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“Nothing could be more generous than his treatment of me,” said Grant, who successfully recommended Sherman for brigadier general in the regular army.
Driven by ideological zeal, previewing a muscular style for which he became notorious in the South, Sherman informed Grant, “The wholesale destruction, to which this country is now being subjected, is terrible to contemplate,” but the moralistic Sherman blamed the South for not employing the “learned and pure Tribunals” established by America’s forefathers to settle their grievances lawfully.45 He wanted northern armies to impose military rule on the South, teaching it a lesson it would never forget.
“Impress upon the men the importance of going through the State in an orderly manner, abstaining from taking anything not absolutely necessary for their subsistence while traveling. They should try to create as favorable an impression as possible upon the people.”
Lincoln refused to rescind the draft and brought troops fresh from victory at Gettysburg to restore order.
“negro troops are easier to preserve discipline among than our White troops and I doubt not will prove equally good for garrison duty. All that have been tried have fought bravely.”
“I am anxious to get as many of these negro regiments as possible and to have them full and completely equipped,”
“The large amount of arms and equipment captured here will enable me to equip these regiments as rapidly as they can be formed.”
Grant’s conversion to this cause reflected his commonsensical approach to things: he had tested and observed black troops and was honest enough to credit their high-caliber performance.
“a resource which if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest—It works doubly, weakening the enemy & strengthening us.”
In reply, Grant brought his views in exact conformity with national policy and presidential direction. “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support,” he assured the president.
“This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.”
“I had hoped but it appears vainly his New Orleans experience would prevent him ever again indulging with this his worst enemy.”
For all that, Rosecrans was weak, vain, and irresolute, lacking Grant’s superlative drive and focus, a terrible procrastinator who constantly clamored for more troops.
“I don’t think that Stanton was what I might call a cordial friend,” Grant explained. “He was always courteous. Our friendship grew very slowly. I liked him very much better than he liked me, I think; but I must say, as Secretary of War he was extremely loyal and true.”
“He has never dictated a course of campaign to me,” Grant testified, “and never inquired what I was going to do.”99 Grant stood in awe of Stanton’s efficiency. “He was a man who never questioned his own authority, and who always did in war time what he wanted to do. He was an able constitutional lawyer and jurist; but the Constitution was not an impediment to him while the war lasted.”
“We will hold the town till we starve.”
“This is now the most important command in the United States, involving immense labor, unceasing watchfulness and anxiety . . . I feel a confidence in General Grant’s ability to master the whole and turn again as heretofore the tide of defeat and disaster.”107 The general public was amazed by Rosecrans’s swift fall from grace. “Rosecrans is superseded by Grant!” the diarist George Templeton Strong exclaimed in New York. “The change astonishes everyone—its alleged reasons are still more startling. Opium-eating, fits of religious melancholy, and gross personal misconduct at Chickamauga are
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“When [Grant] first came in there was hanging against the wall of my tent an empty liquor flask. His eyes twinkled and I saw a faint smile creep over his face. Before he could speak, I said, ‘General, that flask is not mine. It was brought here by an officer from Chattanooga. I do not drink.’ Grant answered quietly, ‘Neither do I,’ and surely at that period of his career he was not drinking, and I never knew him to take even a glass of wine during the Chattanooga campaign.”118
A stickler for rules, Bragg took sadistic delight in punishing people for violations, forcing fellow soldiers to witness executions of deserters. “He loved to crush the spirit of his men,” said a soldier. “Not a single soldier in the whole army ever loved or respected him.”
Whatever the dislike of his troops, Bragg had won significant victories at Perryville, Stones River, and Chickamauga and never shed the unqualified trust of his main supporter, Jefferson Davis.
Working from a modest white frame house overlooking the Tennessee River, Grant believed the war hinged on saving Chattanooga—“the vital point of the rebellion”—as it had on Vicksburg before.
Grant extended a cigar to Sherman, ushering him toward a rocking chair. “Take the chair of honor, Sherman.” “Oh no—that belongs to you, General,” Sherman retorted. “Never mind that,” Grant replied slyly. “I always give precedence to age.” “Well,” said the slightly older Sherman, “if you put it on that ground I must accept,” and he sat down and lit a cigar.
“Why, General Grant,” he remarked, “you are besieged.” Grant confessed, “It is too true.”
Rawlins began to feel oppressed by the eternal burden of being Grant’s watchdog. “I am the only one here (his wife not being with him) who can stay [the drinking] . . . & prevent evil consequences resulting from it,” Rawlins told his fiancée.
In his Memoirs, Grant admitted that he regarded the egomaniacal Hooker as “a dangerous man. He was not subordinate to his superiors. He was ambitious to the extent of caring nothing for the rights of others.”
At the mountain peak, it was young Arthur MacArthur Jr. of Wisconsin—father of World War II general Douglas MacArthur—who drove in the first regimental flag.
“Bragg looked scared,” one Confederate soldier remarked. “He had put spurs to his horse, and was running like a scared dog . . . Poor fellow, he looked so hacked and whipped and mortified and chagrined at defeat.”
“So far as I can understand the subject,” wrote the historian John Lothrop Motley, “Ulysses Grant is at least equal to any general now living in any part of the world, and by far the first that our war has produced on either side.”
