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In coming months, not many soldiers bothered to learn the language. Because language and culture are inseparable, only a few would be able to see beyond their first impressions.
One reason Taylor took his time was the realization that his army needed to be well supplied for an arduous march. To help meet this need, he created a new rank: regimental quartermaster. He knew he would need officers with leadership and organizational skills who were not afraid to work hard to keep troops fully supplied in the arduous march ahead. As a result, he tapped Grant to act as quartermaster for the Fourth Infantry.
Grant observed, “Some commanders can move troops so as to get the maximum distance out of them without fatigue, while others can wear them out in a few days without accomplishing so much. Worth belonged in this latter class.” Further, he was “nervous, impatient and restless on the march.” If Grant had learned from Taylor how to be a calm, effective, and admired leader, from Worth he learned how not to be.
To replace soldiers killed at Monterrey, new officers joined the Fourth Infantry, including Virginian Tom Jackson and South Carolinian D. H. Hill. Grant saw older officers he had been hearing about: Captain Robert E. Lee, Scott’s favorite; Joe Johnston, much talked about for his leadership in the Seminole Wars in Florida; and Major Jubal Early, a Virginia lawyer. Grant was especially pleased to see Fred Dent with the Fifth Infantry. He wrote Julia, “Fred is here and well. I see him every day.
Grant commended the two commanders with whom he served but offered insightful comparisons. Zachary Taylor, dressed for “comfort,” moved throughout the field of battle by his own timetable, without staff, trusting “his own eyes” to size up the situation. Winfield Scott “wore all the uniform prescribed” and traveled with a large staff who notified his troops of the exact hour he would arrive, so that “all the army might be under arms to salute their chief as he passed.” Grant admired Taylor and Scott; “with their opposite characteristics both were great and successful soldiers.” But in his
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Although Grant did not realize it at the time, his duties in the Mexican War as a quartermaster, procuring much-needed supplies for American armies fighting on foreign soil, had taught him a valuable lesson that he would employ years later in a war fought on American soil: An army without adequate transportation is an army without supplies that will become an army unable to fight.
He wanted his parents to know of his debt to them: “You have always taught me that the post of danger is the post of duty.
“Grant was a favorite among the enlisted men,” remembered Walter B. Camp. He “always talked to a man freely and without putting on the airs of a superior officer.
He was a man whose whole nature demanded work. He did not know how to be lazy.” Working on the land became an elixir that dissolved his melancholy.
“He was one of the greatest readers I ever saw.
Fred had a “vivid recollection” of his father reading aloud Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, then being serialized in Bentley’s Miscellany, which satirized the failings of government and society. “We all used to wait with the greatest eagerness for the next instalment of these interesting stories.
Grant wasted no time. He assumed Johnston would be rushing reinforcements to Fort Donelson and wanted to get ahead of him. As for his forces, “I felt that 15,000 men on the 8th would be more effective than 50,000 a month later.
These terrible battles are very good things to read about for persons who lose no friends but I am decidedly in favor of having as little of it as possible. The way to avoid it is to push forward as vigorously as possible.” Grant diverged
ERMAN MILITARY THEORIST Carl von Clausewitz wrote decades earlier, “Time allowed to pass unused accumulates to the credit of the defender. He reaps where he did not sow.
If the Duke of Wellington had faced a one-mile battlefield at Waterloo in 1815, Grant began to confront ever-expanding battlefields. If at Fort Donelson his front extended three miles, at Shiloh he faced the challenge of a five-mile battlefield marked by creeks, ravines, trees, and undergrowth.
This struggle quickly became not a general’s but a soldiers’ war—individual fights on a hundred battlefronts.
Grant, unlike Johnston, did not attempt to lead from out front or micromanage the divisions of his huge army. Relying upon the effectiveness of a well-structured command, he believed division commanders should direct their forces. Thus, from the moment he arrived at the landing he chose instead to offer overall strategy and support to his commanders.
awkward conversation with Grant. In Grant’s recollection, Rosecrans “described very clearly the situation at Chattanooga, and made some excellent suggestions as to what should be done. My only wonder was that he had not carried them out.
Despite the forcefulness of his order, however, Grant embraced a command structure affirming autonomy. “You have been over this country,” he added, “and having had a better opportunity of studying it than myself, the details are left to you.
The men of Sheridan’s division were the first to reach the crest, and the honor of planting the first colors fell to eighteen-year-old Arthur MacArthur, Jr., captain of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin, who shouted, “On Wisconsin!” MacArthur was his regiment’s fourth color-bearer—the first was shot, the second run through with a bayonet, the third “decapitated.” Young MacArthur would go on to become the senior general of the army from 1902 to 1909 but is remembered best as the father of Douglas MacArthur, commander of Allied forces in the Pacific in World War II. —
The Confederate leadership also deserved credit—Braxton Bragg, for failing to anticipate Grant’s battle plans; Jefferson Davis, for ordering the detachment of Longstreet toward Knoxville, robbing Bragg of one of the best armies at his disposal. Grant, with his dry sense of humor, wrote of Davis later, “On several occasions during the war he came to the relief of the Union army by means of his superior military genius.
