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AS DROUGHT SETTLED over northern Mississippi that summer, parching streams that might nourish soldiers and horses on the march, Ulysses S. Grant, ensconced in Corinth, settled in for a period of defensive operations distinguished by small, hard-fought skirmishes. With guerrilla bands marauding through his district, he had to defend long railway lines, telegraph wires, and wide rivers located deep in enemy territory. Local inhabitants acted as spies, monitoring his every move. All the while, Halleck hollowed out his command, forcing him to divert several divisions to Don Carlos Buell to fight rebels in eastern Tennessee. Grant no longer engaged in wishful thinking about latent pro-Union sentiment simmering in the region. As he saw southerners flocking to partisan cavalry units and smuggling contraband, the Confederacy struck him as more monolithic and formidable than ever.
Such civilian support for the rebellion would lead to a broadening of the war’s scope, an evolution previewed by Washburne telling Grant how the Lincoln administration would pursue “a vigorous prosecution of the war by all the means known to civilized warfare.”1 On August 2, Grant was instructed to “live upon the land,” possibly spawning clashes with farmers. Endorsing a ruthless new phase of operations, Halleck urged Grant to blur distinctions between southern soldiers and citizens: “If necessary, take up all active sympathizers and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves and take their property for public use.”2 However tough his style of warfare, Grant never behaved vindictively toward the southern people. “I do not recollect having arrested and confined a citizen (not a soldier) during the entire rebellion,” he maintained.3
Colonel Theodore Bowers, new to Grant’s staff, told how Grant protected local residents from rough handling by his soldiers. One day Grant “came across a straggler who had stopped at a house and assaulted a woman. The general sprang from his horse, seized a musket from the hands of a soldier, and struck the culprit over the head with it, sending him sprawling to the ground.” From the time he was a boy, Grant had defended the weak and felt especially protective toward defenseless women. “He always had a peculiar horror of such crimes,” his future aide Horace Porter remarked. “They were very rare in our war, but when brought to his attention the general showed no mercy to the culprit.”4
Reluctantly accepting the arduous nature of a protracted conflict and knowing he might not return home for the remainder of the war, Grant brought Julia and the children to Corinth. Condemned to a vagabond existence, they had boarded with Jesse and Hannah in Covington, but Julia was no more popular now with her in-laws than before, when she was rejected as a spoiled southern belle. “Julia says that she is satisfied that the best place for the children is in Covington,” Grant reported to his sister Mary. “But there are so many of them that she sometimes feels as if they were not wanted.”5 Grant hoped Julia and William Hillyer’s wife might share housekeeping duties in St. Louis, where Julia could see Colonel Dent. That May, Grant had instructed Julia that he did not want her to own slaves any longer “as it is not probable that we will ever live in a slave state again.”6
As the Union army pushed deeper into the Mississippi Valley, fugitive slaves sought asylum in Grant’s camps; every time he sent out an expedition, it came back trailed by a flock of hopeful runaways. Ohio chaplain John Eaton likened the influx to “the oncoming of cities” and said “a blind terror stung them and an equally blind hope allured them, and to us they came.”7 “Masters and Mistresses so thronged my tent as to absorb my whole time,” Sherman groused.8 Grant’s thinking underwent a metamorphosis about what to do with them. In early June, he still blamed intransigent abolitionists for prolonging the war, but action in Washington recast the issue. Congress had already passed legislation preventing the return of runaway slaves, even if their masters were loyal. Then, in July, Congress passed the Militia Act, which enhanced the status of free blacks by enabling them to serve at reduced wages in northern militia as part of each state’s federally assigned quota of recruits. Lawmakers also approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared “forever free of their servitude” slaves who fled from disloyal masters to Union lines. The act, however amorphous and poorly worded, was a step in the right direction. The two laws shifted the tenor of the war as Union armies in the South became instruments of liberation, not just agents of punishment. That same month Lincoln decided to issue his Emancipation Proclamation to cover slaves in areas not yet occupied by Union forces.
Writing to Grant on July 25, Washburne coached him on how to advance in the military by adhering closely to Lincoln’s new policy. “The negroes must now be made our auxiliaries in every possible way they can be, whether by working or fighting. That General who takes the most decided step in this respect will be held in the highest estimation by the loyal and true men in the country.”9 Having received these marching orders from his political patron, Grant heeded his advice and succeeded in the war for far more than just his military prowess. By subscribing to administration policy on slavery, he stood apart from renegade generals like George McClellan, a reactionary Democrat and an open racist who hated the thought of abolition, or generals like John Frémont and David Hunter, who brazenly issued freelance emancipation proclamations in their departments.
On August 11, Grant issued new orders to bring his practice into conformity with federal guidelines. He laid down strict instructions that no runaway slaves should be returned to masters, and they should be employed as teamsters, cooks, hospital attendants, and nurses. Most important, large numbers were set to work erecting fortifications. For all that, Grant carefully warned his men not to woo slaves from their masters, but only accept them if they showed up of their own volition. Since the slaves were often ragged, ill clad, and frightened, Grant made sure they were issued shoes, pants, and tobacco, and he wrote tenderly about them in letters: “I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end.”10 What he did know was that spiriting away slaves would destroy the southern economy in a steady progression toward total warfare.
