XII

WASHINGTON AND THE WILDERNESS

It was the bloodiest swath ever cut through this globe.

—Edwin M. Stanton to Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is difficult to comprehend the qualities of a man who could be moved by a narrative of individual suffering, and yet could sleep while surrounded by the horrors of the battles of the Wilderness.

—George S. Boutwell

ULYSSES S. GRANT’S entrance into Washington was the most successful in the history of American politics. It was done exactly right. He simply stopped by the White House, paid his call, and left everyone thinking it would be perfectly natural for him to move right in. He achieved his immediate goal of confirming his military authority, but as he did so he established a public personality that was unforgettable. Everyone had heard about him as a military hero. His picture was on patriotic posters; people had read of his battles and imagined him on battlefields in Tennessee and Mississippi. Now they saw him at the seat of the civilian government, and he looked just fine. He was consummately modest and quietly confident; the image held for the rest of his political career—and beyond, into history.

The only strange thing about the trip to Washington was that Julia was not with him. His reason for going to the capital was so extraordinary that he certainly had license to bring his wife with him. It would have been unlike him to refuse to share such an event with Julia, but perhaps when they talked of the trip the shyness of both argued against her going. For one thing, if Julia went along it would look as if they were anticipating a triumphant occasion. Formally, that was not a certainty, as the Senate had still not acted. It was a primary law with Grant that he should never in the smallest way appear to be pressing for honors.

There were other considerations. Julia, who had visited St. Louis during the winter, had not been well—her eyes were troubling her. Besides, whatever the social activities of the Dents in St. Louis, there was still a layer of awkwardness in Julia Grant. Washington, despite the scorn heaped on it, had an intimidating aura. Together, they would have had to worry over protocol—who should call on whom and in what order. By himself, Grant could be a simple soldier arriving at a new post. So he went without Julia, but with his fourteen-year-old son, Fred. Grant had a wonderfully nice blind spot about his unendearing eldest child. Nothing he had ever done with his own father had been as satisfying as the experience which he, as a father, now shared with his son. And again, Grant’s move was sound politically. The soldier who had made his way to the captaincy of the republic was coming simply—a father with his eldest boy—to its capital to claim his rank and responsibilities. He registered at Willard’s Hotel simply as “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, III.”¹

Grant had never looked better. Theodore Lyman, a young Harvard man on General Meade’s staff who was capable of sharply critical assessments, saw the general enter the dining room of the hotel: “He is rather under middle height, of a spare, strong build; light-brown hair, and short, light-brown beard. His eyes of a clear blue; forehead high; nose aquiline; jaw squarely set, but not sensual.” Grant came in for dinner accompanied only by Fred. He would have gained nothing from a large retinue of prepossessing staff officers or subordinate field commanders; they might have over-shadowed him, and they would have presented even greater protocol problems than a wife. Only two of his staff, Rawlins and Cyrus B. Comstock, had come to the city with him, and at dinner they fended for themselves. Grant and his son Fred were alone at the hotel. This was the right way for the conquest of the capital to begin. It was also an exceedingly effective way to give the lie to any theory that he could not trust himself to stay away from the bottle when in a challenging situation.²

Lyman wrote his wife that Grant, as he entered to dine, “was immediately bored by being cheered, and then shaken by the hand by !” What the elegant New Englander took for boredom was an expression of a certain shyness, or that odd disengagement of his. Grant was already past the point where he could be surprised by such a reception in a public place—even a place like the Willard, in blasé Washington. When he had gone to St. Louis in January (on hearing that Fred was desperately ill with dysentery) he had registered at the hotel there simply as “U. S. Grant, Chattanooga”). The word of his arrival had spread quickly, and the news that Fred was out of danger was followed swiftly and incongruously by a series of invitations. The general was asked to put himself on display, and he had assumed his role in a ritual that was to be enacted repeatedly during the rest of his life. A hero was in town and the citizens of St. Louis made haste to claim him as their own. Like a politician at the height of his popularity, Grant was taken on a tour of Washington University and to the theater, and he was given a grand dinner by three hundred admiring noncombatant gentlemen of the city. After the toast to the general, the band burst into “Hail to the Chief.” Grant rose, there were cheers, and he spoke—combining his distaste for speaking in public with a magnificent sense of how appealing unexpected brevity could be: “Gentlemen, in response, it will be impossible to do more than thank you.”³

By March, neither a testimonial dinner nor any other advertisement was needed to bring the once obscure veteran of the Mexican War to the attention of Americans. When he got to Washington, Grant learned that even in a sophisticated hotel he could not move about without people applauding him. Everyone knew why he was in town; Grant was to be a lieutenant general. He would be subordinate only to the commander in chief, the president. Elihu Washburne’s bill reviving the rank was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln on February 26, 1864. As expected, Lincoln promptly prepared a nomination for Ulysses S. Grant and submitted it to the Senate; the next day it was confirmed. The formal promotion was to take place on March 9 in the relative privacy of a meeting of the cabinet at the White House.

