Grant

by Ron Chernow

befit old friends. After their greetings, Grant asked why Pillow had fled. “Well, he thought you would rather have hold of him than any other man in the Southern Confederacy.” “Oh no,” Grant smirked. “If I had got him I’d let him go again; he will do us more good commanding you fellows.”

This first major Union victory bestowed instant fame on Grant, who became the war’s first certified hero. Rocketed to stardom—The New York Times affirmed that Grant’s “prestige is second now to that of no general in our army”—he leapt to the front pages of newspapers across America.

Amid this Grant mania, many newspaper readers noted that in reports of the final day’s fighting at Fort Donelson, Grant was holding a cigar—the one he received from Foote. Until that point, Grant had been primarily a pipe smoker. Now admirers flooded him with “boxes of the choicest brands” of cigars “from everywhere in the North. As many as ten thousand were soon received.”48 Before long, Grant smoked eighteen to twenty cigars a day and they became an inescapable part of his persona.

Long made the mistake of alluding to the famous victory at Fort Donelson, and Colonel Dent erupted in anger. “Don’t talk to me about this Federal son-in-law of mine. There shall always be a plate on my table for Julia, but none for him.”50

Grant had been innocent of insubordination and had faithfully filed daily reports of his troop strength. Hence, he reacted with “utter amazement” when he received the following dispatch from Halleck on March 4: “You will place Maj. Genl C.F. Smith in command of expedition, & remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength & positions of your command?”

With tears in his eyes, a perplexed and deflated Grant showed Halleck’s dispatch to a fellow officer. “I don’t know what they intend to do with me . . . What command have I now?”72

After Fort Donelson Grant started to appreciate what he meant to the Union war effort. “I began to see how important was the work that Providence devolved upon me.”73 It was a rare allusion to a religious meaning of his work.

It later turned out the telegraph operator at Cairo, who forwarded telegrams to Halleck in St. Louis, was a rebel spy and had not transmitted Grant’s dispatches.

Sherman spent decades pondering the mystery of Grant’s personality. “He is a strange character,” he wrote. “Nothing like it is portrayed by Plutarch or the many who have striven to portray the great men of ancient or modern times.”

With facetious overstatement, Sherman once remarked, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”81

The charge of being blindsided at Shiloh would long be a sore point with Grant. Ordinarily the soul of honesty, he sought to rewrite history, claiming to have known a major battle was imminent. Unfortunately, his April 5 correspondence makes crystal-clear that he had no intimation of a massive attack in the offing. He dismissed raids on Union outposts as the work of reconnaissance forces, insisting, “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack, (general one), being made upon us but will be prepared should such a thing take place.”13

Perhaps no moment in the Civil War has generated such fierce debate about what happened.

Sherman now made an obstinate stand against unrelenting assaults, showing magnificent courage. As if made of indestructible stuff, he stood caked with dust, his bloody hand bandaged, his arm in a sling from a bullet to his shoulder; before the day ended another bullet slashed harmlessly through his hat and three horses were shot from under him. Grant was simply amazed at Sherman’s adroit handling of his green soldiers. There, “in the midst of death and slaughter,” Sherman contended, the friendship between the two men solidified.34 Grant anointed Sherman “the hero of Shiloh.

Americans found it hard to comprehend the dimensions of the losses, which were beyond any historical precedent. Of more than one hundred thousand soldiers who pitched into the fray, twenty-four thousand had been killed or wounded—a casualty count dwarfing that of the battle of Waterloo. Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.54

Before Shiloh, Grant had nursed hopes for a titanic battle that would triumphantly crush the rebellion. Now, stunned by the combative spirit of his foes, he knew there would be many more bloodbaths in a long, grinding war of attrition. This began his conversion to a theory of total warfare in which all of southern society would have to be defeated.

“I would write you many particulars but you are so imprudent that I dare not trust you with them; and while on this subject let me say a word. I have not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts in my defense. I require no defenders and for my sake let me alone.”92 It was a measure of Grant’s new wartime strength that he could sternly lecture his father not to meddle in his life instead of just swallowing his anger.

Grant commiserated with the townspeople. “Soldiers who fight battles do not experience half their horrors,” he lamented to Julia. “All the hardships come upon the weak . . . women and children.”

According to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Lincoln said “that H. would be an indifferent general in the field, that he shirked responsibility in his present position, that he, in short, is a moral coward, worth but little except as a critic and director of operations, though intelligent and educated.”130

Having received these marching orders from his political patron, Grant heeded his advice and succeeded in the war for far more than just his military prowess. By subscribing to administration policy on slavery, he stood apart from renegade generals like George McClellan, a reactionary Democrat and an open racist who hated the thought of abolition, or generals like John Frémont and David Hunter, who brazenly issued freelance emancipation proclamations in their departments.

In fact, 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. To Eaton, Grant delineated a lengthy list of useful tasks that “contrabands” could perform, with the men building bridges, roads, and earthworks or chopping wood for Mississippi steamers, while women worked in kitchens and hospitals. But this merely served as prelude to something much bigger. “He then went on to say that 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. Obviously I was dealing with no incompetent, but a man capable of handling large issues. Never before in those early and bewildering days had I heard the problem of the future of the Negro attacked so vigorously and with such humanity combined with practical good sense.”

In a mood of mounting anger, Grant was not content to chastise Jewish traders: he wanted to banish all Jews. On December 17, he issued the most egregious decision of his career. “General Orders No. 11” stipulated that “the Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department. Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave.”47 It was the most sweeping anti-Semitic action undertaken in American history.

Julia Grant, who seldom breathed a syllable of criticism of her husband, pulled no punches about General Orders No. 11, terming it an “obnoxious order” and saying Grant afterward agreed that criticism of him was deserved “as he had no right to make an order against any special sect.”63 In his Memoirs, Grant passed over the incident in embarrassed silence. When Fred flagged the omission, Grant explained, “That was a matter long past and best not referred to.”64 As we shall see, Grant as president atoned for his action in a multitude of meaningful ways. He was never a bigoted, hate-filled man and was haunted by his terrible action for the rest of his days. Even on his deathbed, according to a friend, “it was a source of great regret to him that he had been instrumental in inflicting a wrong upon [the Jews].”

It was a miserable time for Grant, who also had to cope with the loss of his false teeth. He had dipped them in a washbasin overnight only to find that his servant had tossed them out with the water the next morning.

While such a letter, composed in Cincinnati about Grant’s behavior in Mississippi, is suspect, one notes in these nasty letters a recurring consistency in their portrait of an intoxicated Grant. He was always described as being foolishly or idiotically drunk, childish and even jolly in behavior, never angry or abusive. This makes one suspect that the letters contained a germ of truth, since the various authors described the drinking episodes in remarkably similar terms, even though they could not have coordinated their messages with one another.

“I think Grant has hardly a friend left, except myself,” he said. Nevertheless, “what I want . . . is generals who will fight battles and win victories. Grant has done this, and I propose to stand by him.”42

By the morning of April 30, one corps under McClernand and one division under McPherson had floated across the Mississippi, and Grant never forgot the blissful moment when they all debarked safely on the eastern shore: “When this was effected I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equalled since . . . I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy.”81

One victim was Fred Grant, who was grazed in the right thigh by a bullet, again raising questions about Ulysses’s paternal judgment in permitting him to loiter in the

vicinity of battle.