Too thinly manned to hold so much acreage in northern Mississippi and western Tennessee—fifty thousand men was a pittance in this huge territory—Grant had to postpone major offensive operations. In September, he eyed warily the movements of two Confederate generals in the area. Leading fifteen thousand men, Sterling Price seized from a Union garrison the town of Iuka, a critical supply depot and railroad junction near Corinth in northeast Mississippi. Price hoped it would serve as a platform for invading Tennessee. A lawyer and politician born in Virginia, who fought gallantly in Mexico and then resided in Missouri, the silver-haired Price was a portly man with a rosy complexion and receding hairline. Earl Van Dorn had a shock of unruly hair, a truculent glare, and a bold handlebar mustache. Educated at West Point, he had experience in Mexico and fighting Indians. Grant’s main fear was that Van Dorn would roar up from the south while Price swarmed in from the east, the two Confederate armies squeezing Corinth in a pincer movement. To head that off, he prepared to seize the initiative and assail Price at Iuka before Van Dorn strengthened him. Had Price and Van Dorn acted swiftly, they might have trapped him. Instead they gave him the necessary time to fortify his forces and assume the offensive.
The Confederate pause also allowed Grant to recuperate from another bout of ill health. For several weeks, he had lost his appetite, shed pounds, and awakened with cold night sweats. Fatigued, he told Julia in mid-September that he never got more than five hours’ sleep and had skipped sleep altogether twice the previous week. With his devout belief in concentrating forces, he was trying desperately to marshal his scattered troops before taking on Price at Iuka. His plan envisioned a double-pronged strike that would have General William S. Rosecrans sneak up on Iuka from the south while General Edward O. C. Ord crept in from the northwest. With his irrepressible optimism, Grant hoped to surround the Confederates and bag Price’s army or annihilate it. It was a simple plan, albeit one that required pinpoint accuracy. Once Price was taken care of, Grant planned to turn his attention to Van Dorn.
For the battle of Iuka, Grant took up position in Burnsville, which lay between Corinth and the enemy town. Before dawn on September 19, Ord began to advance on Iuka from the northwest, but was told by Grant to delay his final push until he heard gunfire from the south, signaling Rosecrans’s arrival. Ord halted four miles short of town. With the poor country roads of northern Mississippi, Rosecrans’s movements were hampered by thick woods and plentiful streams and he didn’t reach Iuka till late afternoon. Unfortunately, the wind blew the wrong way, and owing to this “acoustic shadow,” neither Ord nor Grant heard Rosecrans engaging the enemy and being driven back that evening. In frustration, a baffled Rosecrans sputtered, “Where in the name of God is Grant?”11 Not until nightfall did Grant even know a battle had occurred.
In his usual bold style—momentum was everything for Grant—he ordered Ord and Rosecrans to renew their attack at dawn and Iuka fell in short order. Once again, the second day of battle had determined the outcome. Exploiting a critical road overlooked by Rosecrans, Price and his troops fled the town with ghostly ease. Around 9 a.m. Grant arrived in the empty town and took over the storehouse of Confederate supplies. If he had little to show for his conquest, he had blocked Price from entering Tennessee, which, he believed, would have amounted to “a catastrophe.”12 For the moment, he retained a high opinion of Rosecrans, although it was about to be tested.13 A West Point graduate, Rosecrans was a cordial, outgoing man who enjoyed debating the fine points of Catholic theology and was well liked by his troops, who referred to him affectionately as “Old Rosy” in homage to his rubicund complexion and name. Grant thought him “a fine fellow” and a brave soldier, but with his usual exaggerated trust in people, he found it hard to believe Rosecrans secretly planted newspaper stories against him and promoted himself at his expense.
Right after taking Iuka, Grant went to St. Louis to improve his health and lobby Major General Samuel R. Curtis for additional troops. One correspondent observed that he appeared “remarkably well, although bearing some marks of the fatigues of his summer campaigns.”14 While in St. Louis, according to one well-placed onlooker, Grant indulged in a drinking binge. Franklin A. Dick, a St. Louis lawyer, bumped into Grant’s old friend Henry T. Blow, Taylor’s brother, who said Grant was “tight as a brick,” as Dick tattled promptly to Attorney General Edward Bates. “Believing, as I do, that much of our ill success results from drunken officers, I intend to do my duty in reporting such crime upon their part.”15 Bates duly conveyed to Stanton the letter, which wound up on Halleck’s desk. If the incident occurred as Dick alleged, it conformed to the pattern of Grant allowing himself a spree, not at moments of responsibility, but in the aftermath of a major battle when he briefly traveled to another city and could relax his vigilance. His men would then never see him drink and he was temporarily free of Rawlins’s supervision. Grant usually had enough control over his drinking urges that he could confine his binges to such occasions.
In Sterling Price, Grant had met a strong-willed adversary. Not resigned to the loss of Corinth—Grant had returned there on September 30—Price teamed up with Van Dorn, assembled a force of twenty-two thousand soldiers, and headed for the town. The battle began on October 3 with high-pitched yells from hell-bent rebel soldiers and proved of short duration but unusual savagery. Showing uncommon fury, the Confederates pounded their foes with waves of attacks that herded them back to the town’s inner defenses. This first day featured such a broiling sun that soldiers were forbidden to cook on open fires. Old Rosy was all over the battlefield, rallying his men. After one day his clothing was sprinkled with blood and pocked with bullet holes. When night came, water wagons rumbled through the Union camp, dispensing water to dehydrated soldiers. By noon the next day, Rosecrans counterattacked, putting the thirsty, exhausted rebels to flight and leaving a battlefield strewn with corpses. For such a short time span, the death toll was gigantic: 2,500 for the blue, 5,000 for the gray.
