The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (3 page)

This was accurate enough, as far as it went, but it seemed to Grant — as, indeed, it must have done to even a casual observer — that the trouble lay deeper, in the ranks of the army itself. Partly the reason was boredom, a lack of employment in the craft for which its members had been trained. “A winter in tents is monotonous,” one officer complained. “Card playing, horse racing, and kindred amusements become stale when made a steady occupation.” Moreover, Grant would have agreed with an assessment later made by a young West Pointer, a newcomer like himself to the eastern theater, that the trouble with the Army of the Potomac, predating both Meade and Hooker, was its “lack of springy formation and audacious, self-reliant initiative. This organic weakness was entirely due to not having had in its youth skillfully aggressive leadership. Its early commanders had dissipated war’s best elixir by training it into a life of caution, and the evil of that schooling it had shown on more than one occasion.”

Before coming down to Brandy, Grant had rather inclined to the belief that the removal of Meade was a prerequisite to correction of this state of mind in the army he commanded. But once the round of greetings and introductions had ended and the corps and division commanders had retired for the night, leaving the two men alone for a private conference, Meade showed Grant a side of himself that proved not only attractive but disarming. He began by saying that he supposed Grant would want to replace him with some general who had served with him before and was therefore familiar with his way of doing things: Major General William T. Sherman, for example, who had been Grant’s mainstay in practically all of his campaigns to date. If so, Meade declared, he hoped there would be no hesitation on his account, since (as Grant paraphrased it afterwards) “the work before us was of such vast importance to the whole nation that the feeling or wishes of no one person should stand in
the way of selecting the right men for all positions. For himself, he would serve to the best of his ability wherever placed.” Grant was impressed. The offer, he said, gave him “even a more favorable opinion of Meade than did his great victory at Gettysburg,” and he assured him, then and there, that he had “no thought of substituting anyone for him,” least of all Sherman, who “could not be spared from the West.” Now it was Meade who was impressed, and he said as much the following day in a letter to his wife. “I was much pleased with Grant,” he wrote, “and most agreeably disappointed in his evidence of mind and character. You may rest assured he is not an ordinary man.”

Mutual admiration on the part of the two leaders might be a good and healthy thing for all concerned, but the troops themselves, having paid in blood for the blasting of a number of overblown reputations in the drawn-out course of the war, were unconvinced and noncommittal. While this latest addition to the doleful list of their commanders was on his way eastward, they had engaged in some rather idle speculation as to his professional ability, and it did not seem to them that the mere addition of a third star to each of his shoulders would necessarily increase his military worth.

“Who’s this Grant that’s made a lieutenant general?”

“He’s the hero of Vicksburg.”

“Well, Vicksburg wasn’t much of a fight. The rebs were out of rations and they had to surrender or starve. They had nothing but dead mules and dogs to eat, as I understand.”

About the best thing they could say for him was that he was unlikely to be any worse than John Pope, who had also brought a western reputation east, only to lose it at Bull Run. “He cannot be weaker or more inefficient,” a jaundiced New York veteran declared, “than the generals who have wasted the lives of our comrades during the past three years.” For one thing, Grant was likely to find a good deal less room between bullets here in Virginia than he had found in the region of his fame. “If he’s a fighter,” another hard-case infantryman put it, “he can find all the fighting he wants.” Then he arrived and some of them got a look at him. What they saw was scarcely reassuring.

“Well, what do you think?” one asked a friend, who replied thoughtfully, having studied the firm-set mouth and the level glance of the clear blue eyes:

“He looks as if he meant it.”

Nodding agreement, the first allowed that they would find out for themselves before too long. Meanwhile he was willing to defer judgment, except as to looks. “He’s a little ’un,” he said.

