Ulysses S. Grant (10 page)

Grant’s view of his position echoed that of Gen. Joseph Joffre
fifty years later when he was asked how he proposed to defeat the Germans after they had entrenched themselves following the Battle of the Marne—“
Je les grignote
,” Joffre said (“I shall nibble away at them”), and that is precisely what Grant set out to do, with a seemingly endless series of attacks against the Confederate trenchworks from his own, the kind of fighting which was to characterize war on the western front for four long years. Artillery bombardments, mining, bayonet charges, sniping, and hand-to-hand fighting became the defining activities of the siege of Petersburg—those and death by disease as tens of thousands of men huddled together in conditions of primitive unsanitariness.

At City Point, a steamer landing on the south side of the James, Grant built up a whole city of wooden huts, the headquarters and supply base for an army of 125,000 men, and he was soon joined there by Mrs. Grant and their children. Conditions were primitive; mud or dust, depending on the season, was omnipresent; huge quantities of guns, food, forage, and ammunition were accumulated; field hospitals built and staffed—it was in every way the equivalent of a modern army’s base of supply, a sight so impressive that visitors could hardly imagine why the war was still going on or how the Confederates were still able to resist, but then, as Grant explained when he was in the mood, Lee had the advantage of interior lines, so that he could quickly reinforce his defending troops anyplace where they were attacked.

From time to time Lincoln would come down by steamer to visit Grant, and the two were usually photographed together from a respectful distance, sitting opposite each other glumly under an awning, as if the weight of the world rested on their shoulders,
which, in a sense, it did. They look as if they were sitting in complete silence, something that would have been uncommon for Lincoln but not for Grant. Perhaps the best-known photograph of Grant was taken by Mathew Brady at City Point, Grant leaning against a tree in front of a tent, his uniform wrinkled and dusty, his hat pushed back a bit on his head, his eyes, at once determined and deeply sad, staring into the far distance over the photographer’s shoulder. He is not elegantly turned out, his trousers and shoes are muddy, but he is
not
wearing a private’s uniform—simply a dark blue suit with a long frock coat and a waistcoat, decked out with gilt buttons and the shoulder bars of a three-star general. He looks careworn and miserably unhappy, as he surely was, and perhaps in need of a stiff drink.

In July he made two attempts to move things forward. One was to send Sheridan on a long ride behind the enemy lines, which proved how little there was in the way of armed forces behind Lee, and in which he ravaged the Shenandoah Valley on the way home; the other was to employ former mining engineers to tunnel under the Confederate lines and explode a tremendous mine—the biggest in the history of warfare to that date. It went off with an enormous explosion on July 30, killing two hundred Confederate soldiers and creating a huge crater, but the Union troops who rushed into it, disorganized and poorly led, soon found themselves trapped in the crater, with the Confederates shooting down into it, like “shooting fish in a barrel,” as one survivor said. By the time it was over, Grant had lost almost four thousand men for no gain—just the kind of thing that would happen again and again on the western front in World War I, proving, perhaps, that instructors in staff colleges the
world over are usually several wars behind. In retaliation for Sheridan’s raid, Confederate general Jubal A. Early raided deep into Maryland, nearly took Washington, D.C., by surprise, then retreated home again, burning down the city of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on the way. Grant and Lincoln had plenty to be glum about.

The summer limped on into autumn, then winter, while day after day men died in the lines around Petersburg; then, quite suddenly, at the beginning of April 1865, Lee’s forces were finally obliged to retreat—they no longer had the strength to hold Richmond. On April 2 Jefferson Davis abandoned the capital of the Confederacy, while Lee and what remained of the Army of Northern Virginia retreated toward Lynchburg, Virginia. Lee still cherished a notion to retreat south, join forces with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s army in North Carolina, defeat Sherman, then march back north to attack Grant, but events rapidly made any such plan impossible, as Grant’s armies took one by one the roads and railways that would have made the move feasible.

Grant had kept “a bulldog” grip on Lee for nearly eight months, while Sherman’s army, and others, destroyed or burned railways, bridges, whole cities like Atlanta, crops, barns, and proud homes all over the Confederacy, and “freed” the slaves as well, in the sense at least of turning them loose on the roads and depriving their former owners of the capital that a slave represented. Confederate money was worthless paper, the Confederate capital was looted and burnt to the ground, Confederate illusions were shattered, the Confederacy itself was effectively reduced to Lee and his army—weakened, starving, but still dangerous, retreating by muddy back roads into the Virginia countryside, perhaps to make a last stand.

It is with that in mind, that one must read Grant’s letter to Lee, surely one of the most dignified in the history of war. He and Meade had harried and surrounded Lee’s army, while the bumptious Custer had destroyed much of Lee’s supply train, but the one thing Grant did not want was a heroic
finale
to the war.

Lee replied the same evening with a short but equally gracious reply. While “not entertaining the opinion you express on the hopelessness of further resistance,” Lee reciprocated Grant’s “desire to avoid a useless effusion of blood,” and asked for his terms of surrender.

This was not good enough for Grant, but it opened the door a crack to peace. He wrote back to Lee the next morning that he would accept Lee’s surrender of his army on “one condition, namely that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified from
taking up arms again against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged,” and proposed that Lee should choose a time and place for a meeting. These were approximately the same terms he had offered Pemberton at Vicksburg, and a lot better than his famous “unconditional surrender” letter to Buckner. But then Buckner was not Lee, for whom Grant felt a great respect.