For all his horseback heroics at Corinth, Rosecrans committed a costly error by not pursuing the retreating Confederates, whose escape was slowed by the Hatchie River. Instead of dashing in hot pursuit, Rosecrans waited fifteen hours, took the wrong road, then got bogged down by an unwieldy wagon train, allowing the enemy to escape. This began Grant’s progressive disillusionment with Old Rosy, who had twice allowed Confederate armies to get away. Rosecrans didn’t take well to direction and always fancied himself in command. Fortunately for Grant, Halleck soon transferred Rosecrans to the Army of the Cumberland in eastern Tennessee, replacing Buell. Julia Grant remembered the day her husband came back “smilingly holding up a slip of paper” that announced the transfer.16
By trouncing the enemy in northern Mississippi, Grant had inflicted a smashing blow against the Confederacy. “I congratulate you and all concerned on your recent battles and victories,” Lincoln telegraphed Grant in their first direct communication.17 Grant had also walled off western Tennessee from further northward encroachment, shutting down offensive Confederate operations in the Mississippi Valley for the rest of the war. Momentarily reverting to wild optimism, he told his sister Mary, “It does look to me that we now have such an advantage over the rebels that there should be but little more hard fighting.”18 Even though insufficient troops forced him into temporary inaction, he had ensured the safety of the area under his jurisdiction and began to covet the bigger prize of Vicksburg. As the South comprehended how much had been sacrificed at Iuka and Corinth, rage fastened on Van Dorn. As one southern politician observed, “He is regarded as the source of all our woes . . . The atmosphere is dense with horrid narratives of his negligence, whoring, and drunkenness.”19 A court of inquiry exonerated him of charges of being drunk at Corinth.
Grant rose on an upward trajectory that carried him ever higher. On October 16, he was appointed to command the Department of the Tennessee, with headquarters in Jackson, Tennessee. This enormous district encompassed parts of western Kentucky and Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and southern Illinois. Now replenished with troops, Grant was firmly on the offensive, his natural element, as his thoughts turned toward the Confederate citadel at Vicksburg, Mississippi. He conceived a plan for a major offensive that would sweep south from Grand Junction, just across the state line in Tennessee, moving down along the Mississippi Central Railroad. To his great dismay, some soldiers engaged in widespread looting that eroded military discipline. The march to Grand Junction, said an appalled journalist, “was marked nearly every mile of the way by burned buildings and fences, and was literally shown by clouds of smoke in daylight and pillars of fire by night. It had an immense concourse of camp followers who stole horses, mules and vehicles along the route for their own transportation, and robbed houses of everything they fancied.”20 An indignant Grant lambasted soldiers who violated civilian property: “Such acts are punishable with death by the Articles of War and existing orders. They are calculated to destroy the efficiency of an army and to make open enemies of those who before if not friends were at least noncombatants.”21
Assisted by promised reinforcements, Grant set his army in motion with his usual pugnacious, hard-driving spirit. Returning to Mississippi, he pushed south down the railroad tracks. He knew this was a perilous operation, for the farther south he penetrated, the longer the supply lines left behind; conversely, the Confederates, when falling back, collected all the garrisons that had formerly safeguarded railway stops. He also had to parry nocturnal guerrilla raids that constantly menaced his march. “I told the inhabitants of Mississippi . . . that if they allowed their sons and brothers to remain within my lines and receive protection, and then during the night sneak out and burn my bridges and shoot officers, I would desolate their country for forty miles around every place where it occurred. This put an end to bridge-burning.”22 In the march toward Vicksburg, Grant made steady progress and after five weeks had gotten as far south as Grenada.
Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee, emboldened by Second Manassas, contemplated a daring raid against the North, taking the war to the enemy heartland. When crossing the Potomac into Maryland, his often-shoeless army had the appearance of an unwashed rabble. One Frederick resident watched in disgust as they marched by: “I have never seen such a mass of filthy strong-smelling men . . . They are the roughest looking set of creatures I ever saw, their features, hair and clothing matted with dirt and filth, and the scratching they kept up gave warrant of vermin in abundance.”23 They encountered Union troops, led by McClellan, in the town of Sharpsburg, as the two armies faced off across winding Antietam Creek. On September 17, 1862, they clashed in a battle of staggering ferocity that produced more than twenty thousand casualties, making it the single deadliest day in American history. If by most measures the battle was a draw, it foiled Lee’s plans to invade the North and banished him from Maryland, giving Unionists cause to celebrate. Though he had shamefully let Lee’s army slip away across the Potomac, Little Mac could not refrain from crowing: “Those in whose judgment I rely tell me that I fought the battle splendidly and that it is a masterpiece of art.”24 In truth, McClellan had missed a magnificent chance to destroy a badly outnumbered army and it soon ended his military career.
