CHAPTER NINE

GENERAL IN CHIEF

The great thing about Grant is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose . . . he is not easily excited . . . and he has the grit of a bulldog.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

HONORS DESCENDED ON GRANT. The citizens of Galena and Jo Daviess County subscribed for a diamond-hilted sword with a gold scabbard listing the battles he had fought. Congress, not to be outdone, passed a joint resolution thanking Grant and his troops for their gallantry at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, further providing that “a gold medal be struck . . . to be presented to Major General Grant in the name of the people of the United States.”1 Inevitably legislation was introduced to revive the rank of lieutenant general, last held by George Washington in 1798. The bill was sponsored by Elihu Washburne in the House and James Doolittle of Wisconsin in the Senate, and the purpose was to ensure that Grant, for whom the rank was intended, would assume command of the Union military effort.^{2, I} According to Senator Doolittle, Grant had won seventeen battles, captured 100,000 prisoners, and taken 500 pieces of artillery. “He has organized victory from the beginning, and I want him in a position where he can organize final victory and bring it to our armies and put an end to the rebellion.”³

Debate on the bill, which consumed the month of February 1864, took place before the backdrop of a boomlet pushing Grant for president. Lincoln’s renomination and reelection were by no means assured. Despite arguments for not switching horses in the middle of the stream, the one term principle seemed firmly fixed in the mind of the electorate. No incumbent president had been renominated since 1840, and none had been reelected since Andrew Jackson won a second term in 1832. Already rival candidates, including Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, were waiting in the wings preparing to contest the Republican convention at Baltimore in June. Grant, a potential wild card, was wooed by prominent members of both parties. “The next president must be a military man,” wrote James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald. “General Grant celebrated Independence Day of 1863 by marching into Vicksburg, and on Thanksgiving Day he coolly gave Bragg a tanning and a thrashing. Perhaps he has something in store for Christmas, and he may give the rebels a call on New Year’s Day in Atlanta. On the fourth of March 1865 [Inauguration Day], he will be in Washington.”⁴

Even before Bennett began to beat the drum, Grant received a letter from the chairman of the Democratic party in Ohio requesting that he permit his name to be placed in nomination.⁵ “The question astonishes me,” Grant replied. “I do not know of anything I have ever done or said which would indicate that I could be a candidate for any office whatever.” Grant said he would continue to do his duty to suppress the rebellion, and would support whatever administration was in power. Recognizing that even a denial on his part might lead to further speculation, Grant asked the Ohio chairman to keep the correspondence private. “But wherever you hear my name mentioned, say that you know from me direct that I am not ‘in the field.’ ”⁶

Other inquiries were turned aside firmly. Old friends were given the message politely.⁷ Grant’s father, pressing the issue from Covington, Kentucky, was told to stand down somewhat more abruptly. “Nothing personal could ever induce me to accept a political office,” wrote Grant.⁸ The most extensive reply went to Congressman Isaac N. Morris of Illinois, a determined foe of Lincoln:

In your letter you say I have it in my power to be the next President. This is the last thing in the world I desire. I would regard such a consummation as being highly unfortunate for myself, if not for the country. Through Providence I have attained to more than I had ever hoped and . . . infinitely prefer my present position to that of any civil office within the gift of the people.⁹

Lincoln, who wanted to turn the war over to Grant, was nevertheless concerned about creating another rival standing between him and reelection. “When the presidential grub once gets into a man, it can gnaw deeply,” he told a visitor, and Lincoln wondered whether it was gnawing at Grant. To find out, the president asked his old friend from Illinois, Elihu Washburne. “About all I know of Grant I have got from you,” said Lincoln. “I have never seen him. Who else besides you knows anything about Grant?”¹⁰

Washburne said the man to talk to was the United States marshal in Chicago, J. Russell Jones, formerly of Galena, who had kept in touch with Grant throughout the war. Jones, said Washburne, knew Grant as well as anyone. Off to Jones went an urgent message from the White House: Come to Washington immediately, the president wishes to see you.¹¹

Jones was aware of the efforts to create a presidential bandwagon for Grant, and he had written a friendly note urging the general to ignore them. Grant wrote back that he had received a great deal of mail asking him to run, and that he invariably threw it into the wastebasket. “I already have a pretty big job on my hands, and . . . nothing could induce me to think of being a presidential candidate, particularly so long as there is a possibility of having Mr. Lincoln re-elected.”¹²

Grant’s letter was delivered to Jones the day before he left Chicago for Washington. When he called at the White House, Lincoln asked point-blank if Grant wanted to be president and Jones gave him the letter. “My son, you will never know how gratifying this is to me,” said the president.¹³ Later, Jones concluded that the letter “established a perfect understanding” between Lincoln and Grant.¹⁴

With Grant’s position clarified, Lincoln added his support to the bill to revive the rank of lieutenant general. The measure was passed by the House (117–19) on February 1, by the Senate (31–6) on February 26, and signed into law by the president on Leap Year Day, February 29, 1864.¹⁵ The following day Lincoln sent Grant’s name to the Senate. He was confirmed March 2, and on March 3 Halleck wired Nashville instructing him to “report in person to the War Department as soon as practicable.”¹⁶ Halleck said Grant’s commission as lieutenant general had been signed by the president and would be delivered to him when he arrived. “I sincerely congratulate you on this recognition of your distinguished and meritorious service.”¹⁷

Grant’s promotion to lieutenant general meant that he would supersede Halleck as general in chief. Halleck had come to Washington from Corinth in the summer of 1862, but had failed to live up to his early promise. Lincoln told John Hay that he had sent for Halleck when McClellan proved incompetent. Halleck, he said, had stipulated that he should be given full power and responsibility as general in chief. “He ran it on that basis till Pope’s defeat [at Second Manassas]; but ever since that event he has shrunk from responsibility whenever it was possible.”¹⁸

The fault was not entirely Halleck’s. Except for Grant, the Union’s field commanders in 1863–1864 were either unwilling or unable to take the fight to the enemy. McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and even Meade were reluctant to move against the Army of Northern Virginia, while Banks at New Orleans and Frémont in West Virginia were uninspiring at best when confronting the enemy. Topside, Halleck’s task was also not easy. Despite Lincoln’s pledge to give the general in chief full control, both he and Secretary of War Stanton continually intervened to determine military strategy. As Halleck wrote Sherman, “I am simply a military adviser of the Secretary of War and the President, and must obey and carry out what they decide upon, whether I concur in their decisions or not. As a good soldier I obey the orders of my superiors. If I disagree with them I say so, but when they decide, it is my duty faithfully to carry out their decision.”¹⁹

What went unnoticed by Halleck’s critics was his exceptional capacity to organize and equip the army while deflecting political meddling by Congress. The army he was about to turn over, if not a well-oiled machine, was at least superbly supplied and positioned to respond to Grant’s direction. And in the way of the old army, Halleck did not begrudge Grant’s promotion. “General Grant is my personal friend,” the general in chief wrote to an old associate, “and I heartily rejoice at his promotion.” Halleck said that by law Grant would become the army’s commander and that it was a situation into which individual feelings could not enter. “Undoubtedly it will be said that I throw up my office in dudgeon because General Grant has been promoted over my head. There is no possible ground for such an accusation. The honor was fully due to him, and with the honor he must take the responsibilities which belong to the office.”²⁰

Grant departed Nashville for Washington on March 4. When he left, it was with the firm intention of returning to Tennessee and, while he retained control of all the armies, of personally commanding the drive from Chattanooga to Atlanta to the sea. “I am ordered to Washington,” Grant wired Sherman on March 4, but “I expect in the course of ten or twelve days to return to this command.”²¹

In a lengthy personal letter, hand-carried to Sherman by one of Grant’s aides, he told his most trusted associate what was in store: “Dear Sherman: The bill reviving the grade of lieutenant general has become law, and my name has been sent to the Senate for the place. I now receive orders to report to Washington immediately in person, which indicates either a confirmation or a likelihood of confirmation.” Grant told Sherman that he would not accept the appointment if it required him to remain at a desk in Washington, and proceeded to thank him and McPherson “as the men to whom, above all others, I feel indebted for whatever I have had of success. How far your advice and suggestions have been of assistance, you know. How far your execution of whatever has been given you to do entitled you to the reward I am receiving, you cannot know as well as me.”²²

Sherman read the letter with mixed emotions. He was delighted that his friend had received the promotion he deserved, but he worried that Grant would be overwhelmed by the political responsibilities of general in chief, especially if he were cut off from active campaigning in the field. After mulling the matter for two days, he sent Grant a heartfelt reply.

