The Man Who Saved the Union (45 page)

John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, described Grant’s response. “
The general had hurriedly and almost illegibly written his speech on half of a sheet of note paper in lead pencil,” Nicolay recalled. “His embarrassment was evident and extreme; he found his own writing very difficult to read.” But his words suited the moment. “
I accept the commission with gratitude for the high honor conferred,” Grant said in a low voice that gradually gained strength. “With the aid of the noble armies that have fought on so many fields for our common country, it will be my earnest endeavor not to disappoint your expectations. I feel the full weight of
the responsibilities now devolving on me and know that if they are met it will be due to those armies, and above all to the favor of that Providence which leads both nations and men.”

O
n the completion of this ordeal, Grant turned to matters more in his line. His new commission gave him command of all the armies of the Union, and though he had intended to return to the West, he decided he needed to be closer to the seat of government. Telegraphy could accomplish only so much; regular meetings between the commanding general and the commander in chief would facilitate the war effort in ways communication from a distance never could. Besides, Lincoln seemed more sensible than most politicians. He didn’t attempt to intrude in matters beyond his understanding. He told Grant in their initial interview that he had never claimed to be a military expert and would have left matters entirely to his generals had they acted with greater energy and success. Lincoln acknowledged that political pressure in the capital was intense and he had felt compelled to respond to it. He said the military orders he had issued might have been all wrong; he was certain
some
of them were wrong. What he looked for in Grant was the ability and willingness to act independently. He didn’t expect Grant to share his military plans with him; he didn’t even
want
Grant to share his plans. If Grant would simply take responsibility and act, he would receive all the manpower and resources at the president’s disposal.

Yet Lincoln couldn’t resist offering one suggestion. He produced a map of
Virginia with the positions of the Union and Confederate forces carefully marked. He indicated two of the rivers that flowed into the Potomac and said the transfer of Union troops to the strip between them would allow the landing of ammunition and provisions nearby, while the rivers would protect the Union flanks. Grant said nothing. “
I listened respectfully but did not suggest that the same streams would protect Lee’s flanks while he was shutting us up,” he recalled.

Edwin Stanton and Henry Halleck had their own reasons for thinking the president shouldn’t be apprised of military plans. As they told Grant, Lincoln was a soft touch for those who wanted to seem knowledgeable, and he sometimes couldn’t keep a secret. Grant nodded, further persuaded to spare the president the details of his strategy. He simultaneously determined not to reveal more of his plans than necessary to Stanton, who seemed susceptible to the very temptations the war secretary
ascribed to Lincoln. Halleck, who became chief of staff up
on Grant’s promotion, learned more but by no means all.

Lincoln, for his part, proved quite happy with Grant’s reticence.
William Stoddard, assistant to
John Nicolay, remembered asking Lincoln what he thought of Grant. “
Well, I hardly know
what
to think of him,” Lincoln replied. “He’s the quietest little fellow you ever saw.… He makes the least fuss of any man you ever saw. I believe two or three times he has been in this room a minute or so before I knew he was here. It’s about so all around. The only evidence that you have that he’s in any place is that he makes things
git!
Wherever he is, things move!”

Stoddard asked what kind of general Lincoln thought Grant would be. Lincoln’s answer surprised him. “Grant is the
first
general I’ve had!” the president said. “He’s a
general
.” As Stoddard seemed puzzled, Lincoln elaborated. “I’ll tell you what I mean,” he said. “You know how it’s been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the army, he’d come to me with a plan of campaign and about as much as say, ‘Now, I don’t believe I can do it, but if you say so I’ll try it on’; and so put the responsibility of success or failure on me. They all wanted me to be the general. Now it isn’t so with Grant. He hasn’t told me what his plans are. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.”

