Grant

CHAPTER TWENTY

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Caldron of Hell

BY LATE JUNE, Grant wanted Union forces to stake everything on destroying the two principal Confederate armies under Lee in Virginia and Johnston in Georgia. He was resigned to the stalemate of a long siege in Virginia. For the moment, his army was stifled by oppressive heat, the mercury reaching 108 degrees as a plague of flies descended on his soldiers. A ubiquitous, drought-induced dust reached almost biblical proportions. Visiting City Point, George Templeton Strong gagged at the arid landscape: “Drought and travel have done their work on this region and pulverized the soil . . . beyond what I had dreamed possible. Miles and miles of what were meadow and cornfield are now seas of impalpable dust of unknown depth, and heated to a temperature beyond what the hand can bear.”^{¹ The devastated terrain around Petersburg was a scene of deserted houses and flattened fences, with many soldiers buried in shallow graves that gave off a sickening odor. The war had reduced much of Virginia to a sterile wasteland, while drought choked off the harvest. “Indeed it would be difficult to form an idea of a territory more trampled and blasted by the hoof of war than the greater part of Virginia,” Charles A. Dana reported from City Point.²}

Awaiting the arrival of siege guns, Grant extended his line west and south of Petersburg, forcing Lee to imitate him, mile for mile, and throw up earthworks at every turn. Grant wanted to make Lee stretch his thinly staffed lines to the bursting point. Lee worried more about the steady provision of supplies for his men than an attack by Grant’s army. Grant’s overriding objective was to strike at the five railroads that crisscrossed Petersburg and fed Richmond. Starting on June 22, he threw cavalry units against the South Side and Danville Railroads, damaging vast stretches of the tracks but incurring heavy losses.

Grant hoped to choke Richmond through a slow, stealthy process of strangulation. “Every road leading from Richmond is now destroyed,” he reported to Halleck, “and the Danville road so badly I hope, as to take a long time for its repair.”^{³ Grant erred in his optimism, for the rebel army had grown proficient at repairing tracks quickly. He drew encouragement from the fact that Lee’s army was starting to include the very young and old, an unmistakable sign of desperation. As he told his father, his opponents had robbed “the grave and the cradle. Old men like yourself, and little boys like my Fred are now fighting; the Grandfather and Grandson side by side.”^{⁴ No less fervently Grant wrote, “The last man in the Confederacy is now in the Army. They are becoming discouraged, their men deserting, dying and being killed and captured every day.”^{⁵ With the South unable to replace lost men, Grant thought it only a matter of time before the Confederacy yielded.}}}

To replenish the Army of the Potomac, he had appropriated a large number of soldiers previously manning Washington’s defenses. In an emergency, he thought he could transfer an entire corps northward from Virginia in two days. Halleck feared that when Grant moved south of the James River, Lee would be tempted to dispatch a raiding party against the capital. Indeed, Lee imagined such a strategy would force Grant to divert a significant fraction of his army to defend the capital, contracting his presence outside Petersburg. In a fortuitous development for Lee, General David Hunter withdrew from the Shenandoah Valley into West Virginia, opening the way for a Confederate force to tear into Baltimore or Washington, defended only by militia, invalided soldiers, and convalescents. On June 12, Lee sent Jubal Early, with a considerable corps, to storm through the valley and deal a stinging blow to the federal capital. After defeating Hunter at Lynchburg, Early advanced steadily north, reaching Harpers Ferry by July 3.

A balding, full-bearded West Point graduate, riddled with arthritis, Early had functioned as a lawyer and politician in his native Virginia. Fiercely moralistic and notoriously ill-tempered, he didn’t suffer fools gladly. Lee referred to him as “my bad old man.”^{⁶ Urged on by a crusading fervor, Early now led his fifteen thousand men toward Washington, their numbers magnified in the minds of panicky northerners. By July 4, Grant was informed by a deserter of the threat posed by Early and warned Halleck the Confederate general would try to punish Washington. He ordered cavalry and an infantry division to hasten to the capital’s defense. “We want now to crush out & destroy any force the enemy dares send north,” Grant told Halleck in a midnight telegram on July 5.⁷ As always, the two-faced Halleck was quick to distance himself from Grant if things went wrong and equally quick to grab credit if things prospered. He now reproached Grant behind his back. “I predicted this to Genl Grant before he crossed the James River,” he told a friend, “and that Lee would play the same game of shuttle-cock between him & Washington that he did with McClellan.”^⁸}

On July 8, alarm mounted in the capital as Early’s raiders penetrated western Maryland, spreading terror as they ripped up railroad tracks, torched mills and workshops, and sent local residents fleeing toward Washington and Baltimore. The hysteria intensified the next day as Union soldiers retreated toward Washington after Early administered a beating to a Union force under General Lew Wallace at the Monocacy River, outside of Frederick. With a far smaller contingent, Wallace slowed Early’s march by a day, giving Grant precious time to transfer more troops to Washington. “If Early had been but one day earlier,” Grant wrote, “he might have entered the capital before the arrival of the reinforcements I had sent.”^{⁹ Train traffic was halted in and out of the city, government clerks packed weapons at work, and Lincoln had a boat ready to spirit him away if Confederates ransacked the city. The situation was grave enough that an unusually nervous Grant volunteered to go to Washington, if Lincoln thought it advisable.}

Lincoln felt queasy enough to suggest that Grant leave sufficient men to guard his position at Petersburg and bring the rest to the capital. He saw an opportunity to protect Washington and destroy an invading army at once. Having worked hard not to interfere with Grant, Lincoln made a point of treading gingerly. “This is what I think, upon your suggestion, and is not an order,” he told Grant.¹⁰ This was the closest Lincoln ever came to handing Grant orders. Upon reflection, Grant decided that traveling to Washington was “probably just what Lee wants me to do,” and refused to allow Lee to divert him from his plans.¹¹ Rawlins was insistent that Grant’s “appearance in Washington would be heralded all over the country as an abandonment of his campaign, a faltering at least in his purpose,” and Grant was swayed by his typically assertive viewpoint.¹² It spoke to the personal strength that Grant developed during the war that he didn’t agree with the president merely to placate him and that Lincoln abided by his decision.