You do yourself injustice, and us too much honor, in assigning to us too large a share of the merits which have led to your advancement. . . . At Belmont you manifested your traits—neither of us being near. At Donelson, also, you illustrated your whole character. I was not near, and McPherson in too subordinate a capacity to influence you. Until you had won Donelson, I confess I was almost cowed by the terrible array of anarchical elements that presented themselves at every point; but that victory admitted a ray of light I have followed since. . . . The chief characteristic of your nature is the simple faith in success you have always manifested, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in the Savior. This faith gave you victory at Shiloh and Vicksburg. When you have completed your preparations, you go into battle without hesitation, as at Chattanooga—no doubts—no reserve; and I tell you that it was this that made us act with confidence. I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got into a tight place you would help me out, if alive. My only points of doubt was in your knowledge of grand strategy and of books of science and history, but I confess your common-sense seems to have supplied this.

Sherman recognized that if Grant remained in Washington overall command in the West would likely fall to him. And though he wanted the job, he did not want it at his friend’s expense. “Don’t stay in Washington,” he urged Grant. “Halleck is better qualified than you to stand the buffets of intrigue and policy. Come West. For God’s sake and your country’s sake, come out of Washington! I foretold General Halleck, before he left Corinth, the inevitable result to him, and now I exhort you to come out West. Here lies the seat of coming empire. When our work is done, we will make short work of Charleston and Richmond.”²³

Grant arrived in Washington with typical understatement. The White House had designated a welcoming committee to meet the train and escort him to his hotel, but the arrangements fell through and no one was on hand when he arrived the afternoon of March 8, accompanied by his thirteen-year-old son, Fred. Inconspicuous and unrecognized, a travel-stained linen duster hiding most of his uniform, he made his way to the Willard Hotel, two blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Grant had stayed at the old Willard twelve years earlier when he had sought to clear the army’s books of the missing $1,000 in quartermaster funds from Mexico. A bored desk clerk, accustomed to dealing with the capital’s most distinguished guests, looked at him, saw no one in particular, and allowed as how there might be a small room on the top floor, if that would do. Grant said it would be fine and signed the register. The clerk twirled the book around to write a room number after the name, and saw: “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois.” Suddenly, everything changed. The stunned clerk, recognizing his error, became the soul of Washington hospitality. Forgotten now was the top-floor room Grant had modestly accepted. Instead, the clerk suggested Parlor 6, the best suite in the hotel, where Lincoln had stayed the week preceding his inauguration. Grant accepted the change without comment. As he saw it, any room would do and he certainly did not want to call attention to himself.

Word of Grant’s presence in the hotel spread quickly. When he returned downstairs with Fred for dinner, people at nearby tables gawked and craned their necks to see the nation’s hero. Presently one of the diners, unable to contain his enthusiasm, mounted his chair and led the guests in “three cheers for Lieutenant General Grant.” These were given “in the most tremendous manner,” followed by a pounding on tabletops that made the glasses and silverware tinkle.²⁴ Grant stood up, fumbled with his napkin, bowed impersonally in all directions, and resumed his seat. He tried to go on with his meal but left shortly afterward to another standing ovation.

When Grant returned to Parlor 6 a message was waiting for him from the White House. The president’s weekly reception was in progress, and Mr. Lincoln asked if he would care to come by. Grant had not yet changed from his well-worn traveling uniform, but after seeing that Fred was put to bed, he headed over to the executive mansion. There he found himself ushered through the foyer, down the great corridor, and into the brightly lit East Room, where the reception was in full swing. As Grant entered, the crowd fell silent, then parted before him like the waters of the Red Sea to disclose at the far end of the room the tall, gaunt figure of the president of the United States. As Grant walked toward him, Lincoln extended his hand and smiled broadly. “Why, here is General Grant! Well, this is a great pleasure, I assure you.” The handshaking over, the two stood together for a moment, Lincoln beaming down with vast good humor, Grant looking up at him, his right hand grasping the lapel of his uniform.²⁵ There was a smattering of applause, the crowd resumed its buzz, and Lincoln turned Grant over to Secretary of State William H. Seward for presentation to Mrs. Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln told Grant how pleased she was to meet him, and she and the general chatted pleasantly for a few minutes. The guests had by this time become so curious that they surged forward for a closer look and perhaps an exchange of greetings. A White House official recalled that Grant “blushed like a schoolgirl,” sweating heavily from embarrassment and the task of shaking hands with those nearest. Cries arose of “Grant, Grant, Grant,” followed by cheer after cheer. Seward, after some persuasion, induced Grant to stand on a sofa, thinking the guests would be satisfied with a view of him, but it only made the frenzy worse.²⁶ “It was the only real mob I ever saw in the White House,” a newsman wrote. “People were caught up and whirled in the torrent which swept through the great East Room. . . . For once at least the President of the United States was not the chief figure of the picture. The little, scared-looking man who stood on the crimson-covered sofa was the idol of the hour.”²⁷

At last Seward managed to extricate Grant and take him to the Blue Room where Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton were waiting. The president told Grant he would be given his commission as lieutenant general at a White House ceremony the next day. Lincoln said he would speak briefly and Grant would be expected to make a short reply. So that Grant would know what was in store, the president gave him a copy of his remarks, suggesting that the general say something to obviate any jealousy that might arise in the army, especially in the Army of the Potomac.

Grant returned to the Willard and, using Lincoln’s text as a guide, wrote out his reply in pencil. The remarks were appropriate and attained the eloquence that brevity permitted. “Mr. President, I accept this commission with gratitude for the high honor conferred. 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 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.”²⁸

After the ceremony Lincoln took Grant upstairs for a short talk. The president told the new general in chief that he was not a military man, did not know how campaigns should be conducted, and had never wanted to interfere in them. But the procrastination of previous commanders and the pressure from Congress had forced him into issuing a series of presidential military orders. As Grant recalled, Lincoln said, “He did not know but they were all wrong, and did know that some of them were. All he wanted or had ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all of the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance. Assuring him that I would do the best I could with the means at hand, and avoid annoying him or the War Department, our first interview ended.”²⁹

Both men were delighted. Grant spent the remainder of the day inspecting Washington’s fortifications, and dined with Secretary Seward that evening. Lincoln, who had dealt with Napoleonic figures like Frémont and McClellan, blustery show-offs like Hooker and Pope, and academic strategists like Halleck, was relieved to find a plain, direct, unassuming commander who eschewed the trappings of command, who never raised his voice, and who shared his view that the quickest way to end the war was to defeat the Confederate army. A British journalist, covering the war from Washington, noted that unlike his predecessors, Grant was unmoved by flattery. “I never met a man with so much simplicity, shyness, and decision. . . . He is a soldier to the core, a genuine commoner, commander of a democratic army from a democratic people. From what I learn of him, he is no more afraid to take responsibility of a million men than of a single company.”³⁰

The next morning the general in chief set out to confer with General Meade at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, located in the Virginia hamlet of Brandy Station, some sixty miles southwest of Washington. The failure of the Army of the Potomac—the Union’s largest and best equipped army—to move aggressively against Lee was perhaps the major problem Grant faced, and he wanted to examine the situation firsthand. Was Meade the problem, or did the trouble lie deeper? Had the Army of the Potomac been trained and conditioned to a life of caution and inertia? Was the army’s lack of initiative a problem of command, or had it been bred into the bone? Grant came east inclined to believe that the removal of Meade was a prerequisite to correcting the problem,³¹ but he had to see for himself to be sure.

