XI

CHATTANOOGA

…the eternal law
That who can saddle Opportunity
Is God’s elect,…

—James Russell Lowell,
“On a Bust of General Grant”

IF VICKSBURG made Grant a public hero, his conversion of defeat into victory at Chattanooga proclaimed his military greatness. The Confederate commander in Tennessee, General Braxton Bragg, had outmaneuvered the Union commander, General William S. Rosecrans, and brought the Federal forces into a position where they were almost under siege in the important river and railroad town of Chattanooga, in the southeastern corner of the state. Bragg and Rosecrans had been contending for eastern Tennessee, where Lincoln hoped to stimulate Unionist sentiment in the South by liberating the mountain areas whose occupants had never agreed to secession. And beyond Tennessee lay Georgia. Rosecrans had been slow to move, but when finally in motion he had forced Bragg to retreat after a bloody and indecisive battle at Stones River and then had maneuvered the Confederate general east and south, into southeastern Tennessee. However, Bragg had turned the tables on Rosecrans at Chickamauga and now had him nearly surrounded at Chattanooga. Only one torturous mountain road remained open to Rosecrans. In October he was confronted with the death by starvation of huge numbers of draft and attack animals, and with winter approaching, his men were without warm clothing and on short rations. The situation in Tennessee had deteriorated so severely that Lincoln and Stanton decided on a drastic change in organization and leadership. All the forces west of the Alleghenies (save those of General Nathaniel P. Banks, in Louisiana) were to be united under one command—Grant’s. Halleck, though still distrustful of Grant, acquiesced.

In October 1863, Grant was called to Cairo to receive these new orders. As he and Julia traveled by steamboat toward Cairo, he was in great discomfort because of an injury sustained on an earlier celebratory trip. Demonstrating that the Mississippi was indeed his, Grant had traveled down the river after his victory at Vicksburg. At Natchez, high on a beautiful bluff over the water, his fellow Yankees who had preceded him there introduced him to “almost voluptuous luxury” in a house whose walls were hung with Landseers and Sullys and whose ample windows looked out on lavish orchards and richly stocked greenhouses. As he moved still farther down the river toward New Orleans, his steamboat was preceded by another, the Julia, and at one point some not quite conquered rebels ungallantly fired on this vessel, wounding three celebrators. At New Orleans, there were hosannas from his army colleagues who had long been in possession of the city and from a surprising number of the local populace as well. (However, some of the permanent residents were sullen, and one officer, Thomas Kilby Smith, found the women “strangely hostile.”) Grant was treated to a magnificent dinner and a lavish evening reception, and the next day, ten miles out of town, to a grand review of General Banks’s troops.¹

Riding back to the city with his staff and Banks’s, at close to breakneck speed, Grant was thrown by his horse and seriously injured. There were several versions of how the accident occurred. Grant loyalists, for example, blamed a soft spot in the crushed-shell surface of the road, in order to protect, variously, Grant’s reputation as a fine horseman, as a prudent man who did not ride at too fast a pace, and as a general who did not get drunk. Nathaniel Banks was enough to encourage the last course in any man, but it is exceedingly hard to be sure just what was the cause of the accident. Alcohol may well have played a role, as a flood of rumors suggested. If these rumors were correct, the fact that neither Julia Grant nor John A. Rawlins was then in New Orleans lends credence to the theory that their presence was crucial in keeping Grant sober.

Grant did ride exceedingly powerful and difficult horses. At Natchez he had lent one of his mounts to the mayor, and as the mayor, on foot, was leading it over difficult terrain, it had reared, its hooves clashing against those of General Thomas Kilby Smith’s powerful battle horse, which in response had also reared. Smith had been thrown and was extraordinarily lucky not to have been trampled. Smith was riding behind Grant and Banks at the time of Grant’s accident, and his version of the story, which has a ring of truth, is that Grant, riding at an exceedingly strong gallop in traffic, came up so close to a carriage—or a streetcar—that his horse reared. Grant, untypically, was thrown, and the officer behind him was unable to stop his horse before its hooves cut deeply into Grant’s leg. In Grant’s own account the cause of his horse’s panic was not a carriage or a streetcar, but a locomotive. He absolved the horseman riding behind him, blaming the injury instead on his horse, which he said had fallen on top of him.²