Grant had arrived in Washington on the eighth, a day on which the Lincolns gave one of their regular evening receptions. Leaving Fred at the hotel, he walked two blocks to the White House, went in with Rawlins and Comstock, and stood near the door. He was a bit late. The crowd, thicker than usual because of the rumor that he might be present, had largely moved into the East Room, but in the front hall, there was a “stir and buzz” when “it was whispered that General Grant had arrived.” Gideon Welles, who disliked Grant on sight, thought there was a “hesitation”—an “awkwardness”—in the meeting of the “short, brown, dark-haired man,” and the tall president. Others thought not. Lincoln went over to him: “Why, here is General Grant! Well, this is a great pleasure.” They shook hands warmly. Then the president chatted in a friendly way. Grant pulled at his lapel and lowered his head shyly, but his eyes met Lincoln’s. The two men were off to exactly the right start.⁴

It may not have all been entirely guileless. If Grant had been truly as modest and shy as most accounts of the event suggest, he could have arranged for General Halleck or Secretary of War Stanton to escort him to Lincoln’s office quietly during the day. Perhaps because it afforded a kind of anonymity unavailable in an interview in another man’s office, he risked the public reception—and the risk paid off. He was not ignored, and he was not gauche. Even Mary Lincoln was pleased. The new general seemed to her not to be a threat to her husband, and he brought no wife. Wives required either being put in their place, if they were attractive, or being made comfortable, if they were shy. Since Grant was alone, Mary Lincoln could skip wifery and pay full attention to this new and now second most important man in the precariously powerful world at the center of which she lived.

After the Lincolns’ greeting, the crush around Grant was intense. Secretary of State William Henry Seward, the major-domo as usual, led Grant onto the nation’s favorite stage-set, the East Room, where decorum gave way entirely and people began to shove and stare. They wanted to be able to see and hail the new Caesar, and Grant took the dangerous course of allowing himself to be talked into stepping up onto a couch. From this wobbly perch (which could have been a very clumsy point of descent) the general was suddenly and splendidly visible. The assemblage cheered. To Gideon Welles it was all a bit “rowdy and unseemly,” but the Lincolns yielded to the hero, telling Grant to join them when he could get away. After he had been seen by all, he climbed down and began shaking hands and accepting congratulations. It was more than an hour before he got back to his hosts (and Welles could be introduced to him).⁵

Welles found Grant “somewhat embarrassed” again at the formal awarding of the commission the next morning. Wisely, he had written out ahead of time his response to the president’s charge to him, and what he quietly read was both appropriate and eloquent: “With the aid of the noble armies that have fought in so many fields for our common country, it will be my earnest endeavor not to disappoint your expectations. I feel the full weight of the responsibilities now devolving on me….”⁶

When Grant wanted relief from the realization that great responsibilities were his (or—late in his life—from the awful sense that he no longer had any responsibilities at all) he often took refuge in the romantic idea of rusticating on the Pacific Coast. This appealed to him despite his earlier highly unromantic experiences there. Now, when he got back to Nashville, he told Julia that his only regret at accepting the promotion to lieutenant general was that it bound him to Washington; he had been hoping that after the war he might be given a command on the Pacific slope. Gently, unpretentiously, the remark also served to notify her that they were now committed to a great career and that its locus was the capital. They had to establish the family and to find schools for the children in relation not to St. Louis, Galena, or the Pacific Coast, but to Washington, D.C. The Grant family arrived in the capital on March 23, 1864.⁷

Before this, before he had even left Nashville to receive his promotion, in perhaps his most beautiful letter, Grant had written Sherman of the good news that was coming his way. In the letter, discussing the arrangements of command, he spoke of Sherman and McPherson as “the men to whom, above all others, I feel indebted for whatever I have had of success.” He then continued, “How far your advice and suggestions have been of assistance, you know. How far your execution of whatever has been given you to do entitles you to the reward I am receiving, you cannot know as well as I do.” With what for Grant was strong emotion, he added, “I feel all the gratitude this letter would express….,” and he closed, simply, “Your friend.” Sherman responded in kind; he called Grant “Washington’s legitimate successor,” and observed, “Until you had won at Donelson, I confess I was cowed by the terrible array of anarchical elements that presented themselves at every point; but that victory admitted the ray of light which I have followed ever since.” Grant had brought order to Sherman’s martial world. Sherman credited Grant with a “simple faith in success” that he likened to a “faith a Christian has in his Saviour,” a faith which he himself did not possess.⁸

But Sherman also had a warning for Grant. He stated that the promotion was “an almost dangerous elevation,” and urged that Grant “not stay in Washington” and instead “come out West.” By west, he meant the Mississippi Valley, “the seat of the coming empire,” away from “the impoverished coast of the Atlantic.” Grant thought of taking this advice, but quickly recognized that it was wrong. For better or worse, the political focuses of the war were Washington and Richmond, where the respective presidents were. Jefferson Davis embodied the rebellion. His capital, Richmond, was the inevitable magnet of Union attention. However, this political reality did not become confused in Grant’s mind with the question of how that goal should be reached. He understood that the obstacle to be overcome was not geography, but the armies that defended the man in the city. “Lee with the capital of the Confederacy, was the main end to which all were working.” Not places, but men had to be destroyed. Only when men had been killed would their brothers grow discouraged and yield to the Union. Grant was to lead a campaign of annihilation, and to do so he had to stay east.⁹

Grant knew from his meeting with Lincoln and the members of the president’s cabinet that he could not have his headquarters in the west or anywhere else where he could not maintain a basic relationship with Washington. But although he acknowledged the eastern theater as the one most important in the eyes of those who managed the politics of war, he did not want to be in the city itself. It was not so much that he wanted to avoid Halleck (who could have been moved away, as he was after the war when Grant did transfer his headquarters to Washington) but that he did not want to have to discuss every move with Stanton and Lincoln. He knew that both men were not without ideas as to how to fight the war. Both of his superiors were able and eager to support him, but he could do the job they gave him better if he was in the field rather than constricted at a desk in the capital city. Therefore, with Julia established in a house in Georgetown, he set up his command at Culpeper, fifty miles away in Virginia, at the headquarters of General Meade and his Army of the Potomac.

