Grant

by Ron Chernow

George Templeton Strong

William Seward

Horace Greeley was categorical: “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be elected.”

the convention nominated for president George B. McClellan, who was perfectly willing to trade emancipation for peace.

All predictions about the presidential race became obsolete on September 2 when Sherman marched into Atlanta.

“Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”

Grant often doesn’t receive the credit that properly belongs to him for Atlanta’s fall. He was Sherman’s boss and authored the interconnected strategy that guided Sherman’s campaign.

“Keep on,” Grant exhorted Sheridan, “and your work will cause the fall of Richmond.”

Sheridan capped his stellar campaign in the Shenandoah Valley with the battle of Cedar Creek.

“I can make the march and make Georgia howl.”

Sherman preferred Georgia and “smashing things to the sea.”

having destroyed everything of military value in Atlanta, Sherman inaugurated his three-hundred-mile march to the sea.

Sherman’s army largely followed the railroad, plucking up rails as they went, heating them in bonfires, then twisting them around nearby trees or telegraph poles.

The more he later learned about the unity and esprit de corps of Sherman’s army, the more enamored Grant grew of the sixty thousand men who were “as good soldiers as ever trod the earth;

Grant was drawn into a controversy over whether soldiers in the field should be allowed to cast ballots.

Sherman talked of visiting havoc on the Carolinas, boasting, “I can go on and smash South Carolina all to pieces.”

Sherman both feared and favored a policy of revenge. “The truth is, [my] whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina,” he informed Halleck. “I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.”

A major objective was to capture the port of Wilmington, North Carolina,

The key obstacle to any operation against Wilmington was Fort Fisher, a mammoth earthwork redoubt guarding the mouth of the Cape Fear River, just below the port.

Galveston the sole port open to the shrinking Confederacy.

Grant had tightened the noose around Richmond, severing its southern rail links and isolating the town.

The Grants were now a celebrated couple with many worldly temptations dangled before them. They were delighted by the gift of a fully equipped house in Philadelphia, given to them by several dozen grateful citizens. Neither then nor later was Grant nagged by the possible impropriety of such gifts, regarding them as a reward commonly bestowed upon victorious generals.

Gideon Welles,

congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery.

Lincoln also hoped the vote would alert southerners that their struggle to save slavery was now doomed.

“Grant has the bear by the hind leg while Sherman takes off the hide.”

See faulkner "the bear"

As the hard-charging army then passed their way, showing an invincible spirit, “the people became disabused and they saw the true state of affairs.”

Lincoln delivered an inaugural address that talked of retribution against the South but also tried to set a forgiving tone for the peace Grant would soon bring about: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds;

Grant always treated Lincoln with tremendous love and reverence. Unlike some earlier generals, Grant had been completely honorable in his dealings with him, never bad-mouthing him behind his back. “He was a great man, a very great man,” was his final verdict. “The more I saw of him, the more this impressed me. He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”

“It was that gentle firmness in carrying out his own will, without apparent force or friction, that formed the basis of his character.”

Lincoln, who disliked confrontation,

Willie, age eleven, died from typhoid fever, contracted by drinking polluted water from White House faucets.

“I have never in my life taken a command into battle,” Sheridan maintained, “and had [not] the slightest desire to come out alive unless I won.”

On April 1, 1865, at Five Forks came the swift blow from which Robert E. Lee never recovered, the encounter one southern officer eulogized as the Confederacy’s Waterloo.

Grant was hardly surprised that Lee had abandoned Richmond; his only surprise was that he had held it for so long at such dear cost. In later years, he expounded on Lee’s error in holding on to Richmond: “After I crossed the James, the holding of Richmond was a mistake . . . Lee sacrificed his judgment as a soldier to his duty as a citizen and the leader of the South. I think Lee deserves honor for that, for if he had left Richmond when Sherman invaded Georgia, it would have given us another year of war.”

Grant rode off to join Sheridan, Ord, and Meade in hot pursuit of Lee. The last great chase of the Civil War was on.

Grant was never tempted to enter Richmond and play the swaggering conquistador, a piece of symbolism as profound as his upcoming mercy at Appomattox.

Lincoln bravely strode Richmond’s streets, past hundreds of charred, blasted buildings, his steps shadowed by black people who shouted with rapture, as if suddenly beholding the Messiah. One elderly black man exclaimed, “Glory, hallelujah!” and knelt reverently at his feet. Lincoln stood chagrined. “Don’t kneel to me,” he admonished the man tenderly. “That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereinafter enjoy. I am but God’s humble instrument.”

While Lincoln seemed inclined toward leniency, Vice President Andrew Johnson, in a speech celebrating Richmond’s fall, previewed a more vindictive spirit.

Grant insisted he did not want to take Richmond, which was “only a collection of houses,” but grab Robert E. Lee’s army, “an active force injuring the country.”

When Sheridan rushed off a message to Grant—“If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender”—Lincoln endorsed this audacious declaration: “Let the thing be pressed. A. Lincoln.”

Wilmer McLean, who had owned a house at Bull Run damaged during the first battle there; he had fled to the sleepy hamlet of Appomattox Court House, hoping to escape further hostilities, and would now claim the odd distinction of witnessing the beginning of the Civil War in his backyard and its ending in his parlor.

Appomattox Court House consisted of a single street or two of straggling houses.

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.

Grant drafted the surrender terms on a small, oval wooden table, while Lee sat at a squarish, marble-topped table. With no premeditated formula, Grant trusted to the moment’s inspiration.

Afraid Lee would become a martyr and his sword a holy relic, Grant made a point of not asking Lee to surrender his sword;

When Grant asked if the terms were satisfactory, he answered, “Yes, I am bound to be satisfied with anything you offer. It is more than I expected.”

Lee relaxed when he realized Parker was a Native American. “I am glad to see one real American here,” he ventured, shaking his hand. To which Parker retorted memorably: “We are all Americans.”

“The favorable and entirely unexpected terms of surrender wonderfully restored our souls.”

Jefferson Davis, now a fugitive from justice.