The doctors treated Grant first at a roadside inn and then, during the next week, at his hotel in town. Still an invalid, he traveled by steamer back to Vicksburg, where Julia, who had gone to St. Louis to put the three older children into school, rejoined him. He had received orders on September 13 to send troops to assist Rosecrans, but uncomfortable in bed, he waited until September 27 to order Sherman to send two divisions to Memphis and on to eastern Tennessee. Before they were ordered out, however, Chickamauga had been fought and lost and Rosecrans driven into the snare of Chattanooga. And so on October 10, 1863, Grant received the telegram—mysteriously, seven days in arriving—that summoned him to Cairo. He knew only that his going involved shoring up Rosecrans, but he elected to read the assignment as more than a temporary diversion. He wasted no time in departing, and as if to ensure that there were no changes of mind, he did not reply that he was coming until he was on the way. Julia came back from riding to find the headquarters a field of snowy tents that had been struck and to face the commotion of hasty packing. She was told to be ready to leave by four; precisely at sundown they got off.³

In Ulysses S. Grant’s magnificent telling of his own story, this move east takes on far greater drama than the more famous trip five months later to Washington to accept the appointment as lieutenant general from Lincoln. The quick moving of his headquarters from Vicksburg represented the great break forward of his life. In his Memoirs, the first volume ends with the telegram which was his matter-of-fact response to a summons to greatness: “Your dispatch…of the 3d…was received at 11:30 on the 10th. Left the same day….” He had disposed of delay. This was his proclamation that he was on his way and no one would stop him.⁴

Those who might have tried would have had trouble finding him. Grant had a way of being out of touch at critical moments. Officers along the route did not know his precise plans, and he himself only learned at Cairo that he was to go on at once to Louisville. He and Julia took the train to Indianapolis and were just leaving that city to go south to Kentucky when a messenger ran down the track to stop the train. Secretary of War Stanton had arrived by special train and joined the Grants on theirs. It was the first meeting of the secretary and the general. They talked, and the subject was Grant. Stanton gave him orders that, in Grant’s words, “created the ‘Military Division of the Mississippi,’ (giving me the command).” Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland, and the Army of the Ohio, led now by Ambrose E. Burnside, who had lost the command of all the eastern armies after Fredericksburg and had been sent out to the west, were to work together under a unified western command. (The War Department’s mysterious loyalty to the concept of the eastern and western phases of the conflict as almost separate and distinct wars still remained.) Stanton gave Grant his orders in two versions, which were “identical in all but one particular.” In one version, Rosecrans remained in command of the Army of the Cumberland; in the other, George H. Thomas replaced him. Stanton offered Grant the choice, and he picked Thomas.⁵

When he returned to Julia, she had her Alexander at last. He was no longer directing an action that had been ordered by others. Now he could make decisions and move at his own speed. He was vastly and publicly important—a man to be reckoned with. He might still fall on his face (and the Chattanooga campaign, into which he was moving, would provide plenty of opportunity for him to do so), but he could no longer be ignored. Julia grasped this prominence swiftly, but not swiftly enough to be flattered rather than annoyed when no ferry was waiting to take them across the Ohio to Louisville. Mrs. General Grant did not yet sense just how truly important her husband was. By twentieth-century standards, the security procedures during the Civil War, when an enemy in one’s midst was often undetectable, were remarkably casual. Normally, little care was taken to prevent the assassination or capture of key men, but in this instance precautions were deemed necessary: since telegraph messages could be intercepted by the rebels, who were not scarce along the Ohio, it had been decided not to telegraph ahead the precise time that the secretary of war and one of his most valuable generals would be ready to cross the river on a slow-moving and vulnerable ferryboat.⁶

Not all of Julia’s concern as they waited in the damp was for the deference due her. Grant was still not fully recovered from his fall, and Stanton was susceptible to illness. Indeed, Stanton himself later believed that his respiratory condition, which killed him six years later, had begun as he stood on that wharf in a cold rain. Once they reached Kentucky the trip was more comfortable, and in Louisville, settled comfortably in the Galt House, Grant and Stanton continued their talk, holding a conference that lasted a whole day. There is no detailed account of what was discussed, but in view of Stanton’s probing bluntness it is likely that they were frank about General Halleck. Soon thereafter Grant’s communications to Halleck about actions that had been taken or that he wanted taken assumed a tone suggesting that he anticipated no possible rebuff. This may indicate that Stanton had assured Grant that the decisions for the campaigns in the west were his alone, and not subject to Halleck’s veto.⁷