On July 11, Lincoln appeared at Fort Stevens, north of Washington, which was under fire from Early’s men. To soothe an alarmed populace, Lincoln and Stanton rode there in an open carriage. The tall, angular president, peeping over the fort’s parapet, made a prime target for Confederate marksmen, and one Union soldier (possibly Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.), unaware it was Lincoln, shouted, “Get down, you fool.”^{¹³ It was the only time in American history a sitting president came under fire in combat. Luckily for the Union side, the corps sent by Grant under Horatio Wright arrived at Fort Stevens that afternoon and the national capital was spared. Early made no further inroads, fading back into Virginia. “Well Major,” he told an aide, “we haven’t taken Washington, but we scared Abe Lincoln like hell.”^{¹⁴ Lincoln expressed annoyance that Wright didn’t pursue the retreating rebels, saying sardonically the general feared “he might come across the rebels and catch some of them.”^{¹⁵ Grant sent troops to harass Early and leave a trail of devastation in their wake or, in his indelibly ghoulish words, “to eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that Crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.”^{¹⁶ At the War Department, Halleck faced serious internal criticism for not better coordinating Washington’s defenses.}}}}

Although Early never entered Baltimore or Washington, he delivered a psychological jolt not soon forgotten. Grumbling against Grant broadened into a critique of his whole campaign. On July 15, unnerved by Early’s raid, Dana let loose a blast about him to Rawlins. Without quite endorsing them, he set down critical shafts that could be directed at Grant—how he had stripped Washington of troops, rendering it vulnerable; how he had allowed Early to advance up the Shenandoah; how he had dallied in sending troops to Washington until it was too late to do anything other than chase the enemy back across the Potomac. He even disparaged the Wilderness Campaign as a costly fiasco with nothing to show but mass casualties. Dana warned that Grant’s troubles might lead to Lincoln’s defeat in the upcoming election, installing McClellan in the White House. “The black & revolting dishonor of this siege of Washington with all its circumstances of poltroonery & stupidity,” Dana concluded, “is yet too fresh & its brand is too stinging for one to have a cool judgment regarding its probable consequences.”^¹⁷

Realizing that he needed to shore up Washington’s defenses without compromising his plans against Richmond, Grant proposed that newly recruited troops be trained there to solidify its protection. He also proposed consolidating several departments under a lone commander who could single-handedly deal with threats to Maryland or Pennsylvania, suggesting General William B. Franklin. Most important, and contrary to customary practice, Grant sent a cipher telegram to Lincoln calling for another three hundred thousand men in the field. Noting widespread Confederate desertions, he predicted: “With the prospect of large additions to our force these desertions would increase. The greater number of men we have the shorter and less sanguinary will be the war.”^{¹⁸ Lincoln anticipated this plea, calling for five hundred thousand more men, “which I suppose covers the case,” Lincoln told Grant. “Always glad to have your suggestions.”^¹⁹}

Ever since Chattanooga, Grant had esteemed Brigadier General William F. “Baldy” Smith, a Vermont native who attended West Point with him. Short and stout, with a Vandyke beard, Smith had a sharp analytic mind that he applied to opening the “cracker line” that fed ravenous Union troops in Chattanooga. Grateful for this breakthrough, Grant endorsed his elevation to major general. “[Smith] is possessed of one of the clearest Military heads in the Army, is very practical, and industrious,” he told Stanton. “No man in the service is better qualified than he for our largest command.”^{²⁰ But Smith frequently made enemies, sniped privately at other generals, and fumed whenever Grant ignored his advice. His subordination to Ben Butler so grated on him that he swore to his wife that “I cannot live under this man much longer.”^{²¹ Smith was no less antagonistic toward Meade, complaining to Grant that he was “as helpless as a child on the field of battle and as visionary as an opium eater in council,” and he challenged Grant to explain why he tolerated such barefaced ineptitude.²²}}

Gradually Grant’s enthusiasm for Smith cooled since he didn’t care for grumblers and Smith was a professional malcontent. That May, Grant had written that Smith was “obstinate, and is likely to condemn whatever is not suggested by himself.”^{²³ In mid-June, Smith sat down with Grant and delivered a harsh critique of the Overland Campaign, pouring blame on Meade: “I tried to show [Grant] the blunders of the late campaign of the Army of the Potomac, and the terrible waste of life that had resulted from what I had considered a want of generalship in its present commander. Among other instances, I referred to the fearful slaughter at Cold Harbor on the 3d of June.” According to Smith, Grant conceded there had been “butchery” at Cold Harbor, but thought it pointless to criticize Meade.²⁴ Smith believed his rank entitled him to such candor, though it must have strengthened Grant’s view of him as notoriously quarrelsome and vindictive. The touchy relationship between the two men formed the backdrop to a controversy that now unfolded.}

With Grant’s drinking history, it would have been surprising had he not relapsed in the aftermath of Cold Harbor. At the end of June, he visited the headquarters of Ambrose Burnside and, allegedly egged on by Ben Butler, asked for a drink to relieve a migraine headache. When Grant subsequently visited Baldy Smith’s headquarters, he told him the earlier drink had helped and asked for another. As Smith recounted the incident:

My servant opened a bottle for him, and he drank of it . . . I was aware at this time that General Grant had within six months pledged himself to drink nothing intoxicating . . . After the lapse of an hour or less, the general asked for another drink, which he took. Shortly after, his voice showed plainly that the liquor had affected him, and after a little time he left . . . as soon as I returned to my tent I said to a staff officer of mine who had witnessed his departure, “General Grant has gone away drunk. Gen. Butler has seen it, and will never fail to use the weapon which has been put into his hands.”²⁵