Grant now placed Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, in precisely the position he, Grant, had found intolerable at Corinth. There, second in command, with his tent standing apart from Halleck’s, he had had no real authority. But Meade chose not to see the awkwardness and observed that Grant’s “object in coming here to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac is to avoid Washington and its entourage.” At his new headquarters, Grant prepared for the Wilderness campaign.¹⁰

Grant placed Sherman in charge of the armies of the west and gave General James B. McPherson the now proud command of the Army of the Tennessee. There were, however, no other major shifts of command or reorganizations of troops. Halleck stayed on as chief of staff in Washington, and Meade maintained nominal command of the Army of the Potomac. Indeed Grant made so few changes that he was in danger of repeating other men’s earlier errors in the east and getting mired in the almost hopelessly huge task of moving the vast army. Some of his adroitness and decisiveness deserted him; perhaps he was handicapped by the absence of Sherman in his efforts to cut through the cant and overlapping of responsibilities that so befuddled the Union command south of Washington. And yet, if Grant sometimes moved sluggishly, he did move. He never for a moment considered stopping—never dared stop—until Lee was beaten. Lincoln never lost faith in him, and he never lost faith in himself. One day Grant was kidding his old West Point roommate Rufus Ingalls about a bumptious big puppy that Ingalls had brought into camp. When Grant asked if he expected to take the hound into Richmond, Ingalls replied that he thought so, since the breed was long-lived. Grant took the retort in stride. Perseverance would do the job.

Grant’s strategy was to make sure more Southerners than Northerners were killed. It was a matter of simple arithmetic, further helped by the fact that the North had a larger population than the South. Demography was a science whose name he did not know, but he understood the importance to his purposes of demographic phenomena. And to take full advantage of them, Grant had to keep all his armies moving—had to keep the killing going—in all theaters of the war. There had been nothing but skirmishes in Virginia for five months, but now, with winter over, Grant discarded his predecessors’ habit of building huge armies and then failing to commit them to sustained campaigns. He ordered several simultaneous actions: General Sherman was to move on Atlanta, General Banks on Mobile (even if by now Grant must have had a sardonic sense of how ill-fated this favorite venture was), General Franz Sigel on the Shenandoah Valley, and General Benjamin F. Butler on Richmond from the south side of the James. Everyone was to be in action. Banks, Sigel, and Butler did not get very far, but Sherman arrived at Atlanta in time to help get Lincoln re-elected in the fall of 1864, reached the sea in time to give Savannah to the president for a Christmas present, and then moved north through the Carolinas. And Grant moved through northern Virginia with Meade, who was told, “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.”¹¹

George Gordon Meade was a Philadelphia aristocrat who was frankly contemptuous of the common people, of whom Grant was one. The two men were in joint command of one of the greatest armies in history for a year and never got to know each other. It took Meade that whole year to come close to figuring Grant out. Seven years Grant’s senior, Meade too was a West Point graduate and a veteran of the Mexican War. He was a bug-eyed, blunt man whose staff (with a Biddle and a Lyman, they were gentlemen all) called him Pa. They found him less ferocious than did reporters, who loathed him for scathingly attacking them when they lied. Meade was brave, resolute, and unlucky. For a year, he was almost never on his own. When Grant went off for a day, leaving Meade in command, Confederate raiders stole the army’s beef cattle and the newspapers carried the story. Earlier, Meade had won at Gettysburg, but he had not captured Lee, and since then he had won no victories. He had not been made a lieutenant general; the victor of Vicksburg and Chattanooga had taken that prize.

As his relationship with Grant began, Meade, a devout patriot, offered to yield the command of the Army of the Potomac to Sherman if Grant needed the latter near at hand. Grant said no in words “complimentary” to Meade, who found his new commander a man “of more capacity and character than I had expected.” (Grant, in fact, needed Sherman in the west, but he also may have wanted, as he did later as president, a respite from that brilliant hater of politics who so much liked to give others advice on avoiding anything political. Grant knew that everything was political.) Sherman stayed with his western armies and Meade with the Army of the Potomac. He would command it; Grant would push it. Together, the two might make it go. Although Meade was slow to notice and too loyal to publicly complain that his authority had been diminished, everyone knew that Grant was the boss; Meade would be credited only with the mistakes.¹²

A year later, after both Sherman and Sheridan had been promoted ahead of him, Meade realized that he had been killed with kindness. Grant needed a general he could ignore. He wanted an army that would obediently press the enemy, and Meade was never insubordinate. Grant, with affability and praise of both Meade’s organization and his concept of strategy, got the support he needed. He gave Meade no true authority; perhaps wisely, he allowed Meade to make no major decisions. In his official statements Grant backed Meade, but he did not take a brotherly interest in Meade’s troubles or help him deal with reporters. By the war’s end Meade knew that Grant, who so often said he agreed with his ideas, had merely listened and ignored them: he had not taken Meade seriously as a lieutenant. Indeed, Grant used Meade up. The Philadelphian was shunted aside in favor of both the restless Sherman and the vulgar Sheridan. When, in April 1865, Grant went to Raleigh to countermand Sherman’s surrender agreement with Johnston, Meade was “curious to see whether Grant…will smother him [Sherman] as he did me.” (By then Meade was confessing to his wife, who had had a quicker eye for the situation than he, that she had been right all along: “I…now give up Grant.”)¹³

Back in April 1864 the war was far from over and Meade was still persuaded of Grant’s openness. He found him an “executive man, whose only place is in the field,” an “affable” man who was “friendly and confidential” and “agreed so well with me.” Grant, he wrote to his wife, “puts me in mind of old Taylor, and sometimes I fancy he models himself on old Zac.” Meade said his elegant friends were disappointed in Grant, for he was “not a striking man, is very reticent, has never mixed with the world and has but little manner.”¹⁴

