The president spent much of Tuesday, March 7, endorsing applications for jobs: Philip C. Schuyler was recommended for a position as Indian agent for the Sac and Fox tribes; Charles C. Coffenberry had a similar recommendation as agent for the Otoe tribe; and M. R. Dutton received an endorsement as agent for the Kickapoo tribe, with the note, “This application assumes that the incumbent is wholly incompetent,” which was initialed by Lincoln.1

President Lincoln also issued orders for five people who owned unspecified “products of the insurrectionary states” to bring these products “within military lines for sale to agents of government.”² But in addition to these fairly mundane details, President Lincoln also sent a special communiqué to General U. S. Grant: “In accordance with a Joint Resolution of Congress, approved December 17, 1863,” the president awarded a gold medal and an engrossed parchment copy of the resolution. Lincoln went on to say, “Please accept, for yourself and all under your command, the renewed expression of my gratitude.”³

President Lincoln had appointed General Grant general-in-chief of all Union armies a year before, in March 1864, and also promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general. Grant was the hero of Vicksburg—he not only captured the city, but also forced the surrender of Confederate general John Pemberton's army of thirty thousand—and was one of the few generals whom Lincoln had faith in. Lincoln had gone through three other generals-in-chief before Grant—Winfield Scott, Henry Halleck, and George McClellan. All of them had either been too old—Winfield Scott was an overweight and infirm seventy-five-year-old—or just plain incompetent. In the year since Grant had taken command, he had driven Robert E. Lee and his army south through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor to Petersburg, where he kept the entire Army of Northern Virginia bottled up in their trenches all through the winter of 1864–65. None of his predecessors would have had either the determination or the ability to outfight General Lee, or to bring his fabled army to the brink of surrender.

“Grant has stamped a new character on the tactics of the Federals,” the Times of London declared. This was certainly a remarkable reversal of opinion—the Times had always been deliberately antagonistic toward Lincoln, as well as his generals, every one of them. Now the editors were saying flattering and complimentary things, not only about Grant but also about his general strategy. “No other general would either have advanced upon the Wilderness…or followed up an almost victorious though retiring enemy. Under his command the Army of the Potomac has achieved in invading Virginia an amount of success never achieved before except in repelling invasion.”4

Lincoln was more straightforward in his letter to General Grant. He just expressed his appreciation “for yourself and all under your command,” his gratitude “for yourself and their arduous and well-performed public service”⁵

General Grant was too practical and down-to-earth to have his head turned by anything as flashy and transient as a gold medal, even if it was from Congress. He did not even mention the medal, or the engrossed parchment scroll, or the president's letter, in his Memoirs—that would have been completely out of character for the truly modest tanner's son from Ohio. He was certainly touched by the president's—and Congress's—gesture, but he was too unassuming to let his feelings show.

General Grant probably would also have said that the reason for his reticence was that he had more important things on his mind, namely the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, and exactly what General Lee intended to do with his army in the very near future. He was especially anxious that General Lee and his army would slip out of their Petersburg trenches and escape to North Carolina where they would join forces with General Joseph E. Johnston's army. He had done the same thing to General Lee the previous June—evacuated his entrenchments at Cold Harbor and escaped from General Lee—so he knew that it could be done.

“I felt that the situation of the Confederate army was such that they would try to make an escape at the earliest practicable moment,” Grant would write many years later, “and I was afraid, every morning, that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone, and that nothing was left but a picket line.”6 General Lee had the railroad at Danville, which was about 135 miles from Petersburg, to take his army south. He might just decide to load everything aboard a train—men, artillery, equipment, tents, and baggage—and simply disappear, leaving Grant stuck in his trenches south of Petersburg.

“I knew that he could move much more lightly and rapidly than I, and that, if he got this start, he would leave me behind so that we would have the same army to fight again further south—and the war might be prolonged another year.” General Grant said that he was “naturally very impatient” to start his spring campaign against General Lee, “which I thoroughly believed would close the war.”⁷

President Lincoln had the same hopes and the same fears—he hoped that the war would end in the spring, but was afraid that something might happen that would prolong the fighting. Grant instructed his troops around Petersburg “to keep a sharp lookout to see that such a movement should not escape their notice.”⁸ The president was in full agreement with General Grant's orders, and dreaded the escape of General Lee and his army as much as Grant.