Grant knew Meade only slightly. The latter was eight years ahead of Grant at West Point, and the two men had served together as lieutenants with Zachary Taylor in Mexico. However, they had not met since then. Both had won stunning victories the previous summer, but Meade’s failure to pursue Lee after Gettysburg had brought him into bad odor, and his reluctance to launch an offensive in northern Virginia in the autumn of 1863 had accelerated talk of his replacement. “Nothing is to be hoped for from [the Army of the Potomac] so long as it remains under its present commander,” Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana wrote Grant in December.³² Radical Republicans in Congress had already lined up to restore Fighting Joe Hooker to the post. An unseemly scramble for Meade’s job among his subordinates further weakened his position. Grant’s appointment to succeed Halleck made a change appear imminent. Meade understood that. On the day Grant arrived in Washington, Meade wrote his wife that the new general in chief “may desire to have his own man in command, particularly as I understand he is indoctrinated with the notion of the superiority of the western armies and that the failure of the Army of the Potomac to accomplish anything is due to their commanders.”³³

It was raining heavily on Thursday, March 10, when Grant’s train pulled into Brandy Station. Rain or no rain, a regiment of Zouaves, brightly attired in red fezzes and baggy trousers, were drawn up to render the salute while an army band, unaware that Grant was tone-deaf (he once remarked that he knew only two tunes: “One was Yankee Doodle. The other wasn’t.”³⁴) rolled out “The General’s March” to welcome the new commander. Meade and his staff stood stiffly to attention during the downpour, waiting for Grant to emerge from the general in chief’s special car. Tall and dour, professorial in appearance, with a hair-trigger temper that kept his staff on edge, George Meade waited patiently for his head to be handed to him.

Nothing of the kind happened. Grant was already revising his plan to shift commanders when he stepped down from his car, and to the surprise of almost everyone, he and Meade hit it off immediately. “I had a great fondness for Meade,” Grant told New York Herald reporter John Russell Young after the war,³⁵ and Meade, a few days after the meeting, told Mrs. Meade that he was “much pleased with Grant. You may rest assured that he is not an ordinary man.”³⁶ What impressed Grant about Meade, aside from his professionalism, was his selflessness. Meade opened the conversation by suggesting that Grant might want to replace him with a Western officer with whom he was familiar: someone like Sherman, perhaps. If so, he begged Grant not to hold back. As Grant remembered, Meade said “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 taken with Meade’s candor. The offer, he said, “gave me even a more favorable opinion of Meade than did his great victory at Gettysburg, and I assured him that I had no thought of substituting anyone for him.”³⁷

There were additional reasons why Grant chose not to replace Meade. His talks with Lincoln and Stanton convinced him that neither wanted to remove the Pennsylvanian, although they were ready to do so if Grant requested it. Neither the president nor the secretary of war blamed Meade for the inaction of the Army of the Potomac, since Meade was simply following Halleck’s cautious lead. With a more audacious general in chief, both men thought Meade would be fine.³⁸ Meade himself agreed with that assessment. After several weeks he told his wife that Grant “is so much more active than his predecessor, and agrees so with me in his views, I cannot but rejoice at his arrival, because I believe success to be the more probable from the above facts.”³⁹

An even more urgent consideration was Grant’s recognition that as general in chief he would have to remain near Washington. Despite his desire to command the cross-Georgia march to the sea, two days in the nation’s capital convinced him that the commanding general could not afford to be elsewhere. “No one else,” said Grant, “could resist the pressure that would be brought to bear upon him to desist from his own plans and pursue others.” That evening Grant put the pieces together. His meeting with Meade had gone better than he had anticipated, and he knew they could work in harmony. Grant also saw that the Army of the Potomac was in superb condition and that Meade handled it efficiently. Meade knew the officers and their capabilities, and he knew the terrain and the enemy. What he needed was direction and encouragement to move aggressively, and to be freed from second-guessing in Washington. In the West, Grant knew that Sherman was fully capable of commanding the army he had left behind, that McPherson could do Sherman’s old job, and that Black Jack Logan could replace McPherson. With the clarity of conception that had become his military hallmark, Grant arrived at a solution that was simple, logical, original, and most likely to be effective. First, the general in chief, taking full advantage of the Union’s telegraph network, would maintain his headquarters in the field. That was Grant’s command style and he was comfortable with it. Only this time his headquarters would be with the Army of the Potomac. Second, Meade would retain command of the army, simplifying Grant’s administrative responsibility and allowing him to utilize the command structure already in place. Third, Sherman would assume command in the West, also under Grant’s direction; and fourth, Halleck would remain at his desk in Washington where his organizational talent and accumulated knowledge of the political ways of the capital would free Grant to concentrate on fighting Lee.

Of the changes, Grant was most concerned about Meade. “He was commanding an army and, for nearly a year previous to my taking command of all the armies, was in supreme command of the Army of the Potomac. All other general officers occupying similar positions were independent in their commands so far as any one present with them was concerned.” Grant wrote later that the situation “proved embarrassing to me if not to him. I tried to make General Meade’s position as nearly as possible what it would have been if I had been in Washington or any other place away from his command. I therefore gave all orders for the movements of the Army of the Potomac to Meade to have them executed.”⁴⁰ Grant established his headquarters near Meade’s, and only when required to do so by extreme necessity did he give a direct order to any of Meade’s subordinates.

Grant returned to Washington on Friday, March 11. The day afterward, the War Department issued orders formalizing the changes he desired, taking special care to let Halleck down gently. The orders specified that Halleck had been relieved as general in chief “at his own request,” and that Grant was succeeding him. Halleck would continue to serve in Washington as chief of staff, “under the direction of the Secretary of War and the lieutenant general commanding.”⁴¹ Grant met with Lincoln that afternoon and informed the president that he was leaving for Nashville immediately to close out his headquarters and turn the command over to Sherman. The president invited Grant to stay for a banquet planned in his honor, and the general in chief politely but firmly declined. “I appreciate the honor, but time is very important now, and I have had enough of this show business.” The past three days, he told an appreciative Lincoln, had been “rather the warmest campaign I have witnessed during the war.”⁴²

Thus far Grant had not taken a false step. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune reported that “he hardly slept on his long journey East, yet he went to work at once. Senators state with joy that he is not going to hire a house in Washington and make war ridiculous by attempting to manoeuver battles from an arm-chair.” His refusal to dine at the White House was commented on with equal approval. The New York Herald said, “We have found our hero.”⁴³

Grant’s modesty captured the nation’s imagination. An acquaintance described him at the time as “a man who could remain silent in several languages.”⁴⁴ Meade noted that he was “very reticent and somewhat ill at ease among strangers; hence a first impression is never favorable. 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.”⁴⁵ A staff officer who worked with Grant said “the whole man was a marvel of simplicity, a powerful nature veiled in the plainest possible exterior.”⁴⁶ Despite his rank, Grant retained what one historian called “the odd quality of unintentionally vanishing from view in any crowd.”⁴⁷ Stopping in Cincinnati on his way back to Nashville, Grant planned to visit his parents in nearby Covington. Jesse knew when the train was arriving, and sent a driver and carriage to meet him. Several hours later, Jesse and Hannah saw Grant coming up to the house on foot, carpetbag in hand, his well-worn travel duster over his uniform. The driver, it developed, had gone to the station but had been unable to find him.⁴⁸

On March 17 Grant met Sherman in Nashville. Sherman had brought with him four men whom Grant wished to see as well: McPherson, Logan, Sheridan, and Grenville Dodge, an infantry division commander who had achieved remarkable success rebuilding the railroads in Mississippi and Tennessee. These were men Grant knew and trusted. He could relax among them. And for the next two days he discussed his plans with casual informality, listening intently to what was said by longtime colleagues in a way that would not have been possible in the East. Adam Badeau, a former newsman who had become Grant’s military secretary, captured the scene, noting the contrast between Grant’s measured ways and Sherman’s intensity:

Sherman was tall, angular, and spare, as if his superabundant energy had consumed his flesh. His words were distinct, his ideas clear and rapid, coming, indeed, almost too fast for utterance, in dramatic, brilliant form. No one could be with him half an hour and doubt his greatness.

Grant was calmer in manner a hundred fold. The habitual expression on his face was so quiet as to be almost incomprehensible. His manner, plain, placid, almost meek, in great moments disclosed to those who knew him well immense, but still suppressed, intensity. In utterance he was slow and sometimes embarrassed, but the words were well-chosen, never leaving the remotest doubt of what he intended to convey.