Actually, Grant did have manner, but it was of his own making. His headquarters were always studiously simple, consisting of a few tents. He liked his food simple as well. An old friend from West Coast days, Robert MacFeely, was his commissary officer and casually supplied good meals. Charles A. Dana found him “a jolly, agreeable fellow, who never seems to be at work.” The other men of his staff were an odd lot—Rawlins, God-driven, sharp-tongued (even toward Grant); Babcock, the perennial arranger of events and affairs; Wilson, flamboyant, flattering to women and attracted to men. None of their idiosyncrasies threatened Grant. These men were opinionated and verbose; they talked a lot—and Grant listened to all they said, taking it in without commenting. In June 1864, Grant’s brother Orvil and five friends arrived to visit the “elephant”—the army—and chanced on the battle of Cold Harbor. One of these superfluous visitors, F. M. Pixley, wrote exuberantly of the physique of General Winfield Scott Hancock, the commander of the Second Corps, and frankly of his own “skedaddle,” his headlong rush for the rear when the firing of the rebel cannon began. He also took careful note of his host, who may have been less than delighted that they had picked this day for a visit. His description of Grant is a classic:

At the evening mess table I met Gen. Grant, and after a very hasty meal, I watched him for an hour as he sat by the camp fire. He is a small man, with a square resolute thinking face. He sat silent among the gentlemen of his staff, and my first impression was that he was moody, dull and unsocial. I afterwards found him pleasant, genial and agreeable. He keeps his own counsel, padlocks his mouth, while his countenance in battle or repose…indicates nothing—that is gives no expression of his feelings and no evidence of his intentions. He smokes almost constantly, and, as I then and have since observed, he has a habit of whitling with a small knife. He cuts a small stick into small chips, making nothing. It is evidently a mere occupation of the fingers, his mind all the while intent upon other things. Among men he is nowise noticeable. There is no glitter or parade about him. To me he seems but an earnest business man.

Is this the definitive photograph of Grant? Does it fix him forever as calm and earnest, sensibly keeping his fingers busy as he concentrates, with magnificent simplicity, on the great events of the campaign he is directing? Or is it the picture of a profoundly vacant creature whittling a piece of wood into nothing and possessing only the “earnest” mind of the most banal of bourgeois businessmen—unable to conceive of the terrible dimensions of the martial enterprise in which he is engaged?¹⁵

What, indeed, was on Grant’s mind? It is one of the wonders of the American democracy that in the midst of wars the nation carries on politics as usual, with enthusiasm. If, as William E. Leuchtenberg has observed, we carry military rhetoric into our civilian politics, we just as vigorously persist in taking election talk to the battlefield. Early in June, after the battle of Cold Harbor, men who had been fighting with sustained viciousness paused under a truce to bury the dead. As a crowd of rebels and Yankees gathered around a ten-man grave, one Southerner asked a Northerner who his man for president was. “Old Abe, I guess,” was the reply. “Dirty abolitionist,” remarked the man from the South—and the Northerner knocked him out for the insult. The campaigns of 1864, martial and electoral, were under way.¹⁶

Grant and his staff at City Point. John A. Rawlins, without his beard, is at far left; Ely S. Parker is second from right. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

That every boy has the chance to be president is the official fantasy of the American republic. There is no evidence but every probability that the boy Hiram Ulysses Grant indulged the dream. When he had reached forty, the idea that he, a failed farmer and futureless clerk, could gain the first post of the land was preposterous. Two years later, it was not preposterous at all. Grant grew up with the tradition that access to the White House was not limited to aristocrats like the founding fathers. The first president he could have remembered hearing much about was General Andrew Jackson—the first non-Olympian to gain office, and a westerner. The first election of Grant’s young adulthood was that of General William Henry Harrison; Grant was familiar with the hokum of the “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign, with its traveling log cabin, from which Harrison ascended to the White House. Such leaps were possible. And if Harrison could reach back to tidewater Virginia ancestors to give himself secure familial footings, then Ulysses Grant had Matthew Grant of Connecticut.

Grant at City Point, 1864. Photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Ulysses Grant had always known he was someone to be taken into account, even if for forty years no one had done so. From the day he gained his colonelcy and began to confront the war and the officers and politicians who, with him, were waging it, he moved with great inner strength. He seems always, even in his struggles against rebuffs by General Halleck, to have had a sense that he was moving up. He was never vainglorious; his sense of self was too strong for that. It was logical that he should gain—and regain—command of the Army of the Tennessee, and then go on to command of the armies of the west and finally of all the Union armies. Why was it not just as logical that he should move on to the one equally important post the Republic had to offer—the presidency?

In 1864, the successful, shrewd Illinois lawyer who was in the White House wanted to stay there. No rustic, Abraham Lincoln was a well-established attorney who had put a good many assets between him and his axe. Except when campaigning, he no longer had to think about splitting rails. And in the midst of war, good forearms might not be enough if a competitor had greater strengths; both the rails and the Black Hawk War were, after all, pale in comparison to Vicksburg. Lincoln was far above letting his own political ambitions keep him from giving Grant the full military power and prestige needed to win the war and preserve the Union, but one Illinois politician could size up another. Lincoln wisely obtained from Grant a disclaimer of any hope of a hasty move to the White House. Grant, just as shrewdly, chose to wait his turn.

A person named by a national newspaper as a presidential possibility finds it hard not to savor the idea. Apparently it tastes good. When the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg did not lead to a swift defeat of the Confederacy, and the war dragged on, many thought that Lincoln should be replaced. He was attacked from the left by those who waved a radical banner, striped with support for the freedmen. At the other end of the spectrum were those who wanted a more conservative man than he. Still others simply wanted anyone else. Military heroes were highly desirable as political candidates; George Washington, after all, had set a tradition. They were glamorous, and they were thought not to be burdened with too many ideas. The nation had elected five generals to the White-House, one of whom was Grant’s old hero Zachary Taylor. Some believed the time had come for another. Grant was mentioned as a possibility at least as early as Chattanooga, in the fall of 1863. He immediately adopted the classic attitude toward such talk—the one calculated to make it come true. He denied having any interest in the post.

