Grant

by Ron Chernow

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.

Lincoln perceived the political damage and injustice of General Orders No. 11 and rescinded it two weeks after its issuance.

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].”

More than ever the war became a clash between two incompatible ways of life, an effort to remake the nation as well as to save it. Through the proclamation, Lincoln hoped to subvert the southern economy, bridge a widening rift in his own party, and capture the allegiance of mass opinion in Europe.

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.

Grant worked hard to strengthen his men’s morale, even though one British doctor concluded that “no man alive could have counteracted the effects of that climate. Malaria, salt pork, no vegetables, a blazing sun, and almost poisonous water, are agencies against which medicine is helpless.”

The confident Grant, while he respected Johnston beyond other Confederate generals, said he would be thrilled if he dared to barge his way into Vicksburg: “If Johnston tries to cut his way in we will let him do it . . . You say he has 30,000 men with him? That will give us 30,000 more prisoners than we now have.”

In retrospect, Grant asserted that he could have improved upon every one of his Civil War campaigns save one: Vicksburg. Many military historians rate it his masterpiece, the preeminent campaign waged by any general during the war.

The mystique of Robert E. Lee was dealt a heavy blow at Gettysburg. Spoiled by success, succumbing to hubris after Chancellorsville, he had come to believe the myth of his own invincibility. Unlike his Virginia battles, his foray into Maryland and Pennsylvania had forced him to fight on enemy territory. For once it was the northern army that staked out an advantageous defensive position and Lee who had to improvise.

One person who obsessed about Grant’s rise to power was Sherman. Historians always laud their fraternal wartime bond, but where the affection was unalloyed on Grant’s part, Sherman developed unspoken reservations about Grant.

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.”

Grant’s fame had been sudden, massive—a torrential rain after years of drought. It says much about Grant’s character that, at this moment of supreme triumph, instead of advertising his own virtues, he paid unstinting tribute to his colleagues,

The North had the luxury of having more than twice as many men under age thirty as the Confederacy. Hence, Grant’s strategy depended on simple but gruesome math: the South could not replace fallen soldiers while the North could.

As had been the case since boyhood, Grant would only touch meat burned to a dry crisp: “If blood appeared in any meat which came on the table, the sight of it seemed entirely to destroy his appetite.”

Given his high level of activity during campaigns, one might have expected Grant to enjoy a hearty appetite. Instead he ate sparingly. Porter observed that “he ate less than any man in the army; sometimes the amount of food taken did not seem enough to keep a bird alive.”

While Grant respected Lee, he was never intimidated by him and rated Joseph Johnston the superior general.

Military theory taught that offensive forces had to be up to three times larger than dug-in defensive ones, meaning that Grant’s numerical advantage can easily be overstated.

In the two notable instances where Lee fought offensive operations on unfamiliar soil—Antietam and Gettysburg—he suffered crushing setbacks.

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.

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.

“Grant’s strategy embraced a continent; Lee’s a small State,” wrote Sherman. “Grant’s ‘logistics’ were to supply and transport armies thousands of miles, where Lee was limited to hundreds.”

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.”75 With his odd composure, Grant smoked and wrote dispatches, seemingly unaware of having barely escaped death.

Grant’s force was boosted by forty thousand reinforcements, replenishing men he lost, while the ten thousand Lee received didn’t compensate for his losses.

Since May 4, the furious crescendo of fighting had produced appalling casualties: sixty-five thousand for the Union side versus thirty-five thousand for Confederates. Though his losses approached the size of Lee’s entire army, Grant had inflicted comparable losses on Lee, equivalent to 40 percent of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Aside from the drubbing Lee gave him at Fredericksburg, Ambrose Burnside is best known to history for his flourishing side-whiskers, called “sideburns” in homage to him, and the massive bald dome of his head.

Since Grant was congenitally heedless of danger and resisted extra security, his staff secretly organized a night watch to protect him. Grant never learned about this special layer of security until his second term as president.

Grant’s main fear wasn’t that Lee would stand and fight. Rather he worried that Lee’s mobile army would suddenly take flight and dart south to North Carolina or drive west toward Lynchburg and eastern Tennessee, prolonging the war for a year.

With his second inauguration behind him, Abraham Lincoln underwent a spell of illness and exhaustion, doubtless from the cumulative fatigue of four harrowing years of war. “I’m a tired man,” he admitted to one visitor. “Sometimes I think I’m the tiredest man on earth.”