Not a sign about him suggested rank or reputation or power. He discussed the most ordinary themes with apparent interest, and turned from them in the same quiet tones, and without a shade of difference in his manner, to decisions that involved the fate of armies, as if great things and small were to him of equal moment. In battle, the sphinx awoke. The outward calm was even then not entirely broken; but the utterance was prompt, the ideas were rapid, the judgment was decisive, the words were those of command. The whole man became intense, as it were, with a white heat.⁴⁹

While closing out his headquarters and turning matters over to Sherman, Grant took advantage of the opportunity to unbutton. One evening the officers went to see a local production of Hamlet; on another, Grant led them on a quest for fresh oysters, one of the few foods he relished.⁵⁰ Sherman recalled that the mayor of Galena had come to Nashville to present Grant with the jeweled sword his fellow townsmen had subscribed for. The mayor made a dignified speech and read a resolution the city council had adopted to mark the event. According to Sherman, Grant listened attentively and then began to fumble in his pockets for his reply. “First his breast-coat pocket, then his pants, vest, etc., and after considerable delay he pulled out a crumbled piece of common yellow cartridgepaper which he handed to the mayor. His whole manner was awkward in the extreme. . . . I could not help laughing at the scene so characteristic of the man who then stood prominent before the country, and to whom all had turned as the only one qualified to guide the nation in a war that had become painfully critical.”⁵¹

Grant left Nashville for Cincinnati on March 19, accompanied by Sherman and Dodge. On the train, he discussed his plans in greater detail, and then in Cincinnati Grant and Sherman checked into a hotel for privacy, spread their maps, and worked out a preliminary draft of the coming campaign. Dodge recalled that Grant wanted every Union army to move in a coordinated manner against the enemy, so that Lee and Johnston (who had succeeded Bragg) could not detach any troops to reinforce one another. “He also informed us of the necessity of closing the war with this campaign.”⁵² Years later, Sherman summarized the strategy: “He was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was the plan.”⁵³

The following week Grant was back in Washington. With the senior command in place and the basic strategy set, Grant confronted organizational and structural problems the solution to which had eluded Halleck and every commanding general since George Washington. Among the most serious was the statutory independence of various army staff sections such as quartermaster, commissary, ordnance, and the adjutant general. Over the years a jealous Congress, fearful of a military strongman, had provided that the heads of these departments report directly to the secretary of war, not the commanding general. By tradition and practice they were outside the army chain of command and were prone to ignore orders not only from field commanders but also from the general in chief. Grant insisted that the branches be subordinated to the chain of command, and he took the matter to the president. Lincoln told Grant that although he could not legally give him command of the staff departments, “there is no one but myself that can interfere with your orders, and you can rest assured that I will not.”⁵⁴

A second problem was the size of the army’s logistical tail. Virtually half of the soldiers in Federal service were holding down rear-area jobs, guarding supply lines, providing garrisons for cities and forts in occupied areas, and were not available for battlefield duty. George Thomas, for example, had almost 120,000 soldiers in the Department of the Cumberland but could muster no more than 60,000 men for front-line service. Grant instructed Halleck to forward all new recruits to the field immediately, and to strip each department “to the lowest number of men necessary for the duty to be performed.”⁵⁵ By summer, Grant had cleaned out the rear areas and had reduced the ratio of garrison to combat troops by half, an accomplishment no previous general in chief had considered possible.⁵⁶

Grant’s determination to increase the combat strength of the army brought on his first clash with Secretary Stanton, who complained that too many men were being withdrawn from Washington’s defenses.

“I think I rank you in this matter, Mr. Secretary,” said Grant.

“We shall have to see Mr. Lincoln about that,” Stanton replied.

Off to the White House they went, the secretary of war and the general in chief, where Stanton laid the matter before the president. Lincoln heard the secretary out, but did not bother to ask Grant to explain. Smiling good-naturedly he said simply, “You and I, Mr. Stanton, have been trying to boss this job, and we have not succeeded very well with it. We have sent across the mountains for Mr. Grant, as Mrs. Grant calls him, to relieve us, and I think we had better leave him alone to do as he pleases.”⁵⁷

The most difficult problem Grant faced was concentrating Union efforts against Lee and Johnston. Previous generals in chief, bowing partially to congressional pressure, had taken a fly-swatter approach to the Confederacy, dispersing troops against a plethora of targets, few of which were vital to final victory. When Grant assumed command, Union forces were scattered about the country in nineteen separate military departments, plus the Army of the Potomac. Federal forces in these departments acted independently and without concert, enabling the South to exploit its interior lines of communication and shift troops from one sector to another as the need arose. In several instances that ability proved decisive. Bragg’s victory at Chickamauga, for example, was in large measure attributable to the timely arrival of Longstreet’s corps from the Army of Northern Virginia.

“I was determined to stop this,” said Grant. “My general plan was to concentrate all the force possible against the main Confederate armies in the field [Lee and Johnston] . . . and to arrange a simultaneous movement all along the line.”⁵⁸ As a preliminary step, Union forces deployed piecemeal along the Atlantic Coast in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, inching forward against isolated objectives, were ordered north to Virginia and consolidated with the army on the James River. In the West, Grant shook out the garrisons protecting navigation on the Mississippi, and did his utmost to curtail the slow-moving offensive on the Red River, instructing General Banks to return to New Orleans and prepare to support Sherman’s drive on Atlanta. To reduce the number of troops deployed in the northern heartland, Grant proposed to abolish superfluous commands, merge a number of military departments, and retire or dismiss a hundred or more general officers who were manifestly unfit for further service. This last request was ticklish business in an election year, and little came of it. Lincoln, mindful of the danger of making political enemies, let go only a fraction of those Grant recommended.⁵⁹ Finally, officers and soldiers on furlough, of whom there were thousands, were ordered back to their units. “Concentration was the order of the day,” Grant wrote, and it was necessary to accomplish it “in time to advance at the earliest moment the roads would permit.”⁶⁰

The centerpiece of Grant’s strategy was a combined offensive by Meade’s Army of the Potomac against Lee, and Sherman’s Division of the Mississippi against Johnston. “Lee’s army will be your objective point,” Grant instructed Meade on April 9. “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.”⁶¹ Sherman was told to move against Johnston’s army, “break it up and get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their resources.”⁶² Sherman’s force, representing the combined armies of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio, numbered about 120,000—which was about twice what Johnston could muster. Meade boasted a similar advantage over Lee. On April 1, 1864, the Army of the Potomac’s present for duty strength was slightly less than 100,000. But Grant held an independent corps under Ambrose Burnside in reserve, which, when deployed, would raise the total to slightly above 120,000. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia numbered 61,025 effectives, with additional troops in the Shenandoah valley, North Carolina, and a standing garrison of 6,000 in Richmond.⁶³

Grant sought to improve the odds by ordering coordinated attacks by Union armies adjacent to the main thrusts. In the West, Banks was instructed to drive on Mobile with a force of 30,000 men, and to work in tandem with the Gulf squadron of Rear Admiral David G. Farragut. In Grant’s view, a move against Mobile would draw off whatever reserves Johnston might have in Mississippi and Alabama, and would prevent their use against Sherman. Once Mobile was taken, Banks could head north and fall on Johnston’s rear. As Grant told Sherman, “It will be impossible for him to commence too early.”⁶⁴

In the East, Grant planned a variant of his tactics at Chattanooga. Meade’s Army of the Potomac would engage Lee frontally, as Thomas had done with Bragg. On the left flank, General Benjamin Butler, former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, was ordered to move up the James River from Fortress Monroe with 35,000 men, seize City Point, cut the railroad between Petersburg and Richmond, and threaten the Confederate capital from the south. “His movement will be simultaneous with yours,” Grant told Meade.⁶⁵

On the right flank Grant planned a two-pronged attack. Major General Franz Sigel, the prominent German immigrant whose prompt support for the Union in 1861 helped prevent Missouri from seceding, was ordered to move up the Shenandoah Valley, pin down its defenders, cut Lee’s communication with that region, and strike Richmond from the west if the opportunity presented itself. A second column of Sigel’s command, led by Brigadier General George Crook, would move east from Charleston, West Virginia, against the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad, take Lynchburg, and sever the Confederate lifeline to the southwest. Grant said he did not “calculate on very great results” from the West Virginia contingent, but it would keep the enemy occupied and prevent Lee from drawing reinforcements from the region.⁶⁶ A crucial difference between Grant’s strategy in the spring of 1864 and that at Chattanooga, aside from the vast distances involved, was that at Chattanooga he was dealing with three military professionals: Sherman, George Thomas, and Joe Hooker. Grant’s flank men in Virginia were political generals with little practical experience in the field. Sigel had been commissioned to attract German-speaking patriots to the colors, and Butler had been made a general officer to prove to Democrats that the war was not exclusively a Republican affair.⁶⁷ So too in the South. Nathaniel P. Banks, commanding the Gulf Department on Sherman’s flank, was a former Republican congressman from Massachusetts who had been speaker of the House of Representatives. Like Sigel and Butler, his political influence far exceeded his military capacity.