Rawlins did not discourage talk of his chief for the presidency, although in March 1864 he declared the promotion to lieutenant general to be the greater honor. “I cannot conceive how the use of General Grant’s name in connection with Presidency can result in harm to him or our cause,” he stated, going on to observe that “if there is a man in the country unambitious of such an honor, it is certainly he.” Since there was probably no such man, Rawlins’s statement was ambiguous rather than unequivocal; his concern was not whether Grant should speak to the point, but how. He advised against Grant’s declaring publicly that he was not a candidate. No nomination had yet been offered by either party: “To write a declaration now, would place him much in the position of the old maid who had never had an offer declaring she would not marry; besides it would be construed by many as a modest way of getting his name before the country in connection with the office.”¹⁷

Grant, claiming regret that talk of his nomination had become public, had sent such a disavowal to some Ohio Democrats on December 17, 1863: “Nothing likely to happen would pain me so much as to see my name used in connection with a political office. I am not a candidate for any office nor for favors from any party. Let us succeed in crushing the rebellion in the shortest possible time, and I will be content with whatever credit may then be given me, feeling assured that a just public will award all that is due.” If Grant truly wanted no office ever, this was exactly the wrong thing to say. If he sensed that his time would come after he had won the war—and after Lincoln had had his turn—he could not have been a better prophet.¹⁸

Grant was scornful of politicians who misused the war as an approach to the White House. McClerand’s hortatory statements had disgusted him. By dismissing McClernand as a commander, Grant had destroyed not only the man’s military career but his political aspirations as well. George B. McClellan—who, of course, did end up a candidate in 1864, on the Democratic ticket—had long been thought to entertain hopes of the White House; so did John Charles Fremont, exiled in West Virginia, Nathaniel P. Banks, still in Louisiana, and Benjamin F. Butler, wherever he was. Grant was shrewd enough to realize that he still had a huge military job to do and was a long way from having sufficient authority to finish it. The source of the authority he needed was President Lincoln—the very man the others sought to replace. Lincoln was remarkably indulgent toward the political urges of his generals. He even indulged Hooker’s delusions about the need for a dictator, saying he could live with such an idea if the general could produce a victory. (He had no need to worry.) But Grant, with a keen grasp of the realities of politics, understood that Lincoln would be uneasy with any man who appeared to be trying to unseat him.

Quickest to spot talk of the presidency are those who seek a ride to power on another’s coattails. Jesse Grant had already grasped a well-stitched seam and was giving out statements that were highly embarrassing to the general. Exasperated, the son wrote to his father, “From your letter you seem to have taken an active feeling, to say the least, in this matter, that I would like to talk to you about. I could write, but do not want to do so. Why not come down here and see me?” Like Jesse, other people found the rumors fun to play with. Old acquaintances, startled by Grant’s eminence but eager to share a bit in his glory, inserted themselves into the game of president-making. J. Russell Jones, formerly of Galena and now a Chicago businessman who was helping Grant invest his six-thousand-dollar salary, told of traveling to Washington, at the president’s request, to have a conversation about Grant’s desires. Jones claimed he read Lincoln a letter of disavowal by Grant, to which the president replied, “My son, you will never know how gratifying that is to me. No man knows, when that Presidential grub gets to gnawing at him, just how deep it will get until he has tried it; and I didn’t know but what there was one gnawing at Grant.” However shrewd the observation, its language, particularly the “My son,” is too folksy even for Lincoln, and it is possible that the two men never had the conversation Jones reported. If they did indeed talk, it was probably at Jones’s or Washburne’s instigation rather than the president’s; to achieve longer-range goals they would have wanted to persuade Lincoln—and the nation—of Grant’s modest disinterest in the presidency. Julia Grant was another politician who hewed carefully to this line. A diarist interested in politics noted that when Mrs. Grant was asked in Washington, in May 1864, about “the White House and the next presidency…[she] said most emphatically that her husband would not think for one moment of accepting a nomination.” Grant needed Lincoln’s support if he was to have the authority he needed to win the war. When that was done there would be time enough for rewards. First, he had to meet Lee in the Wilderness.¹⁹

For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth

With the slowly-smoked cigar—

The scheme that smouldered through winter long

Now bursts into act—into war—

The resolute scheme of a heart as calm

As the Cyclone’s core.

—Herman Melville

Confederate dead at Spotsylvania, 1864. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

In May 1864 Ulysses Grant began a vast campaign that was a hideous disaster in every respect save one—it worked. He led his troops into the Wilderness and there produced a nightmare of inhumanity and inept military strategy that ranks with the worst such episodes in the history of warfare. One participant, for whom the picture was still clear thirty years later, wrote of men “piled upon each other in some places four layers deep, exhibiting every ghastly phase of mutilation. Below the mass of fast-decaying corpses, the convulsive twitching of limbs and the writhing of bodies showed that there were wounded men still alive and struggling to extricate themselves from their horrible entombment.” A nation’s adulation of the general deserves inspection in the light of this exercise in carnage. When they made Grant a hero, what was it they celebrated?²⁰