That Sunday evening Julia proudly took her husband the general on a triumphant round of calls on the once overbearing Louisville kin whom they had met fifteen years earlier as honeymooners. Just how urgently important her general had become was quickly apparent when a messenger arrived summoning Grant back to the hotel. The assistant secretary of war, Charles A. Dana, had telegraphed Stanton saying that Rosecrans was on the verge of ordering a retreat from Chattanooga. Dana recommended that he be ordered not to do so, and Stanton, his famous temper aroused, was demanding to know where his new commander had gone.⁸

In his unintentionally comic manner, the crinkle-bearded, fiercely intense Stanton had rushed about the hotel asking startled guests if they had seen the Grants. With reasonable promptness, even if it did not seem so to the secretary of war, one of his aides had caught up with the Grants, and the general returned to the hotel to find Stanton, in a dressing gown, pacing nervously around his room. He thrust Dana’s message into Grant’s hand. The general stated firmly that a retreat from Chattanooga would be “a terrible disaster”; he immediately implemented the order removing Rosecrans and putting Thomas in command of the Army of the Cumberland and told Thomas to hold Chattanooga at any cost. The Rock of Chickamauga sent back his famous reply: “We will hold the town till we starve.” It was likely that Bragg would exact the price.⁹

On Tuesday, leaving Julia, now joined by her youngest child, in Louisville with her aunt, Grant set out for Chattanooga. At Nashville he endured the “torture,” as he recalled it, of a long speech of welcome by the Federal military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson. His pain came not only from his swollen leg but also from the anticipation of having to reply with a speech of his own. Sensibly, he responded to the effusion of east Tennessee oratory with a simple thank you. The occasion gave him his first chance to size up the strange man who was to be both an ally and adversary on Grant’s route to the White House. From Nashville, Grant’s train passed through Murfreesboro, Tennessee. One of Rosecrans’s men (who was sorry his commander was being replaced) “ran out to the side of the Railroad and as the car passed, was rewarded with the sight of the grim old Chieftain.” (Grant was forty-one years old.) Harvey Reid sat down to write a letter home and gave a superb description of the general:

He was seated entirely alone on the side of the car next to me and I had a fair view of him. He had on an old blue overcoat, and wore a common white wool [hat] drawn down over his eyes, and looked so much like a private soldier, that but for the resemblance to the photographs that can be seen on every corner in this town, it would have been impossible to have recognized him. But that strongly marked Roman nose, the sternly compressed upper lip, and the closely cut brown whiskers and mustache could not be mistaken by anyone who had ever seen his picture. He was either tired with riding all night, or had something on his mind for he appeared almost sad as he looked vacantly without seeming to see anything that he was passing. I do not think that his staff was with him as the car seemed almost empty.

The train took Grant into northern Alabama, where, at Stevenson, he stopped for a conference with Rosecrans. The deposed general had many intelligent suggestions about how the army should proceed, and Grant could only wonder why Rosecrans had not himself put them into effect.¹⁰

As he drew closer to Chattanooga, Grant met, one by one, the generals who had been fighting in the east and were now under his command. At Stevenson, General O. O. Howard, who had been at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and now had been detached from Meade to aid in the campaign in the west, made his way through the train to meet Grant. Howard had conceived him to be very large and of rough appearance and was astonished by his small size—“Not larger than McClellan,…rather thin in flesh and very pale in complexion, and noticeably self-contained and retiring.” As Howard recalled it: “He gave me his hand,” and Howard, who had lost his right arm in the Peninsular campaign in 1862, took his new commander’s hand with his left. Grant said pleasantly, “I am glad to see you, General.” Then, Howard discovered that he “had to do the talking.” Filling the silence, he offered to accompany Grant to General Joseph Hooker’s headquarters, a quarter of a mile away, in the carriage Hooker had sent. Grant replied, “If General Hooker wishes to see me he will find me on this train.” Both the answer and the manner in which it was delivered surprised Howard, who quickly grasped that this was “Grant’s way of maintaining his ascendancy where a subordinate was likely to question it.” Six months earlier, at Chancellorsville, Hooker—whom Howard recalled as “of full build, ruddy, and handsome”—had had a command greater than Grant’s, but now “Hooker…entered the car and paid his respects in person.” Howard “wondered at the contrast between these two men, and pondered upon the manner of their meeting.” He concluded: “Grant evidently took this first occasion to assert himself. He never left the necessity for gaining a proper ascendancy over subordinate generals…to a second interview. Yet he manifested only a quiet firmness.”¹¹

