Grant

by Ron Chernow

When outraged Jewish leaders descended on the White House, he reassured them that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”

“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.

composed eight months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Grant explained that since slavery was the root cause of the war, its eradication formed the only sound basis for any settlement with the South.

“MADAM—You are at liberty to return to Port Gibson whenever you wish; women and children are non-combatants—we do not make war upon them. U.S. Grant.”86

Dana was startled when Grant bedded down for the night on moist grass. “I have an overcoat here; let me put it under you,” Dana offered. “I’m too sleepy; don’t disturb me,” replied Grant, drawing his knees to his chest and nodding off in seconds. The message of Grant’s businesslike bravery filtered down to average soldiers. “He could stand any hardship they could stand and do their thinking beside,” reflected one officer. “They went with him like men to a game; no despondency, all alert and eager, glad to know inaction had ended and vigorous work had begun.”88

“I don’t think Sherman ever went to bed with his clothes off during that campaign, or allowed a night to pass without visiting his pickets in person.”

Far from bristling at such chastisement, Grant continued to embrace Rawlins as his most valuable staff officer, singling him out in July for his “gallant and meritorious services.”20

By 1865 the Davis Bend community produced two thousand bales of cotton, earning a $16,000 profit and proving to skeptics that freed people could be fully productive, self-supporting members of society.

Grant and his entourage repaired to a fine mansion whose front lawn had grown rank with weeds during the siege. As he mounted the wide front steps, Pemberton stepped onto the verandah and “stood for a single moment glaring upon his conqueror,” Beckwith said.9 The Confederate commander gruffly unbuckled his sword, belt, and revolver and “thrust more than offered” them in surrender to Grant, who reacted with punctilious restraint. “Retain your side arms, General,” he told Pemberton, placing his hand softly upon the sword.10 When Grant offered him a cigar, Pemberton took one with exaggerated reluctance. He refused to offer Grant a seat, and when Grant asked for a glass of water, a rebel officer told him he could get it himself. Behaving with his congenital aplomb, Grant did not stoop to anger, and the contrast between the two generals struck observers. According to Charles A. Dana, Grant “was received by Pemberton with more marked impertinence than at their former interview. Grant bore it like a philosopher, and in reply treated Pemberton with even gentler courtesy and dignity than before.”11 Based on his prewar experience, Grant knew a thing or two about the tender ego of a defeated man.

Lincoln dubbed Grant his “fighting general” and told Eaton of a congressional delegation that had lobbied for his ouster. “I asked why, and they said he sometimes drank too much and was unfit for such a position. I then began to ask them if they knew what he drank, what brand of whiskey he used, telling them most seriously that I wished they would find out . . . for if it made fighting generals like Grant, I should like to get some of it for distribution.”23 (Lincoln himself questioned the authenticity of this famous statement. “That would have been very good if I had said it,” he told a cipher operator in the War Department, “but I reckon it was charged to me to give it currency.”

Far from enjoying his glory, Grant sometimes exhibited a melancholy air, as if burdened by responsibility. After spending the night in Nashville, he boarded a train, and, as it slid through Tennessee, a soldier named Harvey Reid saw Grant sitting alone, wrapped in thought. “He had on an old blue overcoat, and wore a common white wool [hat] drawn down over his eyes, and looked so much like a private soldier, that but for the resemblance to the photographs that can be seen on every corner in this town, it would have been impossible to have recognized him . . . He was either tired with riding all night, or had something on his mind for he appeared almost sad as he looked vacantly without seeming to see anything that he was passing.”

Once again the man badly stereotyped as a butcher showed more sensitivity toward his fallen adversaries than his colleagues.

“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.”

“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.”

He wished me to beat Lee, how I did it was my own duty. He said he did not wish to know my plans or to exercise any scrutiny over my plans; so long as I beat the rebel army he was satisfied.”

Lincoln greatly overstated the degree of his future detachment.

The moment illustrated that, if the naive Grant lacked polish, he already had finely tuned political instincts, the product of native intelligence.

Brady snapped a perceptive photograph of Grant, leaving the upper third of the canvas bare and placing his subject slightly below the picture’s center, accentuating his short stature. There was no strutting, no bombast, no false bravado. Grant sat with one arm resting on a table, his hand dangling in the air, while the other hand curled loosely into a fist. His hair was swept back carefully, his beard relatively well trimmed. He had been posed with a somewhat stiff, upright carriage, but his pale, sad eyes seem to brood over years of military casualties.

that the Union army should destroy Confederate armies, not take cities or territory; that it should exploit its massive resources by simultaneous attacks against the enemy across many fronts; that military decisions were inseparable from political goals; and that only one final, savage, protracted burst of fighting could end the conflict.

“He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”

The lone Confederate officer warning against dangerous complacency was Grant’s old friend James Longstreet.

He acknowledged that slavery was “a moral and political evil,” but he also exhibited a paternalistic form of racism that condoned it. Slavery, he claimed, was “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race . . . blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare and lead them to better things.”

If Lee was master of the individual battle, it was Grant who excelled in grand strategy.

Lee had no real plan to end the war other than to prolong it and make the cost bloody enough that the North would weary of the effort. Grant, by contrast, had a comprehensive strategy for how to capture and defeat the southern army, putting a conclusive end to the contest.

