Ulysses S. Grant (9 page)

It took a long time to organize it all—longest of all to get the army and its vast supplies down to Hard Times on the improvised roads—and it was fortunate that Dana was able to persuade the president to be patient. It would not be until April 16, on a moonless night, which was just what he needed, that Porter was finally able to
run his fleet past Vicksburg, and although the Confederates set houses on fire until the river was lit as if by day, and opened up one of the heaviest bombardments of the war, he lost only one transport. In the meantime, on April 17, Grant sent Col. Benjamin H. Grierson off from Memphis, Tennessee, on a cavalry raid that would take Grierson’s troopers around Jackson and all the way down to the Union lines at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, diverting Pemberton’s attention from what was happening at Hard Times, and revealing the hollowness of the Confederate defenses in Mississippi (the raid would be the subject of
The Horse Soldiers
[1959], a hugely successful movie starring John Wayne as the Grierson character). By April 29 Grant was across the Mississippi with more than 40,000 men, on the same side of the river as Vicksburg and less than twenty miles south of it, while Pemberton, still addled “like a duck hit on the head,” to use one of Lincoln’s favorite phrases, by the Grierson raid, dithered. He would shortly be reinforced, in numbers if not in determination, by the arrival of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, with nearly ten thousand men, but in the meantime the damage had been done. Grant would attack Vicksburg by the “back door,” while the Confederates wasted time and manpower looking for Grierson’s troopers and trying to figure what they were doing deep behind Confederate lines.

“Don’t allow yourself to be shut up in Vicksburg under any circumstances,” Johnston had advised Pemberton, but Pemberton eventually did just that. Meanwhile Grant rampaged through Mississippi for three weeks, capturing more than six thousand prisoners, taking more than one hundred guns, and living off the land. At one point he even raided Jefferson Davis’s plantation and appropriated
one of the Confederate president’s favorite horses as his own (he renamed it “Jeff Davis”), revenge perhaps for Davis’s snub to Jesse Grant in refusing to reinstate Ulysses’ captaincy. In three weeks Grant marched his army two hundred miles, and by the end of May he had cut Pemberton’s line of communication with Jackson and effectively trapped him in Vicksburg. On May 22 Grant stormed Vicksburg, taking terrible losses, and was forced to withdraw, the only blessing being that McClernand finally and irrevocably blotted his copybook by his reckless handling of his own troops and his overoptimistic reporting to Grant.

Grant paused to take a deep breath, then invested Vicksburg. If he could not take it by storm, he would starve it out, and so he did. On July 1 Pemberton finally asked for a truce, and on July 3 he and Grant sat down under a tree, Grant smoking a cigar, Pemberton chewing on a blade of grass, to work out the surrender terms.

Grant took nearly 32,000 prisoners and 172 cannon and gave Pemberton more generous terms than he had given Buckner at Fort Donelson, paroling all prisoners until they could be exchanged. Really he had no choice—he had not the time, the place, nor the supplies to deal with them.
¹

The news reached Washington on July 4, the same day as the news of Pickett’s disastrous charge on the last day of Gettysburg. Although Gettysburg, with its fifty thousand casualties, has achieved a place of mythic significance in American history, partly due to Lincoln’s speech there, Vicksburg was the more decisive victory. To Lincoln’s despair, Meade failed to pursue Lee and allowed him to retreat back across the Potomac to safety, while Grant had won a complete victory. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” wrote
Lincoln, and it was true. Grant had opened the Mississippi from the north to New Orleans, splitting the Confederacy in two and opening its heartland to attack—it was the biggest victory in the history of America.

Despite yet another fall from a horse, which laid him up for two weeks, Grant was soon joined in Vicksburg by Julia and their children. In their presence he relaxed until October 1863, when Lincoln ordered him to go with all possible speed to Chattanooga, where a Union army was in desperate straits, and take command there.

Grant moved quickly and took in the situation swiftly—General Rosecrans had been badly beaten by Confederate general Braxton Bragg in the bloody Battle of Chickamauga and was now surrounded in Chattanooga, his army demoralized and starving. Grant relieved Rosecrans, replaced him with Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, opened up a new supply line down the Tennessee River, and, taking personal command, broke the siege of Chattanooga. Waiting only for Sherman to join him, he then moved to attack Bragg’s supposedly impregnable positions on Missionary Ridge, and in a brutal uphill frontal attack—no fancy maneuvering here—drove Bragg back and took six thousand Confederate prisoners.