As Grant shrewdly outmaneuvered potential McClernands and adroitly established his authority over rival generals, he was equally careful to avoid giving any intimations of excessive ambition. Generals like Hooker and McClellan had created great problems for themselves by seeking high positions and the perquisites that accompanied them, but then not matching loftiness with performance on the battlefield. Grant was determined to keep the horse before the cart; he would perform, and then see that what he had done was celebrated. He thought the wind of recognition was now blowing his way, and he was not going to take any stance that would block it. Howard remembered that as they lay on their cots that night, Grant said, “If I should seek a command higher than that intrusted to me by my Government I should be flying in the face of Providence.”¹²

Howard, on his way to his own headquarters at Jasper, Tennessee, traveled by train with Grant to Bridgeport, Alabama, on the Tennessee border. Here, just west of the northwestern corner of Georgia, the railroad line ended; the Confederates had destroyed the bridge that had crossed to the south side of the Tennessee River, which they held. The only Union enclave on the south bank was the town of Chattanooga itself. To reach it required a trip of two or three days by horseback over a poor circuitous mountain road on the north side of the river—the only route into the Union encampment at Chattanooga. At daybreak, outside Howard’s tent, Rawlins lifted Grant “as if he had been a child, into the saddle,” and in a heavy storm, the small party set off; they covered only ten or twelve miles that day, October 22. As Howard put it: “By this journey he set in motion the entire fall campaign against Bragg.” But the grandeur of the situation was not apparent at the time. Their mounts picked their way over Waldron Ridge through the wreckage of discarded wagons and the unfrozen carcasses of starved draft horses, slipping over rocks, roots, and mud. The ride was anguished and difficult for a man with a painfully injured leg.¹³

Miraculously, the motion of the horse eased Grant’s pain. The men paused in the rain for the night and then pressed on to Chattanooga. Late in the day, one of the travelers was lifted from his saddle and helped into a small house. “Wet, dirty, and well,” as Lincoln learned the next day, Ulysses S. Grant had arrived at the headquarters of General George H. Thomas. Although a Virginian, Thomas was not a cordial host, and an aide had to nudge him and suggest that he offer Grant some dry clothes. Grant, who never warmed to Thomas, declined the offer, pushed his damp jacket open, slumped in an armchair in front of the fire, and lit a cigar. One of the officers in the room, Horace Porter, found him “immovable as a rock and as silent as a sphinx.”¹⁴

Not rising, Grant shook hands with each of Thomas’s staff officers and “in a low voice, speaking slowly, [said] ‘How do you do.’” Then, somewhat disconcerted, the officers one by one presented their reviews of the precarious military position. Grant’s inattentive manner was perplexing, but he was not missing a thing; in particular he was alert for signs that any of them had endorsed the retreat proposed by Rosecrans, of which he so thoroughly disapproved. Porter noticed that when General William F. Smith, the engineer responsible for bridges and roads (whom Grant had known at West Point), began talking, Grant “straightened himself up in his chair, his features assumed an air of animation, and in a tone of voice that manifested a deep interest in the discussion,…[he] began to fire whole volleys of questions….” He pursued the matter of establishing a better line of food supply—“opening up the cracker line,” he called it—and then asked Porter, in charge of ordnance, if there was sufficient ammunition for an attack. There was only enough for a single day’s battle, and immediately the problem of opening a new supply line took on a dimension beyond that of bringing in desperately needed food, shoes, and overcoats.¹⁵