Antietam represented an important juncture in the war. On the eve of battle, the British and French had seriously entertained recognizing the Confederacy, and an indisputable triumph by Lee might have tilted the scales toward such a decision. Now Confederate diplomacy was frozen in its tracks. Still more momentous was that Lincoln seized on the quasi-victory as the occasion to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, with the Confederate states given until January 1 to renounce rebellion or see their slaves freed. At Secretary of State Seward’s suggestion, Lincoln had awaited good news from the Union army to make this decision public, lest it appear a sign of desperation. Although slavery in the border states remained untouched by the proclamation, the war aims now expanded to include emancipation. The conflict had edged past the point of no return, making compromise impossible. To Grant, Halleck telegraphed the seismic shift: “We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them . . . Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat.”25
Every northern commander was sucked into the vortex of the fugitive slave issue, none more so than Grant in the heart of the cotton kingdom. As plantation owners fled his advancing army, thousands of slaves raced to freedom in Grant’s camps. Temporary towns of makeshift dwellings, overcrowded with frightened black refugees, sprang up on the fringes of army posts. The slaves’ lamentable condition demanded urgent attention. “There were men, women, and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude, often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escapes,” wrote John Eaton, who saw slaves dropping by the wayside. “Sometimes they were intelligent and eager to help themselves; often they were bewildered or stupid or possessed by the wildest notions of what liberty might mean . . . Some radical step needed to be taken.”26
At first Grant was perplexed by these masses of dislocated people. “Citizens south of us are leaving their homes & Negroes coming in by wagon loads,” he wired Halleck, adding plaintively, “What will I do with them?”27 Many northerners feared an abrupt influx of blacks, making it essential to employ them in the South. Nobody stood under any illusions about the extent of northern bigotry. On November 13, 1862, Grant took his first historic step in dealing with runaway slaves, naming Eaton as superintendent of contrabands for the Mississippi Valley—“contraband” of war being the term of art for runaway slaves coined by General Benjamin Butler in 1861 as a way to bypass the Fugitive Slave Act, then still in effect. A farmer’s son, born in New Hampshire, Eaton had graduated from Dartmouth College and served as school superintendent in Toledo, Ohio. After attending Andover Theological Seminary, he was assigned as chaplain to the Twenty-Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry. A caring, passionate advocate for the former slaves, he faced the daunting need to shelter, employ, and prepare them for the demands of freedom. He set up large contraband camps where slaves could be educated, treated for medical problems, and set to work picking cotton as hired hands. Eaton felt awed by the godlike responsibility thrust upon him—“There was no plan in this exodus, no Moses to lead it”—and sensed it would be “an enterprise beyond the possibility of human achievement.”28
When Eaton first met Grant at La Grange, Tennessee, he expected to find “an incompetent and disagreeable man” whose weather-beaten face would betray signs of dissipation.29 Instead, he was pleasantly surprised to discover Grant’s innate modesty, simplicity, and sobriety. Other than the shoulder straps that signified a major general, Grant was indistinguishable from his officers. Grant knew that the deeper his army penetrated into cotton country, the more he would have to grapple with the destiny of a slave population fast emancipating itself. Eaton was stunned that Grant’s thinking already “far outstripped” the “meager instructions” he had received from Halleck.30
In fact, Grant’s imagination had charted the entire arc of the freed slaves from wartime runaways to full voting citizenship. This man who had so recently balked at abolitionism now made a startling leap into America’s future. To Eaton, Grant delineated a lengthy list of useful tasks that “contrabands” could perform, with the men building bridges, roads, and earthworks or chopping wood for Mississippi steamers, while women worked in kitchens and hospitals. But this merely served as prelude to something much bigger. “He then went on to say that when it had been made clear that the Negro, as an independent laborer . . . could do these things well, it would be very easy to put a musket in his hands and make a soldier of him, and if he fought well, eventually to put the ballot in his hand and make him a citizen. Obviously I was dealing with no incompetent, but a man capable of handling large issues. Never before in those early and bewildering days had I heard the problem of the future of the Negro attacked so vigorously and with such humanity combined with practical good sense.”31 This sudden enlargement of Grant’s thinking and concern for the ex-slaves shows how the war had reshaped his views on fundamental issues.
Grant gave Eaton orders to establish the first contraband camp at Grand Junction, Tennessee, where thousands of former slaves had congregated. A central aim was to have newly liberated blacks work on abandoned plantations, picking cotton and corn that could be shipped north to assist the war effort. “We together fixed the prices to be paid for the negro labor,” Grant recalled, “whether rendered to the government or to individuals.”32 It was a remarkable moment—the sudden advent of a labor market for former slaves, who would now be rewarded for picking cotton. Grant found himself overseeing a vast social experiment, inducting his black charges into the first stages of citizenship. Taking the proceeds from their labor, he created a fund that was “not only sufficient to feed and clothe all, old and young, male and female, but to build them comfortable cabins, hospitals for the sick, and to supply them with many comforts they had never known before.”33 This brand-new Grant never wavered in his commitment to freed people. It would be army commanders in the field, not Washington politicians, who worked out many of the critical details in caring for the recently enslaved. Frederick Douglass never forgot the service Grant rendered to his people, arguing that General Grant “was always up with, or in advance of authority furnished from Washington in regard to the treatment of those of our color then slaves,” and he cited the food, work, medical care, and education Grant supplied in the months before the official Emancipation Proclamation.34
In the fall elections, Lincoln paid a fearful price for that impending proclamation. Berating Republicans as “Nigger Worshippers,” Democrats conjured up fantastic “scenes of lust and rapine” in the South and “a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers” in the North as the likely consequences of emancipation.35 Although Republicans retained their hold over Congress, they surrendered twenty-eight House seats to Democrats and lost governorships in New York and New Jersey as well as statehouses in Indiana and Illinois.
Lincoln’s woes as a liberator were compounded by the ongoing disaster of Union military performance in Virginia. With elections safely behind him, he acted swiftly to sack George McClellan, who had responded neither to gentle nudges nor outright pressure to become more aggressive. Without referring to McClellan by name, Grant later made a comment that seems to allude to him: “The trouble with many of our generals in the beginning was that they did not believe in the war . . . They had views about slavery, protecting rebel property, State rights—political views that interfered with their judgments.”36 It was Grant’s stalwart faith in Lincoln’s war aims, coupled with his military acumen, that made him the ideal commander.