Smith claimed Grant mounted his horse with some difficulty and rode off “in a most disgusting state after having vomited all over his horse’s neck & shoulders.”^{²⁶ This detail is highly suspect since it would have been the talk of the army and nobody else recorded the incident. Grant’s departure from abstinence that day is echoed in a lament from the ever-vigilant Rawlins to his wife: “The General was at the front today, and I learn from one of his staff he deviated from the only path he should ever travel by taking a glass of liquor.” Pained that he hadn’t accompanied Grant to the front, Rawlins vowed, “I shall hereafter, under no circumstances, fail to accompany him.”^{²⁷ Butler denied having seen Grant touch a drop of hard liquor and contested the allegation that he had cajoled him into drinking. Had he done so, Butler wrote, “I should have expected Grant to dismiss me from the service at once, as he ought to have done, and as I would have done to him under the same circumstances.”^²⁸}}

In early July, when Smith asked for a leave of absence, Grant disclosed he had lost faith in Butler, was trying to get rid of him, and wanted to replace him with Smith. Indeed, on July 1, Grant wrote a damning letter to Halleck, citing Butler’s lack of military knowledge and inability to execute orders. Instead of sacking Butler outright, Grant wanted to allow him to save face by transferring him to another theater of war, perhaps Kentucky. In a neat piece of sarcasm, Halleck replied, “To send him to Kentucky would probably cause an insurrection in that state.”^{²⁹ Halleck suggested that Grant keep Butler in place but neutralize his battlefield influence.}

When Halleck suggested that Baldy Smith replace Butler on the battlefield, Grant liked the idea and Lincoln endorsed it on July 7. This would exile Butler to administrative purgatory at Fort Monroe, giving Smith a free hand with field troops. But on July 9, before the order was published, Butler met with Grant at City Point to discuss the decision, which he thought a plot cooked up by Halleck and Smith. Whatever Butler said at the meeting, the offending order was rescinded the next day. When Smith returned from his furlough, he learned, to his everlasting suspicion, that Grant had overturned his decision, reinstated Butler to his former command, and dispatched him, Smith, to New York. In meeting with Smith on July 19, Grant referred to Smith’s habit of slandering colleagues and creating mischief as the primary reason behind the reversal. It may have been that Lincoln decided he could not afford to alienate the politically powerful Butler and intervened to save him. At the end of the interview, Grant rebuked Smith flatly: “You talk too much!”^³⁰

The only way Smith could explain Grant’s change of heart was that Butler had blackmailed Grant about the drinking episode: “I was convinced that General Butler had used his knowledge of the fact that General Grant . . . had temporarily become the victim of a habit which had at one time disqualified him for command, to force him to act against his judgment and inclination.”^{³¹ Eleven days after being relieved, an irate Smith wrote to Senator Solomon Foot of Vermont—the letter’s authenticity has been questioned—laying out his case for what had happened. After the colossal deaths of the Overland Campaign, Smith speculated, Grant felt vulnerable to dismissal: “At that gloomy time, the blackest in the history of the war, when General Grant’s movements in the East had been attended with awful sacrifices of life and with little substantial success, an indictment against him, based upon these failures and a recurrence of his old habit [i.e., drinking], supported by General Butler, might have swept him from power.”^³²}

What Smith didn’t acknowledge were the many factors that might have compelled Grant to yield to Butler. It was widely thought that McClellan would emerge as the Democratic nominee for president at the August convention in Chicago. Grant might have feared political repercussions if he crossed swords with Butler at such a delicate moment, harming Lincoln’s reelection chances. According to Adam Badeau, from the time Grant became general in chief he wanted to get rid of Butler, but at a meeting with Lincoln and Stanton “was informed that political considerations of the highest character made it undesirable to displace Butler.”^{³³ In a newspaper interview in 1887, Smith admitted that “General B[utler] had threatened to make public something that would prevent the President’s reelection. General Grant told me that he had heard that Gen. B. had made some threat with reference to the Chicago convention which he said he ‘had in his breeches pocket.’”^³⁴}

For Grant, morale and teamwork were always vitally important, and the venomous Smith had violated that code of soldierly conduct. It was his berating of Meade that Grant mentioned in relieving Smith from command. Smith had declared he could not serve with Butler, and when it was decided to retain Butler, his days were numbered. With his backbiting tendencies, Smith had simply overplayed his hand. As Rawlins wrote, Grant dismissed Smith “because of his spirit of criticism of all military movements and men . . . and his disposition to scatter the seeds of discontent throughout the army.”^{³⁵ Rawlins, never shy about Grant’s drinking, made no mention of liquor entering into the decision. Whatever his reasons for keeping Butler, the need for it surely rankled Grant. As Dana told Rawlins: “I see that the General has backed down on Butler but I hope that he will fix it so that that military lawyer will not be able to ruin the end of the campaign as he has ruined and foiled the beginning.”^³⁶}

By the summer of 1864, northern victory seemed tantalizingly close, if only Richmond or Atlanta were taken. Given the outsize casualties under Grant, Republicans needed a major southern city to fall before the election to demonstrate genuine progress. By now Sherman preached a doctrine of total warfare that grew ever more militant. By late 1863, his letters to Grant throbbed with a burning sense of vengeance as he planned to widen the war to engulf civilian society, obliterating the South’s productive capacity. When Grant gave Sherman his marching orders in April 1864, he provided him with extraordinary autonomy in his impending campaign against Joseph Johnston’s army and Atlanta. The brief orders allowed Sherman to fill in the blanks as he attacked Johnston in the mountainous terrain of northwest Georgia. From afar Grant followed Sherman with admiration, later contending that his campaign toward Atlanta had been “managed with the most consummate skill, the enemy being flanked out of one position after another all the way there.”^³⁷