Grant made one final organizational change before leaving Washington to join Meade at the front. After suffering the stings of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Earl Van Dorn in Mississippi, Grant expressed to Lincoln and Halleck his dissatisfaction with Union cavalry operations and suggested that if properly led the cavalry was capable of accomplishing much more than it had done. “I said I wanted the very best man in the army for that command.”

“Would Sheridan do?” asked Halleck.

“The very man I want,” said Grant.

Lincoln told Grant he could have anyone he wished, and Sheridan, then commanding an infantry division under George Thomas, was immediately ordered to Virginia to assume command of the cavalry corps of the Army of the Potomac.⁶⁸ Sheridan had just turned thirty-three, and was one of the few officers in the army who was smaller than Grant, standing five feet five inches tall and weighing 115 pounds. “The officer you brought on from the West is rather a little fellow to handle your cavalry,” someone at headquarters remarked to Grant shortly after Sheridan reported for duty. “You’ll find him big enough before we get through,” Grant replied, and then took another pull on his cigar.⁶⁹

Grant’s last call in Washington was on President Lincoln. He felt duty-bound to inform the president what was afoot, but had been warned by Halleck that the commander in chief could not keep a secret. The interview had scarcely begun when Lincoln gave Grant the same warning. “He said he did not want to know my plans, for everybody he met was trying to find out from him something about the contemplated movements, and there was always a temptation to ‘leak’.”⁷⁰ As a consequence, Grant confined his report to general principles. He told the president that he intended to bring “the greatest number of troops practicable” against the enemy, and that he would “employ all the force of all the armies continually and concurrently, so that there should be no recuperation on the part of the rebels, no rest from attack.”⁷¹ When Grant explained how all the armies could contribute to victory simply by advancing even if they won no battles, Lincoln remarked, in all apparent innocence: “Oh yes! I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while someone else does.”⁷² Grant, the son of a tanner, relished the remark so much that he passed it along to Sherman the following week in a letter explaining Sigel’s role in the Virginia campaign. “If Sigel can’t skin himself he can hold a leg while someone else does.”⁷³

Lincoln was perhaps even more pleased than Grant with the interview. His secretary, John Hay, recorded that the president was “powerfully reminded” of his “old suggestion so constantly made and as constantly neglected, to Buell, Halleck, et al., to move at once upon the enemy’s whole line so as to bring into action our great superiority in numbers.”⁷⁴

Grant by this time had become the center of attention in the East. New England Yankees, curious about his military success, were initially puzzled. Some were dismayed to find no trace of breeding or gentility. An observer seeing Grant for the first time noted only an “ordinary, scrubby-looking man, with a slightly seedy look, as if he was out of office on half-pay.” Another saw someone with “the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink.” Once it was revealed that this “short, round-shouldered man” was the general in chief, second assessments followed. The pale eye became “a clear blue eye,” the slightly dissipated face took on “a look of resolution, as if he could not be trifled with.” The answer to the riddle of Grant’s success, it was decided, lay in his unpretentious but resolute demeanor, his shy but manly bearing. “He habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.” A critical New Yorker who had watched a half-dozen generals come and go because “they did not know how to march through Virginia to Richmond” believed that “Grant may have the talisman.”⁷⁵

Grant would be the seventh Union commander to try to smash the Confederacy in Virginia. In 1861, Irvin McDowell came to grief at Manassas. In 1862, McClellan turned tail on the peninsula, John Pope was routed at Second Manassas, and Burnside met his master at Fredericksburg. In 1863, Joe Hooker stumbled at Chancellorsville and Meade called off a hopeless attack at Mine Run and pulled back to avoid destruction. Six Union generals, six Southern triumphs, the last three in the region where the Army of the Potomac was now deployed, and the last five at the hands of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s finest soldier. For many in the South, Grant was simply the seventh name to be added to the list of failed Yankee generals. “If I mistake not,” a young officer on Lee’s staff wrote home after hearing of the arrival of the new Union commander, “Grant will shortly come to grief if he attempts to repeat the tactics in Virginia which proved so successful in Mississippi.”⁷⁶

Longstreet was one of the few who dissented from the rebel consensus. “Do you know Grant?” Longstreet asked the buoyant Virginians. None did. “Well, I do,” Old Pete replied. “I was with him for three years at West Point, I was present at his wedding, I served in the same army with him in Mexico, I have observed his methods of warfare in the West, and I believe I know him through and through. And I tell you we cannot afford to underrate him and the army he now commands. We must make up our minds to get into line of battle and stay there, for that man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of this war. In order to whip him we must outmaneuver him, and husband our strength as best we can.”⁷⁷

Grant differed from his predecessors in many ways. As general in chief he commanded 533,000 troops “present for duty, equipped,” organized for battle in twenty-one corps of two to four divisions each.⁷⁸ This was one of the largest military commands in history, and Grant, whose supreme authority was unchallenged, chose to run it from the field. That insured he would be on the scene in Virginia, where the principal struggle would take place. It also freed him from being distracted by administrative details in Washington and from being drawn into the swirling political currents of the capital. Finally, it permitted him the luxury of entrusting the conduct of campaigns elsewhere to proven commanders such as Sherman, subject only to the broad direction of the general in chief at the far end of a telegraph line. Grant set himself up in such a way so as not to be distracted from the major task facing the commanding general: defeating the Army of Northern Virginia and Robert E. Lee.

On March 24, 1864, Grant left Washington for Culpeper, Virginia, six miles beyond Meade’s headquarters at Brandy Station, about midway between the two important rivers of the region, the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. He traveled light. His staff as general in chief consisted of fourteen officers, two of whom were left behind in Washington.^II Initially, headquarters was established in a small brick house on the outskirts of Culpeper. In the field, the headquarters of the Army of the United States consisted of three tents: a large hospital tent where the mess was housed, a slightly smaller one for business, and a very small one where Grant slept. Its only furniture consisted of a portable cot made of canvas stretched over a light wooden frame, a tin washbasin that stood on an iron tripod, two folding camp chairs, and a plain pine table. The general’s baggage consisted of a single trunk, which contained underclothing, toilet articles, a suit of clothes, and an extra pair of boots. According to an aide, meals were casual and informal. Officers sat where they wished at the table, coming and going as their duties required, and the conversation “was as familiar as that which occurs in the household of any private family.”⁷⁹

Grant ate less and talked less than anyone. He breakfasted frequently on a cup of coffee and a sliced cucumber doused with vinegar. If he ate meat it had to be roasted black, and he never ate fowl. (“I could never eat anything that goes on two legs.”) His favorite fare was old army standbys: pork and beans, and buckwheat cakes.⁸⁰ But if Grant ate lightly, he smoked heavily. When he started his rounds each morning he loaded his pockets with two dozen cigars—a day’s supply—and carried a small silver tinderbox containing a flint and steel with which to strike a spark, and a coil of fuse that was easily ignited and not affected by the wind.⁸¹

The one luxury Grant permitted himself was his choice of horses. At forty-two, Grant remained one of the best equestrians in the United States, and his legendary jump on York at West Point in 1843 was the prelude to a string of marvelous mounts that carried him through the Civil War. Jack, the cream-colored stallion that rushed Grant from Commodore Foote’s flagship to Donelson, was high-spirited and intelligent, “a noble animal in every way.” In 1864 Grant donated him to the Sanitary Fair in Chicago, where he was raffled off, bringing $4,000 to the Sanitary Commission.⁸² Grant’s second warhorse was Fox, a powerful roan gelding of great endurance who accidentally fell with Grant in the saddle the night before Shiloh. It was at Shiloh that Grant acquired Kangaroo, a Thoroughbred found wandering on the battlefield, wasted and in need of care. After a short period of rest and feeding he proved to be such a magnificent mount that Grant used him during the Vicksburg campaign. The fourth horse Grant rode was Jeff Davis, a pony of a horse, liberated by a scouting party from the plantation of Jo Davis, brother of the Confederate president. Although Jeff Davis was much smaller than the horses he usually rode, Grant enjoyed the horse’s easy gait and always used him when traveling a long distance. Grant’s most famous charger was Cincinnati, an enormous animal, seventeen and a half hands high, acquired after the battle of Chattanooga from a well-wisher in St. Louis. The son of Lexington, the fastest four-mile Thoroughbred in the United States (7.195 minutes), Cincinnati was the apple of Grant’s eye. Grant rarely permitted anyone to ride the horse, the exception being Lincoln, whom Grant considered an excellent horseman, and who rode Cincinnati whenever he visited the front.^{83, III} In 1865, Grant refused an offer of $10,000 for the horse.

