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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.
In less than three weeks, Grant had traversed 130 miles on foot and handily won five consecutive battles in a bravura campaign that would be enshrined in military textbooks.
Contrary to his image of securing victories at heavy cost, Grant had sacrificed 4,300 men versus 7,200 for the Confederates, even though he had tackled a combined Confederate force at Vicksburg, Grand Gulf, and Jackson of more than 60,000 men, much larger than the 43,000 he transferred across the Mississippi.
By year end, Thomas had plucked twenty thousand young black men from contraband camps in the Mississippi Valley and absorbed them into African American regiments. Grant placed the full weight of his prestige into coaxing his commanders to flesh out these new regiments.
As he mulled over surrender to Grant and pondered the “vanity of our foes,” he somehow fancied that Grant might confer lenient terms if allowed to take the town on Independence Day, July 4.83 Grant was neither vain nor tender in this regard.
Once again the Mississippi became an open thoroughfare for commerce from the northern states. As Lincoln phrased it more poetically, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”13 Union control of the waterway sheared off Texas and Arkansas from the rest of the Confederacy, depriving it of western horses and cattle that had sustained its soldiers.
Grant had gotten religion on the issue. “I am anxious to get as many of these negro regiments as possible and to have them full and completely equipped,” he told Lorenzo Thomas.
At the second Memphis dinner, John Eaton watched Grant handle this threat, especially when the mayor grew tipsy, spilled soup on Lorenzo Thomas, then splashed Grant while uncorking a champagne bottle.
For the federal side, the sole redeeming feature came when the quietly determined General George H. Thomas and his men refused to buckle under Confederate assault. For his bravery Thomas chalked up legendary status as “the Rock of Chickamauga.”
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. At Chickamauga, he behaved with such shocking cowardice as he fled the battlefield that even Lincoln sneered he was “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”
With his formidable energy, Stanton studied railway timetables and proceeded to shift twenty thousand men and three thousand horses to Chattanooga in eleven days. The obstacles were daunting—the troops had to cover 1,233 miles, including crossing the Appalachian Mountains and twice fording the Ohio River—making the successful move a tour de force of military organization.
When Grant reached Cairo on October 16, leaning on a crutch, he learned that an unnamed War Department official planned to meet him at the Galt House in Louisville.
One created a brand-new Military Division of the Mississippi that consolidated the Armies of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee. Grant was placed atop this grand structure, giving him power over a huge western territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, with the exception of Banks’s southwest command.
After numerous mistakes in selecting generals, Lincoln and Stanton had weeded out the weak reeds and began to assemble the team that would win the war.
Whatever his earlier fondness for Rosecrans, Grant grew withering in his contempt for him, telling Halleck a year later that any general “will be better than Rosecrans” and advising Dana that Rosecrans should be shipped off to “the northern frontier with the duty of detecting & exposing rebel conspiracies in Canada.”
The laconic Grant had his first experience of Johnson’s long-winded style. As they stood together before the St. Cloud Hotel, Johnson delivered a lengthy welcome speech while Grant, by his own admission, stood “in torture . . . fearing something would be expected from me in response. I was relieved, however, the people assembled having apparently heard enough.”111 Grant charmed the throng by admitting he had “never made a speech in his life, and was too old to learn now.”
Unlike Robert E. Lee, the heavyset Virginian had decided that the treasonous nature of secession surpassed loyalty to his home state and stayed with the Union. As Grant recalled from West Point, Thomas had been tarred with the name “Old Slow-Trot”—he had a spinal injury that forced him to gallop slowly—which got to the heart of Grant’s dilemma with him.
Since nearly ten thousand horses and mules had perished from starvation, not a single draft animal remained to haul artillery or transport the sick. Desperate soldiers, subsisting on half rations of leathery meat and hard bread, prowled the ground searching for scraps of corn or oats.
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.
“When General Grant reached the line of ragged, filthy, bloody, despairing prisoners . . . he lifted his hat and held it over his head until he passed the last man of that living funeral cortege,” recalled a prisoner. “He was the only officer in that whole train who recognized us as being on the face of the earth.”64 Once again the man badly stereotyped as a butcher showed more sensitivity toward his fallen adversaries than his colleagues.
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.”89
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!”
He had mastered the art of not grasping for power, but letting it come to him unbidden.
As a courtesy to Grant, Lincoln furnished him with a four-sentence statement that he would read aloud to him the next day, enabling Grant to prepare his reply. Lincoln made two suggestions about Grant’s response, both pertaining to the morale of soldiers and officers. Back at Willard’s, Grant promptly scribbled his statement in pencil on a sheet of paper. Determined to establish his independence, he pointedly ignored Lincoln’s two suggestions. Wary of pressure from Washington, he was bent upon resisting it from the outset.
Meade later became notorious among the press corps when he seized a reporter who had criticized him, hung a scurrilous sign around his neck that said “Libeler of the Press,” placed him backward on a mule, and ran him out of camp.
