went backstairs all the way up to the White House. He tried to fire Butler and replace him with General Smith, his old West Point instructor; he failed. Even his three stars were no match for Butler.

  In the first week of May 1864, Grant moved south and crossed the Rapidan River with nearly 120,000 men—an immense force for the day—and plunged into the region that was known then—and has since become famous in military history—as “the Wilderness,” an area of about fifteen square miles of scrub forest, heavy, tangled second-growth woods, abandoned farms, steep gullies, meandering creeks, and primitive cart tracks that had been fought over several times before. The gloominess of the place was made more intense by the unburied skeletons of soldiers on both sides who had died in previous battles on this unpromising ground. It was Grant’s hope to cross the river, get through the Wilderness as fast as possible, and fight Lee in more open country where he could make full use of his cavalry and artillery, but Lee was too quick for him. He did not attempt to hinder Grant’s crossing of the Rapidan, but the moment Grant’s columns were in the Wilderness, Lee attacked, with Ewell on the left and A. P. Hill on the right, bringing Longstreet up as fast as possible to attack between them, in the center. Grant’s long columns had to be reformed into three corps, under (from right to left) John Sedgwick, Gouveurneur Warren, and Hancock. It took time on both sides to form a coherent line of battle in such broken, thickly wooded country, and Grant’s army was quickly pushed back off its main north-south road into the woods, while Lee’s army retained control over the roads running through the Wilderness from west to east. A day of bitter fighting took place, during which the dry undergrowth caught fire, burning the wounded to death where they lay—an additional horror in a day of horrors. Despite Lee’s reputation for the daring strategic move, it was, as Wellington described Waterloo, “a pounding match,” in which both sides simply closed with each other, fired at point-blank range, and charged with the bayonet.

  Grant was expecting the unlucky Burnside to march northwest from the James River to support him, but Burnside became lost in the thick woods and did not appear until late in the day. Almost everybody in the Union army expected that Grant would retreat back across the Rapidan after receiving such a severe mauling—certainly McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade, when they had been in command, would have done so—but Grant ordered another attack at dawn, and the second day turned out to be as bloody as the first. At the end of it the army was ordered to move during the night, not back to the Rapidan as they expected, but instead to swing around Lee’s right, moving south toward Spotsylvania Court House.

  Lee was momentarily taken by surprise, but he moved his army fast, getting a step ahead of Grant, and was already in front of Spotsylvania while Grant was trying unsuccessfully to move around his right. From May 8 through May 20, Grant pummeled Lee’s positions around Spotsylvania in a series of brutal, head-on attacks, always searching for a way to get around Lee’s right, with mounting casualties. On May 11 he wrote to Halleck, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer” (another Grant line that was to become famous), and he clearly meant it. As the casualties rose the old rumors and criticism that had surfaced after Shiloh were raised again—that Grant was drunk, incompetent, “a butcher.” Union casualties may have been as high as eighteen thousand—the fighting was so intense that there was no time to count them—and Confederate casualties reached almost twelve thousand, a crippling loss for the Army of Northern Virginia; still the fighting went on with no letup. Grant truly had “a bulldog grip” on Lee.

  At last Grant turned Lee’s flank, but Lee once more managed to get ahead of him, and the two armies fought day by day, foot by foot, Grant advancing, Lee retreating toward Richmond, until, on June 2, Grant was wit
hin six miles of Richmond, with nothing but Lee’s dwindling but still considerable army between him and the city. Still, that was enough. Lee was an engineer—his positions were carefully chosen, and protected with formidable breastworks and deep trenches. Grant ordered a full attack for the next day—the day that would see him lose his temper at the Union teamster beating a horse around the head—and by noon, in less than half an hour’s fighting, he had lost some seven thousand men without shifting the Confederates an inch from their positions.2 It was, even in his own eyes, the nadir of his generalship.

  The next day even Grant was forced to stop and reconsider, especially since it was by no means sure at this point that the Union troops could, or would, make another charge over ground that was still thickly covered with Union dead and wounded. With one of those swift changes of mind that mark the true military genius, Grant decided to give up the position that had cost him so many lives and cross the James River to the south of Richmond. He would move his army to where Butler had been ineffectually camped, abandon his line of communication to the north, and take up positions where he could be supplied by steamships coming up the James. From there he would move his army to the left in an effort to cut the railway lines running to Richmond from the south, in effect choking Lee off from his supplies.

  By June 14 Grant had his army across the James, and he determined at once to move on Petersburg, a small town south of Richmond through which one of the major railways ran. He moved immediately to take Petersburg, but the Confederate forces there, under the command of General Beauregard, with fewer than fifteen thousand men to Grant’s fifty thousand, managed to hold out until Lee could disengage from his lines north of Richmond and bring the Army of Northern Virginia by forced march into Petersburg. Grant’s generals may have been hesitant to attack after the experience of Cold Harbor, and the men themselves may at that point have been reluctant to attempt another frontal attack, but whatever the reason, the brief moment in which the Union army might have seized Petersburg passed with Lee’s arrival on the scene, and both enemies settled down for a long siege.