It was another stunning victory, so widely applauded that it seemed almost inevitable, given the nature of American politics, that Grant would be nominated for the presidency by either the Republicans or the Democrats in ’64.

In two years of war Grant had not only proved that he knew how to fight and how to command an army, but also that he knew how to beat the enemy. Like Lincoln, he learned on the job and did not let his ego get in the way. Dogged determination, the ability to
take a licking and come back fighting, above all the realization that the enemy’s difficulties were at least as great as his own, and perhaps greater—the notion that had struck him with such clarity way back in 1861 when he was still an inexperienced colonel of volunteers pursuing Colonel Harris’s Confederates through the countryside around the village of Florida, Missouri—all these had finally matured him into that rarest of men, a successful commander.

Grant was flattered at the offers he received, but not tempted, and was by now wise enough to let Lincoln know it. With a sigh of relief, no doubt—for Lincoln wanted a second term as much as any American president—he persuaded Congress to revive the rank of lieutenant general, nominated Grant be the first to receive that rank, and then called him to Washington to put him in command of all the Union armies.

G
RANT ARRIVED IN
W
ASHINGTON
on March 8, 1864—the last time he had visited the capital was to try to persuade the War Department that he was not responsible for the theft of one thousand dollars when he had served as a quartermaster during the Mexican War—and quietly checked in at Willard’s Hotel, accompanied by his fourteen-year-old son Fred. The desk clerk was astonished when the man in the dusty, wrinkled, shabby uniform signed the register, “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Ill.” As the news of his presence spread through the hotel, crowds gathered in the lobby to watch Grant, having put his son to bed, come downstairs to smoke a cigar. Then he walked across Lafayette Park to the White House, where the Lincolns were holding a reception. Leaving his battered black slouch hat with a servant, he joined the crowd in the East Room, an awkward, ill-dressed figure, uneasy, as he always was in social situations without Julia to tell him what to do. Lincoln, either because he had been tipped off or because he recognized the new lieutenant general, came over to him, shook Grant’s
hand, pulled him into the center of the room, and introduced him to Mrs. Lincoln, saying, “Why look, Mother—here is General Grant.”
¹

They must have looked like Mutt and Jeff, Grant a stocky, robust five feet seven, Lincoln an awkward, angular six feet four, but they made conversation—easy for Lincoln, the lawyer and professional politician, but hard work for Grant—until the president, having heard the buzz of excitement in the room at the presence of the victor of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Missionary Ridge, persuaded Grant to stand on a couch so people could see him.

The next day Grant received his formal promotion and sat down for his first serious talk with the president. Lincoln made it clear that he did not intend to look over Grant’s shoulder, as he had with so many of his previous generals. He would later write to Grant, “The particulars of your plans I neither know or seek to know,” a very different approach from the fretful micromanagement by telegraph that Lincoln had inflicted on McClellan, Burnside (who had burst into tears at the thought of his own inadequacy on being told he was to command the Army of the Potomac), and Hooker, and no doubt Lincoln emphasized his belief that Grant should “hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible.”

That was Grant’s own view of the matter. He had opened up the South, and would shortly send Sherman on his famous march to the sea; in the meantime he intended to hold on to Lee “with a bulldog grip” until Lee’s army was defeated in the field. He had no complicated strategy in mind; he did not much care whether he took Richmond or not—he simply calculated that the North had a larger population than the South, that he could therefore afford ca
sualties better than Lee could in the long run, and that the only way to win was to move forward and push Lee back, day by day, inflicting casualties on the Army of Northern Virginia until the South ran out of men to replace them. It was simple, brutal, and would prove to be effective, but it required a general with Grant’s grim view of war to make that deadly calculation and see it through to the bitter end. Lee had remarked to Jackson at Fredericksburg, as he watched Burnside’s troops make charge after futile charge into a storm of Confederate fire, “It is well that this is terrible, or else we might grow fond of it,” but it is hard to imagine Grant agreeing with him. He had no romantic notions about war and would surely have agreed with Sherman’s famous remark, “War is hell.” The waving flags, the glint of bayonets through the smoke, the bugle calls and thunder of artillery drowning out the screams of dying men and horses—none of this held anything in the way of an attraction for Grant. The sooner it was over, the better for all concerned, including the Confederates, and the way to end it fast was to kill them in larger quantities than anybody had heretofore contemplated. It was not a prospect that gave him pleasure—indeed it merely deepened his tendency to melancholy—but he did not shrink before it, or at what it would cost in Union lives.

