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Lincoln ate at a common table with the officers and fraternized informally with them in the same egalitarian spirit as Grant.
It spoke to the personal strength that Grant developed during the war that he didn’t agree with the president merely to placate him and that Lincoln abided by his decision.
On July 11, Lincoln appeared at Fort Stevens, north of Washington, which was under fire from Early’s men. To soothe an alarmed populace, Lincoln and Stanton rode there in an open carriage. The tall, angular president, peeping over the fort’s parapet, made a prime target for Confederate marksmen, and one Union soldier (possibly Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.), unaware it was Lincoln, shouted, “Get down, you fool.”13 It was the only time in American history a sitting president came under fire in combat.
Grant sent troops to harass Early and leave a trail of devastation in their wake or, in his indelibly ghoulish words, “to eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that Crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.”
Smith was no less antagonistic toward Meade, complaining to Grant that he was “as helpless as a child on the field of battle and as visionary as an opium eater in council,” and he challenged Grant to explain why he tolerated such barefaced ineptitude.
Instead of circumventing the breach, the troops had tried to rush through it and were trapped by the Crater’s steep sides.
Even though the Confederates had been caught off guard, giving Burnside’s men plenty of time to rush forward and capture Petersburg, the opportunity had been squandered. It was not so much the conception of the plan as its execution that had proven gravely defective.
The moment marked a watershed in Grant’s life as he developed an avowed ideological commitment to the war as profound as his military contribution. Widening his outlook, he transcended the ethic of a mere soldier and, under Lincoln’s tutelage, showed a touch of statesmanship. His new militance on abolition, coupled with his encouragement of black recruitment and devotion to “contraband” welfare, established a political outlook that would govern the rest of his career, setting an agenda from which he never deviated.
All predictions about the presidential race became obsolete on September 2 when Sherman marched into Atlanta. Fanatically determined to take the town, Sherman had promised he would leave Atlanta “a used up” community when he got through with it.20 The next day, Sherman greeted Lincoln with the news that would help reelect him: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”21
Grant’s strategic achievements were inseparable from the advanced telegraphy of the Union side, which strung 15,389 miles of wire during the war, operated by an army of 1,500 linemen and operators.29
He again showed he knew how best to motivate commanders by delegating authority to them—a trust that worked well with the talented, but could backfire with incompetents.
Upon returning to City Point, Grant told his officers how he had instructed Sheridan to “whip” Jubal Early. The verb “whip” struck one officer as unorthodox. “I presume the actual form of the order was to move out and attack him,” he said. “No, I mean just what I say,” retorted Grant. “I gave the order to whip him.”38 And that is exactly what thirty-three-year-old Sheridan did.
By November 1, with Hood’s army marching north, Grant reversed position and told Sherman his first order of business should be to destroy that army. An anguished Sherman replied that Thomas could check any adverse moves by Hood: “If I turn back the whole effect of my campaign will be lost.”
With so much at stake, the election dove straight down into gutter politics, with Democrats accusing “Black Republicans” of promoting “miscegenation”—a loaded word they introduced into the political lexicon during the campaign.
In all, an estimated twenty thousand slaves deserted their plantations to travel on the edges of Sherman’s army.
Sherman’s letter notifying Lincoln of what happened became an instant classic: “I beg to present you as a Christmas-gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton. W. T. Sherman, Major-General.”
Lincoln acquiesced to the plan without placing much credence in it, saying mockingly, “We might as well explode the notion with powder as with anything else.”
In a quandary over what to do, Hatch returned to the three commissioners and blurted out, in what may have been a delaying tactic, “that Grant was on a big drunk and it might be some time before there was any reply.”29 The next morning, the three men directed a letter to Grant himself.
Southern conscription covered boys as young as fourteen and men as old as sixty.
The scenes that now unfolded heralded not simply impending Confederate defeat, but a brave new biracial world. In a sight scarcely credible to southern eyes, the black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry arrived in Charleston, lustily singing “John Brown’s Body.”
Belatedly Richmond newspapers awoke to the realization that Grant traced Sherman’s mysterious movements through their own columns. “The papers are requested to say nothing relative to military operations in South and North Carolina,” wrote the rebel war clerk John Jones on February 25, “for they are read by Gen. Grant every morning of their publication.”
A company of black soldiers—a first for an inauguration—marched in the parade.
Allegedly to soothe his nerves because of a recent illness, Johnson had imbibed a few glasses of whiskey before the ceremony, and this showed all too plainly. When Johnson was done, Lincoln whispered to the parade marshal, “Do not let Johnson speak outside.”