“the whole country looks up to [Grant] as the great genius who is to end this war, restore the Union and save us from the danger which the end of the war may bring upon us.”
He also noticed how decisively Grant acted under pressure. When brought a request for a major expenditure, Grant approved it with startling speed. Rusling asked Grant if he was sure he was correct. “No, I am not,” Grant shot back, “but in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.”
“Why, you are getting to be such a great man and I am such a plain little wife,” Julia replied, “I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain, Ulys; who knows?” Grant’s response was piercingly tender. “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”
Waiters kept placing wineglasses at Grant’s side from which he would not partake. “I dare not touch it,” he told General John M. Schofield. “Sometimes I can drink freely without any unpleasant effect; at others I could not take even a single glass of wine.” Schofield, impressed, thought, “A strong man indeed, who could thus know and govern his own weakness!”
When traveling on a train with Grant in Kentucky, two St. Louis society ladies tried to push a bottle of wine on Grant, which he refused. Grant’s physician, Dr. Kittoe, described Rawlins’s outraged reaction: “Rawlins watched his chief with fear and trembling lest he should yield to the temptation, and gave vent to his indignation at the course pursued by the St. Louis females in terms more profanely forcible than elegant and in so loud a tone that the two objects of his wrath plainly heard what he said and bore evidence of their mortification by their looks.”
It came as no surprise that Grant’s main cheerleader on the House floor was Elihu Washburne, who informed colleagues that Grant had “captured more prisoners and taken more guns than any general in modern times.”
In the Senate, James Doolittle led the charge for Grant, enumerating how he had won seventeen battles and taken one hundred thousand prisoners and five hundred artillery pieces.
Opposition to the bill centered on the idea that such a lofty rank should be conferred only after the Union won the war. As Congressman Thaddeus Stevens colorfully put it, “Saints are not canonized until after death.”
He had mastered the art of not grasping for power, but letting it come to him unbidden.
“Nothing ever fell over me like a wet blanket so much as my promotion to the Lt. Generalcy,” he later confessed.
You are now Washington’s legitimate successor and occupy a position of almost dangerous elevation, but if you can continue as heretofore to be yourself, simple, honest, and unpretending, you will enjoy through life the respect and love of friends, and the homage of millions of human beings that will award to you a large share in securing to them and their descendants a Government of Law and Stability . . . I believe you are as brave, patriotic, and just, as the great . . . Washington—as unselfish, kindhearted and honest, as a man should be, but the chief characteristic in your nature is the
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Sherman's letter to Grant
Sherman ended this warmhearted letter with a stark warning that Grant should beware the perils of Washington—a plea from one western man to another to avoid the insidious snares of the East. “Don’t stay in Washington. Halleck is better qualified than you are to stand the buffets of Intrigue and Policy. Come out West, take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley . . . Here lies the seat of the coming Empire, and from the West when our task is done, we will make short work of Charleston, and Richmond, and the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.”
The last time Grant was in the capital, he was on the humble mission of trying to convince the War Department that he hadn’t stolen the missing thousand dollars as a quartermaster in the Mexican War.
Now he confronted a sadder, busier Washington, reshaped by wartime exigencies. Churches and stables were enlisted as hospitals, while soldiers pitched their tents everywhere, even on the White House lawn. The city’s sanitary conditions were atrocious with the Potomac River degraded into a receptacle for sewage, spreading filth and disease whenever it overflowed. Soldiers trudged down muddy streets, past the newly completed Capitol dome and the unfinished Washington Monument—apt symbols of both the finished and remaining business of the war.
Political life in Washington flowed through the thronged corridors of the Willard Hotel, down the block from the White House. Lincoln’s secretary John Hay criticized the place as “miraculous in meanness; contemptible in cuisine,” but that was beside the point.22 Political deals were sealed in this watering hole, office seekers and war contractors buttonholed legislators, and senators socialized over free-flowing whiskey. “Everybody may be seen there,” Nathaniel Hawthorne observed. “You exchange nods with governors of sovereig...
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Richard Henry Dana Jr., a well-known writer, attorney, and politician from Massachusetts, reacted snobbishly to Grant, as educated easterners often did. He was disgusted by Grant’s seedy appearance. Grant “had no gait, no station, no manner,” Dana huffed. “He gets over the ground queerly. He does not march, nor quite walk, but pitches along as if the next step would bring him on his nose.” He noted snidely that Grant had “rather the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink.”
The renowned Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth grew enamored of the new lieutenant general: “Grant looks like the man he is—solid, true and honest.”
Theodore Lyman, a young officer on General Meade’s staff, described his appearance: “He is rather under middle height, of a spare, strong build; light-brown hair; and short, light brown beard; his eyes are of a clear blue; forehead high; nose aquiline; jaw squarely set, but not sensual.”
Having misplaced the key to his trunk, Grant wore the same grubby outfit in which he had traveled that day.
So boisterous did the gathering grow that Noah Brooks labeled it “the only real mob I ever saw in the White House.”
The moment capped Grant’s improbable progression since Fort Sumter.
To Julia, he confessed, “I heartily wish myself back in camp.”