Both armies were still moving west as the two generals communicated, Lee’s slowly and painfully, Grant’s more quickly, while Grant tried to separate Lee from the South. On the morning of the ninth, the head of Lee’s column reached Appomattox Station, only to find Custer’s troopers already in possession of it, and the supplies waiting there. In the meantime Grant was suffering, as he often did when under stress, from a severe migraine headache. He took refuge in a farmhouse and spent the night of the eighth bathing his feet “in hot water and mustard” and applying “mustard plasters” to his wrists and neck.

The early morning of the ninth brought another, longer letter from Lee, implying that he understood Grant’s terms but still not specifically agreeing to them. It was a step in the right direction, however, and it got Grant out of his sickbed and onto his horse. Severe fighting had resumed, and although Appomattox Court House was only two or three miles away as the crow flies, there was no way for Grant to ride through it. Lee sent messengers under the white flag of truce to Meade and to Sheridan, asking for “a suspension of hostilities” to allow for a meeting between himself and Grant. Meade set a time limit of two hours, and Grant rode south with a modest escort, to get around the area where the fighting had been taking place, then turned north and reached Appomattox
Court House by the back roads, his head still pounding. On the way he received yet another note from Lee, borne by a Confederate officer, at last agreeing to Grant’s terms, and Grant’s headache instantly vanished. He quickly scrawled a reply to Lee from horseback, saying that he was “four miles West of Walker’s Church,” and asking for an officer to conduct him to where Lee was, and after a long and confusing ride on muddy country roads was led to the McLean house in the village of Appomattox Court House, where Lee was waiting for him. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that Grant plunged off into the Virginia countryside and got lost, something it is possible to do even today in a car, with a map in hand. What is also worth noting is that it took a high degree of courage for a three-star general to ride through back roads where it was only too likely he would meet angry Confederate soldiers, any one of whom might be only too happy to kill the Union commander—a thought that does not even seem to have occurred to Grant.

He arrived slightly embarrassed by his muddy uniform, particularly since Lee was waiting for him on the porch of the McLean house in a brand-new, beautifully tailored pale gray uniform, gold braid glistening on his sleeves, a scarlet sash and a gold-braided belt around his waist, wearing a gilt presentation sword (probably the one presented to him by the state of Virginia), and carrying his white kidskin riding gloves in one hand, every inch the patrician
beau sabreur
of legend. He stood erect, nearly six feet tall, with gleaming boots, a perfectly trimmed white beard, and the piercing eyes of a born commander of men, a figure of awesome military dignity, as Grant clumped up the steps in his muddy boots and wrin
kled uniform to meet him. As Grant commented with undisguised admiration, “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible [
sic
] face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it.”

Despite the best efforts of Lee’s staff, and of Grant’s, things were not quite ready for the two commanders in the small, cramped house, and they stood making small talk for a few minutes, mostly about the Mexican War. Grant remembered Lee well, and Lee at any rate pretended to remember Grant, despite the fact that they had been separated by a great distance of age and rank, and they chatted together so pleasantly about old campaigns and old army friends that Lee finally had to remind Grant what they were there for.

Once they were inside—Lee raised a well-bred eyebrow at Col. Ely Parker, Grant’s full-blooded Indian staff officer—they sat down together at a small table, and Lee suggested that Grant put the terms he was suggesting in writing. Parker hunted up paper, an inkwell, and a pen, and Grant scratched away while Lee politely stared at the walls. On his own it occurred to Grant to put in a sentence allowing Confederate officers to retain their sidearms, private horses, and baggage, to “avoid unnecessary humiliation.”

No conversation took place until Grant passed the letter to Lee, who put on his reading glasses and perused it carefully. When he came to the part about officers retaining their sidearms, horses, and baggage, he remarked, “with some feeling,” Grant thought, that this would have “a happy effect” upon his army.

Lee raised only one point, which was that in the Confederate army cavalrymen and “artillerists” owned their own horses, and
asked if they would be permitted to retain them. Grant pointed out that the exemption was for officers only, and that he could not or would not rewrite his letter, but since most of the men were small farmers, and would need to plant their crops, his officers would be instructed to allow any Confederate soldier who claimed a horse or a mule to take the animal to his home. Lee remarked again that this would have “a most happy effect,” and, taking a piece of paper, wrote out his acceptance of the terms in five brief lines.

While the exchange of letters was being copied, Lee and Grant chatted quietly, filling in time. Lee, in the end, did not offer Grant his sword, nor would Grant, in view of the line he had written into the surrender terms, have accepted it. Lee did point out, with some embarrassment, that his troops were starving, and Grant agreed to provide him rations for 25,000 men. With that they parted, perhaps the most famous scene in American history having been completed in less than an hour, and Grant wrote out a few lines to be telegraphed to Stanton with perhaps the least self-congratulatory or exultant message of victory in the history of warfare:

As the news spread through the Union lines, the Union artillery began to fire a one-hundred-gun salute. Grant, whose headache was returning, sent word to have it stopped. Whether he actually said, “We are all Americans again now,” is doubtful, but that was certainly his thought. “The Confederates,” he later wrote, “were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.”

What he thought about the story that Custer, the “boy general,” had ridden off from the McLean house with the small table on which the surrender had been signed held upside down on his head, taking it away as a souvenir, we do not know, but it may well have been one of the many reasons for his dislike of Custer, whose death at the Little Big Horn Grant took with something that goes well beyond stoicism, approaching a certain satisfaction. In any event the next day he permitted his officers to visit any friends they might have in the Confederate camp (the professional army was a small world), and he himself rode over to the McLean house again for a long and friendly chat with Lee. Lee gracefully declined to issue a call for the remaining Confederate armies to surrender, saying that he could not do so without consulting his president, and the two men shook hands and parted, Lee to return to his defeated army, Grant to proceed by railway to Washington, where, he felt, his presence was urgently required.