39

L
INCOLN LEARNED OF
G
RANT’S STRATEGY FOR THE SPRING OF
1864 only as it developed. Grant conceived of the entire South as a single battlefield. Facing south from his new headquarters at Culpeper Court House, Virginia, north of the Rapidan River, he saw a battle line that stretched from the Mississippi on his right to the Atlantic on his left. The western armies of Sherman, who had been promoted to Grant’s old position as commander of the Mississippi division, formed his right wing. The
Army of the Potomac, nominally commanded by George Meade but under Grant’s personal direction, was his center. The
Army of the James, under
Benjamin Butler, was his left. Opposing him were two Confederate armies, that of Joseph Johnston, who had replaced Bragg, in the West, and Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant’s strategy was simple. Union forces would pursue and capture or destroy Johnston’s and Lee’s armies and by that means eliminate the enemy’s ability to continue fighting. As before, he considered the capture of Confederate cities secondary, although he didn’t dismiss the symbolic and logistical value of Richmond, Atlanta and Mobile.

Sherman would deal with Johnston, whose army now sat between Chattanooga and Atlanta. Grant ordered Sherman “
to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.” Grant’s confidence in Sherman made him comfortable providing this mere sketch. “I do not propose to lay down for you a plan of campaign but simply to lay down the work it is desirable to have done and leave you free to execute in your own way.”

Grant himself, with the assistance of Meade and Butler, would
handle Lee. Grant moved slowly in making the Army of the Potomac his own. He knew few of its officers and none of its men. He had met Meade during the war with Mexico but hadn’t encountered him personally since. The day after receiving his commission at the White House he traveled to Meade’s headquarters in Virginia. Meade acknowledged that Grant might wish to put his own lieutenant, perhaps one who had served with him in the West, at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Meade even encouraged him to do so if he thought it for the good of the army and the war effort. “
This incident gave me even a more favorable opinion of Meade than did his great victory at Gettysburg the July before,” Grant observed later. “It is men who wait to be selected, and not those who seek, from whom we may always expect the most efficient service.”

Grant impressed Meade rather differently. “
Grant is not a striking man, is very reticent, has never mixed with the world, and has but little manner, indeed is somewhat ill at ease in the presence of strangers,” Meade wrote his wife. “Hence a first impression is never favorable. His early education was undoubtedly very slight; in fact, I fancy his West Point course was pretty much all the education he ever had, as since his graduation I don’t believe he has studied or read any. At the same time, he has natural qualities of a high order, and is a man whom, the more you see and know him, the better you like him.”

Grant aimed for the spring campaign to begin in early May. He and Sherman would move simultaneously lest Lee reinforce Johnston or vice versa. But his plans were nearly disrupted, in a most personal way, even before they commenced. Grant traveled from Culpeper to Washington regularly during April to meet with Lincoln and Stanton. One day, returning by train from the capital, he spotted a cloud of dust to the side of the road and inferred a movement of cavalry. He subsequently was informed that Confederate colonel
John Mosby’s horsemen were tangling with Union cavalry guarding the railroad. “
I do not know that the enemy’s attack on the road last Friday was with the view of ketching me,” he wrote Julia a few days later. “But it was well timed.” He decided to stick closer to his camp. “In the first place I do not like being seen so much about Washington. In the second it is not altogether safe. I cannot move without it being known all over the country, and to the enemy who are hovering within a few miles of the railroad all the time.”

L
ee had learned to respect Grant’s talents from afar, and he assumed Grant would make the Army of the Potomac a more formidable force than it had been. But Lee’s primary concern during the late winter and early spring of 1864 was holding his own army together. The same
shortages that had driven him into Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863 had worsened after the retreat from Gettysburg. That August Lee complained to
Jefferson Davis that he couldn’t move for lack of horse power. “
Nothing prevents my advancing now but the fear of killing our artillery horses,” he said. Deprived of forage, the animals were starving. “The cavalry also suffer, and I fear to set them at work. Some days we get a pound of corn per horse and some days more; some none.… You can judge of our prospects.” During the autumn the men began to suffer, too; in January 1864 Lee lamented to Davis of “
our crying necessity for food.” He reported that his army was down to three days’ provisions of four ounces of salt meat per man per day. “
I can learn of no supply of meat on the road to the army, and fear I shall be unable to obtain it in the field,” he told Davis. He argued that the Confederate government should take sterner measures to ensure that civilians sacrificed on behalf of the war effort. “
If it requires all the meat in the country to support the army, it should be had.”