After listening to each of his subordinates, Grant turned to a table and, ignoring their presence, began to write. They stood by uselessly as he composed orders and telegrams that demonstrated a grasp of the whole of the western theater of the war. From the disjointed reports he had been given, he put together a coherent picture of the terrain of an area new to him, and of the vast confused array of men who contended for it. To Halleck, in Washington, he announced, “Have just arrived. I will write tomorrow. Please approve order placing General Sherman in command of Department and Army of the Tennessee, with headquarters in the field.” Grant was making doubly sure that his own army would be commanded by his best lieutenant and would be available wherever he wanted to use it.¹⁶

The next day he rode with Thomas to the point on the river from which he was later to push through the new supply route back to Bridgeport. As he looked along the bank he was in plain view of Confederate pickets on the other side, but he drew no fire. (Indeed, he recalled, they saluted.) Having seen for himself one problem, he went back to headquarters, and that evening Porter again watched Grant at work. His writing was the act of an athlete; it was done with the command of a horseman:

He soon after began to write despatches, and I arose to go, but resumed my seat as he said, “Sit still.” My attention was soon attracted to the manner in which he went to work at his correspondence. At this time, as throughout his later career, he wrote nearly all his documents with his own hand, and seldom dictated to any one even the most unimportant despatch. His work was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly, but without any marked display of nervous energy. His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as the ink from his pen; he was never at a loss for an expression, and seldom interlined a word or made a material correction. He sat with his head bent low over the table, and when he had occasion to step to another table or desk to get a paper he wanted, he would glide rapidly across the room without straightening himself, and return to his seat with his body still bent over at about the same angle at which he had been sitting when he left his chair.¹⁷

Grant did his own work. Porter was amazed that he simply pushed a finished page off the table onto the floor as he turned to the next, and then, when finished, picked up the lot and sorted them. The commander of the armies of the west was his own file clerk. What he readied for distribution were orders of great precision. Their execution, begun the next morning, created the campaign that routed Braxton Bragg. Grant squared the corners of the sheets of paper, handed them to Ely S. Parker, “bid those present a pleasant good night, and limped off to his bedroom.” In the orders, Sherman and the Army of the Tennessee were directed to move east from Corinth, Halleck was told (not asked) how the new supply line was to function, and arrangements were made to reinforce Burnside, besieged at Knoxville, to the northeast. In fact, Porter noted, “directions…were given for the taking of vigorous and comprehensive steps in every direction throughout the new and extensive command.”¹⁸

To Sherman, out to the west, Grant had written, “Drop all work on Memphis and Charleston Railroad…and hurry eastward with all possible dispatch toward Bridgeport, till you meet further orders from me.” Delivery of the message was not easy, and the man who brought it was even wilder with the excitement of war than either the general who sent it or the one who received it. According to Sherman, the messenger’s name was Pike, and he came by canoe down the Tennessee, shooting rapids and portaging past rebel guerrillas who occasionally fired at him. Sherman thought him splendid, and liked his response—“Something bold”—to the question, “What do you want to do next?” (Later, at the end of the war, Pike told Sherman that he thought he would rather become an Indian than face domestication in the peacetime army in Oregon. Instead, he shot himself.) In November 1863, Sherman was as happy with Pike’s message as he was with the man. He abandoned Halleck’s orders to complete the boring and slow work of rebuilding a railroad from the west into Chattanooga and hurried his large army eastward to Bridgeport, just to the rear of Grant’s position, ready to be called eastward to battle.¹⁹

Meanwhile, at Chattanooga, Grant was establishing an adequate supply route to the town. A flotilla of scows full of armed men was floated—unnoticed—past Confederate pickets, and the southern bank of the Tennessee, west of Chattanooga, was secured for the Union. General Grenville M. Dodge was put to work restoring railroad service from this point north to Nashville. With haste and skill, bridges were built and tracks laid in the mountainous terrain, and a dependable line of supply was opened. Food came in on Grant’s cracker line, and so too did munitions for his attack on Bragg.²⁰