As his men trooped south, Sherman took note of enemy resilience. “No amount of poverty or adversity seems to shake their faith; niggers gone, wealth and luxury gone, money worthless . . . yet I see no sign of let up.”^{³⁸ Only violence on a massive scale, he believed, could subdue such a hardy and refractory breed. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” he wrote. “The worst of the war is not yet begun.”^{³⁹ Sherman wanted to implant in his men a fighting spirit that would alter the whole balance of the war. He also wished to inflict psychological damage on the southern people because the North was “not only fighting hostile armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as the organized armies.”^{⁴⁰ Better to bring the war to a speedy conclusion by hard fighting, he thought, than prolong the suffering of the conflict.}}}

Atlanta beckoned as the peerless prize, home to arsenals and foundries, munition plants and machine shops, a place so crammed with manufacturing facilities that Sherman prophesied “its capture would be the death-knell of the Southern Confederacy.”^{⁴¹ Its extensive railway network sped food to Lee’s faraway army. As Sherman’s army moved forward it was a force of nature, an unstoppable juggernaut, pushing Johnston’s army closer to Atlanta, and Jefferson Davis monitored its progress with “intense anxiety.”^{⁴² Many running battles Sherman fought with Johnston were inconclusive, but they had a common denominator: they brought him inexorably closer to Atlanta’s outskirts. He wanted to circle the city, cut off its rail links, isolate it, and starve it out.}}

On July 20, Sherman notified Grant that Johnston had been replaced by John Bell Hood. While Grant respected Hood as “a gallant brave fellow,” he greeted the news with quiet jubilation and smiled knowingly.⁴³ Much like Lee, Johnston had fought cautiously, sticking to defense and buying time for the Confederacy, while Grant thought Hood “would dash out and fight every time you raised a flag before him, and that was just what we wanted.”^{⁴⁴ In Grant’s view, Hood was prone to “rash and ill-advised attacks,” and he was certain Sherman would outgeneral him.⁴⁵ Grant and Sherman hoped Hood would stand and fight in Atlanta rather than recede into the hinterland, a move that would yield the city but not the gray-coated army. Sherman’s arrival on the city fringes provoked an exodus of fear-stricken residents. He believed it crucial that Grant keep Lee pinned down, unable to assist the rebel army in Atlanta—exactly the sort of integrated strategic thinking Grant had favored.}

Whatever high spirits Grant experienced at Hood’s advent were shortly dashed by a shocking development as the Atlanta contest got under way: the death of thirty-five-year-old General James B. McPherson, who commanded the Army of the Tennessee. On July 22, he was felled by a bullet while out surveying Confederate defenses. Riding straight into a band of rebel skirmishers, he waved his hat at them as he rode away and they shot him in the back; evidently he died within an hour, his bloodied horse limping back riderless into camp. A tall, genial young man, McPherson had graduated first in his class at West Point. At his death, he was engaged to a young woman in Baltimore. A courteous Methodist who never cursed, he had endeared himself to Ulysses and Julia Grant. Sherman had imagined that if anything ever happened to him and Grant, McPherson would be summoned to direct the Union war effort, and Grant eulogized him as one of the “ablest, purest and best generals” he had.⁴⁶

It fell to Captain Samuel Beckwith, the chief cipher operator, to deliver the heartbreaking news to Grant in his tent. He handed the dispatch to Grant, who “read it silently. He was hard hit, I could readily see that. His mouth twitched and his eyes closed as if he were shutting out the baleful words. Then the tears came and one followed the other down his bronzed cheeks as he sat there without a word of comment.”^{⁴⁷ Shaken to his core, Grant wrote a rare condolence letter to McPherson’s grandmother that belied Grant’s image as stolid and unemotional. With simple eloquence, he expressed “personal love for the departed. He formed for some time one of my military family. I knew him well. To know him was but to love him . . . Your bereavement is great, but cannot exceed mine.”^⁴⁸}

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BY JULY 1864, with spirits slumping in the North and Lincoln’s election prospects dampened by the abysmal rate of casualties in Virginia, Grant dreamed of the bold breakthrough that would replenish the Union cause. After frenetic spring fighting, the pace had slackened and Grant took advantage of this hiatus to improve his entrenchments. The long Petersburg siege led to slow-motion torment for soldiers in the dank, filthy trenches, who had to duck to avoid bullets. As Grant wondered how to end this stalemate—his aggressive temperament chafed at the tedium of a siege—he was extremely open to any unconventional ideas that appeared.

During the Vicksburg siege, he had experimented with digging a mine under enemy defenses and blowing them up. The aborted explosion had left only a gaping crater. Nonetheless, in late June 1864, Grant endorsed a similar plan from Ambrose Burnside. The impetus came from Colonel Henry Pleasants, whose Pennsylvania volunteers included miners skilled at excavating tunnels, one of whom boasted, “We could blow that damn fort [at Petersburg] out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.”^{⁴⁹ On June 25, these erstwhile miners began gouging out a tunnel that would secretly span the hundred yards separating Union and Confederate lines. Repeating the reason he had invoked for the quixotic schemes at Vicksburg, Grant wrote in his Memoirs that he approved the plan “as a means of keeping the men occupied.”^{⁵⁰ It exercised a special fascination for Burnside, who wished to exorcize the stigma of his ruinous performance at Frederickburg. The mining scheme promised to punch a hole in Petersburg’s defenses and possibly deliver the entire city to Union forces.}}

At first Meade thought Burnside would complete his mine in a little more than a week, but the work proved laborious, hampered by underground springs and quicksand. The miners, wielding primitive tools, had to figure out how to ventilate galleries with fresh air. Burnside planned to have the main tunnel branch off into chambers, with gunpowder stored in each. While some officers had misgivings about the project, Grant understood his men’s restlessness in the baking heat and allowed it to proceed.⁵¹ Many of Grant’s soldiers were unaware of the surreptitious plan, but by July 17, Grant heard reports that the other side had learned of it and launched a similar project in reverse. As the date of the mine detonation neared, Confederate soldiers sank shafts to plumb where the Union galleries stood.