Grant spent April poring over maps at Culpeper and working out his plans for the spring offensive. As he had done a year before in the ladies’ salon of the Magnolia, where he planned the campaign that took Vicksburg, the general in chief darkened the air with cigar smoke and kept his own counsel. Whatever orders he issued were logistical, designed to bring the greatest number of troops and their equipment to the scene, but providing no tip-off as to the direction of the coming Union assault.

“Lee’s army will be your objective point,” Grant had told Meade, and he counted on the Confederacy’s need to defend Richmond to fix Lee’s position. Richmond was not only the capital of the South, loaded with the prestige of government, but Lee’s supply base and the principal railroad hub of the Confederacy. Aim at Richmond, and the Army of Northern Virginia would spring to its defense. Richmond, however, was not Grant’s target but merely a means to an end. His object was not to capture the Confederate capital but to destroy the rebel army. Richmond was to be attacked because it was defended by Lee, not Lee because he defended Richmond. In fact, Grant preferred to fight his way to Richmond rather than arrive at its gates unmolested, because he hoped to annihilate Lee’s army on the way.⁸⁴

When Grant arrived in Culpeper, the Army of the Potomac, organized into three infantry and one cavalry corps, was entrenched in the vicinity of Brandy Station, a railhead on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, fifteen miles north of the Rapidan. Below the Rapidan, deployed along a front of nearly twenty miles, was the Army of Northern Virginia, secure in entrenchments they had spent the last six months improving. A frontal attack across the river into the face of the rebel fortifications was out of the question. The problem for Grant was how to get around Lee, flank him out of his earthworks, and meet him in open country. Should he move left or move right, east or west, around that twenty-mile line of entrenchments?

To move right, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, offered considerable tactical advantage. The countryside was open, and the advance, along the Orange & Alexandria and the Virginia Central railroads, would take Grant to Lynchburg, perhaps let him get behind Lee and invest Richmond as he had done at Vicksburg. Thinking about the possibility years later, Grant said, “I thought of massing the Army of the Potomac in movable columns, giving the men twelve days rations, and throwing myself between Lee and his communications. If I had made this movement successfully—if I had been as fortunate as I was when I threw my army between Pemberton and Joe Johnston—the war would have been over a year sooner. I am not sure that it was not the best thing to have done; it certainly was the plan I should have preferred.”⁸⁵

What deterred Grant was that he was unfamiliar with the Army of the Potomac. “If it had been six months later, when I had the army in hand, and knew what a splendid army it was, and if I could have had Sherman and McPherson to assist in the movement, I would not have hesitated for a moment.”

The problem, however, was that the downside risk was too great. Just as the defense of Richmond limited Lee’s options, the need to protect Washington curtailed Grant’s mobility. To move right would uncover the capital and give Lee the opportunity to launch a lighting strike at the seat of the national government. “I did not dare take the risk,” said Grant.⁸⁶ A second drawback was logistical. Unlike the lush Mississippi delta, northern Virginia had been devastated by three years of war, and there was no possibility of living off the land. To move right would make Grant entirely dependent on the railroad for resupply. To guard the line against rebel raiders would entail a crippling redeployment of men from the front, and even then it was not clear that the single-track railroad would be sufficient to supply food and ammunition for an army of 120,000 men, fodder for 56,000 horses and mules, plus everything else an army in the field required. Finally, there was an important strategic consideration. To move right would draw Grant away from Butler and the Army of the James, impairing the concentration of force on which the offensive against Lee depended.

The answer seemed clear. The Army of the Potomac would move left. That would keep it between Lee and Washington, the linkup with Butler would be facilitated, the distance would be shorter, and the supply problem would be solved by using the navigable rivers flowing into the Chesapeake, allowing rapid all-weather connection with well-stocked coastal depots protected by the United States Navy’s control of the waterways. Evacuation of the wounded was an additional consideration, the transportation of injured men by ship presenting far less of a hardship than doing so overland.

There was, however, a drawback, and it was serious. Once the Rapidan was crossed, the route to the left would take the army through a desolate reach of pine barrens and scrub oak known as the Wilderness, a vast forbidding region, with few roads, and a dense undergrowth, making maneuver impossible and nullifying the Union’s preponderance in men and artillery. It was a doom-struck area familiar to every veteran of the Army of the Potomac. Joe Hooker had come to grief here the year before, and this is where Meade withdrew without a fight in November, considering himself lucky to have extricated the army without disaster. This is where units fell apart, where military cohesion dissolved in claustrophobic thickets so impenetrable that friend and foe could not be told apart, where artillery fired blind if it could fire at all, where men panicked sometimes for no reason, and the outcome of battle was always uncertain. As a military obstacle, the Wilderness ranked high on anyone’s list: Lee treasured it; Grant believed he could minimize its danger by moving quickly. Once the fords across the Rapidan were secure, if the army marched fast enough it could get through the Wilderness and gain the open country beyond it before Lee had time to react.⁸⁷

To enhance the army’s mobility, Grant ordered Meade to reduce the baggage that accompanied the troops as sharply as possible: two wagons for a 500-man regiment, one wagon for a brigade or division headquarters, two for corps headquarters. Playing his cards close to his chest—just as he had done before the Vicksburg campaign—he told Meade to prepare to move either by the left or by the right. If the army moved right, it would require at least 500 rounds of ammunition per man. This should be on hand and ready to use. To cover the possibility of a move to the left, Meade should have supplies stockpiled at the Union logistics depot on the Pamunkey River. “Your estimates for this contingency should be made at once.”⁸⁸

For the most part, Grant confined his planning to the evening hours. During the day he took the measure of the Army of the Potomac—and he liked what he saw. On April 19 he told Sherman everything was well and morale was high.⁸⁹ The following week he wrote Brigadier General John E. Smith, an old friend from Galena: “The Army of the Potomac is in splendid condition and evidently feel like whipping somebody. I feel much better with this command than I did before seeing it. There seems to be the best of feeling existing.”⁹⁰

The army sized up Grant as well. Initially, skepticism was the order of the day. A brittle artillery colonel from the old army wrote home that he found the general in chief “stumpy, unmilitary, slouchy, and western-looking; very ordinary, in fact.”⁹¹ An officer in 2nd Corps said, “There is no enthusiasm in the army for General Grant. On the other hand there is no prejudice against him. We are prepared to throw up our hats for him when he shows himself the great soldier here in Virginia against Lee and the best troops of the rebels.”⁹² Many found him an enigma. Lieutenant Morris Schaff of Meade’s staff marveled at the “fascinating mystery in his greatness,” and said that at headquarters Grant was “the center of a pervasive quiet.”⁹³

Enlisted men sorted it out more quickly. They liked Grant’s reticence, his disregard for pomp and ceremony, his eye for the essential. A Wisconsin veteran said, “He looks as if he means it.”⁹⁴ An enlisted diarist from New Jersey wrote that the troops “look with awe at Grant’s silent figure.”⁹⁵ A New England soldier noted simply, “We all felt at last that the boss had arrived.”⁹⁶ One source of satisfaction among the troops was Grant’s relentless effort to strip soldiers from cushy assignments in rear areas and add them to the fighting force. In April alone he extracted thousands of heavy artillerists manning unnecessary fortifications and turned them into straight-leg infantry. This was taken as a good omen by soldiers who had spent the war at the front.

One story that made the rounds quickly was Grant’s encounter with Brigadier General Rufus Ingalls, chief quartermaster of the Army of the Potomac. Ingalls had been his first-year roommate at West Point, and the two had not met since Grant resigned from the army in 1854. Ingalls needed to confer with him about the supplies that would be required for the coming campaign. In the East, an interview with the commanding general was a formal occasion, and Ingalls put on his dress uniform with full regalia and rode over in the finest quartermaster wagon drawn by a matched set of four carefully groomed horses attended by four equally well turned out orderlies.