Whether Chattanooga was to be regarded as a trap in which Grant was caught, or as a staging area for a splendid offensive, was a matter for the eye of the beholder. Sherman, when he arrived, was as usual a realist: “‘Why,’ said I, ‘General Grant, you are besieged;’ and he said, ‘It is too true.’” Grant was once more growing depressed. In two weeks, the vast stimulation that he had felt as he seized the challenge of rescuing the Union army at Chattanooga, and leading it on an offensive against Bragg, had receded. The change in mood recalled in some ways Grant’s shift from elation when the war broke out to depression just days later, as he anxiously waited for a commission. Now, as he moved from elation to depression, John Rawlins again indulged his powerful urge to protect his friend Ulysses. “The necessity of my prescence here [is] made almost absolute,” he wrote his fiancée, “by the free use of intoxicating liquors at Headquarters, which last night’s developments showed me had reached to the General commanding. I am the only one here (his wife not being with him) who can stay it….”²¹

Rawlins sent this letter, but wisely pocketed a second one, a hortatory summons to Grant “to immediately desist from further tasting of liquors.” In it, Rawlins states that Grant would earn the “bitterest imprecations of an outraged and deceived people” if he got drunk. He likened Grant to Washington about to cross the Delaware, and declared firmly that “two more nights like the last will find you prostrated on a sick bed unfit for duty.” Rawlins did not give the letter to Grant, but he did keep it; it was the written version of all the sermons he had imagined directing at this friend whom he took satisfaction in regarding as dependent on him. The friendship of the two was real, and it was important to both; while Rawlins may have exaggerated the risk to Grant—and the nation—of his drinking, there is no reason to think him an out-and-out liar. Once again, Grant did drink, and once again he sobered up and went back to the other activities of war.²²

Grant’s job was to marshal forces against Braxton Bragg. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland made the first offensive move and was in the center of the line at Chattanooga, and his men were resentful when Grant held them back, in reserve, while entrusting the fighting on the battle line to Sherman, deployed to the northeast, and Hooker, to the southwest. When the attack came, the Confederate response from Missionary Ridge was murderous. Howard observed Grant “looking steadily toward the troops just engaged and beyond. He was slowly smoking a cigar. General Thomas, using his glasses attentively, made no remark.” Rawlins rushed up to urge that there be no retreat, “pressing his reasons into the general’s seemingly inattentive ear…. When General Grant spoke at last, without turning to look at anybody, he said, ‘Intrench them and send up support.’” Under the merciless guns of seemingly impregnable Confederate forces in the mountains of Missionary Ridge, all of Grant’s troops were needed; it was not Sherman’s ill-generaled army but Hooker’s men who dramatically (if unnecessarily) took Lookout Mountain on November 24, 1863, and it was Thomas’s Chickamauga veterans who, on November 25, in fiercely brave assaults broke the Confederate line. The enemy fled, but Grant, as at Shiloh, did not move in pursuit. It was a great victory, but it had not been accomplished according to Grant’s design. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee had not won the fierce battle, and Grant never forgave Thomas for the fact that the men of his Army of the Cumberland, whom Grant held in some contempt, had carried the day. The Union had won—the engagement may even have been the turning point of the war—but the total destruction of Bragg’s army was not accomplished and an immediate march southeast into Georgia did not follow. The splendid military victory was not, finally, a complete success. However. Grant’s reputation soared.²³

In his assessment of the battle, Grant gave credit to Confederate president Jefferson Davis for an assist to the Union victory. Davis had come to Missionary Ridge shortly before Grant arrived at Chattanooga to mediate a dispute between two proud commanders, Braxton Bragg and James Longstreet. Grant knew them both from Mexico—Longstreet, in fact, had been at his wedding and Grant had a high opinion of his friend, as he did of Bragg. Together, they would have been a formidable, perhaps invincible, team, but Davis judged Bragg’s temper so sharp as to make co-operation impossible. So the president sent Longstreet to attack Burnside at Knoxville primarily to keep him away from arguments with Bragg. Grant also suspected a second cause for Bragg’s being compelled to fight at Chattanooga without Longstreet’s forces. He reasoned that Davis, proud of his own skill as a military strategist, may have thought a double victory—at Knoxville and at Chattanooga—was worth trying for. Grant had a very low opinion of Davis’s capacity as a military strategist and wrote caustically of the “several occasions during the war” when Davis “came to the relief of the Union army by means of his superior military genius.” Had Longstreet stayed with Bragg, wrote Grant, rubbing it in, the Union forces might have lost Chattanooga, and then, he conjectured—leaping rather far—the Confederates would have had no trouble taking Kentucky.²⁴

Grant, at left, on Lookout Mountain, after the battle, 1863. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