Porter recorded a horrifying moment when a Union soldier was struck by a bullet in his neck, which spouted blood. “I’m killed!” the man exclaimed, slumping to the ground. “You’re not hurt a bit!” Sheridan expostulated. “Pick up your gun, man, and move right on to the front.” So commanding were Sheridan’s words that the stricken man hoisted his musket and stumbled forward a dozen paces before keeling over and dropping dead.

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.

Grant’s courtesy at Appomattox became engraved in national memory, offering hope after years of unspeakable bloodshed that peace, civility, and fraternal relations would be restored. It was a fleeting, if in many ways doomed, hope, which may be why it has had such staying power in the American imagination.

Lee endorsed the need to pacify the country and bring the South back into the Union fold. At heart, he asserted, he had always been a Union man and blamed extremist politicians for bringing on the war. He contended that southerners stood resigned to the end of slavery.

I would not distress these people. They are feeling their defeat bitterly, and you would not add to it by witnessing their despair, would you?”140 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.

The Civil War had been a contest of incomparable ferocity, dwarfing anything in American history. It claimed 750,000 lives, more than the combined total losses in all other wars between the Revolutionary War and the Vietnam War.145 The historian James M. McPherson has calculated that, as a portion of the total population, the Civil War killed seven times as many American soldiers as World War II.

by the end, more than one-fifth of the southern white male population had perished.

six Union commanders before him had failed, with the same men and matériel, whereas Grant had succeeded. It vexed him that the North denigrated its generals, while southern generals were idealized.

What has never been doubted is Lee’s gratitude to Grant for his behavior at Appomattox, which he commended as “without a parallel in the history of the civilized world.”

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.”

Five years before Grant had arrived in Galena in a state of shame and misery. Now ten thousand people greeted him, backed by brass bands, thunderous cannon, and blizzards of bunting.

As befit the political custom of the time, Grant did not actively campaign or make formal speeches. Lacking the big, overflowing personality or oratorical skills of a lifelong politician, he was lucky to have that custom in effect.

Grant exhibited another serious defect in managing appointments. In the fast-moving world of warfare, it was a virtue to act decisively and make snap judgments based on intuition. In the White House, by contrast, he was too quick to hire people, then too quick to fire them.

In an era when strangers could walk straight into the White House, Abraham Lincoln had been besieged by job seekers who cluttered the stairs and corridors day and night.

the postwar economic boom was uneven, the South having surrendered half its wealth, while four million freed slaves struggled to find their niche in American society.

During his presidency, Grant came to dwell obsessively on annexing Santo Domingo—the Spanish-speaking half of the island of Hispaniola, today’s Dominican Republic—and found it hard to let the controversial issue drop.

The president didn’t anticipate what a hard sell Santo Domingo annexation would be, involving a tropical, Spanish-speaking, Roman Catholic nation inhabited by dark-skinned people. He committed fatal errors by pursuing this momentous policy in a closed-door, top-down style that made sense in wartime, but not in politics. He didn’t prepare the American electorate or mobilize public opinion or rally voters to his side. Grant hadn’t yet learned the art of appealing to the public over the heads of Washington legislators, presenting himself as steward of a broader public interest. The

“The people had desired money” before Gould, Mark Twain observed, “but he taught them to fall down and worship it.”1 Indeed, Gould’s audacious moves riveted and appalled the nation in equal measure.

The Gold Corner set the pattern for future Grant scandals. The personal integrity of the president was never questioned, only his judgment in consorting with unsavory characters, oblivious to the impression it might create.

The dread of black suffrage drove many former secessionists to new heights of indignation. Although blacks made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, they constituted 36 percent of the South, with outright majorities in Mississippi and South Carolina. The Fifteenth Amendment meant that blacks, armed with the vote, could exercise real power and invert, in an astonishingly short period, the power structure that had long suppressed them.

His support for annexation now flew into the realm of fantasy. On the one hand, he admitted the Dominican republic was a weak nation, with fewer than 120,000 inhabitants; on the other, he prophesied that it was “capable of supporting a population of 10,000,000 of people in luxury.” Even though he had never visited the place, Grant advertised it as paradise on earth: “It possesses the richest soil, best and most capacious harbors, most salubrious climate and the greatest abundance of [most valuable] products of the forest, mine and soil, of any of the [West India] islands.”