On July 23, the excavation ended its initial phase. The main gallery ran 511 feet long, terminating 23 feet below the Confederate parapet. All that remained was to pack the tunnel with eight thousand pounds of explosives and blow the rebels to kingdom come. To set the stage for this, Grant concocted a characteristic ruse: he sent out a corps under Hancock with Sheridan’s cavalry to wreck the Virginia Central Railroad, drawing a large portion of Lee’s troops to the north side of the James. Sheridan proved adept at deception: under cover of night, he sneaked his men back across the James, carpeting a pontoon bridge with moss and earth to muffle the tramp of soldiers. Then by day he sent them across the James again to create the illusion that most of Grant’s army was being evacuated. Steamboat captains blew shrill whistles, adding to the charade of a sudden retreat. The main aim of this subterfuge was to weaken Petersburg’s defenses, making them vulnerable to the hole Grant hoped to blow through them. When this maneuver was completed, he was ready to ignite the mine and pour fifteen thousand troops into the fray.

Aside from the drubbing Lee gave him at Fredericksburg, Ambrose Burnside is best known to history for his flourishing side-whiskers, called “sideburns” in homage to him, and the massive bald dome of his head. Elegant, gracious in his manners, he was, like Rosecrans, popular and respected, but, in Grant’s estimation, scarcely “fitted to command an army. No one knew this better than himself. He always admitted his blunders, and extenuated those of officers under him beyond what they were entitled to.”^{⁵² With the mine set to explode on July 30, Burnside planned to employ a division of highly motivated black troops, who wanted “to show the white troops what the colored division could do,” said an officer.⁵³ They had distinguished themselves guarding Grant’s huge wagon train, but stood somewhat apart from the rest of the Army of the Potomac. Black soldiers still had to contend with the ingrained prejudice that they couldn’t perform complex maneuvers. At the last minute, Meade objected “that if we put the colored troops in front . . . and it should prove a failure, it would then be said, and very properly, that we were shoving those people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.”^{⁵⁴ Agreeing with Meade, Grant decided to use Burnside’s three divisions of white soldiers at the mine blast. It was an ill-fated change, for the black division had received special training while the whites hadn’t. Their three commanders drew slips to see who would lead the charge and the choice fell on General James H. Ledlie. In the estimation of one officer, “Ledlie was a drunkard and an arrant coward . . . It was wicked to risk the lives of men in such a man’s hands.”^⁵⁵}}

On July 28, in yet another tactical deception, Grant ordered a cessation of artillery fire against Petersburg as an eerie silence fell over the front line. He wanted to dupe the enemy into thinking he was furtively slinking away. At the same time, Rawlins, just back from Washington, was irked to learn that Grant had taken advantage of his absence to indulge in alcohol. “I find the General in my absence digressed from his true path,” the long-suffering Rawlins told his wife. “The God of Heaven only knows how long I am to serve my country as the guardian of the habits of him whom it has honored. It shall not be always thus.”^{⁵⁶ The time had long since passed when he had vowed to quit his staff if Grant touched a drop of forbidden liquor.}

Grant and his staff eagerly awaited the mine explosion, hoping for a spectacular turn in the fighting. After a false start, the mine was triggered a little before 5 a.m. on July 30. With a fearsome roar, the earth was torn asunder, spewing a colossal cloud of dirt, dust, and smoke as broken muskets whirled into the sky, killing a rebel regiment and demolishing an artillery battery. Body parts lay scattered everywhere. One observer compared the lethal cloud to “an immense mushroom whose stem seemed to be of fire and its head of smoke.”^{⁵⁷ The blast carved a crater 30 feet in depth, 60 feet in width, and 170 feet in length. One Confederate gunner remembered the dust column “hurtling downward with a roaring sound, showers of stones, broken timbers and blackened human limbs . . . the gloomy pall of darkening smoke flushing in an angry crimson” before the rising sun.⁵⁸ Then came the thunderous boom of 110 Union cannon and 50 mortars swinging into cooperative action.}

Initially staggered by the blow, the Confederates fled in disarray instead of mounting a response. All seemed to proceed according to plan until Ledlie’s division rushed into the breach and lost its way. Ledlie was nowhere to be found as his men milled around amid the smoking debris. Although Cemetery Hill commanded a direct route into Petersburg and was a mere three hundred or four hundred yards away, it wasn’t taken. As Grant explained, he hadn’t wanted Burnside’s corps “to stop in the crater at all but push on to the top of the hill.”^{⁵⁹ Burnside ignored these instructions while Ledlie was holed up in a bombproof trench, taking refuge in a bottle of rum. Instead of circumventing the breach, the troops had tried to rush through it and were trapped by the Crater’s steep sides. They stood there adrift, defenseless, exposed to Confederate fire. “The shouting, screaming, and cheering,” wrote Horace Porter, “mingled with the roar of the artillery and the explosion of shells, created a perfect pandemonium . . . the crater had become a caldron of hell.”^⁶⁰}

Simply dressed in a blue blouse and trousers in the blazing heat, Grant rode down to the front after the detonation, negotiating the final portion on foot, his face pasted with dust and sweat. Distracted soldiers brushed past him, not knowing it was Grant. He jumped over the parapet, exposing himself to enemy fire, and saw that the chance to advance had been fumbled. “These troops must be immediately withdrawn,” he ordered. “It is slaughter to leave them here.”^{⁶¹ Even though the Confederates had been caught off guard, giving Burnside’s men plenty of time to rush forward and capture Petersburg, the opportunity had been squandered. It was not so much the conception of the plan as its execution that had proven gravely defective.}

Belatedly Burnside threw his black division, commanded by Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, into the maelstrom. By this time Union soldiers stood entrapped in a deep hole, easy targets for Confederate grenades. The black troops, who behaved gallantly, simply swelled the churning mass of soldiers meandering around. By now, the rebels, yelling racial epithets, had counterattacked and hurled grenades down at the black troops, who had no place to hide. In a burst of sadistic behavior, rebel soldiers responded with “a bayonet thrust” to cries for water from injured black soldiers.⁶² Those who attempted to surrender were killed. Union forces suffered nearly four thousand dead, wounded, or missing—more than twice the number of their opponents—five hundred of them black.

