Grant

by Ron Chernow

Grant’s imagination had charted the entire arc of the freed slaves from wartime runaways to full voting citizenship. This man who had so recently balked at abolitionism now made a startling leap into America’s future.

Grant found himself overseeing a vast social experiment, inducting his black charges into the first stages of citizenship.

With elections safely behind him, he acted swiftly to sack George McClellan, who had responded neither to gentle nudges nor outright pressure to become more aggressive.

McClellan was succeeded by Ambrose Burnside,

in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, Burnside sent wave after wave of Union soldiers to their death against the well-fortified positions of Robert E. Lee’s

Lincoln axed Burnside and replaced him with Joseph Hooker,

At a time of rampant anti-Semitism, “Jews” ended up as a shorthand for unscrupulous traders.

WHEN NEW ORLEANS fell to a Union fleet under David Farragut in April 1862, it left Vicksburg as the last forbidding Confederate fortress towering over the Mississippi River.

If the Union could capture Vicksburg, it could slice the Confederacy in two, separating eastern soldiers from western supplies.

Lincoln understood Vicksburg’s centrality, but committed a critical error in selecting the general for the task.

“General Grant, Sir,” Porter replied crisply. “Vicksburg is within his department, but I presume he will send Sherman there, who is equal to the occasion.” “Well! Well! Admiral,” said the president, “I have in my mind a better general than either of them: that is McClernand, an old and intimate friend of mine.”66 According to Porter, Lincoln made the absurd statement that John A. McClernand, not Grant, had saved the day at Shiloh.

antiwar, or Copperhead, Democrats

Forrest initiated a terrifying campaign against Union garrisons and cavalry in western Tennessee, ripping up railroad and telegraph lines and killing Union troops.

Forrest was legendary for his ferocity in battle.

peerless among Confederate cavalry officers because his methods were so unorthodox and unpredictable.

As Grant improvised these opportunistic methods to supply his army, he drew the invaluable lesson that his men could subsist for days, even weeks, off the produce of local farms, an insight that opened up the possibility of operating deep in enemy territory for prolonged periods.

ON JANUARY 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

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Two-thirds of Grant’s army had now congregated below Vicksburg.

(Late in life, he argued that Stonewall Jackson stood out only because he had fought inexperienced Union troops early in the war and would have been destroyed by Phil Sheridan later on.)

Grierson gave southern towns a taste of the terror that had been so liberally meted out by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

The message of Grant’s businesslike bravery filtered down to average soldiers.

Jackson collapsed with stunning speed, becoming the third southern capital after Nashville and Baton Rouge to succumb to the Yankee interlopers.

Grant and his fifty thousand soldiers began to encircle Vicksburg, with thirty-one thousand Confederate soldiers trapped inside.

Grant had heeded McClernand’s call for more troops against his better judgment, and he came to rank the May 22 assault as one of two wartime decisions he most regretted, the other being the later attack at Cold Harbor in Virginia.

“I never had a moment’s care while Sherman was there,” Grant reminisced.

the bumbling ineptitude of Fighting Joe Hooker, whose nickname had proven a sad misnomer at Chancellorsville, Virginia,

The only consolation anyone in Washington could extract from Chancellorsville was that Stonewall Jackson had been wounded by friendly fire and died in its aftermath.

George Gordon Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac.

up the Yazoo

Cadwallader delayed composing his memoirs

When the book was belatedly published in 1955, the historian Bruce Catton greeted it as “one of the great books of the Civil War.”

up the Yazoo

As he blasted Vicksburg into submission, Grant had no doubt the town would submit. He now had more than seventy thousand men camped in the vicinity and was surprised Pemberton made no attempt to slash his way out: “I didn’t think the rebels would be such fools as to shut up thirty thousand troops there for me to capture.”

Grant shelled the city at regular intervals, sowing terror among the inhabitants, who slowly regressed to a primitive state.

Grant constantly fraternized with his men.

Grant never assumed military airs and talked casually with his men, as if he were a peer.

Everyone noticed Grant’s strangely nonchalant demeanor in a war zone. One day he strolled about in full view of Confederate marksmen as enemy bullets raised the dust around him.

Lincoln never wavered in his belief that Vicksburg represented the centerpiece of Confederate defenses in the west.

Where another general might have heeded Johnston’s warning about not getting bogged down in Vicksburg, Pemberton dreaded charges that he had abandoned the city because of his northern background and feared a treason prosecution.

The useless effusion of blood you propose stopping by this course can be ended at any time you may choose, by the unconditional surrender of the city and garrison.

“The men had behaved so well that I did not want to humiliate them. I believed that consideration for their feelings would make them less dangerous foes during the continuance of hostilities, and better citizens after the war was over.”

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Union soldiers engaged in no gloating as they watched their enemies being humbled.

Grant was struck by how quickly the two sides began to mingle, retrieving their common nationality.

Grant knew a thing or two about the tender ego of a defeated man.

during the rest of the day.”18 When a band serenaded Lincoln at the White House that evening, he toyed with a theme he would later rework into the Gettysburg Address: the idea of a war that would deliver on the unfinished promise of the Declaration of Independence.

I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong. Yours very truly. Abraham Lincoln.”

they said he sometimes drank too much and was unfit for such a position. I then began to ask them if they knew what he drank, what brand of whiskey he used, telling them most seriously that I wished they would find out . . . for if it made fighting generals like Grant, I should like to get some of it for distribution.”

the Vicksburg “operations will compare most favorably with those of Napoleon at Ulm.”27 (In the Bavarian town of Ulm, Napoleon had trapped the Austrian army, which surrendered without a fight.)

the Vicksburg conquest coincided with Lee’s bloody defeat at Gettysburg