With Chattanooga secured and Bragg routed, Grant immediately sent Sherman to relieve Burnside at Knoxville. That general’s telegraph line across the Appalachians had been cut, and he was out of contact with Washington. As a result, Secretary of War Stanton and President Lincoln had one of their most apprehensive periods of the war as they worried about the fate of his forces. Grant too was concerned, though less so than the helpless men in Washington. Unlike them, he could do something about the situation. As Grant nicely put it, everybody was in a panic about Burnside, except Burnside. Sherman arrived to find that Burnside had enough supplies to hold out for some time longer; with a line across the Tennessee he had been snagging scows loaded with food that were floated down the river past Confederate pickets by loyal Unionists living upstream.²⁵

The battles in the eastern mountains won, Grant established his headquarters not at Chattanooga, but at Nashville. He did not set out to take Atlanta, nor did he turn southwest toward a favorite goal that was always to elude him, Mobile. Nashville would be comfortable for Julia, who had been staying in Louisville. She took the train there with Jesse in December and found herself in the same car with General William F. Smith and his wife, who offered her a ride from the station; they were sure, Julia recorded in her Memoirs, that the general would be too busy to meet her, but “as the cars slowed up, I heard: ‘Is Mrs. Grant aboard?’ and saw dear Ulys coming forward on the train greeting each one kindly as he came to meet us.”²⁶

While he was at Nashville, Grant visited Chattanooga and Knoxville on an inspection trip, and in his description of this trip we may sample a fine bit of the prose of his Memoirs, revealing not only his keen awareness of the grassroots sensibilities of the civilians during the war but a fine sense of himself:

I found a great many people at home along that route, both in Tennessee and Kentucky, and, almost universally, intensely loyal. They would collect in little places where we would stop of evenings, to see me, generally hearing of my approach before we arrived. The people naturally expected to see the commanding general the oldest person in the party. I was then forty-one years of age, while my medical director was grey-haired and probably twelve or more years my senior. The crowds would generally swarm around him, and thus give me an opportunity of quietly dismounting and getting into the house. It also gave me an opportunity of hearing passing remarks from one spectator to another about their general. Those remarks were apt to be more complimentary to the cause than to the appearance of the supposed general, owing to his being muffled up, and also owing to the travel-worn condition we were all in after a hard day’s ride. I was back in Nashville by the 13th of January, 1864.

Like Harry before Agincourt, he had his way of disguise. He had found a method of indulging both his capacity for watching people and his intense need for praise.²⁷

One of the tragedies of Grant’s rise to power was that he divorced himself from direct touch with the people. Something magnificently simple was lost when he could no longer stumble into the reality of an encounter like the one he had along a narrow stream near Chattanooga:

The most friendly relations seemed to exist between the pickets of the two armies. At one place there was a tree which had fallen across the stream, and which was used by the soldiers of both armies in drawing water for their camps. General Longstreet’s corps was stationed there at the time, and wore blue of a little different shade from our uniform. Seeing a soldier in blue on this log, I rode up to him, commenced conversation with him, and asked whose corps he belonged to. He was very polite, and touching his hat to me, said he belonged to General Longstreet’s corps. I asked him a few questions—but not with a view of gaining any particular information—all of which he answered, and I rode off.²⁸

With such innocence slipping away, Grant spent the winter of 1864 in Nashville waiting out the efforts of his townsman Elihu Washburne to guide through Congress a bill reviving the rank of lieutenant general. There were now major generals by the score in the Union army, and there were lieutenant generals in the Confederate army, but the latter rank was not then to be found in the Army of the United States. Winfield Scott, the great patriarch of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, had held the rank of lieutenant general by brevet, but only the Father of his Country had held it in full. There was a sense that a sacred symbol was being re-created as Congress revived the rank George Washington had held, with the expectation that it would be bestowed on Ulysses S. Grant. The son was to perfect the work of the father not only by rebuilding his fallen house but by making it everlasting, and Grant was conscious of the gravity of his responsibility. On March 4, 1864, he wrote to Sherman, “The bill reviving the grade of lieutenant-general in the army has become a law, and my name has been sent to the Senate.” He continued, “I now receive orders to report at Washington immediately in person, which indicates either a confirmation or a likelihood of confirmation.”²⁹