Horace Porter recalled a sepulchral silence as Grant rode away from the scene of the disaster. He knew he had frittered away a chance to level a crippling blow at the Confederacy. When he finally broke the stillness, he remarked, “Such an opportunity for carrying a fortified line I have never seen, and never expect to see again.”^{⁶³ In his Memoirs, he blamed Burnside and Ledlie without detailing the hideous carnage. In later years, he also claimed Gouverneur Warren had fatally hesitated to exploit the advantage opened by the Crater: “If Warren had obeyed orders we would have broken Lee’s army in two and taken Petersburg.”^{⁶⁴ Grant was not blameless, having given these incompetent officers too much latitude, then compounded his error by remaining curiously detached from the operation in its early stages. In time he confessed that he was culpable in allowing Ledlie—the worst division commander in Burnside’s corps—to spearhead the fatal charge. “I knew that fact before the mine was exploded, but did nothing in regard to it. That is the only thing I blame myself for.”^⁶⁵}}

Theodore Bowers, an aide, watched the toll taken on Grant, writing that “as the evidences of the disgraceful conduct of all concerned develop and thicken, Grant grows sicker at heart.”^{⁶⁶ With his army enveloped by “gloom and despondency,” Grant lay helpless with grief, confined to bed, his hopes deflated.⁶⁷ He came to consider the Crater disaster “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”^{⁶⁸ Meade and Burnside immediately descended into a round of mutual recriminations. Meade favored a court-martial for Burnside, whereas Grant just wanted him to exit quietly while a court of inquiry parceled out blame. In the end, Burnside was discreetly eased out of service.}}

After Cold Harbor and earlier fruitless attempts to take Petersburg, Grant knew the northern public would interpret the horrifying episode in an unforgiving mood. Many journalists wrote him off as no better than his predecessors. “Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the opening of Grant’s campaign?” the New York World asked tartly.⁶⁹ Inside Lincoln’s cabinet, Gideon Welles confessed to “an awakening apprehension that Grant is not equal to the position assigned him. God grant that I may be mistaken, for the slaughtered thousands of my countrymen who have poured out their rich blood for three months on the soil of Virginia from the Wilderness to Petersburg under his generalship can never be atoned in this world or the next” should he “prove a failure.”^⁷⁰

On July 31, with wounded men still lying in the bloody chasm, Grant and Rawlins conferred for five hours with Lincoln and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox at Fort Monroe. Grant asked to tour Norfolk, which he had never seen, before the party boarded a steamer. “The visit was very short for the heat was terrible,” Fox explained, “so we pushed off towards the open ocean to get a sniff of the ocean sir.” Lincoln may have needed a chance to express his grave apprehensions to Grant in private. Nevertheless, he kept up his implicit trust in his ability to win the war, Fox noted, because Grant frankly owned up to the obstacles. “Neither Grant or the Pres[iden]t seemed cut down by the Petersburg affair . . . Genl Grant in our former visit told the Pres[iden]t that he should meet with several rebuffs but that he would finally get the place.”^⁷¹

The Crater wasn’t the only atrocity exciting public comment. A day earlier, Jubal Early had torched Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, leaving three thousand residents homeless. For Lincoln and Grant, it was the last straw. Philip H. Sheridan, Grant’s bantam cavalry commander, recalled that his assignment was to confront Early and “put an end to incursions north of the Potomac,” which had hitherto turned Grant’s army from its main purpose of destroying Lee and capturing Richmond.⁷² The next day, Grant wired Halleck: “I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field with instructions to put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death.”^{⁷³ On August 3, Lincoln, alarmed that Washington might be needlessly exposed, dissented sharply, telling Grant to “please look over the despatches you may have received from here . . . and discover if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here, of ‘putting our army South of the enemy’ or of following him to the death in any direction.”^{⁷⁴ Nevertheless, Lincoln confirmed Sheridan’s appointment. Grant was determined to stop Jubal Early and lay waste to the Shenandoah Valley, which had furnished its agricultural bounty to Lee’s army for too long.}}

With Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan in place, the North now possessed an unbeatable team that surpassed Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston in its eagerness for combat and winning ways. The whole dismal parade of career hacks and self-promoting political generals on the Union side had been weeded out, giving way to a new fighting breed. Phil Sheridan, a pint-size man of cocky ferocity, was especially spoiling for a fight, convinced his cavalry could ride roughshod over anybody. Sheridan would command thirty thousand men in the Shenandoah Valley, eight thousand of them cavalry.