The food shortages translated into troop shortages. Lee sent soldiers home on furlough, in part to avoid having to feed them; many never returned. Conscription yielded fewer and fewer recruits as the likely ones had already been taken and the unlikely got better at eluding the
draft agents. A sense of despondency fell across the Confederacy. “
Today closes the gloomiest year of our struggle,” the
Richmond Examiner
observed on December 31. “No sanguine hope of intervention buoys up the spirits of the Confederate public as at the end of 1861. No brilliant victory like that of Fredericksburg encourages us to look forward to a speedy and successful termination of the war, as in the last weeks of 1862.” Southern finance had fallen into chaos, and for most Southerners mere existence was a grinding struggle. “Hoarders keep a more resolute grasp than ever on the necessaries of life.… What was once competence has become poverty, poverty has become penury, penury is lapsing into pauperism.” The future was grim. “We do not know what our resources are, and no one can tell us whether we shall have a pound of beef to eat at the end of 1864.”

To offset the desertions Lee appealed to his soldiers’ love of their homeland. “
A cruel enemy seeks to reduce our fathers and our mothers,
our wives and our children, to abject slavery; to strip them of their property and drive them from their homes,” he proclaimed. “Upon you these helpless ones rely to avert these terrible calamities, and to secure to them the blessings of liberty and safety.”

Some soldiers responded; others did not. Desertions mounted to a point where Lee had to shelter himself from certain of their consequences. Until lately he had listened to appeals from decisions by courts martial in cases of desertion and other failures of soldierly will. He now ordered his aides to keep the supplicants away from his tent. “
He said that with the great responsibilities resting on him he could not bear the pain and distress of such applications,”
Charles Venable of Lee’s staff recalled.

As the fighting season of 1864 approached, Lee’s army dwindled to fifty thousand. These were tested veterans, to be sure, and loyal to the end. And they would have the advantage of fighting on familiar ground. But they knew they were outnumbered and getting more so each day. “
The reports of General Lee’s scouts were scarcely necessary to our appreciation of the fact that the odds against were constantly and rapidly increasing,” Confederate general
John B. Gordon recalled. “From the highland which bordered the southern banks of the Rapidan one could almost estimate the numbers that were being added to Grant’s ranks by the growth of the city of tents spreading out in full view below.”

Gordon and the others knew the enemy commander by reputation. “Grant had come from his campaigns in the Southwest with the laurels of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Missionary Ridge on his brow,” Gordon said. Yet he and his comrades considered their own commander fully a match for Grant. “Lee stood before him with a record as military executioner unrivaled by that of any warrior of modern times. He had, at astoundingly short intervals and with unvarying regularity, decapitated or caused the official ‘taking off’ of the five previously selected commanders-in-chief of the great army which confronted them.” Gordon and the others were confident Grant would be Lee’s next victim.

G
rant couldn’t decide initially whether to cross the Rapidan above Lee, to the west, or below him, to the east. “
Each plan presents great advantages over the other, with corresponding objections,” he mused to Meade. “By crossing above, Lee is cut off from all chance of ignoring Richmond and going north on a raid. But if we take this route, all we
do must be done whilst the rations we start with hold out.” The roads weren’t sufficient to sustain an army as large as that of the Potomac. The alternate route—below Lee—was longer but would allow access by water. “Brandy Station can be used as a base of supplies until another is secured on the York or James River.” This approach, however, would tempt Lee to move north, perhaps against Washington. One thing was essential, Grant told Meade. “Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes there you will go also.”