Grant Moves South (74 page)

Meanwhile, if it mattered to him—and beyond any question it did matter, in some area of the spirit buried far down inside—Grant had become famous. A Grant legend was developing, and the bits and pieces of it were no longer pinned to the ancient tale of too much whisky; men were telling, instead, little stories illustrating his capacity for handling men, his ability to remain relaxed and unperturbed under pressure, his general goodness and humanity—very different, all of this, from the network of tales that made the rounds after Shiloh. One officer recorded that Grant had a great knack for getting his subordinates to work harmoniously together; when rows and bitterness developed, Grant could somehow get things adjusted without fuss, so that there was never (now that McClernand was gone, at any rate) any backbiting or hard rivalry around the headquarters tents. “None of his officers,” said this man, “ever quarreled or ever showed any heat of discussion in his presence.… In the presence of Grant or in the face of an order issued by him all of them were submissive, unresentful and quiet. They never attempted to explain this.”

A staff officer told a story which would be told and retold. Grant was walking the lines one day and saw a mule driver beating his team in profane fury; he ordered the man to stop, and since the General was wearing nothing much in the way of uniform the man failed to recognize him and turned to swear at him. Grant ordered the staff man to arrest the driver and punish him. The staff man went to Grant's tent a bit later and reported that he had the offender strung up by the thumbs. He added that the man was frightened and contrite, because he had just learned that it was the Commanding General whom he had been tangling with. Grant had the man released and brought before him, and gave him a stiff reprimand; the man apologized and explained that he had never dreamed he was swearing at a major general. Grant sent him away, explaining
that punishment and reprimand had been visited on him not because he had cursed a general officer but simply because he had abused a mule. “I could defend myself,” Grant told the driver. “The mule could not.”
¹⁷

These and other tales made the rounds, as such things always do when a man suddenly attains great prominence. Meanwhile, more solid evidences of recognition were coming in. From Halleck came word that Grant had been appointed a major general in the Regular Army, and that the appointment had quickly been confirmed by the Senate. It was less than ten years since he had resigned as a captain of infantry, a man under a cloud, his career wrecked; now the Army that had not wanted him was giving him the highest gift in its capacity—permanent tenure, security for old age, the promise that a starred flag would fly over his grave when things came to an end. Grant never said much about this, but an indication of what it meant to him can be found in a letter he wrote a few months later to his old boyhood friend Daniel Ammen, now an officer in the Navy. Always, until now, when he wrote to intimates about postwar plans, Grant had said that he hoped for nothing more than the chance to go back to Galena and live out his days in decent, peaceful obscurity. To Ammen he sounded a new note, writing:

… My only desire will be, as it has been, to whip out rebellion in the shortest way possible, and to retain as high a position in the army afterward as the administration then in power may think me suitable for.
¹⁸

He had found himself, finally. He had not chosen a military career, and most of the time he had not liked it—this unobtrusive man with the sensitive eyes and the firm mouth. Now he was at home in it, it was the career he belonged in, and he proposed to stay in it. This was what he could do; this was what, from now on, he would want to do.

Far down inside, perhaps, it was what he had always wanted. No one knew this general as well as his wife Julia, and she saw him as the born fighter. Many years later she summed up his feeling about the army by writing: “He was happy in the fight and the din of battle, but restless in the barracks.… He could no more resist the sound
of a fife or a drum or a chance to fire a gun than a woman can resist bonnets.”
¹⁹

Some of Grant's fame was rubbing off on his associates. Halleck wrote to say that General George Gordon Meade, new commander of the Army of the Potomac, had just been given a Regular Army brigadier's commission in recognition of the victory at Gettysburg. There were three or four other vacancies in brigadier's ranks, and Halleck suggested that if Grant felt like recommending Sherman and McPherson they would promptly be promoted: “The feeling is very strong here in favor of your generals.” Grant immediately sent in the recommendations, and was pleased to see the promotions made. He felt that Sherman and McPherson were equipped for almost any command, and when he wrote in praise of them he touched on one point that was always important to him: “The army does not afford an officer superior to either, in my estimation. With such men commanding corps or armies, there will never be any jealousies or lack of hearty co-operation.”
²⁰

Best of all, probably, was the letter that presently came to Grant from Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln and Grant had never set eyes on one another, but they had been moving together, slowly but surely, from the moment when Grant marched east from Fort Henry with the remark that he would just step over and capture Fort Donelson. Of all the officers in the Army, Grant was the one who best fitted in with what Lincoln was trying to do. He had sent the President no letters of complaint or protest, he had not tried to substitute policies of his own for policies laid down in Washington, and from first to last he had shown a quality of complete dependability Lincoln saw in few other commanders. Now Lincoln sent him this letter:

M
Y DEAR
G
ENERAL
:

I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do, what you finally did—march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition
, and the like, could succeed. When you got below, and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.

Yours very truly,

A.
LINCOLN
²¹

The summer was moving on. In the East, Lee had taken a beaten army back into Virginia, and he and Meade were sparring cautiously. In Tennessee, Rosecrans was at last on the move, coming down to maneuver Bragg out of Tennessee. West of the great river were isolated Confederate armies that would never quite be able to make their strength felt on any major strategic issue. And in the Deep South itself there was wreckage and a sense of disaster, with no solid nucleus of force to oppose any advance the Federals might choose to make. It was no time for Grant's army to remain idle in the camps around Vicksburg. An invisible door had swung open; somewhere, far ahead, no matter how thick the haze of gun smoke, victory was in sight.

Grant was ready, at last. The time of testing was over, and he had reached his full stature. He had developed—through mistakes, through trial and error, through steady endurance, through difficult lessons painfully learned, through the unbroken development of his own capacities—into the man who could finally lead the way through that open door. Better than any other Northern soldier, better than any other man save Lincoln himself, he understood the necessity for bringing the infinite power of the growing nation to bear on the desperate weakness of the brave, romantic and tragically archaic little nation that opposed it; understood, too, that although Rebellion must be crushed with the utmost rigor, the Rebels themselves were men who would again be friends and fellow citizens. Now it was time to go on. Sherman had said it:
Sling the knapsack for new fields
.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

“Tomorrow I Move South”

CHAPTER TWO

Assignment in Missouri