Born to poor Irish parents and reared in Somerset, Ohio, Sheridan, thirty-three, had fiery eyes, high cheekbones, and a handlebar mustache. He had been a middling student at West Point, his stay troubled by disciplinary problems. Already betraying a turbulent nature, he was suspended for a year after menacing a Virginia student with a bayonet. People tended to find “Little Phil,” bowlegged and five feet five inches tall, risible in appearance, and Lincoln famously mocked him as “a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.”^{⁷⁵ George Templeton Strong wisecracked that Sheridan had “hair so short that it looks like a coat of black paint.”^⁷⁶}

Sheridan moved with a vigorous stride. An inspirational force in battle, mounted on his black horse Rienzi, he seemed to be everywhere at once, a whirlwind of martial ardor. It was a matter of pride with him to fight in the front ranks, to which his men responded with adoration. “With the first smell of powder,” said a journalist, “he became a blazing meteor, a pillar of fire to guide his own hosts.”^{⁷⁷ Hotheaded, profane, excessively sure of himself, he never backed down or ran from trouble and was known for his salty comments. Like Grant, Sheridan had a pugnacity that refused to quit, and Sherman described him as “a persevering terrier dog, honest, modest, plucky and smart enough.”^{⁷⁸ Quite unlike Grant, Sheridan was blunt and hard-drinking and almost foamed at the mouth when angry.}}

A superb judge of military talent, Grant made few errors in the generals he selected or cashiered. When he first met Sheridan at a railway station early in the war, Grant found him “brusque and rough,” but he came to glory in his high spirits.⁷⁹ Most of all, he prized Sheridan’s thorough preparations for battle and magnetic presence, sometimes rating him higher than Sherman. “He belongs to the very first rank of soldiers, not only of our country but of the world,” Grant later commented. “I rank Sheridan with Napoleon and Frederick and the great commanders in history.”^{⁸⁰ If there was an element of fraternal rivalry in Grant’s relationship with Sherman, he displayed a purely paternal regard for Sheridan and was “as proud as a mother of a handsome son,” said Augustus Chetlain.⁸¹ Sheridan reciprocated this high regard, saying Grant “inspired me with confidence; he was so self-contained, and made you feel that there was a heap more in him than you had found out.”^⁸²}

Lincoln’s telegram sent Grant rushing north for consultations to straighten out the command structure in the Shenandoah Valley. At Monocacy Junction in Maryland, Grant accepted the resignation of David Hunter, giving Sheridan undisputed control of troops in the Shenandoah Valley and Maryland. Grant gave him license for total warfare in the valley—a view congenial to Sheridan. “As war is a punishment,” the latter believed, “if we can, by reducing its advocates to poverty, end it quicker, we are on the side of humanity.”^{⁸³ Now Grant ordered Sheridan and his Army of the Shenandoah to ransack the valley so “that nothing should be left to invite the enemy to return . . . Such as cannot be consumed destroy.”^{⁸⁴ Sheridan had few qualms about incinerating farms, destroying crops, and propagating terror. By August 8, a British soldier fighting with Confederate forces reported “columns of smoke . . . rising in every direction from burning houses and burning barns.”^⁸⁵}}

Grant didn’t endorse promiscuous destruction. Previously he had issued orders to Hunter stating that “indiscriminate marauding” should be avoided, that only supplies absolutely necessary for troops should be taken, and that receipts should be issued so loyal people could be reimbursed.⁸⁶ The order was perhaps more honored in the breach than the observance, as when Hunter’s men looted and burned Lexington, Virginia, that June. Now in early August, Grant wrote: “It is not desirable that the buildings should be destroyed, they should rather be protected, but the people should be informed that so long as an Army can subsist among them, recurrences of these raids must be expected.”^⁸⁷

Grant felt vindicated during his brief trip north, having redirected troops in Maryland to northern Virginia. He was also heartened by Admiral David Farragut’s victory at Mobile Bay on August 5, achieving a long-sought objective. Grant knew, as he told Sherman, that Sheridan would “push the enemy to the very death.”^{⁸⁸ Sherman wired back his pleasure that Sheridan would “worry Early to death. Let us give these southern fellows all the fighting they want and when they are tired we can tell them we are just warming to the work.”^{⁸⁹ Whatever the gloom hanging over the North, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan exhibited a combative spirit that would ultimately lead to victory. Grant had also won a major bureaucratic showdown, neutralizing Halleck’s power. As Bowers told Rawlins, “He has settled Halleck down to a mere staff officer for Stanton. Halleck has no control over troops except as Grant delegates it. He can give no orders and exercises no discretion. Grant now runs the whole machine independently of the Washington directory.”^{⁹⁰ Simplifying the command structure and concentrating power in Grant’s hands would work to speed up Union victory.}}}

By late August, Lee felt the pain of the terrifying tourniquet Grant was applying to his army, telling Jefferson Davis, “I think it is [the enemy’s] purpose to endeavor to compel the evacuation of our present position by cutting off our supplies . . . It behooves us to do everything in our power to thwart his new plan of reducing us by starvation.”^{⁹¹ In early September, Lee confirmed that Grant was forcing him to fly blind in his own territory and react to Union initiatives. It was clear that Grant was in charge, setting the tempo and agenda and cramping Lee’s style. “The enemy’s position enables him to move his troops to right or left without our knowledge,” Lee said, “until he has reached the point at which he aims, and we are then compelled to hurry our men to meet him, incurring the risk of being too late to check his progress.”^⁹²}

On the morning of August 9, Grant had just returned to City Point when the war came unexpectedly to his headquarters on the James River. A Confederate agent, John Maxwell, slipped through Union lines, clambered aboard a barge loaded with shells and ammunition, and planted gunpowder and a timing mechanism. As he hurried from the scene, a huge explosion threw up a towering shower of shells, bullets, splinters, iron bars, and human limbs, flinging them so high and far that fragments littered the ground a quarter mile away. By coincidence, Grant was then sitting in front of his tent, chatting with General George Sharpe, who had fretted about possible plots being hatched by nearby Confederate spies. Grant lived up to his image by exhibiting perfect sangfroid amid the mayhem. As the commissary chief Michael R. Morgan recalled, “I saw General Grant at his usual gait, walking up from his tent toward the adjutant-general’s tent, taking things coolly, and seemingly not thinking anything out of the ordinary was taking place.”^{⁹³ Grant took no precautions aside from ducking behind a large tree. Theodore Lyman remembered things differently. “The only man who, at the first shock, ran towards the scene of terror was Lieutenant-General Grant.”^⁹⁴}