Talk of Vicksburg brought on the inevitable comparison of western and eastern Confederates, with particular reference to the presence here in the Old Dominion of General Robert E. Lee, the South’s first soldier. Grant could never have penned up Lee, as he had
done John Pemberton, thereby forcing his surrender by starvation; Lee, they said, “would have broken out some way and foraged around for supplies.” Thus the men. And Rawlins, as he moved among the officers on Meade’s staff, found a similar respect for the southern commander, as if they took almost as great a pride in having opposed “Mars Robert” as the Virginian’s tattered veterans took in serving under him. “Well, you never met Bobby Lee and his boys,” they replied when Grant’s chief of staff presumed to speak of victories in the West. “It would be quite different if you had.” As for the campaign about to open here in the East, they seemed to expect nothing more than another version of the old story: advance and retreat, Grant or no Grant. They listened rather impatiently while Rawlins spoke of past successes, off on the far margin of the map. “That may be,” they said. “But, mind you, Bobby Lee is just over the Rapidan.”

In any case, whatever opinions had been formed or deferred, the new chieftain and his major eastern army had at least had a look at each other, and next morning, after a second conference at which both past and future campaigns in Virginia were discussed, Grant returned to the station and got aboard the train for Washington. Last night he had received a presidential telegram extending an invitation from Mrs Lincoln for him and Meade “to dine with us Saturday evening,” and he had replied by wire that they were pleased to accept. Overnight, however, he changed his mind. Today was Friday, March 11, and he would be leaving at once for the West — but only for a visit of a week or ten days, in order to confer with Sherman and other commanders there; after which, despite his previous resolution to avoid the political snares so thickly strewn about the eastern theater, he would be returning here to stay. Paradoxically, now that he had seen them at first hand, it was just those snares that determined his decision. “When I got to Washington and saw the situation,” he later explained, “it was plain that here was the point for the commanding general to be. No one else could, probably, resist the pressure that would be brought to bear upon him to desist from his own plans and pursue others.”

Not that the adulation and the invasions of his privacy did not continue to go against his grain. They did indeed. Closeted that afternoon with the President at the White House, he complained that the past three days, in Washington and at Brandy, had been “rather the warmest campaign I have witnessed during the war.” Lincoln could sympathize with this, but he was disappointed that the general would not stay on through tomorrow night for the banquet planned in his honor. “We can’t excuse you,” he protested. “Mrs Lincoln’s dinner without you would be
Hamlet
with Hamlet left out.” But Grant was firm. “I appreciate the honor Mrs Lincoln would do me,” he said, “but time is very important now. And really, Mr Lincoln,” he added frankly, “I have had enough of this show business.”

He left that evening on a westbound train, with stops for inspection at several points along the way, and reached Nashville in time to keep a St Patrick’s Day appointment with Sherman, whose troops were advanced beyond Chattanooga, into northwest Georgia, to confront the main western Confederate army under General Joseph E. Johnston, around Dalton. They traveled together by rail to Cincinnati, the voluble red-head, “tall, angular, and spare, as if his superabundant energy had consumed his flesh” — so an acquaintance saw him at the time — and the new lieutenant general, who had once been described as “a man who could be silent in several languages” and who now seemed doubly reticent by contrast with his talkative companion. In the Ohio city they left the cars and checked into a hotel for privacy and room to spread their maps. There they worked on a preliminary draft of the over-all campaign which Sherman defined long afterwards: “He was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was his plan.”

That was what it basically was. That was what it came to, in the end. At the outset, however, the plan — which might better have been defined, at this stage, as a plan for a plan — was a good deal more complicated, involving a great many other forces that were thrown, or were intended to be thrown, into action against the South. Grant had under him more than half a million combat soldiers, “present for duty, equipped,” about half of them in the ranks of six field armies, three in the East and three in the West, while the other half were scattered about the country in nineteen various departments, from New England to New Mexico and beyond. His notion was to pry as many as possible of the latter out of their garrisons, transfer them to the mobile forces in the field, and bring the resultant mass to bear in “a simultaneous movement all along the line.” Long ago in Mexico, during a lull in the war, he had written home to the girl he later married: “If we have to fight, I would like to do it all at once and then make friends.” Apparently he felt even more this way about it now that the enemy were his fellow countrymen. In any case, the plan as he evolved it seemed to indicate as much.