To head the Army of the Potomac McClellan was succeeded by Ambrose Burnside, a West Pointer from Rhode Island, a balding, congenial man with fluffy side-whiskers that jutted from his face and formed a mustache across his upper lip. A military lightweight, Burnside was in way over his head, betraying as much self-doubt as Little Mac had flaunted conceit. Grant had a certain fondness for Burnside, even though he saw him as unsuited to command an army. “No one knew this better than he did,” Grant remarked.37
Lincoln continued to be cursed in his choice of generals. On a frigid day in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, Burnside sent wave after wave of Union soldiers to their death against the well-fortified positions of Robert E. Lee’s army. If there was one Union loss during the war that looked like outright suicide, this was it. In the one-sided battle, nearly thirteen thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded. A distraught Burnside had the decency to admit responsibility, while Lincoln, Halleck, and Stanton were all blamed by a northern public fed up with shocking losses. In the resulting demoralization, cabinet members began to plot against one another. “If there is a worse place than hell,” Lincoln admitted to a visitor, “I am in it.”38 On January 25, 1863, Lincoln axed Burnside and replaced him with Joseph Hooker, dubbed “Fighting Joe,” another general who would be undone by overweening self-confidence. A weary despair fell over Union ranks. “Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak,” a New York corporal wrote home. “I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”39 Repeated Union failures in the East opened the way for a military hero to emerge in the West.
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THROUGHOUT NOVEMBER 1862, Grant maintained his steady progress south along the Mississippi railroad, seizing Holly Springs and constructing a supply depot there before advancing as far south as Oxford, where he established his headquarters in early December. He now stood halfway to his overriding objective, Vicksburg, burrowing deeper into enemy territory. For his army to survive, he had to keep open a railroad 190 miles long, threatened by bitter, hostile residents. Oxford was an oasis, ringed by danger, “an island surrounded by a sea of fire, the enemy in front and rear, opposing progress,” wrote Rawlins.40 Always sensitive to the war’s tragic nature, he described for his sister the Union army’s impact on the cloistered university town: “This city, the seat of science for the South, toward which they pointed with pride and exaltation as the place rivaling ‘Yale’ for the education of their sons and daughters, is now one vast camp, and the University buildings of which they so justly boasted are the hospital for the sick, wounded soldier.”41
With his army deep in the land of cotton, Grant had to deal with swarms of northern traders who maneuvered to cash in on the North’s consuming need for this major export. Southern planters, stymied by the Union blockade, searched for ways to sell their product. Union armies required prodigious quantities of cotton for articles such as tents, and northern mills were starved for the raw material. There was even fear Great Britain might lean toward the Confederacy to keep its textile mills humming. “See that all possible facilities are afforded for getting out cotton,” Halleck instructed Grant. “It is deemed important to get as much as we can into market.”42 Grant was outraged that gold paid for southern cotton might be utilized by rebels to buy arms against his men. After Washington overruled his order to prevent gold from being used in such transactions, he abided by a decision that required cotton traders to possess two permits: one from the Treasury Department, another from the local army.
It proved tough to enforce these rules. Cotton fetched such exorbitant prices in the North that huge fortunes were reaped overnight, and army officers were regularly bribed to wink at smuggling. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana was shocked by the wholesale corruption infecting the Union army: “Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay.”43
Such practices infuriated Grant, who also fretted that traders might transmit military intelligence to the enemy—a special concern with the Vicksburg Campaign under way. Instead of allowing private traders to enrich themselves through price gouging, he wanted the government to purchase cotton at fixed prices. One journalist remembered that “Grant and Rawlins abominated cotton buyers as a class. In private conversations to the end of the war [Grant] always spoke of them as a gang of thieves.”44 Not surprisingly Grant felt a special antagonism against war profiteers, who not only extracted southern cotton but often vended useful articles, such as medicine, flour, and salt, to southern buyers. At a time of rampant anti-Semitism, “Jews” ended up as a shorthand for unscrupulous traders. As Sherman wrote from Memphis, “I found so many Jews & Speculators here trading in cotton . . . that I have felt myself bound to stop it. This Gold has but one use, the purchase of arms & ammunition.”45 Of course, the great majority of those involved in the illicit trade were gentiles, but Jews were much easier to scapegoat.
By early December 1862, Grant had zeroed in on Jewish traders as the source of the trouble. During his southward advance, he issued orders that all traders should stay in the rear of his army, but on December 5 he complained to Sherman that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.”46 In a mood of mounting anger, Grant was not content to chastise Jewish traders: he wanted to banish all Jews. On December 17, he issued the most egregious decision of his career. “General Orders No. 11” stipulated that “the Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department. Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave.”47 It was the most sweeping anti-Semitic action undertaken in American history.
On the same day Grant issued the order, he wrote a letter expressing a conspiratorial view of Jewish traders, endowing them with almost diabolical powers, saying “they come in with their Carpet sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any wood yard or landing on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy Cotton themselves they will act as Agents for someone else who will be at a Military post, with a Treasury permit to receive Cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold.”48
There are compelling reasons to think Grant promulgated his infamous order in a fit of Oedipal rage against his father, who materialized in Mississippi with three Jewish merchants from Cincinnati, the Mack brothers, who hoped to inveigle cotton-trading permits. All year, in an evolving family psychodrama, Grant’s anger had risen against Jesse, who sought to exploit his son’s position to gain appointments for relatives. Ulysses had also been annoyed when his father tried to borrow money from Julia and scolded Fred for supposed misbehavior. “I feel myself worse used by my own family than by strangers,” Grant protested to Julia, “and although I do not think father . . . would do me injustice, yet I believe he is influenced, and always may be, to my prejudice.”49 With Julia and the children rootless and adrift, the tension between her and her in-laws complicated life for Grant, the enforced separation from his family replicating the harrowing situation of his early army years. Worsening matters was the way Grant’s sisters mistreated his itinerant family, complaining about the money he paid them to care for his children. “Such unmitigated meanness as is shown by the girls makes me ashamed of them,” Grant told Julia.50
On November 23, Grant sent his father a scalding letter about his treatment of Julia. He tore away his inhibitions, venting his fury: “I am only sorry your letter, and all that comes from you speaks so condescendingly of everything Julia says, writes or thinks. You . . . are so prejudiced against her that she could not please you. This is not pleasing to me.”51 It was while Grant was seething over this matter that his father and the Mack brothers appeared seeking cotton-trading permits. Because the brothers were large clothing contractors who provided uniforms to the Union army, they desperately needed cotton. They promised to give Jesse Grant a quarter of the profits if he prevailed upon his son to bestow a permit to buy cotton for shipment to New York.