On the road near Culpeper, Ingalls saw Grant riding toward him and asked the driver to halt. The two men shook hands warmly, and Ingalls said he had some business to discuss. Grant said: “Very well—we can talk about it here.” He dismounted and Ingalls got down from the wagon and they started walking up and down the road together. There was a slight drizzle, the road was muddy, and every time a horse or wagon went by the generals were spattered. An hour later the conversation was finished and Grant said, “That’s all—goodbye, General,” remounted Jeff Davis and rode away. Ingalls returned to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac muddy and bedraggled, and immediately sought out Meade. “I tell you, General,” said Ingalls, “Grant means business.”⁹⁷

Back in Washington, Lincoln had a pretty clear picture of what was happening. William O. Stoddard, the president’s third secretary, who had been ill when Grant arrived in Washington, was back on duty at the White House and asked what sort of man Grant was. Lincoln said he was “the quietest little fellow you ever saw,” and remarked that several times Grant had been in the room for a minute or so before the president knew he was there. “The only evidence you have that he’s any place is that he makes things git! Wherever he is things move.”

Stoddard asked about Grant’s military ability. “Stoddard,” said the president, “Grant is the first general I’ve had. He’s a general.” When Stoddard paused, Lincoln replied: “I’ll tell you what I mean. 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. 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.”

Lincoln told Stoddard that all the previous commanders would “pick out some one thing they were short of and that they knew I couldn’t give them and then tell me that they couldn’t win unless they had it; and it was generally cavalry.

“When Grant took hold I was waiting to see what his pet impossibility would be, and I reckoned it would be cavalry, for we hadn’t horses enough to mount even what men we had. There were fifteen thousand or thereabouts up near Harper’s Ferry, and no horses to put them on. Well, the other day, just as I expected, Grant sent to me about those very men. But what he wanted to know was whether he should disband them or turn ’em into infantry.

“He doesn’t ask me to do impossibilities for him, and he’s the first general I’ve had that didn’t.”⁹⁸

Under Grant’s overall command, the Army of the Potomac prepared for battle. In the South, Sherman made ready to move through Georgia; Butler appeared to have things in hand on the James; and Sigel, after a brief wrangle pertaining to the proper command channels he should use, looked as though he was ready to advance up the valley. But one of Grant’s flank men was already in trouble. On April 8 a Confederate force under Major General Richard Taylor, the feisty son of Old Rough and Ready, fell on Nathaniel Banks’s Army of the Gulf while it was in march column at Sabine Crossroads, Louisiana, thirty-five miles south of the Union objective of Shreveport. In the resultant rout, Banks lost 2,235 men, twenty guns, and 200 wagons. A stream of anguished telegrams from Banks convinced Grant that the Red River expedition was in deep trouble and whatever help Sherman might have expected from the Gulf command was becoming increasingly unlikely. He ordered Banks to return to New Orleans, and sent the army’s senior trouble-shooter, Major General David Hunter, to Louisiana to investigate. Hunter’s report was devastating. “The Department of the Gulf is one great mass of corruption. Cotton and politics, instead of the war, appear to have engrossed the army. The vital interests of the contest are laid aside . . . and the lives of our men are sacrificed in the interests of cotton speculators.” Hunter said Banks had lost the confidence of the army and that if he were not replaced quickly “we shall lose the navigation of the Mississippi.”⁹⁹

Grant needed no convincing. The disaster in Louisiana, he told Halleck, was unmistakably attributable to Banks’s incompetence. “His failure has absorbed ten thousand veteran troops that should now be with General Sherman, and thirty thousand of his own that should have been moving towards Mobile.”¹⁰⁰ The immediate consequence of the debacle was that Joseph E. Johnston received 15,000 reinforcements from Alabama whom Banks might otherwise have engaged, Sherman got no help whatever, and Grant’s efforts to have Banks relieved foundered in the political quicksand of an election year. Grant, who was sympathetic to Lincoln’s plight, acquiesced gracefully, and on April 29 urged Halleck “to go in person and take charge of the trans-Mississippi” until the situation could be sorted out. Old Brains showed little interest in Grant’s suggestion, but eventually the Department of the Gulf was carved up, leaving Banks responsible for Louisiana’s civil administration and placing military matters in the hands of Major General Edward Canby, a reliable professional officer.¹⁰¹

Across the Rapidan, Lee readied the Army of Northern Virginia for the coming onslaught. “All the information that reaches me goes to strengthen the belief that General Grant is preparing to move against Richmond,” he wrote Jefferson Davis on April 5.¹⁰² Lee was blessed with a multitude of reliable scouts in northern Virginia, and as additional reports trickled in he refined his prognosis. Three days later he informed Richmond: “The general impression [is] that the great battle will take place on the Rapidan, and that the Federal army will advance as soon as the weather is settled.”¹⁰³ The following week, with schooled insight bordering on clairvoyance, Lee told Davis he anticipated three separate Union attacks to be delivered simultaneously from three directions. The main assault would come more or less against his front from across the river. A second attack would come up the James and menace Richmond from the east, and a third, largely diversionary effort, would be made in the Shenandoah valley. Lee said, “If Richmond could be held secure against the attack from the east,” he intended to fall on the flank of the main Union effort. Rather than wait for Grant to attack him, he intended to attack Grant when he was least prepared for it. “Should God give us a crowning victory, all their plans would be dissipated,” and the Union would be forced on the defensive.¹⁰⁴

On April 18 Lee ordered all surplus baggage sent to the rear and prepared his army to move out of its entrenchments as soon as Grant’s line of march became clear. Lee deployed two corps forward, Richard S. Ewell on the right, Ambrose P. Hill on the left, with Longstreet’s veterans, recently returned from Tennessee, in reserve. He could move either right or left, depending on which direction Grant chose. By April 30 the clash appeared imminent. The Army of the Potomac had not yet struck its tents, but Lee informed Davis that “engineer troops, pontoon bridges, and all of the cavalry of Meade’s army” had been advanced to the vicinity of the Rapidan. “Everything indicates a concentrated attack on this front.”¹⁰⁵

Grant spent the last days of April adding the final brushstrokes to his attack plan. Ambrose Burnside, who commanded the 9th Corps, Grant’s four-division reserve, was ordered forward from his staging area near Annapolis and instructed to assume the responsibility for protecting the Army of the Potomac’s supply line south of Washington, freeing Meade’s troops for combat. “You can give orders to your troops to move to the front as soon as relieved,” Grant told Meade on April 27.¹⁰⁶ Because Burnside had once commanded the Army of the Potomac and still ranked Meade on the army’s list of major generals, Grant believed it would spare both men embarrassment if the 9th Corps remained independent, at least for the moment. Accordingly, Grant addressed separate orders directly to Burnside, and kept Meade informed of what was happening. It was an awkward arrangement, but Grant had a warm spot in his heart for Burnside after his spirited defense of Knoxville.¹⁰⁷

April 27 was Grant’s forty-second birthday. On that day a year before, looking eastward from the Louisiana shore of the Mississippi, he had marshaled the Army of the Tennessee for crossing the mighty river and opening the final stages of the Vicksburg campaign. As one historian has observed, it was therefore a fitting day to fix the date for the commencement of the spring offensive that Grant hoped would bring the war to a close.¹⁰⁸ It was a Wednesday. Believing that it would take a week to put the Army of the Potomac in motion, he set the date for Wednesday next: May 4, 1864. Grant visited Meade that afternoon and gave his instructions orally. The direction of march was not disclosed, merely that the army would be crossing the Rapidan. Whether he intended to move west and turn Lee’s left, or east through the Wilderness, Grant kept to himself. The following day, he passed the word to Sherman, Butler, and Sigel. “Get your forces up so as to move by the fifth of May,” Grant instructed his deputy in Georgia.¹⁰⁹ He ordered Butler to “Start your forces the night of the 4th so as to be as far up the James River as you can by daylight the morning of the 5th.”¹¹⁰ Sigel was told to begin his move up the valley on May 2, “unless you hear orders from me to the contrary.”¹¹¹

On April 29 Grant informed Halleck of the jump-off date, but continued to keep his plans under his hat. “Our advance will commence on the 4th of May. General Butler will operate on the south side of the James River, Richmond being his objective point. I will move against Lee’s Army attempting to turn him by one flank or the other. . . . My own notions about our line of march are entirely made up. But, as circumstances beyond my control may change them, I will only state that my efforts will be to bring Butler’s and Meade’s forces together.”¹¹²

Whether Halleck informed Lincoln of Grant’s message is unclear, but it seems likely because the following day the president wrote Grant a personal message of encouragement.