He moved at once to define and consolidate his position. He intended to command the armies of the East and the West from the field, with the Army of the Potomac, rather than remain in Washington, so he made a grateful Halleck a kind of chief of staff. Grant did not intend to coop himself up in an office or expose himself to visits from importunate members of Congress or officers of the cabinet—Halleck could do all that for him, and do it better, anyway.
He quickly made it clear to Meade that despite Grant’s own presence in the field, Meade would remain in command of the Army of the Potomac and did his best to convey his confidence in Meade’s ability—no easy task, considering Meade’s prickly character. In fact, Grant went out of his way not to interfere with Meade, though inevitably the victor of Gettysburg soon became merely a kind of second in command. Meade’s prickliness reached a peak when he had a newspaperman he didn’t like drummed out of camp wearing a large sign around his neck with the word “Liar!” in bold letters, about par for the course when it came to Meade’s sense of public relations—still his competence as a general was never in doubt.

Grant’s strategy for winning the war must be seen against the political realities that concerned the president. Draft riots in the North (represented in our day on film in Martin Scorcese’s
Gangs of New York
) were violent and widespread. It was inevitable that growing numbers of the working-class poor in Northern big cities took unkindly to the idea of being conscripted into the army as cannon fodder in order to liberate large numbers of Negroes who would work for lower wages than themselves. The situation was exacerbated by a system that permitted those who had enough money to avoid the draft by paying for a substitute to take their place, an inequity that somewhat resembled the way in which the children of the middle class could avoid the draft by going to graduate school during the Vietnam War, one hundred years later.

Grant was aware of all this, and he did not need Lincoln to point out to him that if the pressure on Lee was lack of manpower and supplies, the pressure on
him
was time. After Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg, there was no longer any realistic possibility of the South
winning the war, but if it dragged on too long in a series of bloody battles with lengthening casualty lists and no end in sight, there was still a chance for Lincoln to lose the election of ’64, and even if he did not, there was still a chance for Northern antiwar feeling to become socially divisive (again, think ahead one hundred years to what happened when substantial numbers of Americans lost faith in victory in Vietnam), either of which could produce a compromise peace. Grant would have to fight hard, but he would also have to press forward and finish the enemy off as quickly as possible.

Previous Union attempts had often been aimed at bypassing the Army of Northern Virginia and taking Richmond—McClellan’s disastrous 1862 campaign in the Peninsula, when Lee first acquired his reputation as the South’s leading general, had been a perfect example of this—but Grant contemplated no fancy footwork or elaborate attempts to outflank Lee. It was not his style.

Grant had in mind a three-pronged attack on the Confederacy, though in the event, only two of the prongs would do serious damage. He would attack Lee frontally, driving him back on Richmond; the odious but politically powerful Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, who was already on the James River, to the southeast of Richmond, would advance on Richmond itself; while Sherman would march through Georgia, take Atlanta, then march on to the sea, cutting Richmond (and Lee’s army) off from supplies from the west or the south.

Grant’s was to be the main effort. Sherman, Grant knew, could be trusted to succeed, and to pursue a draconian policy of destruction along the way of his advance—for it was Sherman’s intention to burn and destroy as much as he could on his march. Butler, who
had been thwarted again and again in his attacks on Richmond, without seriously inconveniencing Lee, was to make a more determined effort to threaten the town and give Lee at least some reason to fear for what might be happening behind him.

Butler, true to form, failed to deliver, but Grant, for once, was unable to replace him with a more determined or professional commander, or at least one who was less overbearing and brutally pigheaded—Butler was a politician first and a general second, and Grant was no match for him when it came to political influence that in Butler’s case went backstairs all the way up to the White House. He tried to fire Butler and replace him with General Smith, his old West Point instructor; he failed. Even his three stars were no match for Butler.