According to one version of the story, Jesse first appeared in Oxford alone and spent a pleasant day or two with his son, who never suspected his true intentions. Ulysses entertained the Mack brothers cordially when they arrived until he spied their true purpose. At that point, said one journalist, “The general’s anger was bitter and malignant toward these men . . . because of their having entrapped his old father into such an unworthy undertaking.”52 Of course, Jesse was a willing accomplice in the whole scheme. Once he saw the plot that was afoot, Grant had them all shipped north by the next train. Another version of the story says Grant was tipped off by aides to Jesse’s imminent arrival with the Mack brothers and issued General Orders No. 11 as a preemptive strike against them before they arrived.53
Whatever the exact sequence of events, Grant must have felt wounded by the situation, for he had railed at traders only to discover his father in cahoots with them. Grant’s infamous order was a self-inflicted wound, issued at a moment of pique and over the objections of Rawlins. Besides pointing to the order’s offensive nature, Rawlins predicted it would be countermanded by Washington. “Well, they can countermand this from Washington if they like,” Grant rejoined, “but we will issue it anyhow.”54 When he refused a trading permit to the Mack brothers, they pulled out of the agreement with Jesse, who then sued them for breach of contract. In undertaking the lawsuit, Jesse guaranteed more bad publicity for his son. The judge overseeing the case declared that “the whole of the Trade disclosed in this proceeding was not only disgraceful, but tends only to disgrace the country. It is the price of blood.”55
Lincoln perceived the political damage and injustice of General Orders No. 11 and rescinded it two weeks after its issuance. When outraged Jewish leaders descended on the White House, he reassured them that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”56 Hesitant to rebuke Grant harshly lest it damage their relationship, Lincoln was firm in his decision, if relatively gentle in his reprimand. He did not ask Grant for an apology, letting others handle it. On January 21, Halleck transmitted to Grant Lincoln’s reaction to his order: “The President has no objection to your expelling traders & Jew pedlars, which I suppose was the object of your order, but as it in terms Proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”57
While the Jewish press vehemently denounced Grant, the mainstream press also criticized him, The New York Times noting that the war had revealed in many gentiles “degrees of rascality . . . that might put the most accomplished Shylocks to the blush.”58 At first, Elihu Washburne sought to transform General Orders No. 11 into an enlightened action, “the wisest order yet made,” as he told Lincoln. He professed amazement at all the fuss. “Your order touching the Jews has kicked up quite a dust among the Israelites,” he told Grant. “They came here in crowds and gave an entirely false construction to the order.”59 Nonetheless, Washburne faced considerable opposition in the House, where a resolution was introduced to censure Grant. Extolling him as “one of our best generals,” Washburne got it tabled by a narrow margin of 56 to 53. Although Senator Lazarus W. Powell of Kentucky castigated Grant’s order as “illegal, tyrannical, cruel and unjust,” Republicans still defeated the censure effort by a 30 to 7 vote.60
Luckily, during the brief time Grant’s obnoxious directive was in effect, it was weakly enforced. The sole exception came in Paducah, Kentucky, where thirty Jewish families received notice to leave the city within twenty-four hours. These shell-shocked Jews hastily collected their belongings, shuttered their homes and shops, and boarded an Ohio River steamer. Several Jewish merchants in the group fired off a message to Lincoln protesting Grant’s order, calling it unconstitutional and asserting it would “place us besides a large number of other Jewish families of this town as outlaws before the whole world.”61 American Jews were highly patriotic—in a population of 150,000, ten thousand served the North or South in the war—and were horrified at being stigmatized. So painful was the abuse incited by Grant’s order that Philip Trounstine, a Jewish captain in the Fifth Ohio Cavalry, resigned from the army, explaining, “I can no longer bear the taunts and malice, of those to whom my religious opinions are known, brought on by the effect that, that order has instilled into their minds.”62
Julia Grant, who seldom breathed a syllable of criticism of her husband, pulled no punches about General Orders No. 11, terming it an “obnoxious order” and saying Grant afterward agreed that criticism of him was deserved “as he had no right to make an order against any special sect.”63 In his Memoirs, Grant passed over the incident in embarrassed silence. When Fred flagged the omission, Grant explained, “That was a matter long past and best not referred to.”64 As we shall see, Grant as president atoned for his action in a multitude of meaningful ways. He was never a bigoted, hate-filled man and was haunted by his terrible action for the rest of his days. Even on his deathbed, according to a friend, “it was a source of great regret to him that he had been instrumental in inflicting a wrong upon [the Jews].”65
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WHEN NEW ORLEANS fell to a Union fleet under David Farragut in April 1862, it left Vicksburg as the last forbidding Confederate fortress towering over the Mississippi River. As hub of a railroad network radiating outward to many parts of the Confederacy, the town was central to the Confederate psyche as well as its military strategy. If the Union could capture Vicksburg, it could slice the Confederacy in two, separating eastern soldiers from western supplies. With Vicksburg conquered, the Union would again enjoy untrammeled navigation of the Mississippi. Lincoln understood Vicksburg’s centrality, but committed a critical error in selecting the general for the task. That fall, he asked Admiral David D. Porter to recommend the best general for taking Vicksburg in conjunction with a naval force. “General Grant, Sir,” Porter replied crisply. “Vicksburg is within his department, but I presume he will send Sherman there, who is equal to the occasion.” “Well! Well! Admiral,” said the president, “I have in my mind a better general than either of them: that is McClernand, an old and intimate friend of mine.”66 According to Porter, Lincoln made the absurd statement that John A. McClernand, not Grant, had saved the day at Shiloh. It should be noted that Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles claimed it was Porter who wanted McClernand, hoping to be relieved from dealing with West Point generals.