Grant disarmed people’s expectations with his interpersonal skills. If he did not overflow with charm, neither did he ruffle people’s feathers or threaten them with rivalry. If needed, he could handle people as delicately as he did his horses, and this formed a major part of his military success as he assembled the team of people required to end the war.
He did detect one critical, lifelong failing in Grant: “a simple and guileless” nature that placed him “under the influence of those who should not influence him and desire to do so only for their own purpose.”62
Probably relieved by the change, Halleck now found his ideal position, bound to his desk and thrust into an advisory role, where he could shield Grant from Washington intrigue, free him from tedious paperwork, and provide a crucial liaison with Lincoln.
But he also told them of an army cowed by the overblown specter of Robert E. Lee. “He said . . . that the officers told him, ‘You have not faced Bobby Lee yet,’ and as he said it,” Grenville Dodge noted, “I could see that twinkle in Grant’s eye that we often saw there when he meant mischief.”69
theater trip to see Hamlet. The audience was noisy and Sherman, an avid theatergoer, complained how the actors were butchering the text. In the graveyard scene, when Hamlet performed his soliloquy over Yorick’s skull, one soldier hollered, “Say, pard, what is it—Yank, or Reb?”70 This led to such tumult that Grant and his associates left the theater to dine on oysters in a local restaurant.
The strategy Grant laid out envisioned assaults on enemy armies, not cities or territories. “He was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston,” Sherman wrote. “That was his plan.”
They also discussed the operation that would win Sherman lasting fame, his march on Atlanta. Then Sherman retraced his steps westward to Nashville and Grant continued eastward. Years later, standing outside the hotel, Sherman waved his hand toward it and declared, “Yonder began the campaign.”73
His eccentric tastes favored oysters and cucumbers, along with corn, pork and beans, and buckwheat cakes.
The lone Confederate officer warning against dangerous complacency was Grant’s old friend James Longstreet.
The caricature of Lee as elegant and faultless whereas Grant was a clumsy butcher misses the point that Grant had much the harder task: he had to whittle down the Confederate army and smash it irrevocably, whereas Lee needed only to inflict massive pain on the northern army and stay alive to fight another day.
One soldier, revolted by Butler’s unsightly form, wrote of him: “Call before your mental vision a sack full of muck . . . and then imagine four enormous German sausages fixed to the extremities of the sack in lieu of arms and legs.”88
Throughout the Overland Campaign, he would force Lee to react to him. Striking first, setting the pace, shaping the contours of battle—these were priorities dear to Grant’s heart.
At 4 a.m., Grant rose and breakfasted on a cucumber soaked in vinegar, washed down with black coffee. Then he stuffed his pockets with cigars and retreated to a little knoll to superintend the battle.
On May 11, at Yellow Tavern near Richmond, Sheridan’s men routed Confederate cavalry under Stuart, who was mortally wounded, robbing Lee of a premier lieutenant.
At 9:30 a.m. on May 10, Grant prepared for a furious onslaught. He dashed off a telegram to Halleck with a vintage statement: “I shall take no backward step.”
One adjutant remembered standing twenty feet from Grant when a shell “passed 3 inches from his ear.” Without missing a beat, Grant told his new aide, Captain Peter Hudson, “Hudson, get that shell. Let’s see what kind of ammunition they are using.”
He struggled to augment public confidence without raising unrealistic expectations. “I do not know any way to put down this rebellion and restore the authority of the Government except by fighting, and fighting means that men must be killed. If the people of this country expect that the war can be conducted to a successful issue in any other way than fighting, they must get somebody other than myself to command the army.”
At the same time he had severely depleted the officer corps of Lee’s army, taking, killing, or wounding twenty of the fifty-seven corps, division, and brigade commanders—irremediable losses for Lee.
Some historians believe Butler’s failure to capitalize on this unmatched opportunity may have prolonged the war by nearly a year.
He sat silent among the gentlemen of his staff, and my first impression was that he was moody, dull and unsocial.
Grant believed that bloody warfare since the Wilderness had debilitated Confederate morale, making him willing to risk a colossal gamble, a frontal assault that would pierce a hole in Lee’s line.
To deal with the legions of dead, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed the creation of a national military cemetery, surrounding the former Lee mansion at Arlington, and Stanton approved the measure the same day.
Incredibly, Lee still had no idea Grant’s army had slipped across the James in an operation so stupendous even one Confederate general dubbed it “the most brilliant stroke in all the campaigns of the war.”
The Army of the Potomac had sacrificed sixty-five thousand men killed, wounded, or missing since crossing the Rapidan on May 4, far exceeding anything experienced in the past.
When they sat down for lunch, Lincoln told of the rough journey aboard his steamer, confessed to having been seasick, and complained of an upset stomach. “Try a glass of champagne, Mr. President,” an officer said. “That is always a certain cure for seasickness.” Lincoln’s face crinkled with humor. “No, my friend,” he replied. “I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very stuff.”84 Lincoln’s witty retort provoked laughter. Aware of Grant’s reputation for drinking, he had gracefully sidestepped the issue. After lunch, when Grant suggested the president might want to ride
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