Lieutanant General Grant: Not expecting to see you again before the spring campaign opens, I wish to express, in this way, my entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it. The particulars of your plans I neither know, or seek to know. You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you. While I am very anxious that any great disaster, or the capture of our men in great numbers, shall be avoided, I know these points are less likely to escape your attention than they would be mine. If there is anything wanting, which is within my power to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now, with a brave Army, and a just cause, may God sustain you.

Yours very truly,

LINCOLN¹¹³

Grant replied the next day. After thanking Lincoln for his support, he took full responsibility for the coming campaign. Grant told the president that since he had become general in chief, he had been “astonished at the readiness with which everything asked for has been yielded without even an explanation being asked. Should my success be less than I desire, and expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you.” There would be no alibi for failure.¹¹⁴

At 3 P.M. on May 2, Grant put the armies in motion. “Move at the time indicated in my instructions,” he wired Sherman. “All will strike together.”¹¹⁵ Butler was told, “Start on the date given in my letter. There will be no delay with this army.”¹¹⁶ Meade, with whom Grant was in continuous contact, was instructed orally to take the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan, using the lower fords, i.e., the fords to the left (Lee’s right). Whether Meade anticipated moving left is unclear, but his orders to the army were prepared with textbook precision. Sheridan’s cavalry would seize the Germanna and Ely fords at midnight on May 3 and hold them until the infantry arrived. Germanna Ford was ten miles below Lee’s right, Ely was six miles below that. Both had been used by Meade when he crossed the Rapidan in November, and the topography was familiar to the army. Two infantry corps, commanded respectively by Gouverneur Kemble Warren and John Sedgwick, would cross at Germanna Ford and move quickly toward Wilderness Tavern, five miles south. Winfield Scott Hancock’s 2nd Corps, the bulk of the artillery, and the army’s train would cross at Ely Ford and move in a parallel direction toward Chancellorsville. In a separate communication, Grant ordered Burnside to bring his corps forward as soon as Meade crossed the river. “Your line of march, after crossing the Rapidan, will be in the rear of the right flank of the Army of the Potomac.”¹¹⁷ At noon on May 3 Grant told Halleck, “This Army moves tomorrow morning.” The direction would be to the left.¹¹⁸ Grant counted on taking Lee by surprise. With a series of forced marches, he planned to have the army through the Wilderness before battle was joined.

In the West, Grant had capitalized on Southern errors. At Donelson, Gideon Pillow’s decision to return to the fort after opening the Nashville road allowed Grant to invest the garrison and storm the revetments. At Shiloh, Beauregard’s order to reduce the hornets’ nest before pressing on permitted Grant to re-form his line for a successful last stand before sunset. At Vicksburg, the failure of Pemberton and Johnston to join forces enabled Grant to slip between them and defeat each in turn. And at Chattanooga, the dispatch of Longstreet’s corps to Knoxville and Bragg’s faulty deployment of his infantry rendered an impregnable position vulnerable.

Robert E. Lee was not prone to mistakes. If he made one, he rectified it quickly. At noon on May 2, as Grant ordered the Union armies forward, the fifty-seven-year-old Confederate icon was meeting with his corps and division commanders near the crest of Clark’s Mountain, ten miles in a direct line from Grant’s headquarters at Culpeper. From the ridge, some 700 feet above the Rapidan floodplain, a panoramic view unfolded, a living map of the future battlefield. Like Grant, Lee gave his lieutenants enormous leeway in battle, and he wanted them to digest the geographic features of the land over which they would be fighting. For the past two months, the rebel chief had studied Grant’s options, placing himself in the shoes of the Union commander. Gleaning what he could from an assortment of intelligence sources, and studying the same maps Grant was using, he had arrived at what he thought was the answer. Pointing downstream, well below the right anchor of his own line, he announced simply, “Grant will cross by one of these fords.” Lee said he expected Grant to throw the Army of the Potomac across either the Germanna or the Ely ford, and he let it go at that. The evidence was not all in, the tents of Meade’s army had not been struck, and at this point his conclusion was merely an educated guess.

Whether it was a guess or not, Lee’s plan, according to his most assiduous biographer, was already set. He would not defend the Rapidan or attack Grant while he was crossing. Instead, he would wait until the entire Army of the Potomac had crossed to the south bank of the river, and then, when they and their immense trains were entangled in the Wilderness, fall upon their right flank with everything he had. In Lee’s view, the Wilderness was a great equalizer. He would take advantage of it to whip Grant as thoroughly as possible, as quickly as possible, and send the Yankees reeling back across the Rapidan.¹¹⁹

On Tuesday, May 3, rebel lookouts on Clark’s Mountain reported heavy activity in Union encampments. As the day progressed, the activity heightened, into the evening hours. Near midnight, signalmen flashed the word to Lee’s headquarters. Long columns of troops were passing in front of campfires, marching toward the Rapidan. Back came the response: Were the troops moving upstream toward the Blue Ridge, or downstream toward the fords? The signalmen could not tell. It was too dark. But the Union army was in motion. It was now after midnight. May 4 would dawn in a few hours. Lee gambled. Prepare your troops to move right, he instructed his corps commanders.¹²⁰

The Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan without incident. Grant, who for the rest of his life believed he had taken Lee by surprise,¹²¹ wired the good news to Halleck 1 P.M. on May 4. “The crossing of the Rapidan effected. Forty-eight hours now will demonstrate whether the enemy intends giving battle this side of Richmond.”¹²² The answer came sooner than Grant anticipated.

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I. The bill reviving the position of lieutenant general made it explicit that the person holding that rank would “under the direction of the President, command the armies of the United States.” (Emphasis in original.)

II. Incredible as it may seem, Grant commanded the Army of the United States from the field with a staff of twelve: Brig. Gen. John Rawlins, chief of staff; Lt. Col. Theodore S. Bowers, Ass’t. Adj. Gen.; Lt. Col. Cyrus B. Comstock, senior aide-de-camp; Lt. Col. Orville E. Babcock, aide-de-camp; Lt. Col. Frederick T. Dent, aide-de-camp; Lt. Col. Horace Porter, aide-de-camp; Lt. Col. W. L. Duff, Inspector General; Lt. Col. William R. Rowley, secretary; Lt. Col. Adam Badeau, secretary; Capt. Ely S. Parker, Ass’t Adj. Gen.; Capt. Peter T. Hudson, aide-de-camp; 1st Lt. William M. Dunn, acting aide-de-camp. Two additional officers, Capts. George W. Leck and H. W. Janes, were left to handle details in Washington. Four men were regular army officers and graduates of West Point (Comstock, Porter, Babcock, and Dent), and Dent, who was Grant’s roommate at the academy, was also his brother-in-law. The other officers were volunteers, Rawlins, Rowley, and Parker, a full-blooded Indian, hailing from Galena. Two officers, Adam Badeau and Theodore Bowers, had been newsmen in civil life. See Grant to Halleck, April 6, 1864, 10 The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant 221–22, John Y. Simon, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).

III. The horses of Civil War generals were often as recognizable to the troops as the generals themselves. Lee’s iron gray Traveller and Stonewall Jackson’s Little Sorrel became Confederate legends. Meade’s battle-scarred mount Baldy was wounded twice at Bull Run, left on the field for dead at Antietam, shot between the ribs at Gettysburg, yet survived his owner by ten years. Philip H. Sheridan’s spirited Morgan Rienzi (renamed Winchester) stood seventeen hands and carried Sheridan on his famous ride to the battle of Cedar Creek in October 1864. Many who saw Rienzi considered him the strongest horse in the country. George Thomas rode a heavy-bodied bay named Billy (after Thomas’s friend Sherman), a horse, like its owner, that was deliberate in its movements and not easily disturbed by the turmoil of battle. Sherman rode a half-Thoroughbred, Sam, a horse of great speed and endurance who lived on in retirement until 1884. Theo. F. Radenbough, “War Horses,” in 4 Photographic History of the Civil War 289–316, Francis T. Miller, ed. (New York: Review of Reviews, 1911).