The spring of 1864 was the worst of times. With ironic beauty, the season arrived in Virginia, and thousands of men marched and died. There was no fool to cry out as their Dmitri moved on to Richmond. The fools had been left at home, with the terrors of loneliness and poverty that other poor men like Grant had put behind them when they joined the army. While the Northwestern Gazette, in Galena, told its readers, in stately passages, of Grant on the road to Richmond, it told stories too of other local people. A crippled man—past providing for his family—got himself to the Mississippi, neatly put down his crutches, and let himself into the river. He had tried before; this time he succeeded in drowning himself. And another man, a farmer outside town, back from bleak fields after putting out poisoned corn for the birds, walked into his house and hanged himself. He had to tuck up his legs to prevent his feet from supporting him. No cause for the act was known.²¹

For Ulysses Grant it was a time of no such despair. On May 2, 1864, he wrote Julia, “The train that takes this letter will be the last going to Washington. Before you receive this I will be away from Culpepper and the Army will be in motion. I know the greatest anxiety is now felt in the North for the success of this move, and that anxiety will increase when it is once known that the Army is in motion. I feel well myself. Do not know that this is any criterion from which to judge results because I have never felt otherwise. I believe it has never been my misfortune to be in a place where I lost my presence of mind, unless indeed it has been when thrown in strange company, particularly of ladies.” At no other time in his life was Grant as confident. Melville caught it:

The May-weed springs; and comes a Man

And mounts our Signal Hill;

A quiet Man, and plain in garb—

Briefly he looks his fill,

Then drops his gray eye on the ground,

Like a loaded mortar he is still:

Meekness and grimness meet in him—

The silent General.

There were no strangers in his quiet company as he and his men marched into the Wilderness.²²

In Virginia the verdant richness of spring diminished the visibility in the densely wooded area through which Grant elected to drive 118,000 of his men. He had rejected a move around Lee’s left flank (to the west) and chose instead to pass down the east not far from Fredericksburg—indeed, straight through the country around Chancellorsville where Hooker had faltered in his drive against Lee and Jackson just a year before:

In glades they meet skull after skull

Where pine-cones lay—the rusted gun,

Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat

And cuddled-up skeleton;

And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,

And comrades lost bemoan:

By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged—

But the Year and the Man were gone.

On the night of May 3 the first Union soldiers crossed the Rapidan River at Germanna Ford and Ely Ford and moved down narrow roads past dense walls of second-growth trees. Winfield Scott Hancock, leading the Second Corps, was “the beau ideal of a soldier,” wrote a dazzled Californian, “blue-eyed, fair-haired Saxon, strong, well-proportioned and manly, broad-chested, full and compact.” He was as aggressive as this description required him to be. In contrast was the diffident Gouverneur Kemble Warren, in command of the Fifth Corps, whose hesitancy troubled both Meade and Grant. John Sedgwick, steady (and soon to die), was at the head of the Sixth Corps. The Ninth Corps, the last to move into battle, was under Ambrose E. Burnside, whose finesse at Knoxville was remembered and admired by Grant. Burnside must have had his own memories. He led his men not far west of the town of Fredericksburg, which, as a commanding general long before Grant, he had failed to take in bloody assault in December 1862. Now, following commands, he would try again to get to Richmond.²³

Had Grant used fewer men on the march, and started a few hours earlier, he might have made it through the Wilderness before Lee could attack. The first delay came on May 4 when two corps, halfway down the road, were halted, and moved to the side, so that the supply train could move up with them. Then, once below the Rapidan, this vast assemblage of men was highly vulnerable to the attack of Lee’s smaller quicker army of 64,000. Some of the Confederate soldiers knew their way around in this wood, and all of Lee’s corps were ably commanded. In his Army of Northern Virginia the First Corps was under Longstreet, the Second under Richard S. Ewell, and the Third under A. P. Hill. The assaults of the two huge armies as each sought the other out in the maddening forest on May 5, 1864, can be plotted and described, but in truth there was no sense to the battle of the Wilderness. Grant’s supply plans, and his crossing of the river, had been orderly, but when the fighting began it was a blind and murderous stumbling of men unable to see those they smashed through the woods to kill.

Bethesda Church, June 1864. Grant, his generals, and his men in the Wilderness campaign. Grant sits, legs crossed, in front of the two trees. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

If either attack made any sense it was Lee’s, and yet his celebrated cavalry let him down. J. E. B. Stuart was colorfully and irrelevantly engaged along the James River, far south of the battle. He had not scouted Grant’s army for Lee, and Lee began his major attack on May 5 without knowing how huge the forces were that he sought to destroy. He did not concentrate sufficient troops to annihilate the Second and Fifth corps. But it was not the opposing generals that gave the battle its terrible form in that screaming, shrieking day; it was the lay of the land. Masses of bodies were absorbed into the terrain of tangled roots, mud, and splintered trees. In mercilessly close firing, men were sent in relentlessly to stumble past the dying who had fallen before them.

To say that men replaced men is to suggest more order than existed. There was no front. There was no direction. As the writers of the bland text of The West Point Atlas of American Wars put it: “Attackers could only crash noisily and blindly forward through the underbrush, perfect targets for the concealed defenders. In attack or retreat, formations could rarely be maintained. In this near-jungle, the Confederates had the advantage of being, on the whole, better woodsmen than their opponents and of being far more familiar with the terrain. Federal commanders were forced to rely upon maps, which soon proved thoroughly unreliable.” Both armies fought savagely, bravely, and futilely throughout May 5 and then again on May 6, by which time all four corps of the Union army were in action. On neither night did Grant yield to any thought of getting his men out and away from the nightmare, despite the screams of soldiers dying slowly in fires that moved through the woods faster than they could crawl.²⁴