Whether McClernand bamboozled Lincoln, or simply convinced the president to appoint him on political grounds, is unclear. With his lean, bearded face and keenly flashing eyes, the Kentucky-born McClernand could be crotchety and hotheaded one moment, funny and quick-witted the next. Before the war, he had served as a lawyer, a newspaper editor, and a congressman from Illinois. He had dealt extensively with Lincoln, having served with him in the state legislature and argued courtroom cases with and against him. McClernand’s military experience was sparse, confined to three months in the Black Hawk War of 1832, but that did not shrink his swollen ambitions or prevent him from becoming a brigadier general in 1861. As a leading War Democrat and a rousing orator with a gift for intrigue, he attracted many western recruits to the cause, and Lincoln, eager to shore up war support in southern Illinois, was loath to rebuff him. Fearful of treasonous home-front dissension, Lincoln grew alarmed by talk among antiwar, or Copperhead, Democrats of forging a “Northwest Confederacy” that would enter into a separate peace with the Confederacy. He needed McClernand to scotch any such effort. Although McClernand had been one of his commanders at Belmont, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh, Grant did not like the way he attempted to grab credit for victories and often overstated his contribution.
What Grant likely did not know was the extent to which McClernand exploited the drinking issue against him. “McClernand was very bitter against Grant from the start,” recalled one officer. “He tried to destroy Grant. He had Grant drunk at Belmont, drunk at Donelson, drunk at Shiloh. He had spies in every regiment. He and [General Benjamin] Prentiss gave rise to a good many of the tales concerning Grant’s use of liquor.”67 James H. Wilson confirmed McClernand’s condescending view of Grant as a drunken mediocrity: “[McClernand] naturally looked down on Grant as a poor little captain kicked out of service for drunkenness, and it galled him like the devil to serve under such a man.”68 The historian Kenneth P. Williams has documented that it was McClernand who instigated Captain William J. Kountz to level drinking charges against Grant at Cairo early in the war.69
By the fall of 1862, Lincoln regarded reopening the Mississippi as a paramount objective and was receptive when McClernand, unknown to Grant, lobbied him in Washington about leading a mission to take Vicksburg. With his customary vanity, McClernand proclaimed he was “tired of furnishing brains” for Grant’s forces and grumbled about West Point generals who mistook strategy for fighting.70 Backed by endorsements from eight governors, McClernand requested an independent command in Grant’s territory. His plan was to raise midwestern volunteers, assemble them in Memphis, then take them down the Mississippi to conquer Vicksburg. Lincoln had misgivings about McClernand, complaining that he was “brave and capable, but too desirous to be independent of everybody else.”71 Nevertheless, on October 7, he informed his cabinet that he would accede to McClernand’s request for an independent command. To please all parties, in his confidential order of October 21, Stanton resorted to creative ambiguity, telling McClernand his expedition would “remain subject to the designation of the General-in-Chief.” He also advised him to launch his campaign “when a sufficient force, not required by the operations of General Grant’s command, shall be raised.”72 So McClernand didn’t escape entirely from Halleck and Grant’s oversight. Gideon Welles suggested that Stanton and Halleck endorsed the McClernand plan because “Grant was not a special favorite with either. He had like Hooker the reputation of indulging too freely with whiskey to be always safe and reliable.”73
McClernand’s top secret mission leaked to the press and on October 30 The New York Times issued a paean to him: “Gen. McClernand has inspired the whole West with enthusiastic faith in his courage, uniting energy with military skill.”74 Grant was sourly aware of the rumors. “Two commanders on the same field are always one too many,” he believed, “and in this case I did not think the general selected had either the experience or the qualifications to fit him for so important a position.”75 At this point, Grant did something clever, asking Halleck to restate the exact scope of his authority. He really wanted to know whether he could deploy troops at Memphis intended for McClernand. A West Point cabal now swung into action, with Halleck retaliating against McClernand by wiring Grant: “You have command of all the troops sent to your Department, and have permission to fight the enemy when you please.”76 This was all the encouragement Grant needed to thrust McClernand aside and reassert control. Now engaged in a race to take Vicksburg, he wanted to beat McClernand at his own game. On November 14, in a daring, provocative move, he authorized Sherman to “leave Memphis with two full Divisions,” including regiments McClernand had raised for his own use.77
On December 8, Grant conferred with Sherman at Oxford and sketched out plans for the expedition down the Mississippi River in which Sherman would cooperate with a gunboat fleet under David Porter. He was to assail Vicksburg from a spot north of the city known as Chickasaw Bayou. Showing his usual teamwork with Sherman, Grant was to execute a parallel movement south along the Mississippi Central Railroad, marching all the way down to Jackson, which lay due east of Vicksburg. In this way Confederates in Vicksburg would be required to fight on two fronts, land and water, to save the city. On December 19, as he rushed to depart before McClernand arrived, Sherman, in a mood of heady optimism, left Memphis with a large army and boasted to Rawlins, “You may calculate on our being at Vicksburg by Christmas.”78
Such premature optimism didn’t reckon on the damage Nathan Bedford Forrest and Earl Van Dorn would inflict on Grant’s supply network. In mid-December, Forrest initiated a terrifying campaign against Union garrisons and cavalry in western Tennessee, ripping up railroad and telegraph lines and killing Union troops. A handsome man with blue eyes and steel-gray hair, a former slave dealer and planter with little formal schooling and no military training, Forrest was legendary for his ferocity in battle. In one newspaper advertisement for recruits, he exhorted them: “Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.”79 Like Grant, Forrest was known for demanding “unconditional surrender” from opponents. His rapid-fire, zigzagging movements on horseback perplexed Union cavalry. Though never intimidated by Forrest, Grant respected, even dreaded, his prowess. He thought him peerless among Confederate cavalry officers because his methods were so unorthodox and unpredictable.