“From an early period of the rebellion,” he said afterward, looking back, “I had been impressed with the idea that active and continuous operations of all the troops that could be brought into the field, regardless of season and weather, were necessary to a speedy termination of the war.” The trouble from the outset, east and west, was that the Federal armies had “acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together, enabling the enemy to use to great advantage his interior lines of communication.” It was this that had made possible several of the greatest Confederate triumphs, from First Bull Run to Chickamauga, where reinforcements from other rebel departments and even other theaters had tipped the tactical scale against the
Union. “I determined to stop this,” Grant declared. Moreover, convinced as he was “that no peace could be had that would be stable and conducive to the happiness of the people, both North and South, until the military power of the rebellion was entirely broken,” he held fast to his old guideline; he would work toward Unconditional Surrender. He had it very much in mind to destroy not only the means of resistance by his adversaries, but also the will. The Confederacy was not only to be defeated, it was to be defeated utterly, and not only in the field, where the battles were fought, but also on the home front, where the goods of war were produced. “War is cruelty,” Sherman had said four months ago, in response to a southern matron’s complaint that his men appeared hardhanded on occasion. “There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” Grant felt much the same way about the matter, and here at the start, in formulating his plan for achieving what he called “a speedy termination,” he was determined to be guided by two principles of action: 1) “to use the greatest number of troops practicable,” and 2) “to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but an equal submission with the loyal section of our common country to the Constitution and the laws of the land.”

To achieve the first of these, the concentration of fighting men on the actual firing line, he proposed that most of the troops now scattered along the Atlantic coast, in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, be brought to Virginia for a convergent attack on Richmond and the army posted northward in its defense. All down the littoral, various forces of various sizes were attempting to make their way toward various objectives, few if any of them vital to Grant’s main purpose. Accordingly, he prepared orders for abandoning all such efforts south of the James, along with as much of the region so far occupied as was not clearly needed to maintain or strengthen the naval blockade. The same would apply in the West, along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Cairo, where the men thus gained were to be employed in a similar convergence upon Atlanta and the forces likewise posted in its defense. As for the troops held deep in the national rear, serving mainly by their numbers to justify the lofty rank of political or discredited generals assigned to duty there, Grant proposed to abolish some of these commands by merging superfluous departments, thus freeing the men for duty at the front. As for the generals themselves, useless as most of them were for combat purposes, he favored their outright dismissal, which would open the way for just that many promotions in the field. Though this last was rather a ticklish business, verging as it did on the political, he thought it altogether worth a try because of the added opportunities it would afford him to reward the ablest and bravest of his subordinate commanders, even before the fighting got under way, and thus incite the
rest to follow their example. By such methods (though little came of the last; out of more than a hundred generals Grant recommended for removal, Lincoln let no more than a handful go, mindful as he had to be of the danger of making influential enemies with the presidential election less than nine months off) he would reduce the ratio of garrison to combat troops from one-to-one to one-to-two, which in itself was a considerable accomplishment, one that no previous general-in-chief, from Winfield Scott through George McClellan to Henry Halleck, had conceived to be possible even as a goal.

As for his method of employing that continuous hammering which he believed was the surest if not the only way to bring the South to her knees, the key would be found in orders presently issued to the commanders involved: “So far as practicable all the armies are to move together, and toward one common center.” This was to be applied in two stages. West and East, there would be separate but simultaneous convergences upon respective goals, Atlanta and Richmond, by all the mobile forces within each theater; after which, the first to be successful in accomplishing that preliminary task — the reduction of the assigned objective, along with the defeat of the rebel army charged with its defense — would turn east or west, as the case might be, to join the other and thus be in on the kill, the “speedy termination” for which Grant had conceived his grand design. It was for this, the western half of it at least, that he had come to Tennessee to confer with Sherman, his successor in command of the largest of the three main armies in this and the enormous adjoining theater beyond the Mississippi.