In the first week of May 1864, Grant moved south and crossed the Rapidan River with nearly 120,000 men—an immense force for the day—and plunged into the region that was known then—and has since become famous in military history—as “the Wilderness,” an area of about fifteen square miles of scrub forest, heavy, tangled second-growth woods, abandoned farms, steep gullies, meandering creeks, and primitive cart tracks that had been fought over several times before. The gloominess of the place was made more intense by the unburied skeletons of soldiers on both sides who had died in previous battles on this unpromising ground. It was Grant’s hope to cross the river, get through the Wilderness as fast as possible, and fight Lee in more open country where he could make full use of his cavalry and artillery, but Lee was too quick for him. He did not attempt to hinder Grant’s crossing of the Rapidan, but the moment Grant’s columns were in the Wilderness, Lee attacked, with Ewell
on the left and A. P. Hill on the right, bringing Longstreet up as fast as possible to attack between them, in the center. Grant’s long columns had to be reformed into three corps, under (from right to left) John Sedgwick, Gouveurneur Warren, and Hancock. It took time on both sides to form a coherent line of battle in such broken, thickly wooded country, and Grant’s army was quickly pushed back off its main north-south road into the woods, while Lee’s army retained control over the roads running through the Wilderness from west to east. A day of bitter fighting took place, during which the dry undergrowth caught fire, burning the wounded to death where they lay—an additional horror in a day of horrors. Despite Lee’s reputation for the daring strategic move, it was, as Wellington described Waterloo, “a pounding match,” in which both sides simply closed with each other, fired at point-blank range, and charged with the bayonet.

Grant was expecting the unlucky Burnside to march northwest from the James River to support him, but Burnside became lost in the thick woods and did not appear until late in the day. Almost everybody in the Union army expected that Grant would retreat back across the Rapidan after receiving such a severe mauling—certainly McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade, when they had been in command, would have done so—but Grant ordered another attack at dawn, and the second day turned out to be as bloody as the first. At the end of it the army was ordered to move during the night, not back to the Rapidan as they expected, but instead to swing around Lee’s right, moving south toward Spotsylvania Court House.

Lee was momentarily taken by surprise, but he moved his army
fast, getting a step ahead of Grant, and was already in front of Spotsylvania while Grant was trying unsuccessfully to move around his right. From May 8 through May 20, Grant pummeled Lee’s positions around Spotsylvania in a series of brutal, head-on attacks, always searching for a way to get around Lee’s right, with mounting casualties. On May 11 he wrote to Halleck, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer” (another Grant line that was to become famous), and he clearly meant it. As the casualties rose the old rumors and criticism that had surfaced after Shiloh were raised again—that Grant was drunk, incompetent, “a butcher.” Union casualties may have been as high as eighteen thousand—the fighting was so intense that there was no time to count them—and Confederate casualties reached almost twelve thousand, a crippling loss for the Army of Northern Virginia; still the fighting went on with no letup. Grant truly had “a bulldog grip” on Lee.

At last Grant turned Lee’s flank, but Lee once more managed to get ahead of him, and the two armies fought day by day, foot by foot, Grant advancing, Lee retreating toward Richmond, until, on June 2, Grant was within six miles of Richmond, with nothing but Lee’s dwindling but still considerable army between him and the city. Still, that was enough. Lee was an engineer—his positions were carefully chosen, and protected with formidable breastworks and deep trenches. Grant ordered a full attack for the next day—the day that would see him lose his temper at the Union teamster beating a horse around the head—and by noon, in less than half an hour’s fighting, he had lost some seven thousand men without shifting the Confederates an inch from their positions.
²
It was, even in his own eyes, the nadir of his generalship.

The next day even Grant was forced to stop and reconsider, especially since it was by no means sure at this point that the Union troops could, or would, make another charge over ground that was still thickly covered with Union dead and wounded. With one of those swift changes of mind that mark the true military genius, Grant decided to give up the position that had cost him so many lives and cross the James River to the south of Richmond. He would move his army to where Butler had been ineffectually camped, abandon his line of communication to the north, and take up positions where he could be supplied by steamships coming up the James. From there he would move his army to the left in an effort to cut the railway lines running to Richmond from the south, in effect choking Lee off from his supplies.

By June 14 Grant had his army across the James, and he determined at once to move on Petersburg, a small town south of Richmond through which one of the major railways ran. He moved immediately to take Petersburg, but the Confederate forces there, under the command of General Beauregard, with fewer than fifteen thousand men to Grant’s fifty thousand, managed to hold out until Lee could disengage from his lines north of Richmond and bring the Army of Northern Virginia by forced march into Petersburg. Grant’s generals may have been hesitant to attack after the experience of Cold Harbor, and the men themselves may at that point have been reluctant to attempt another frontal attack, but whatever the reason, the brief moment in which the Union army might have seized Petersburg passed with Lee’s arrival on the scene, and both enemies settled down for a long siege.