On the morning of December 20, Grant was chatting with John Eaton when a telegram alerted him to a dreadful development: Earl Van Dorn, with 3,500 men, had audaciously swooped down at dawn on the Union supply depot at Holly Springs, torching millions of rations, dozens of train cars, and hundreds of bales of cotton, while also capturing 1,500 Union troops. Van Dorn regained the reputation he had lost at Corinth in an action that threatened to undermine Grant’s move on Vicksburg. As Grant read the telegram, Eaton recalled, “there was on his face no sign of disturbance that I could see, save a slight twitching of his mustache. He told me very quietly and dispassionately . . . that the night before he had telegraphed Colonel [Robert C.] Murphy warning him of Van Dorn’s approach and directing him to be on guard at every point. He had since been informed that Murphy was engaged at the time in some form of conviviality and let the warning pass unheeded.”80 Grant characterized the Holly Springs surrender as “the most disgraceful affair” that had occurred in his department.81 His soldiers had shown little stomach for a fight and capitulated with unseemly haste, while the young, inept Murphy had displayed “disloyalty” or “gross cowardice.”82 One southern journalist described wanton destruction at Holly Springs with “tents burning, torches flaming, Confederates shouting, guns popping, sabres clanking, abolitionists begging for mercy.”83 Loss of the supply depot temporarily derailed Grant’s overland campaign to Vicksburg, forcing him to retreat northward. Van Dorn had little time to luxuriate in his triumph. On May 7, 1863, he would be shot to death at his desk by a husband incensed at the license he had taken with the man’s wife.
Mississippi residents rejoiced at the Holly Springs raid until they realized Grant would now supply his army’s needs by living off the land. Rich foods began showing up in Union camps as wagons returned from countryside forays loaded with ham, corn, peas, beans, potatoes, and poultry. Herds of cattle were rounded up for slaughter. As Grant improvised these opportunistic methods to supply his army, he drew the invaluable lesson that his men could subsist for days, even weeks, off the produce of local farms, an insight that opened up the possibility of operating deep in enemy territory for prolonged periods.
As Sherman steamed toward Vicksburg with a huge flotilla of thirty-two thousand men, crammed aboard seventy transports, Grant lost communication with him for more than a week since Forrest had torn the telegraph wires to shreds. This meant that when Sherman launched his morning attack on the north side of Vicksburg on December 29, he had no inkling of the disaster that had befallen the Union entrepôt at Holly Springs or that Grant had retired northward. He faced the full strength of the enemy alone and his attack proved hopeless from the outset. First his soldiers had to traverse the treacherous terrain of Chickasaw Bayou, a maze of swamps and streams. When they reached high, dry ground on an open plateau, they made easy targets for Confederate marksmen firing from the bluffs. One Union general described being “mowed down by a storm of shells, grape and canister, and minié-balls which swept our front like a hurricane of fire.”84 More a massacre than a battle, the operation was over by noon, the Union side having suffered nearly 1,800 casualties. Sherman shouldered the blame. “Our loss has been heavy,” he wrote, “and we accomplished nothing.”85 So total was the communication blackout between Grant and Sherman that on January 5, Grant reassured Halleck of his firm “belief that news from the South that Vicksburg has fallen is correct.”86 It would be another four days before Grant received irrefutable confirmation of the horrific failure of Sherman’s mission.
The short-tempered McClernand was incensed when he realized Grant and Sherman had outsmarted him, stolen his troops, and excluded him from the Vicksburg operation. Erupting in indignation, he howled to Lincoln, “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me.”87 To remind Grant who was boss, McClernand took thirty thousand soldiers, packed them on fifty transports, and led them on what Grant termed “a wild goose chase” to attack Fort Hindman on the Arkansas River.88 Although McClernand captured thousands of prisoners and believed he deserved high praise for his initiative, Grant regarded the fort as devoid of strategic value and protested the wasted effort to Halleck. In reply, he got the exact message he longed to receive: “You are hereby authorised, to relieve Genl McClernand from command of the Expedition against Vicksburg, giving it to the next in rank, or taking it yourself.”89
Henceforth, Grant spearheaded the expedition down the Mississippi himself. While he would have preferred to hand the role to Sherman, the latter was junior in rank to McClernand; McClernand could hardly protest if Grant personally took command. In handling McClernand, Grant had shown tact in a thorny matter of rank and protocol and proved surprisingly adept at bureaucratic infighting. McClernand continued to rant against Grant and Halleck. On January 22, exasperated by his pushiness, Lincoln wrote to McClernand and laid down the law, hectoring him to accept as a fait accompli his subordinate position under Grant: “I have too many family controversies (so to speak) already on my hands to voluntarily take up another . . . Allow me to beg, that for your sake, for my sake, & for the country’s sake, you give your whole attention to the better work.”90 Periodically McClernand would pretend he retained a command independent of Grant, but Lincoln had spoken decisively and Grant had neatly consolidated his power.