By this point, the Lincoln-Grant relationship had ripened into genuine friendship. Both men had been caricatured as simpletons from the western prairies and greeted with contemptuous sneers by detractors. A certain self-deprecating modesty deceived people into underrating both of them, causing them to miss an underlying shrewdness.
He also knew the war cost a stupendous $4 million a day and, if it persisted, could easily bankrupt the federal government.
“The white citizens felt annoyed that the city should be held mostly by negro troops,” wrote the rebel war clerk John Jones.42
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.”
“There was no more expression in Grant’s countenance than in a last year’s bird nest,” observed a journalist. “It was that of a Sphinx.”
It was owned by 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.
With no tinge of malice, Grant’s words breathed a spirit of charity reminiscent of Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
For all intents and purposes, the war had ended, although Johnston’s army in North Carolina, Richard Taylor’s in Alabama, and Edmund Kirby Smith’s in Texas remained at large.
It was the observation of a man who had known terrible shame in his own life and understood the extreme need for self-respect at moments of failure.
by the end, more than one-fifth of the southern white male population had perished.
Like Lincoln, Grant deemed the war “a punishment for national sins that had to come sooner or later in some shape, and probably in blood.”
It seemed as if the day would be noteworthy in American history as the fourth anniversary of the evacuation of Fort Sumter. Northern dignitaries and abolitionists congregated in Charleston to watch General Robert Anderson hoist above the harbor ruins the same American flag hauled down in shame on April 14, 1861.
The President remarked [that the news from Sherman] would, he had no doubt, come soon, and come favorable, for he had last night the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the War. Generally the news had been favorable which succeeded this dream, and the dream itself was always the same . . . he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and . . . was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore; that he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone[s] River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc. General Grant said
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Lincoln reacted flippantly, chaffing Stanton “for his lack of faith in human nature.”16 The president of a democracy, he averred, had to show himself to the people, and some danger was an inescapable hazard of office.
Grant would long wonder if his presence at Ford’s Theatre might have altered things and whether Julia’s dislike of Mary Lincoln had inadvertently modified the direction of American history.
Many years later, attending the dedication of a Lincoln museum, Grant summed up the importance of the dead president, the first in American history to be assassinated: “His fame will grow brighter as time passes and his great work is better understood.”
As the only senator from a secession state to retain his seat in the U.S. Congress—a courageous stand that endeared him to Republicans—a heroic aura had burnished Andrew Johnson for a time.
Jefferson Davis, still blinded by zeal, wanted to prosecute a now hopeless war, telling Johnston and Beauregard, “I think we can whip the enemy yet, if our people will turn out.” With soldiers deserting in droves, Joseph Johnston brushed aside this attitude as purely delusional.
On April 24, when Major Hitchcock appeared back at Sherman’s headquarters, an officer quizzed him as to whether “you bring peace or war?” “I brought back General Grant,” he disclosed.
Mary Surratt, who ran a boardinghouse where Booth colluded with other conspirators, went down in historical annals as the first woman ever executed by the federal government.
What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. “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.”
Refusing to recognize this forcibly imposed government, Lincoln rushed to shore up Union forces in Texas to stem any possible French incursion from Mexico.
The bureau’s mandate was to feed, clothe, and educate former slaves, providing them with medical supplies and legal protection and relocating them on more than 850,000 acres of land the federal government came to control during the war. It was overseen by General Oliver O. Howard, whom Grant had met outside Chattanooga and who later helped to found Howard University.
On August 16, Johnson issued an order that allowed southern whites to recapture land confiscated from them during the war—a move that made him heroic to whites while dealing a crushing blow to black hopes.
He hoped that poor downtrodden whites who had never owned slaves would now make common cause with northern liberals rather than the large planters who had conspired to keep them in an impoverished, dependent state.
Historians have been quick to pounce on the blind spots in Grant’s report. Less noticed is that he almost immediately recanted what he wrote. As early as January 12, 1866, Carl Schurz informed his wife that “Grant feels very bad about his thoughtless move and has openly expressed regret for what he has done.”102 When Schurz encountered Grant at a soldiers’ reunion in December 1868, Grant was still more regretful, admitting that on his southern tour “I traveled as the general-in-chief and people who came to see me tried to appear to the best advantage. But I have since come to the conclusion
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In early March, Grant applied to Johnson to have his fifteen-year-old son Fred admitted to West Point and he was promptly accepted. Grant and longtime aide Theodore Bowers shepherded Fred to the academy for his entrance exams a few days later. Bowers was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor and former newspaperman from Illinois, a handsome, bearded young man with dark, wavy hair and expressive eyes. The Grant family had delighted in his self-deprecating humor. On the way home, Grant boarded the train at Garrison Station, across the Hudson River from the academy, but Bowers, running late, tried to
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