Five minutes later, with his yard full of splinters and shell fragments, Grant filed a report with Halleck, claiming the death toll had reached fifty-three men, including thirty-eight black laborers. At first it was thought human error had triggered the mishap; seven years later, when Grant was president, a Virginian admitted the sabotage to Porter. The episode alerted Grant’s staff to shortcomings in headquarters security and how readily a rebel assassin could snuff out Grant’s life. Since Grant was congenitally heedless of danger and resisted extra security, his staff secretly organized a night watch to protect him. Grant never learned about this special layer of security until his second term as president.⁹⁵

Despite the debilitating heat of a Virginia summer—“marching troops is nearly death,” Grant observed—the headquarters staff tried to make life as tolerable as possible.⁹⁶ One commander attempted to divert Grant with a band that played patriotic and sentimental songs each evening, then discovered the lieutenant general was completely tone-deaf. “I’ve noticed that that band always begins its noise just about the time I am sitting down to dinner and want to talk,” Grant protested.⁹⁷ The food at headquarters, though not lavish, was far superior to the grub of ordinary soldiers. “We live very well,” Ely Parker reported. “Ice cream and all sorts of nice cakes cover our table at every meal.”^⁹⁸

The one jarring note was the health of Rawlins, whose cough steadily worsened, exacerbated by dust from the constant procession of supply wagons. Grant expressed “no little anxiety about his illness,” said Porter.⁹⁹ Rawlins’s condition became so incapacitating that he took a three-month leave to recuperate with his family in Connecticut. Some observers feared he had consumption from which he would never recover and wondered darkly what that would mean for the man who had ridden herd on Grant’s drinking problem for three years. “I fear [Rawlins] is permanently disabled, though I still hope he may recover,” James H. Wilson told Badeau. “His loss would be irreparable, particularly when the surroundings of the General are considered. Heaven help us when some of the influences I know to be at work shall attain the ascendancy.”^¹⁰⁰

Someone else might have resigned, but beyond unwavering loyalty to Grant and solicitude for his sobriety, Rawlins had an undying love of country. “Its greatness and glory is the one idea of my heart,” he told his wife, “after my love and duty to you and our little ones.”^{¹⁰¹ While on leave, Rawlins consulted a New York medical specialist who reassured him that his cough was merely chronic bronchitis. Others were far more skeptical, including Charles Dana, who met Rawlins in Washington and detected “signs of increasing disease.” Writing to Wilson, he did not mince words: “I fear there is no escape for him.”^¹⁰²}

Grant was no stranger to psychosomatic symptoms, and his bitter disappointment at the Crater was mirrored in lassitude and jangled nerves, as his body expressed what his mind could not admit. “Grant is not at all well,” Provost Marshal Marsena R. Patrick wrote on August 18, “and there are fears that he is breaking down.”^{¹⁰³ Bowers saw Grant’s military frustration mirrored in poor health over a ten-day period: “He feels languid and feeble and is hardly able to keep about, yet he tends to business promptly and his daily walk and conduct are unexceptional.”^{¹⁰⁴ For Bowers, Grant’s low spirits bespoke his predicament as a man of action paralyzed by the lethargic tempo of the extended Petersburg siege. “I never before saw Grant so intensely anxious to do something,” he informed Rawlins. “He appears determined to try every possible expedient . . . The failure to take advantage of opportunities pains and chafes him beyond anything I have ever before known him to manifest.”^¹⁰⁵}}

Without Rawlins, Grant desperately needed Julia and the children, who visited City Point in August, staying for a day aboard a steamer. Grant still couldn’t entirely shake depression when apart from his family. Now briefly buoyed by their company, he was emotionally carefree in a way he seldom managed alone. Porter left a charming vignette of him roughhousing with his boys: “The morning after their arrival, when I stepped into the general’s tent, I found him in his shirt-sleeves engaged in a rough-and-tumble wrestling-match with the two older boys. He had become red in the face, and seemed nearly out of breath from the exertion. The lads had just tripped him up, and he was on his knees on the floor grappling with the youngsters, and joining in their merry laughter, as if he were a boy again himself.”^{¹⁰⁶ Whenever she came to camp, Julia, a sprightly presence, enjoyed taking meals with the officers’ mess and was widely appreciated for her geniality. In the evening, when she and Ulysses sat alone in the corner, they appeared to Porter “as bashful as two young lovers spied upon in the scenes of their courtship.”^{¹⁰⁷ In company, Julia called him “Mr. Grant” and “Ulyss” to his face and sometimes added a private name she had coined for him after Vicksburg’s fall—“Victor.”}}

Grant’s losses from Cold Harbor to the Crater left him leery of launching a major attack against Lee, and his men were equally gun-shy of direct assaults. The alternative was to draw the Confederates from their substantial entrenchments, which was no easy matter. Failing that, Grant could only tighten the pressure on Lee by cutting railroads linking Petersburg and Richmond and points south, sacking the Shenandoah Valley. He believed he had made it impossible for Lee to send troops to Atlanta and forced him to reinforce Petersburg by recalling men from the Shenandoah Valley as Confederate recruits ran short. “Unless some measure can be devised to replace our losses,” Lee alerted the Confederate war secretary James Seddon, “the consequences may be disastrous.”^{¹⁰⁸ “The rich men and slave owners are but too successful in getting out, and in keeping out of the services,” lamented the rebel war clerk John Jones in Richmond.¹⁰⁹ Southerners knew that, unlike Lee, Grant could replenish his army. Whatever his frustrations, his tenacious choke hold on Lee’s army preyed on the minds of the southern populace, who knew Grant would never relent. In South Carolina, Mary Chesnut wrote resignedly that August, “Grant’s dogged stay about Richmond is very disgusting and depressing to the spirits.”^¹¹⁰}