Grant’s campaign in the Wilderness was no more successful than Hooker’s had been. Lee’s defenses held; his counterattacks were fierce and took a terrible toll of the Union forces. The only difference between the battles of Chancellorsville and of the Wilderness—fought not fifteen miles apart, and with many in the second who had grim memories of the first—was that after Chancellorsville, Hooker cut his losses and, defeated, retreated back across the Rapidan. Grant ignored the losses and—if not victorious, at least undaunted—kept going. On the night of May 7, Grant studied his position and ordered his mauled armies of exhausted men to move. On May 8 they broke out of the ruined wood—only to begin the long, fierce, useless battle of Spotsylvania.²⁵

Because fire in the woods prevented him from obeying Lee’s orders that he camp along a road, the Confederate general Richard H. Anderson moved to Spotsylvania Court House on the evening of May 8, ahead of the Yankees. The next day, James Harrison Wilson took the crossroads town briefly. But Wilson, unsupported, had to yield it again, and Grant therefore lost his chance to be nearer to Richmond than Lee was. Instead of racing to the capital, Grant would again have to fight the Confederate defenders despite the dismaying terrain, terrain which he simply chose to ignore. One of Meade’s staff men wrote that late in one day of heavy fighting, at about “half-past four what should Generals Grant and Meade take it in their heads to do but, with their whole Staffs, ride into a piece of woods close to the front while heavy skirmishing was going on. We could not see a thing except our own men lying down; but there we sat on horseback while the bullets here and there came clicking among trunks and branches and an occasional shell added its discordant tone. I almost fancy Grant felt mad that things did not move faster, and so thought he would go sit in an uncomfortable place. General Meade, not to be bluffed, stayed longer than Grant, but he told me to show the general the way to the new Headquarters. Oh! with what intense politeness did I show the shortest road!”²⁶

At dawn on May 10, 1864, the full battle began. Each army had built breastworks to withstand assaults from the other. Lee’s forces were in a rough arc, from which there was a protrusion in the shape of a mule’s shoe. This exposed area seemed the logical place for the Union attack, and it was here that Emory Upton led his famous brave and futile charge. His men reached the rebel lines and bayoneted their way across them before being killed. They had broken in on Lee, but no other officer had his forces in place to follow them. Two days later, Union soldiers again pressed desperately against excellent fortifications, at a point known with grim accuracy as the Bloody Angle, until the dead and dying lay heaped in piles that survivors could never forget. Only at midnight was that horrible day over—and still with no resolution. And so it was for six more days as Grant, in assault after assault, tried to break Lee’s lines. He could not do so. He was beaten at Spotsylvania.

“The ninth day of battle is now closing,” Ulysses wrote Julia on May 13. He was near Spotsylvania Court House, and he saw “victory so far on our side. But”—he added—“the enemy are fighting with great desperation…. We have lost many thousands of men killed and wounded and the enemy have no doubt lost more.” Lieutenant Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., speaking of the casualties between May 5 and May 14, wrote in a letter to his parents about how “immense the butchers bill has been.” Back in Washington, civilians were watching the general. Walt Whitman wrote his mother, “I steadily believe that Grant is going to succeed, and that we shall have Richmond—but oh what a price to pay for it.” Many of the Union wounded, Grant told Julia in the May 13 letter, were “but slightly hurt,” but they would not be fit for further duty. Reinforcements would come in shortly, however, and buoy his men’s spirits and discourage the enemy. Turning to himself he wrote, “I am very well and full of hope. I see from the papers that the country is also hopeful.” After mentioning family matters, he continued: “The world has never seen so bloody and so protracted a battle as the one being fought and I hope never will again.” He told her that the Confederates had been “whipped” the day before and that their situation was “desperate beyond anything heretofore known.” If they lost this battle, “they lose their cause.” They had, he acknowledged, “fought for it with…gallantry….” Grant was trying to talk a victory into being, but a Confederate soldier had written in his diary the night before, “Grant was foiled in the purpose he had in mind and sullenly kept up his artillery firing.”²⁷

The failure to break through Lee’s lines at Spotsylvania or later at Cold Harbor made it certain that Grant would have to wait four more years to be elected president. James Ford Rhodes, writing of Grant as he became lieutenant general and moved on Virginia, said flatly, “He was now by all odds the most popular man in the United States.” George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary in July that Grant was “the great man of the day—perhaps of the age.” Abraham Lincoln gained similar accolades only as the martyred hero following his assassination. Very much alive in the spring of 1864, he was not unaware of the adulation of Grant that he, as president, had done much to stimulate. On June 4, the night before the National Union convention was to open in Baltimore, a mass meeting was held in Union Square in New York “to give expression to their gratitude to General Grant, for his signal services in conducting the national armies to victory….” (This, ironically, was the day after the battle of Cold Harbor.) Lincoln, declining an invitation to attend, reminded the gentlemen arranging the salute that Grant had a job at present and would need no other for some time: “My previous high estimate of Gen. Grant has been maintained and heightened by what has occurred in the remarkable campaign he is now conducting; while the magnitude and difficulty of the task before him does not prove less than I expected.” It was elegant prose written to bank a fire; Lincoln gave assurance that he too would support Grant—as a soldier fighting under his commander in chief. There is no suggestion that Lincoln suspected Grant of political intrigue, but the president was taking no chances on any sudden wind that might blow south out of New York and reach Baltimore.²⁸

Similarly, there is no evidence that Grant thought of stealing the nomination from Lincoln with a blitzkrieg capture of the Confederate capital. And yet, twenty years later, Grant was still imagining the exhilaration of such a rush on Richmond. Writing of Spotsylvania, he remembered the fluke by which Anderson had secured a position that he might otherwise have gained: “By this accident Lee got possession of Spottsylvania. It is impossible to say now what would have been the result if Lee’s orders had been obeyed as given; but it is certain that we would have been in Spottsylvania and between him and his capital. My belief is that there would have been a race between the two armies to see which would reach Richmond first and the [Union] Army of the Potomac would have had the shorter line.” Legend has it that Lincoln himself said, “If Grant takes Richmond let him have the nomination.” And a political convention is a strange box of fireworks, full of sparklers that sometimes ignite runaway fires. It is not impossible that if someone had walked into the convention hall in Baltimore, gotten the attention of the delegates, and announced that Grant had taken Richmond, Ulysses S. Grant would have been the seventeenth rather than the eighteenth president of the United States.²⁹