Nearby, Meade set up his tent, complete with his new headquarters flag—a golden eagle in a silver wreath against a lavender background. Grant, chuckling, could not resist asking an aide, “What’s this!—Is Imperial Caesar anywhere about here?” By the next morning, Meade’s ornate flag had disappeared. In its place, following Grant’s practice, he had hung a small American flag. —
The infantry began to march at eight thirty that evening. Grant, Meade, and the headquarters party started along Brock Road. In the darkness, fog, and smoke from the still burning scrub forest, it was difficult for soldiers to recognize anyone. But a buzz grew as the headquarters party came into sight at the Chancellorsville junction. Recognition passed from man to man, and soldiers flocked to the junction, pushing in from all sides. In the dim light they recognized Grant on Cincinnati, the huge horse dancing with excitement. Which direction would Grant turn? Back north in the direction of the
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Adding to his unmistakable appearance, “Little Phil” rode one of the tallest horses in the Civil War. Rienzi, jet black and sixteen hands high (five feet four inches high at the withers, the tallest point of a horse’s body), became famed for his endurance. Today, at Sheridan Circle in Washington, the life-sized statue of Sheridan and Rienzi captures the dynamism of the general, his right hand stretched out as if commanding his cavalry. Sheridan arrived in Washington on April 4 and made
At about nine thirty, while doing reconnaissance, Sedgwick ordered the Fourteenth New Jersey to build additional rifle pits for better protection. Their work prompted sporadic fire from Confederate sharpshooters. The men ducked while Sedgwick, striding around in the open, laughed. “What! What! Men dodging this way and that for single bullets! What will you do when they open fire along the whole line?” As the men continued to flinch, he said, “I am ashamed of you. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” Moments later a bullet hit Sedgwick just below his left eye, killing him instantly.
Cold Harbor consisted of a run-down tavern in a crossroads village, sweltering in one-hundred-degree May heat and lacking any kind of harbor. The name actually derived from an English tavern where people could find overnight accommodations but not hot food.
Former slaves now wore Union uniforms in southern cities. At the end of the war, black soldiers represented 11 percent of the army. Because whites had entered the army earlier than blacks, their terms of enlistments expired earlier. This meant that by the fall of 1865, when Grant had reduced the army from more than a million to 227,000, blacks constituted 36 percent of the Union army.
Johnson attempted to hold back Schurz’s more critical report, agreeing to release it only if it was paired with Grant’s report. Ironically, this strategy backfired: Grant ended up reading Schurz’s forty-six-page report with great care and recognized that Schurz had done what he had not—focused attention on violence against both blacks and white Unionists. He confessed later to Schurz, “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 that you were right and I was wrong.
S A WELCOME diversion, Ulysses and Julia looked forward to listening to renowned British author Charles Dickens present readings at Washington’s Carroll Hall. Dickens had visited the capital in 1842, but that first trip had been largely a sightseeing tour. Since that time he had become the first author who took his books on the road in lucrative moneymaking tours. In Dickens’s second visit to America, he started in Boston and slowly worked his way down to Washington. The Grants joined the nation
Estimates differ on the number of workers left unemployed, but it probably exceeded one million in a nation of forty million people.
That's 2.5 percent
General Edward Canby was killed by the renegade Modoc Indian Captain Jack while sitting at a peace parley in California.
See Devil's Backbone: The Modoc War, 1872-3 by Terry C. Johnston. It's fiction but historically accurate and a great read. https://amzn.to/2Kb8roG
The saga of Orville Babcock and William Belknap revealed how personal loyalty, which Grant prized so highly in the military, became his blind spot in the more public world of the presidency. He could not understand how men could change within power-seeking Washington.
controversy when in conversation,” said George Boutwell, Grant’s secretary of the Treasury, putting his finger on an important part of Grant’s makeup. This trait meant he found himself unwilling or unable to confront individuals. In the Civil War, as general in chief, when he tried to confront Ben Butler’s shortcomings as commander of the Army of the James, he ended up drawing back.
Grant had told Mark Twain he was not disciplined enough to be a writer, but he now embarked on a disciplined regimen. He asked Adam Badeau to assist him. Fred would help his father by checking official records. Reading these records again sparked Grant’s memory.
Writing is a craft that can be enhanced with practice. Whereas in the army Grant wrote steadily, with hardly a crossover, he now became his own editor. Though he understood that because of his health he was in a race against time, it is remarkable how much care he took revising his manuscript.
A close reading of the Personal Memoirs reveals many other literary qualities that would allow Grant’s work to stand the test of time. Like Lincoln, he preferred strong, one-syllable words, eschewing the use of adjectives and adverbs. In perusing Grant’s edits, one perceives he learned the lesson that less is more.
The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant https://amzn.to/2JoSedZ
Old Pete enthused, “He was a great general, but the best thing about him was his heart.”