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.

“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.”

All the bloodshed made it easy to miss the significance of Grant’s accomplishment. By steadily pushing Lee eighty miles south, he had robbed him of mobility and prevented him from assuming the offensive.

Better to bring the war to a speedy conclusion by hard fighting, he thought, than prolong the suffering of the conflict.

“As war is a punishment,” the latter believed, “if we can, by reducing its advocates to poverty, end it quicker, we are on the side of humanity.”

“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war.”

“I have always felt that you personally take more pleasure in my success than in your own and I appreciate the feeling to its fullest extent.”

This was an assertive commander after Grant’s own heart, and he decided not to linger in West Virginia “for fear it might be thought that I was trying to share in a success which I wished to belong solely to him.”

As the correspondence wore on, Lee treated Grant to a frosty lecture on the right of southern slave owners to reclaim black soldiers who had been their slaves, and his stilted language revealed something about his bad faith in defending this abhorrent practice: “The constitutional relations and obligations of the Confederate government to the owners of this species of property, are the same as those so frequently and so long recognized as appertaining to the government of the United States, with reference to the same class of persons, by virtue of its organic law.”

“In performing this sacred duty, [soldiers] should not be deprived of a most precious privilege. They have as much right to demand that their votes shall be counted, in the choice of their rulers, as those citizens, who remain at home; Nay more, for they have sacrificed more for their country.”

Even as Sherman was demonized in the South, the black community welcomed him as their liberator. White folks might stare with stony contempt at the endless columns of northern troops striding through their towns, but their slaves, wrote Sherman, “were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name, they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style, which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of such scenes.”

Gideon Welles, that inveterate chronicler of invidious gossip,

But Lincoln, no pushover, immediately made clear he had three nonnegotiable conditions: permanent restoration of the Union; an end to slavery; and no cessation of hostilities until all rebel forces were disbanded.

The North was winning the war and Lincoln knew he played a strong hand. Hunter interjected: “Mr. President, if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Is that not about what your words imply?” Lincoln didn’t sugarcoat the truth. “Yes. You have stated the proposition better than I did. That is about the size of it.”

When someone asked if he had ever doubted the North’s final victory, he shot back, “Never for a moment.” He quoted Seward, saying “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency, and he agreed with Mr. Seward in this view.”103

It speaks well of Julia Grant that, despite her treatment by Mary Lincoln, she still observed the social amenities and remained concerned about her mental state.

Approaching the historic rendezvous, Grant was painfully aware of how poorly costumed he was to enact this lofty scene; his slovenly appearance had come about merely from being detached from his headquarters wagon. He had no inkling that later historians might be charmed by his outfit or assume that his mud-caked clothes made a political statement.

Slouched hat without cord; common soldier’s blouse, unbuttoned, on which, however, the four stars; high boots, mud-splashed to the top; trousers tucked inside; no sword, but the sword-hand deep in the pocket; sitting his saddle with the ease of a born master, taking no notice of anything, all his faculties gathered into intense thought and mighty calm. He seemed greater than I had ever seen him,—a look as of another world about him. No wonder I forgot altogether to salute him. Anything like that would have been too little. He rode on to meet Lee at the Court House.

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.101

This done each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes not to be disturbed by United States Authority so long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside.”

Even while reining in Sherman, Grant handled the situation with consummate finesse, allowing Sherman to save face by negotiating the surrender, while he stayed discreetly in the background.

“Although it would meet with opposition in the North to allow Lee the benefit of Amnesty,” Grant told Halleck, “I think it would have the best possible effect towards restoring good feeling and peace in the South to have him come in.”33

table with his clenched hand with considerable force.”92 Johnson asked the attorney general whether any reason existed “why General Grant should not obey my orders? Is he in any way ineligible to this position?” Grant sprang to his feet in protest. “I am an officer of the army, and bound to obey your military orders. But this is a civil office, a purely diplomatic duty that you offer me, and I cannot be compelled to undertake it.”93 Amid shocked silence, Grant stormed from the room. Realizing that he was unmovable, Johnson reluctantly let Sherman go to Mexico instead.

When Gideon Welles challenged him and asked if the latest Reconstruction law wasn’t “palpably unconstitutional and destructive of the government and of the Constitution itself . . . ?” Grant countered: “Who is to decide whether the law is unconstitutional?”12 The exchange went to the heart of the dispute that led to Johnson’s impeachment. However unwise the Tenure of Office Act, were not government officers obligated to heed it until the courts overturned it as unconstitutional? Grant thought so.

“All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations and act only from motives of pure patriotism . . . has been destroyed,” he told Sherman.

Grant explained to Johnson that if the Senate stood by Stanton, Grant would have to vacate his office, citing the possible fine and prison term. He and Johnson quarreled bitterly over the meaning of the Tenure of Office Act. Grant believed bad laws trumped presidential directives and must be obeyed until judges rescinded them. “I stated that the law was binding on me, constitutional or not, until set aside by the proper tribunal,” Grant wrote.46 Dismissing the act as unconstitutional, Johnson refused to be bound by it and grew agitated over Grant’s unbending position.