Lee protected Lincoln, permitting Grant no sensational victory. Instead, dead bodies lay in a no man’s land between the stalemated armies when the National Union convention renominated Lincoln. The nomination was acclaimed unanimous, but it was made so only after the Missouri delegation changed its vote, having initially cast its twenty-two votes for Grant.³⁰

In Virginia, at Cold Harbor, on June 3, 1864, Grant seemed almost not to have been paying attention. East of Richmond and south of Spotsylvania ran a Confederate line through which no passage could be hammered except perhaps at Cold Harbor. There, Grant might assault Lee directly and destroy him. Grant ordered his armies to attack, but when the delays were over and the battle began, at dawn on June 3, 1864, he was not front and center. Meade was. “I had immediate and entire command on the field all day,” Meade reported to his wife. The day was a morning of fierce futile charges that resulted in slaughter. Meade went on, “the Lieutenant-General honoring the field with his presence only about one hour in the middle of the day.” At one-thirty, after riding to the front to see what was going on and conferring with the corps commanders, but not with Meade, Grant noted that they “were not sanguine of success,” and ordered Meade—in a note—to put a stop to the dreadful business. Men in the front lines had to give up the idea that their great effort would carry them through the enemy’s defenses—some had reached the top only to be driven back—and, instead, had to dig trenches under the fire of sharpshooters.³¹

Everything had gone wrong. A Confederate attack on June 1 had been repelled, but the Union commanders had failed to follow through by counterattacking immediately. Incorrect orders written by Grant had sent General William F. Smith’s army off in the wrong direction, to New Castle instead of Cold Harbor, giving Lee time to fortify skillfully. The Union army’s frontal assault had first been ordered for June 2, but as the ponderous armies lurched about, it was delayed until the third. Neither Meade nor Grant had surveyed the enemy’s defensive positions or provided artillery support. At the end of the day, official reports suggested that the battle had been a stalemate, with losses about even on both sides. But in fact, the reporting Union generals were covering up carnage of fearful dimensions inflicted by the Confederates on Union soldiers moving straight into their guns. When the first assault had been stopped, another had been ordered. At least one corps commander had been insubordinate, and his men did not move. Those who did had walked straight into bullets. In Bruce Catton’s judgment, the Union suffered an “unvarnished repulse.” Only at Fredericksburg had Lee inflicted such terrible losses, with so little cost to his own men.³²

Grant and Nellie, from a Civil War patriotic album. BETSY D. KONTOLEON

Years later Grant stated that he regretted the assault on June 3 at Cold Harbor, but this admission does not explain away his and Lee’s inexcusable behavior in the hours and days following the battle. Union soldiers, who had charged, lay where they had fallen wounded, moaning in the blistering sun. Their brothers watched their torment, unable to retrieve them because of Confederate sharpshooters. Lee, hoping to force Grant to admit a defeat, refused to call off the sharpshooters. After two days, on June 5, Grant sent one of Meade’s aides across the lines with a letter suggesting that firing cease while litter bearers went out on the field. Lee insisted that “a flag of truce be sent, as is customary.” The next morning, June 6, Grant wrote Lee that at noon men with stretchers and white flags would go out for the wounded, but again Lee insisted that he could “accede with propriety” only to a request made under a flag of truce: “I have directed that any parties you may send out be turned back.” Grant, that afternoon, reminded Lee that “wounded men are now suffering from want of attention” and agreed to a formal two-hour truce. Lee replied that it was too late to accomplish this by daylight, but agreed to a break between 8:00 P.M. and 10:00 P.M. that evening. The letter was received by Grant after 10:45 P.M. and it was not until late the next morning, June 7, that Grant wrote and informed Lee of the missed opportunity. Lee then proposed, and Grant accepted, a second truce, which took place that evening. For days, as commanders stupidly corresponded, untended men had lain in agony dying. While they lay there, Grant sat down and wrote the most affectionate of fatherly letters to Nellie. She would soon be nine, and he told her he would get her a buggy for the family pony. He simply shut off the horrors for which he was responsible and retreated into a fantasy of comfortable domesticity.³³

As Grant understood the war, Cold Harbor was not a defeat. It simply did not contribute to his victory. He did not apologize for it or lie about it in his official report after the war was over; he simply said that it was the one engagement between the Rapidan and the James in which he did not inflict on the enemy losses equal to his own. (The only other such loss in a major battle had been on May 22, 1863, outside Vicksburg.) With the North’s greater population, equal losses meant, ultimately, “the complete overthrow of the rebellion.” The men who died at Cold Harbor could be replaced. Grant needed only to move on and engage the enemy elsewhere. Cold Harbor, indeed, could prove helpful in this maneuver. The nasty trench fighting that kept up there until June 12 covered the vast movement of forces that Grant ordered as he at last stopped trying to pound his way through Lee’s lines and slipped a hundred thousand men east and south, in order to get below his opponent. His aim was to come up under Lee to take Richmond.³⁴

Back at Cold Harbor, on a hot June day, a Union staff officer wrote that “after extraordinary delays an armistice was concluded [on June 7]…. It was very acceptable for burying the dead; but the wounded were mostly dead too, by this time, having been there since the 3d.”³⁵