  Grant’s view of his position echoed that of Gen. Joseph Joffre fifty years later when he was asked how he proposed to defeat the Germans after they had entrenched themselves following the Battle of the Marne—“Je les grignote,” Joffre said (“I shall nibble away at them”), and that is precisely what Grant set out to do, with a seemingly endless series of attacks against the Confederate trenchworks from his own, the kind of fighting which was to characterize war on the western front for four long years. Artillery bombardments, mining, bayonet charges, sniping, and hand-to-hand fighting became the defining activities of the siege of Petersburg—those and death by disease as tens of thousands of men huddled together in conditions of primitive unsanitariness.

  At City Point, a steamer landing on the south side of the James, Grant built up a whole city of wooden huts, the headquarters and supply base for an army of 125,000 men, and he was soon joined there by Mrs. Grant and their children. Conditions were primitive; mud or dust, depending on the season, was omnipresent; huge quantities of guns, food, forage, and ammunition were accumulated; field hospitals built and staffed—it was in every way the equivalent of a modern army’s base of supply, a sight so impressive that visitors could hardly imagine why the war was still going on or how the Confederates were still able to resist, but then, as Grant explained when he was in the mood, Lee had the advantage of interior lines, so that he could quickly reinforce his defending troops anyplace where they were attacked.

  From time to time Lincoln would come down by steamer to visit Grant, and the two were usually photographed together from a respectful distance, sitting opposite each other glumly under an awning, as if the weight of the world rested on their shoulders, which, in a sense, it did. They look as if they were sitting in complete silence, something that would have been uncommon for Lincoln but not for Grant. Perhaps the best-known photograph of Grant was taken by Mathew Brady at City Point, Grant leaning against a tree in front of a tent, his uniform wrinkled and dusty, his hat pushed back a bit on his head, his eyes, at once determined and deeply sad, staring into the far distance over the photographer’s shoulder. He is not elegantly turned out, his trousers and shoes are muddy, but he is not wearing a private’s uniform—simply a dark blue suit with a long frock coat and a waistcoat, decked out with gilt buttons and the shoulder bars of a three-star general. He looks careworn and miserably unhappy, as he surely was, and perhaps in need of a stiff drink.

  In July he made two attempts to move things forward. One was to send Sheridan on a long ride behind the enemy lines, which proved how little there was in the way of armed forces behind Lee, and in which he ravaged the Shenandoah Valley on the way home; the other was to employ former mining engineers to tunnel under the Confederate lines and explode a tremendous mine—the biggest in the history of warfare to that date. It went off with an enormous explosion on July 30, killing two hundred Confederate soldiers and creating a huge crater, but the Union troops who rushed into it, disorganized and poorly led, soon found themselves trapped in the crater, with the Confederates shooting down into it, like “shooting fish in a barrel,” as one survivor said. By the time it was over, Grant had lost almost four thousand men for no gain—just the kind of thing that would happen again and again on the western front in World War I, proving, perhaps, that instructors in staff colleges the world over are usually several wars behind. In retaliation for Sheridan’s raid, Confederate general Jubal A. Early raided deep into Maryland, nearly took Washington, D.C., by surprise, then retreated home again, burning down the city of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on the way. Grant and Lincoln had plenty to be glum about.

  The summer limped on into autumn, then winter, while day after day men died in the lines around Petersburg; then, quite suddenly, at the beginning of April 1865, Lee’s forces were finally obliged to retreat—they no longer had the strength to hold Richmond. On April 2 Jefferson Davis abandoned the capital of the Confederacy, while Lee and what remained of the Army of Northern Virginia retreated toward Lynchburg, Virginia. Lee still cherished a notion to retreat south, join forces with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s army in North Carolina, defeat Sherman, then march back north to attack Grant, but events rapidly made any such plan impossible, as Grant’s armies took one by one the roads and railways that would have made the move feasible.

  Grant had kept “a bulldog” grip on Lee for nearly eight months, while Sherman’s army, and others, destroyed or burned railways, bridges, whole cities like Atlanta, crops, barns, and proud homes all over the Confederacy, and “freed” the slaves as well, in the sense at least of turning them loose on the roads and depriving their former owners of the capital that a slave represented. Confederate money was worthless paper, the Confederate capital was looted and burnt to the ground, Confederate illusions were shattered, the Confederacy itself was effectively reduced to Lee and his army—weakened, starving, but still dangerous, retreating by muddy back roads into the Virginia countryside, perhaps to make a last stand.

  It is with that in mind, that one must read Grant’s letter to Lee, surely one of the most dignified in the history of war. He and Meade had harried and surrounded Lee’s army, while the bumptious Custer had destroyed much of Lee’s supply train, but the one thing Grant did not want was a heroic finale to the war.

  Headquarters Armies of the U. S.

  5 P. M., April 7, 1865

  General R. E. Lee

  Commanding C. S. A.

  The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.

  U. S. Grant

  Lieut.-General.

  Lee replied the same evening with a short but equally gracious reply.
While “not entertaining the opinion you express on the hopelessness of further resistance,” Lee reciprocated Grant’s “desire to avoid a useless effusion of blood,” and asked for his terms of surrender.

  This was not good enough for Grant, but it opened the door a crack to peace. He wrote back to Lee the next morning that he would accept Lee’s surrender of his army on “one condition, namely that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified from taking up arms again against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged,” and proposed that Lee should choose a time and place for a meeting. These were approximately the same terms he had offered Pemberton at Vicksburg, and a lot better than his famous “unconditional surrender” letter to Buckner. But then Buckner was not Lee, for whom Grant felt a great respect.