Grant

by Ron Chernow

I hate war with all my heart, and nothing but imperative duty could induce me to engage in its work or witness its horrors.”

Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.

when it had been made clear that the Negro, as an independent laborer . . . could do these things well, it would be very easy to put a musket in his hands and make a soldier of him, and if he fought well, eventually to put the ballot in his hand and make him a citizen.

“his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world”—a judgment in which military historians would concur.

it was “hard to believe that Southern soldiers—and Texans at that—have been whipped by a mongrel crew of white and black Yankees.

“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.”

Lincoln had undertaken a crash course in the art of warfare, borrowing military manuals from the Library of Congress and staying up late to devour them. He also studied reports from the field and quizzed every general and admiral he could find. The miracle was that Lincoln ended up a fine military strategist who was, in many ways, superior to the chief generals who preceded Grant.

When Lincoln reached the camp of black soldiers, he witnessed a scene of overpowering emotion. The men who lined up two deep on each side of the road laughed, cried, and cheered, sending up hosannas for their beloved liberator. “They crowded about him and fondled his horse; some of them kissed his hands,” wrote Porter, “while others ran off crying in triumph to their comrades that they had touched his clothes.”

In a sight scarcely credible to southern eyes, the black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry arrived in Charleston, lustily singing “John Brown’s Body.”

Grant had reached his peak powers as a strategist, and Horace Porter noted that his operations now “covered a theater of war greater than that of any campaigns in modern history, and . . . required a grasp and comprehension which have rarely been possessed even by the greatest commanders. [Grant] was at this period indefatigable in his labors, and he once wrote in a single day forty-two important despatches with his own hand.”

It would have been hard to say which was more surprising: the sudden freedom of the slaves or the fact that the president who brought forth the Emancipation Proclamation was there to greet them personally in their first hours of freedom.

Grant engaged in total warfare that eroded enemy supply lines and infrastructure, while Lee remained tightly focused on the battle at hand, without a long-term strategy for winning the war.

“This is a country for white men,” he declared unashamedly, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

clashed with a white mob, backed by police, many of them Confederate veterans. The whites stomped, kicked, and clubbed the black marchers mercilessly. Policemen smashed the institute’s windows and fired into it indiscriminately until the floor grew slick with blood.

the riot left 34 blacks and 3 white Republicans dead, with 160 wounded, in a chilling display of racial hatred.

at least nine tenths of the casualties were perpetrated by the police & citizens stabbing and smashing in the heads of many who had been already wounded or killed by policemen.”41

For many southern whites, however, the idea that their erstwhile slaves could now hold office and even gain the upper hand in their political lives was intolerable.

which makes at once Four Millions of people heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land, not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so, voters in every part of the land, the right not to be abridged by any state, is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day

Those who cooperated in Klan prosecutions were almost guaranteed to suffer vicious reprisals. One district attorney in Mississippi despaired when five of his main witnesses were murdered.

that portrayed the Klan not as bands of isolated, wild-eyed ruffians but as a comprehensive movement that spanned the entire white community. It embraced “at least two thirds of the active white men of those counties, and have the sympathy and countenance of a majority of the other third.

“If as a class we are slighted by the Republican party,” he noted, “we are as a class murdered by the Democratic party.”

On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white flag of surrender, begging for mercy, the mob butchered dozens of them.

when Sheridan conducted an investigation, he came up with a gruesome tally of 2,141 blacks killed by whites since the war, with another 2,115 wounded—almost all crimes that had gone unpunished.

Sheridan noted that more than two thousand political murders had been committed in Louisiana since 1866.

the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.

Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southerners could now count them fully for election purposes, giving the “solid South” forty extra votes in the Electoral College and disproportionate influence in American politics. “They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes.