XIII

PETERSBURG

…the days we played soldier.

—William Tecumseh Sherman

All wars are boyish…

—Herman Melville

A BRISK YOUNG aide to General Meade rode into headquarters on the night of June 16, 1864, “and found General Grant just going to bed. He sat on the edge of his cot, in shirt and drawers, and listened to my report.” Theodore Lyman told Grant that Meade was sending five thousand fresh troops in by moonlight to assist in General Smith’s attack on Petersburg. Grant “smiled, like one who had done a clever thing.” He had, and the moment of celebration was uncharacteristic both in the breach of bedroom privacy and in the display of self-approval. Grant was buoyed by the realization that his engineers had built a magnificent pontoon bridge, 2,100 feet long, across the James and tens of thousands of men had marched over it “to attack Lee in his rear before he is ready for us.” He assumed, climbing into his bed, that he was about to surprise Lee.¹

Grant had abandoned the terrible and unproductive frontal assaults of Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor to find a new way to get at the enemy. Risking an attack by Lee on his exposed flank, he moved his immense army south, to cross the James River. General Butler had already crossed the river, upstream from the Charles City Court House crossing Grant was planning. Butler engaged General Beauregard on June 9, but failed to dislodge him. Meanwhile, Grant, leaving one corps facing westward toward Richmond, passed southeast to Butler’s rear and accomplished the vast maneuver of crossing the James between June 14 and June 16. The next step was to be a lightning-swift attack on June 16 on the small railroad town of Petersburg, twenty-three miles south of Richmond. The attack was made, but not with brilliant quickness, and once more the Confederate defenses were too strong for him; once again there were “slopes covered with dead and wounded.” For the Confederates, Beauregard was adroit, and on the Union side, Smith was timid, but the overarching reason for the failure was the hugeness of the Union army. It could not be moved into battle with the precision with which it had been brought to and over the bridge. And the army’s size was matched by the ponderousness of its command structure. Grant did not take Meade into his confidence, and so, all down the line, there was lack of direction. The field commanders did not know what their men were to do. They did not take Petersburg, and as a result Grant’s gigantic army was destined to stand in place before that town not only through the summer, but all fall and winter as well.²

Grant is famous for not stopping once in motion, and yet he conducted the final nine months of the war immobilized. He stood in place and directed a siege during a war that was being fought over the thousand-mile sweep of a vast segment of a continent. He established his headquarters at City Point, Virginia. This tiny landing town on the south side of the James became in effect the military capital of the United States. Emissaries visited him there, and eventually so did his president. From his tent, later from a small cabin, Grant directed not only the siege of Petersburg, ten miles away, but the whole of the war spread over the entire reach of the Confederacy. As long as Grant kept up the pressure on Petersburg, Lee could do very little without giving up Richmond. Grant stood still so that others—Sherman and Sheridan and, it was to be hoped, Banks and Thomas—could move. But thoughts of moving were not confined to the Union. Despite the constraints, Lee’s men broke loose and undertook enterprises of great danger to their opponent.

On July 13, 1864, General Jubal A. Early’s skirmishers struck at towns around Washington. The alarm caused the Lincolns to move back to the White House from their summer lodgings at the Soldiers’ Home, on the outskirts of town, and Grant sent General Horatio G. Wright with two divisions from City Point to reinforce the capital. Grant also had rebel deserters carefully questioned, and reported to Halleck on July 14 that he “could locate every Division & Longstreet’s & Hill’s Corps and Beauregard’s forces,” and was certain that no large force had been moved north to accompany Early on an invasion. And so the Lincolns moved back to their cooler quarters at the Soldiers’ Home.³

Ulysses, Jesse, and Julia, City Point, 1864–65. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

People in the North were on edge not only because of Early’s threat to Washington, but also because of the grim casualty figures that had emerged after Grant’s Wilderness campaign. Lincoln, as he called for 500,000 volunteers to replace those killed and those leaving the service, showed his awareness of public opinion in the contradictory advice which he offered Grant, telling him to make a strong attack on Petersburg, but to do so with as little loss of life as possible. Grant did not reply directly to the president on this point, but he did volunteer emphatic objections to some of the efforts to increase the number of men available for war. For one thing, he did not want the Massachusetts governor, John A. Andrew, to send agents into the South to recruit black volunteers to fill the man-power quotas of Massachusetts. Negro men coming across Federal lines, he contended, “are rightfully recruits to the United States Service and should not go to benefit any particular state.” For another, it was a waste of money to pay bounties to recruit men already available free to the army. Even sillier, and dangerous as well, was the practice of recruiting Southern prisoners of war. Grant protested that “each one enlisted robs us of a soldier”—a Union man not returnable through a prisoner exchange—“and adds money to the enemy with a bounty paid in loyal money.” He anticipated immediate desertion of any troops obtained in this manner. With such firm statements, Grant was taking strong political positions—against as powerful a war governor as Andrew—and demonstrating no reluctance to speak his voice. He softened the letter’s force only by sending it to Stanton rather than directly to Lincoln, as he had originally intended.⁴

Grant was disingenuous in his objection that every rebel prisoner recruited meant a Union soldier was doomed to stay a prisoner in the South, for actually he wanted no prisoner exchanges. The Confederacy’s supply of replacement troops was smaller than the Union’s; prisoner exchanges would give the Confederates fresh troops just as their stock of men was giving out. Grant knew now that he could win as long as policies were pursued that resulted in using up the South’s men. His own supply, when exhausted, could be replenished; there were more men in the North.

A good many Northern men were in Georgia in July 1864. On the twenty-second, Grant’s old Army of the Tennessee fought at Decatur, on the outskirts of Atlanta. The troops performed well, and General John Bell Hood, who had replaced Joseph E. Johnston in command in Georgia a week earlier, suffered losses—killed and wounded—of ten thousand men. The Federal losses were somewhat less than four thousand, but one of those killed was the stalwart, popular commander of the Army of the Tennessee, James B. McPherson, whom Grant had coupled with Sherman as one of the two men “above all others” whose “energy, skill, and the harmonious putting forth of that energy and skill” had contributed most to his own success. Now death had destroyed harmony, and Sherman, creating dissension, passed up the swarthy, aggressive Illinois politician-soldier John A. Logan and replaced McPherson with a West Pointer, O. O. Howard. Grant sustained Sherman in this action, and urged Stanton to do so as well: “He [Sherman] has conducted his Campaigns with great skill and success and I would therefore confirm all his recommendations [for promotion]…. No one can tell as well as one immediately in command. The disposition thus should be made of the material on hand.” “Material on hand” was an odd term for men alongside whom he had fought, but Grant was giving Sherman the support he needed.⁵

Siege was the order of the summer. Atlanta lay before Sherman’s forces, and Petersburg, the little Virginia town astride the last railroad into Richmond (from the south and west), had stood barricaded against Grant’s huge armies for six hot long weeks, when on July 30 a brilliant but bungled attempt was made to break through its defenses. For a month, a group of Pennsylvania coal miners had been digging a tunnel to a point under a major fort on the Confederate line. When experts said a tunnel longer than four hundred feet could not be ventilated without vertical air shafts, they improvised an air supply, using a wooden duct and a fire that created a draft to suck in fresh oxygen; when proper tools were not supplied, they made their own. Hearing the voices of rebels eighteen feet above their heads as they placed eight thousand pounds of black powder in the tunnel’s end, these miners knew they had done their job well. While they dug, another group of workingmen had been preparing to do theirs. It was a new one for them; the soldiers being rehearsed for a quick race through the pass which the explosion would open were black. Although they had fought at Fort Wagner and Fort Pillow, black soldiers were still scorned by most Union officers. Now Burnside, more sympathetic than most generals to his black soldiers, had ordered that his black division, under the command of a white brigadier general, Edward Ferrero, was to rush through the pass, far behind Confederate lines, and open the way for the Union army to enter Petersburg along the Jerusalem Plank Road.⁶

The black men were not to get their chance. Both Meade and Grant were skeptical of the whole tunneling operation, and they anticipated that if the assault failed and it looked as if black men had been deliberately chosen to die futilely, the fury of the abolitionists back home would descend on them. Grant explained this at the later inquiry: “If we put the colored troops in front and [the attack] should prove a failure…it would then be said, and very properly that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything for them.” The order of assault was changed; a different and unrehearsed division of soldiers, under General James H. Ledlie, was chosen to go first, while huge contingents were put on the alert to follow.⁷

At headquarters Grant was up and waiting, but when 3:30 A.M., the agreed-on moment of detonation, passed without a sound, he grew restive. At the mouth of the tunnel, the miners and their co-operative lieutenant colonel, Henry Pleasants, sent two very courageous men, Harry Reese and Jacob Douty, into the tunnel to locate the problem: denied a suitable fuse line, the miners had made their own and it had failed at a joint. So the two lit the line on the other side of the joint, and then managed to race back to the entrance as the flame traveled to the black powder. At 4:44 there was perhaps the greatest man-made explosion that had ever occurred: “Without form or shape, full of red flames and carried on a bed of lightning flashes, it mounted to heaven with a detonation of thunder spread out like an immense mushroom whose stem seemed to be of fire and its head of smoke.”⁸

Not the least terrified were Ledlie’s men, who were expected to charge toward the explosion. The earth was falling back to form a huge crater, sixty by two hundred feet in girth and from ten to thirty feet deep, where the fort had been. Ten minutes were lost as officers forced men to stop fleeing and advance instead. The only obstacle before them was of their own making; incredibly, Burnside had not arranged for the removal during the night of the tangled wire before his lines, and now, in this moment of intense stress, his troops had to cut their way through it. As they reached the crater Ledlie was not with them; he was hiding and drinking. The leaderless men, instead of racing through the opening and fanning out, huddled within the crater, with some Confederates who had miraculously survived the explosion. They were totally vulnerable.

At first, nearby Confederate soldiers had fled, leaving the open way that Pleasants had anticipated, but soon Beauregard’s men, despite a fierce Union artillery barrage, rushed back to the lip of the crater and began sending murderous fire down on the Union soldiers. The black troops had now been sent in, but with no chance of successfully executing the invasion techniques in which they had been drilled. As they tried to move up the sides of the crater, they too were cut down. Confederate soldiers later told without apology of having ferociously reacted not only to what seemed a cheating kind of warfare, represented by the tunnel-bomb, but even more to the insult of being attacked in their Virginia by uniformed Nat Turners. Gunstocks and bayonets bore nappy hair in clogged blood from the heads of the Union assailants, grimly but vainly attacking, and sometimes surrendering.⁹

Grant ordered no further assaults through the crater and sent word that Burnside should pull back those who could still escape. In time, there was a formal inquiry into what Grant called “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.” Ledlie was cashiered, in disgrace, but when Meade (like Grant, scarcely free of all blame) called for a court-martial for Burnside, Grant blocked it and allowed the general to retire comfortably from the army. Grant was nothing if not frank about the results of this “stupendous failure.” To Halleck, he wrote, “The loss in the disaster of Saturday last foots up [to] about 3500 [,] of whom 450 were killed and 2000 wounded…. Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect to have.” The enemy had been taken “completely by surprise” and “1–50 yards off, with clear ground intervening, was the crest of the ridge leading into town….” The Confederates had lost only one for every four Union men killed, and they had held their defense lines. Grant told Halleck that Petersburg could have been taken, but did not say who should be blamed for what had happened instead.¹⁰

Grant had been busy on the day of the explosion getting ready for a conference the next day, July 31, 1864, with President Lincoln. The timing of the meeting must have seemed as disastrous as the explosion had been. But Grant was exceedingly lucky; Lincoln could have seen the episode as evidence of incompetence lunatic enough to put McClellan and all of Grant’s other predecessors in Virginia to shame. Instead, the president chose to see Grant as his best bet for ensuring that the war not end in crazy craters. Lincoln was as sure as Grant that Grant was the right man. He saw that the only chance for the Union and for success in the November election was to push the electorate to a commitment to victory at any cost. “I cannot but feel the weal or woe of this great nation will be decided in the approaching canvass” was how he expressed it on August 19. Under pressure to step aside in favor of a candidate who could either win the war or end it, Lincoln could not afford to live patiently through another shift in commanders. He was as firmly desperate to take the crater fiasco in stride—and to keep pushing—as Grant was. Both saw clearly that the general was now to be on the offensive not merely in eastern Virginia but wherever the war was. Their attention extended past battlefields in Georgia and the western theater and into the streets of northern cities, where new protests against the draft were feared, and circled back to the battlefields. Grant and Lincoln both knew that their offensive had to be won. Both saw victory and survival of the Union as synonymous. Grant realized that Lincoln might be defeated for the presidency; if Lincoln went down before a trimmer, all would be lost for both men.¹¹

The day after his talk with Lincoln, letting no one think he wasted time on regrets over the failure to take Petersburg, Grant issued one of his most famous offensive orders. Confederate cavalry riding up out of the Shenandoah Valley had burned Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on July 30 and reminded the North that the town lay along the route Lee had taken to Gettysburg a year earlier. To retaliate, Grant sent the young man whom, after Sherman, and since McPherson’s death, he most respected as a soldier, thirty-three-year-old Philip H. Sheridan. Grant told Halleck, “I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field, with instructions to put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.” Lincoln, as savage as Grant—yes the enemy should be followed “to the death”—wired from Washington, “This I think is exactly right….” But, he added, “It will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.” To start the forcing, Grant took a steamer to Washington and, bypassing the War Department, went to the railroad station to talk to the new commander of the Army of the Shenandoah. Sheridan took to his new command with the ardor of a young lover as he was told by Grant: “Carry off stock…and negroes, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Sheridan’s was to be warfare on people and property—psychological warfare at its most demoralizing and successful. Furthermore, the action west of Richmond was linked to the whole of Grant’s campaign in Virginia: “Give the enemy no rest, and if it is possible to follow to the Virginia Central road, follow that far.” This railroad came into Petersburg from the west; Lee was to be ringed round.¹²

To reach out to a still larger ring, Grant on August 7 sent Sherman, outside Atlanta, a message that was a laying on of hands: “Your progress instead of appearing slow has received the universal commendation of all loyal citizens as well as of the President….” To give Sherman a sense of a whole, he quoted his charge to Sheridan “to push the enemy to the very death” and (with considerable exaggeration) sought to encourage Sherman by telling him that he himself had come north from City Point only after “having put all our forces in motion against the enemy.”¹³

Grant now saw the war with frightening clarity. Sherman should keep every one of the enemy “constantly employed” in the field: “Every day exhausts the enemy at least a regiment without any further population to draw from to replace it, exclusive of losses in battle.” To maintain this pressure on the enemy, Sherman’s men would have to be used to the best advantage: “I would suggest the employment of as many negroes as you can as teamsters, Company Cooks, Pioneers etc. to keep the enlisted men in the ranks, and the shipment to Nashville of every unemployed negro, big and little.” He wanted the fighting men to have full support, and he wanted them ready to move without the impediment of refugees, white and, in great numbers, black—all victims in the South of this awful war to end slavery.¹⁴

And his deadly demand for men extended further. “By sending some of your disabled officers you might rake a considerable force from Northern Hospitals,” he suggested to Sherman. To Halleck went an order: “Can not troops be got by thinning out about Columbus, Cairo and Paducah…. I would like to hear of 1000 a day going by some means.” He sent a regiment made up of Confederate deserters and prisoners to Pope, out west, so that a dependably loyal regiment could go to Sherman, and with more men for Georgia in mind asked Halleck, “Have Inspectors or Surgeons gone to the Western Hospitals to clear them out and send the convalescents to the front?”¹⁵

These last orders were sent from City Point. Grant had spent only four days in Washington, returning in time to come close to being blown up by a bomb smuggled into his headquarters by a rebel on August 9. He had his men keep up the pressure on all the lines before Petersburg and Richmond, and began two thrusts south of Petersburg to prevent Lee from sending any reinforcements to Hood, in Georgia. And he sought to get rid of the one last impediment to his control of the whole of the war effort. Lying, he told Stanton that the Pacific Coast was of great military importance, and went on to say, “I am in favor of Halleck for that Dept.” Looking slightly less westward, he warned that the Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith must not be allowed to come east across the Mississippi to reinforce Hood. As George Frederickson has pointed out, democracy yielded to nation-state Unionism as the war grew older and the supreme commander insisted that, everywhere, the pressure must be intensive; the Northern government, Grant said, must use police as militia if there “is any danger of an uprising in the North to resist the draft.” With laconic clarity he added, “If we are to draw troops from the field to keep the loyal states in the harness it will prove difficult to suppress the rebellion in the disloyal states.” His attitude toward those disloyal states is reflected in one of his instructions to Sheridan: “If you can possibly spare a Division of Cavalry send them through Loudon County to destroy and carry off the crops, animals[,] negroes, and all men under fifty years of age capable of bearing arms. In this way you will get most of Mosby’s men.” Here he referred to the able guerrilla cavalry force of General John S. Mosby, which had long harassed the Union. “All male citizens,” he continued, “can farely be held as prisoners of war and not as civilian prisoners. If not already soldiers they will be made so the moment the rebel army get hold of them.”¹⁶

Grant was constantly concerned with maintaining the manpower of his huge armies. He backed the draft with urgent messages to Halleck and Stanton and even Lincoln, often giving the officials in Washington statements they could pass on to the newspapers, in the hope that the words of the commander at the front would convince the people of the North of the need for more and more men. Some soldiers were killed; others left when their term of enlistment ran out. Finally, there was the problem of desertion. The war went on and on and would not end, and lonely and unhappy men wanted to get away from it. Grant took as an indication of both the enemy’s strength and its morale the number of deserters who came across into his lines, and he was alert to any behavior by his own men suggesting a trend toward increasing desertion. Particularly galling were those who had joined his army for the bounty and then deserted to the Confederacy to pick up another. Sometimes, lonely and confused, these men came back. Three of them, caught as they returned to the Union lines before Petersburg, were sentenced to be hanged, as a warning. With nothing much else going on during the siege, a corporal from Vermont, George H. Mellish, went to have a look. He saw the three led to the scaffold, and could then watch no longer. He went back to his tent and wrote in a letter to his mother, “The youngest was drunk at the time he deserted. He cried all the time he was in the Division Guard House and while he was on the scaffold.”¹⁷

Walt Whitman had heard that particular sound of war a year earlier. In Ward A of a soldiers’ hospital he came on “an elderly man weeping bitterly—Joseph Grover—poor man: wretched, wretched father.” Whitman made notes on the man’s son: “[A] dark haired good looking fellow” of “about 18 or 19,” who had been in the army for two years. “[H]e was very fond of his mother & as others had gone off for a while & returned & nothing was done about it he tried to get away….” Whitman then copied into his notebook, without comment, an item from the New York Herald: “Wm. Grover & Wm. McKee of Co. A 46 Penn & Christopher Kumbert of Co. H 13 N.J. were shot for desertion at the camp of the 12th Army Corps on Friday last.”¹⁸

By August 1864 little sense of humanity was left. On the sixteenth, furious at the attacks on the Union invaders of central Virginia by the irregular cavalrymen under Mosby, Grant told Sheridan, “The families of most of Mosby’s men are known and can be collected. I think they should be taken and kept at Ft. McHenry or some such secure place as hostages for good conduct of Mosby and his men.” Only later, when alerted by Washington, did he tell Sheridan to exempt from arrest “the large population of Quakers” in Loudoun County, “who are all favorably disposed to the Union.” As for Mosby’s raiders themselves: “When any of them are caught with nothing to designate what they are[,] hang them without trial.” Once such unequivocal orders had been issued, it was hard to return to civilities, as intermittently suggested by Lincoln. The president urged that Grant and Lee, through emissaries, agree not to burn farms and towns indiscriminately. In firm tones, Grant rejected any arrangement with Lee “for the suppression of insindiaryism.” (Grant’s command of spelling occasionally deserted him; his grasp of syntax almost never did.) Instead, he urged that department commanders alone have the power to order the firing of a building and then only in retaliation for some publicly specified Confederate act. Grant carefully closed his letter by saying his was only a suggestion, but he had made it clear that he was not afraid to speak his mind frankly to the president. With similar firmness, he wired Stanton to order General John G. Foster to stop exchanging prisoners: “Exchanges simply reinforce the Enemy.” The Confederates did not have food enough for their prisoners; they needed their own men back in the line. Grant was willing to sacrifice the former to prevent use of the latter and, in effect, was telling the secretary of war that this was to be governmental policy.¹⁹

Grant pressed his generals hard as well. On August 18, 1864, he acknowledged to Sherman that Atlanta could probably hold out for another month. This meant that at their convention ten days later the Democrats would be able to point to a stalemate, but perhaps something could be achieved before the November election. Sherman, Grant insisted, must keep trying: “I never would advise going backward even if your roads are cut so as to preclude the possibility of receiving supplies from the North but would recommend the accumulation of ordnance and supplies while you can and if it comes to worst move South as you suggested.” Confederate action in Tennessee, to the rear of Sherman, was not to be allowed to stop the march into Georgia. The Army of the Potomac—bottled up though it was—kept Lee’s army engaged, so none of it could be detached and sent to stop Sherman. The great campaign of the day was Sherman’s, and yet even with a major battle in Georgia in the offing, Grant knew as clearly as ever that the war would never be carried by a single day’s battle. He told Sheridan to go on harassing the enemy behind Richmond: “Do all the damage to railroads & crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions and negroes so as to prevent further plantings. If the war is to last another year we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”²⁰

Lincoln too anticipated no early victory; indeed, perhaps no victory at all. On August 23 he had extracted a pledge from his cabinet that it would cooperate with a new administration in the turnover of power. He expected that he would be defeated in November and that his successor would not press for unconditional surrender. The Democratic convention opened on August 28 and two days later adopted a platform stating that the Lincoln administration had failed to restore the Union with its experiment of war and calling for a convention of men from the North and the South to end hostilities and restore harmony. George B. McClellan was nominated for the presidency; when he formally accepted the nomination a week later, he repudiated the antiwar plank, but clearly, the war was of dubious popularity.

It was General Sherman who turned things around. On September 2 Grant sent a message:

TO COMMANDER A[RMY OF THE] P[OTOMAC] & ALL CORPS COMMANDERS

A dispatch just received from Superintendent of Telegraph in Dept. of Cumberland of this date announces the occupation of Atlanta by our troops. This must be by the 20th Corps which was left by Sherman on the army

Chattahoocha whilst with the balance of his army he march to the south of the City.

U. S. Grant
Lt. [Gen.]

Here was the great news Grant and Lincoln wanted, and in telling it, Grant revealed much about himself as the Civil War commander. As usual, the message was written in pen, in his own hand. His hold on syntax was firm. He wrote so swiftly that for an instant his thought ran ahead of his hand: he omitted the word “army” and then inserted it with a caret, leaving, uncharacteristically, a plural verb—“march”—where the singular form was needed. His salutation brushed past formality—General Meade was not named. Sending a less urgent piece of news, he would have honored protocol; here he wasted no words on deference.²¹

Characteristically, he began with the seemingly unimportant detail of how the news had been sent, along the telegraph wires. His mind worked that way; he saw the way stories worked their way along in the telling. The whole map of the war moved through his head—from Georgia back up to Tennessee, and on to Washington, and finally to himself at City Point. His rhetoric was quiet: “our troops” accomplished the “occupation”; he did not credit Sherman with taking Atlanta, he did not invoke the deity, he used no adjectives. He visualized Sherman’s moves although he had never been to Atlanta and had sparse information about them. With his knowledge of Sherman’s forces firmly in mind, he guessed that it was the Twentieth Corps that had entered the city while the deadly battle of Jonesboro was being fought below Atlanta. Rivers tell with precision where one is; the creek on Atlanta’s north side, the Chattahoochee, was not ignored. And with a kind of unconscious grandeur he anticipated history; Sherman’s marching would soon become Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”

A capital other than Washington (and City Point) also heard the news of Atlanta. On September 3, Grant wrote Stanton that in Richmond a rebel newspaper contained a “rumor” of a battle at Atlanta, but “declines to form an opinion from its rumors.” Cautiously, he himself did not send congratulations to his old comrade in Georgia until confirmation of the victory arrived on September 4. When it came, he ordered “a salute to be fired from every battery bearing on the enemy” in celebration. Nicely, in the congratulatory letter, he told how he had been scooped in broadcasting the news; before he had made any announcement, “the fact was known to our picketts. The rebels halloed over to our men that Sherman had whipped Hood—that the latter had lost 40,000 men—and that our troops were in Atlanta.” A bit ruefully he added, “All quiet here.”²²

Grant did not rest on Sherman’s laurels long. Immediately, his eye was on his old target—Mobile—and he considered having E. R. S. Canby, then in Louisiana, join Sherman at Mobile, or at the least, engage a large enemy force and thus keep it away from Sherman. But military prowess eluded the Federal army commanders in the Department of the Gulf and Grant’s attention soon turned to a commander in whom he had already expressed extraordinary confidence, Philip H. Sheridan. On September 15 he again left City Point and again bypassed Washington (after politely telling Halleck that he would stop only if Stanton or Lincoln insisted), going to meet Sheridan at Charles Town, West Virginia. Grant’s faith in the fiery commander was firmer than ever. At their meeting, he urged Sheridan to press Jubal Early, and shortly thereafter, he recommended that Sheridan be made a brigadier general in the regular army and, of more immediate significance, head of a new command, midway between the eastern and western commands, to be called, inelegantly, the Middle Division; the Union army would thus be divided into three separate forces. Grant told Halleck that Sheridan did not need new regiments, for he was operating with what would be called today an elite corps. Grant could train raw recruits best in eastern Virginia; he did not want the fast-moving Sheridan held back by green troops, sluggards, or anyone who had ever deserted; all of Sheridan’s soldiers had to be fierce professionals. Grant pledged to Halleck that with such men, Sheridan would “wipe out all the stain the Valley of the Shenandoah has been to us heretofore before he gets through.” No other region evoked such a streak of revenge in Grant—a fact that is curious in that he had never himself served there, and he had no personal ties to it.²³

In mid-September, just after their meeting, Sheridan gave his commander justification for his prophecy. In a wild, daring attack, complete with shouts, Sheridan’s horsemen under George Crook rode swiftly and skillfully at Fisher’s Hill, Virginia. Fifty of Crook’s men were killed; Jubal Early found 1,200 men missing at the end of the battle. Whether they had deserted or been killed, they were gone, along with arms the Confederates could no longer afford to lose. Grant had already extravagantly praised Sheridan for his earlier “great victory at Winchester,” but concluded that Sheridan had been more than bold enough to suit the dispirited politicians in the White House: “I had reason to believe that the administration was a little afraid to have a decisive battle fought at that time, for fear it might go against us and have a bad effect on the November elections.” Lincoln preferred to stick with Atlanta and not risk a defeat. Luckily, Sheridan’s succession of raids was a victory. Indeed, in Grant’s judgment, “this decisive victory was the most effective campaign argument made in the Canvass.”²⁴

Jubal Early later revealed that the impact of the engagement was far less great than it might have been; Sheridan could have crushed his whole force if all of his army had pressed on after Winchester. But if Sheridan’s men were less than perfect warriors, they still had Grant’s admiration. Grant was not the same kind of soldier as Sheridan, but there must have been moments, perhaps as he rode a strong horse, when his imagination went to such bold attacks as the one at Fisher’s Hill. Such adventures were a far cry from the sluggish inactivity of his huge forces stalled before Petersburg and Richmond. Stalled they were, but to good over-all purpose. As long as Grant held Lee locked into eastern Virginia, there was no way the rebels could prevent the spectacular successes of Sherman and Sheridan. To the latter he wrote, “May your good work continue is now the prayer of all loyal men.” Grant’s team was winning its terrible game.²⁵

They played it Grant’s way. He never mapped strategy, never put pins in charts or moved counters over simulated terrain. Everything was in his head. He heard all that was said around him, he took in every message, he said little. What he wanted people to know he wrote out in his own hand, so there could be no misunderstanding. His crisp, clear orders were almost impossible not to comprehend. Those who did not carry them out either chose not to or lacked any ability to translate words into action.

To Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, September 26, 1864: “Lee has sent no troops from here…except two regiments & one City Battalion…. Your victories have created the greatest consternation.” With this news, Sheridan knew he was not endangered, and learned also that he was doing his job. To Sherman at Atlanta, the same day: “Jeff Davis was in Richmond on last Thursday. This I think is beyond doubt.” This spoke to Sherman’s worry that the Confederate president would go to Georgia to strengthen his armies there. To Butler, nearby on the James, September 27: “Make all your changes of troops at once ready for the execution of orders verbally communicated so as to have troops as fresh as possible.” To Halleck, also on September 27: “Order all recruits and new regiments from lower Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, now ready, to be sent at once [to Nashville, and hence to Sherman].” To Halleck again, on opening railroad lines to Sheridan (there were six telegraph messages to Halleck in one day and four letters as well): “If he moves as I expected him to Charlottesville, the road to Culpepper would be the one to repair.” To Meade, before Petersburg, again on September 27: “If troops can be moved tomorrow so as to give the appearance of Massing to our left it would serve to deceive the enemy.” He wanted to mask Butler’s moves. Once again to Meade: “I think also it would be adviseable to send scouts…to discover if the enemy are moving Cavalry around towards the James River.” Grant’s mind and his pen encompassed the whole of the war as it constantly shifted before him.²⁶

Grant wrote Sherman that he had ordered recruits sent to him, and he admitted that he had made one wrong call: “I was mistaken about Davis being in Richmond on Thursday last. He was then on his way to Macon.” He informed Stanton, in Washington, “Every thing indicates the enemy are going to make a last and spasmodic effort to regain what they have lost and especially against Sherman. Troops should be got to Sherman as rapidly as his lines of communication will carry them.” He was explosive on that subject. “If Gen. Rosecrans does not send forward the regiments belonging to Sherman as ordered,” he wrote Stanton, “arrest him by my order unless the President will authorize his being relieved from command altogether.” He told Halleck what he knew of Sheridan’s moves, although his information was less complete than he liked, because the nearby battles at Fort Harrison and Peebles Farm had “prevented getting the Richmond papers.” He could see the whole of his war, and he was anxious that nothing be done which would allow the Confederates to impede Sherman. Jefferson Davis was worried about Sherman, and Grant was determined to justify those worries.²⁷

Grant was demonstrating great confidence in Sherman, but he showed less for commanders nearer at hand. They had been ordered to make an attack on September 29; the day before, in exasperation, he wrote Surgeon General Joseph Barnes, “I have called on Gen. Butler to know why he wanted the two ocean Hospital Steamers of which you telegraph but have received no reply. Until you hear from me on the subject you need not send them.” Butler was moving men and material preparatory to battle; early in the afternoon Grant looked out on the James: “I see a pontoon train being towed up the river. Will it not attract attention and put the enemy on his guard?” On the twenty-ninth his impatience with Butler caused him to go himself to Fort Harrison to observe still another, and final, attempt by the Union army to break through the Confederate lines north of the James in front of Richmond. Instead, he witnessed a desperate effort to halt the savage counterattack by Lee’s men.²⁸

Along with the large things that had to be watched, there were small ones. If the officers in Arkansas could not keep the railroad lines open from Little Rock to Fort Smith and Port Gibson, Grant declared, they were to “abandon them altogether. The first thing…to do is to dismiss…[the] Chief Quartermaster and put a line man in his place. The idea that Animals should starve in Arkansas when the enemy can come and supply man and beast is simply ridiculous.” He saw it all. He wrote the orders himself. No clerks or counselors interfered. Businessmen, in the guise of inept quartermasters, were an unhealthy intrusion into war. The quartermaster in Grant was not a businessman in army clothes. Grant was an able quartermaster because when he thought of Sherman at Atlanta, he could see all the blankets, and bacon, and bullets that had to be there too. What he did not want to see were the sutlers, the speculators, the in-laws. They brought the weight of the unmastered world of commerce down on Grant, and instinctively he moved to push them away. Before the war, Grant had not dared look at commerce because he could not comprehend it. Business was a requirement of his father’s world, not his.²⁹

In war, he could meet all the requirements. If there were things he could not do himself, he was remarkably unenvious of those who could do them. The excellent horseman who had never been in the cavalry seems to have been more exhilarated by Sheridan’s exploits than by any of his own. He was not possessive about Sheridan or Sherman. He liked it when they cut loose from their bases—when no one (himself included) knew exactly where they were, when no people of business could get to them. He liked having to learn the location of his two favorite commanders from the nervous Richmond press.

They kept moving. Rosecrans, who would not move, he could neither understand nor tolerate. “Anybody…. will be better than Rosecrans,” he finally said in exasperation. But, paradoxically, he could not move himself. The stalemate at Petersburg dragged on largely because Grant wanted it to; if he kept all of Lee’s forces there, they could not go to Georgia to stop Sherman. Still, he yearned for his own victory. On September 30 he was encouraged by the report of a “refugee from Richmond” that “the greatest consternation is felt in the City and citizens generally are anxious that the city not be evacuated by the Military.” He told Meade that day, “I can’t help believing that the enemy are prepared to leave Petersburg if forced a little.” They did not leave for six more months.³⁰

Grant may have eliminated business from his war, but he did not try to banish politics. In the account of Sherman’s and Sheridan’s enterprises in his Memoirs, Grant wrote, “The news of Sherman’s success reached the North instantaneously, and set the country all aglow. This was the first great political campaign for the Republicans in their canvass of 1864. It was followed later by Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley; and these two campaigns probably had more effect in settling the election of the following November than all the speeches, all the bonfires, and all the parading with banners and bands of music in the North.” This was sound history—and in 1885 not disinterested; it was natural for the Republican former president, looking back, to see Lincoln’s party as having been Republican at that time. And Grant had had an equally strong sense of things political in 1864. Then too he had viewed Sherman’s occupation of Atlanta as a “political campaign.” (Sherman must have railed at that designation—and Atlantans at the double meaning of “aglow.” Nowhere in the Memoirs did Grant speak of the burning of Atlanta that November; he mentioned only its occupation.)³¹

Grant was cognizant too of the political implications of a draft call so close to the election, but he needed more men. In a September 13 letter to Stanton he was scornful of “Sec. Seward’s Auburn speech when he intimates that volunteers were coming in so rapidly that there would be no necessity for a draft.” He was no more impressed, he said, by Stanton’s own estimate that “volunteers were coming in at the rate of 5000 per day,” and maintained, instead, that “we ought to have the whole number of men called for by the President in the shortest possible time. A draft is soon over and ceases to hurt after it is made. The agony of suspense is worse upon the public than the measure itself.” He argued for an immediate draft call also because of the military effect it would have on the South, presenting his views in a way that strongly supported the position of those in the party who opposed a negotiated peace:

Prompt action in filling our Armies will have more effect upon the enemy than a victory over them. They profess to believe there is such a party North in favor of recognizing Southern independence that the draft can not be enforced. Let them be undeceived. Deserters come into our lines daily who tell us that the men are nearly universally tired of the War and that desertions would be much more frequent but they believe peace will be negotiated after the fall elections. The enforcement of the draft and prompt filling up of our Armies will save the shedding of blood to an immense degree.

The careful editing of this letter suggests that Grant intended it to be made public. Clearly, he thought Lincoln should use this statement by his military commander to bolster his political position as he issued a draft call.³²

Privately, Grant was once again concerned about desertions from his ranks. On September 20 he scrawled an exasperated note to Meade, telling him that Lee bragged that after one day’s work he took “300 prisoners, a large number of horses and some Arms, besides 2500 Cattle.” Grant was caustic: “The ease with which our men of late fall into the hands of the enemy would indicate that they are rather willing prisoners.” Laxity was his concern that day; Meade was not to relax his discipline in Virginia, and Lincoln, Grant felt, should not permit sloppy civil government in Georgia. Fearing an attempt to establish a Unionist state government of ostensibly loyal Georgians, he started to write directly to the president and then, crossing out Lincoln’s name, wrote to Stanton instead:

Please advise the President not to attempt to doctor up a state government for Georgia by the appointment of citizens in any capacity whatever, leave Sherman to treat on all questions in his own way [,] the President reserving the power to approve or disapprove of his action. Through Treasury Agents on the Mississippi and a very bad civil policy in Louisiana I have no doubt the war has been considerably protracted and the States bordering on that river thrown further from sympathy with the Government than they were before the river was opened to commerce. This is given as my private view.³³

It was a private view of a public question of great moment, and his expression of it gives the lie to all notions that Grant was a general who stuck purely to military matters. Lincoln had put much store in the development of a Unionist government in occupied Louisiana, under the theory that reluctant Confederates who had been antisecessionists would come back into the Union by accepting the alternative state government. Similarly, he had allowed agents of the Treasury Department to negotiate the purchase of cotton with civilians in the lower Mississippi Valley. Both policies were aimed at seducing white Southerners into a return. It was precisely the opposite of the treatment Grant had urged Sheridan to give the people of Loudoun County, Virginia. It was not what was in store for Georgians and Carolinians in Sherman’s path. Grant contended that the South would submit only to fear; the introduction of puppet governments would only stiffen resistance. He had moved a long way from the day when he tried to win the confidence of the people—loyal, he hoped—of Paducah.

Grant was waging war with a brutality of which he had been incapable in 1861 and 1862. There was, too, a sense of building toward a climax that kept eluding him. He knew he would win, and he was eager to accomplish the victory, but his enemy would not let go. He needed a glamorous success, and Sheridan gave it to him. It started with a defeat. On October 19, 1864, Jubal Early’s raiders, using a hidden path, surprised the Union camp at Cedar Creek, Virginia, and dislodged two corps of Sheridan’s army, seizing prisoners and arms. Sheridan, whose forces were vulnerable, had been in Washington. Returning by train, he reached Martinsburg, West Virginia, on the seventeenth, and on horseback, he reached Winchester, Virginia, on the eighteenth. The next morning, the fierce little general woke to distant gunfire, ate breakfast, and, with all the splendid urgency portrayed in Thomas Buchanan Read’s vigorous poem “Sheridan’s Ride,” hurried to Cedar Creek. There his men, recovering from the surprise attack, were driving off Early’s Confederates. This was the last battle in the Shenandoah Valley; the Yankees held it thereafter. Grant was elated: “I had a salute of one hundred guns from each of the Armies here fired in honor of Sheridan’s last victory. Turning what bid fare to be a disaster into glorious victory stamps Sheridan…one of the ablest Generals.”³⁴

Sherman, too, was getting ready to move. “The stores to be intended for Sherman might now [go to] Hilton Head,” Grant rather offhandedly told Halleck on October 21. The Union held Hilton Head Island, off the Carolina coast just above Savannah, Georgia, and Sherman was about to abandon his supply line to Nashville and head there. Grant knew Sherman’s destination, and knew it would take him time to arrive: “There will be no necessity for there going all at once but let them accumulate there gradually.” He did not, however, let other officers know of Sherman’s destination until he was safely away on his march toward the sea.³⁵

One sign that the Confederacy might soon crumble came from a foreign quarter. The French government was trying to arrange the evacuation of some of its citizens from Richmond. Grant told Stanton he could inform Secretary of State Seward that there were no objections to having French nationals pass through the lines on their way to safety. But not all the signals from outside the country were encouraging; as the election came closer, Seward notified the mayor of New York that there were rumors in Canada that Confederates would set fire to his city on election day. These stories were not taken idly; Grant had a small contingent of troops hand-picked and sent to New York to be ready in case of trouble.³⁶

They were not necessary. The election was peaceful everywhere, and Lincoln’s Unionists were victorious almost everywhere. McClellan took only New Jersey (his own state), Lincoln’s native Kentucky, and Delaware. In New York the contest was close. On November 10, two days after the election, Grant, having waited with excessive caution to be sure Lincoln had been safely re-elected, sent a brief letter to Stanton: “Enough now seems to be known to say who is to hold the reins of Government for the next four years. Congratulate the President for me for the double victory. The election having passed off quietly, no bloodshed or riots throughout the land, is a victory counting more to the country than a battle won. Rebeldom and Europe will so construe it.” The political news did not, however, mean a quick, joyous end to the war. The same day, Grant asked Sheridan, “Do you not think it advisable to notify all citizens living east of the Blue Ridge to move out North of the Potomac all their stock, grain and provisions of every description?” The area was to be made so bare of supplies that it would not be able to harbor Mosby’s raiders, and “so long as the war lasts they [the Shenandoah farmers] must be prevented from raising another crop both there and as high up the valley as we can controll.”³⁷

It appeared that the war might, after all, go another full season, and there was still danger of a rebel offensive in Grant’s old western theater of war, Tennessee, where the commander was George H. Thomas. On November 15, Sherman burned Atlanta and headed southeast toward the sea, paced by a vastly outnumbered Confederate force. Grant feared that John Bell Hood, now transferred to Alabama, would also turn his attention to Sherman, and attack him from the rear. This Grant was determined to prevent. Indeed, for months he had been directing the whole war effort with the aim of sustaining Sherman. Keeping Lee’s whole army busy at Petersburg, he ordered Thomas to attack Hood vigorously: “If Hood commences falling back it will not do to wait for the full equipment of your cavalry to follow. He should, in that event, be pressed with such force as you can bring to bear.” Thomas focused more on what he chose to see as the conditional nature of Grant’s order than on its urgency and declined to take the offensive: “I am watching Hood closely and if he should move after Sherman, will follow him with what force I can raise at hand.”³⁸

Hood, however, had a general other than Sherman in his eye. He had spotted Thomas. In addition, he had thoughts of an invasion of the North across the Ohio River—or so Grant soon came to believe. Hood took the offensive and headed toward Thomas at Nashville. He was stopped about forty miles short of the city, and one army confronted the other in the bitter early winter of 1864. With Hood facing him, Thomas received an oddly incongruous message from Grant, dated November 24. In it, a quotation from a Savannah paper, in which Georgians were exhorted to rise against Sherman, was followed by Grant’s exhortation to Thomas: “Do not let Forrest get off without punishment.” No more. Thomas must have thought he had enough on his hands in Tennessee without having to look out for Sherman’s interests in Georgia. Furthermore, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a dangerous but erratic cavalry officer, was not the Confederate immediately confronting Thomas. That man was Hood.³⁹

In his reply Thomas tactfully pointed out that fact: “Hood’s entire army is in front of Columbia and so greatly outnumbers mine, I am compelled to act on the defensive.” Thomas went on to say that his cavalry lacked mounts, the horses having been sent to Sherman, and he had lost “nearly 15,000 men, discharged by expiration of service and permitted to go home to vote.” Finally, seeking to enlist Grant’s support but choosing the wrong phrase to repeat, he wrote, “I am compelled for the present to act on the defensive. The moment I can get my cavalry I will march against Hood, and,” he added dutifully (and perhaps sarcastically), “if Forrest can be reached he will be punished.”⁴⁰

Grant would have done well to tell Thomas more about what he was doing in his support. On November 25, the day after he sent his odd pep talk, Grant had ordered all extra troops in Missouri to report directly to Thomas, thus bypassing the authority of Rosecrans, who was reluctant to release them. On November 27, he urged Thomas to move, but again phrased his instructions conditionally, saying that according to the Savannah newspapers Forrest was on his way to Georgia, and “if this proves true, it will give you a chance to take the offensive against Hood.” Thomas replied that there was no evidence that Forrest had left Tennessee, but went on to assure Grant that his own movements would “commence against Hood as soon as possible, whether Forrest leaves Tennessee or not.”⁴¹

On November 30, with Forrest and his cavalrymen now leading the way, Hood’s army moved toward Nashville and at Franklin met the Union forces led by John M. Schofield and Jacob Dolson Cox. In fierce fighting in which the Confederate losses—including six generals—were greater than were those sustained by the Union, Schofield and Cox held firm. Grant would have counted the action a victory and taken the offensive. Thomas, instead, told Grant that because he was outnumbered he had “determined to retire to fortifications around Nashville until General [James Harrison] Wilson can get his cavalry equipped.” Grant, at City Point, was as close to desperation as he was to come during the war. He immediately told Thomas that for him to stay in Nashville and allow Hood to dig in around him would cost the Union all of southeastern Tennessee—all that had been won at Chattanooga. Grant was anxious for them to fight it out. It would be fine if Hood attacked Thomas, but if the Confederate did not take the initiative, Thomas was to “attack him before he fortifies. Arm and put in the trenches our quartermaster employees, citizens etc.” An hour and a half later, still stewing over Thomas’s retreat, Grant sent a second message: “After the repulse of Hood at Franklin, it looks to me instead of falling back to Nashville, we should have taken the offensive against the enemy where he was.” Allowing that “at this distance…I may err as to the best method of dealing with the enemy,” he went on to urge that Hood be disposed of: “Should you get him to retreat, give him no peace.”⁴²

Thomas, claiming that he lacked support troops, said he was not ready to attack. Grant replied, “Time strengthens him…as much as it does you.” Halleck thought Thomas had so many horses that some would starve unless a few were killed, but Thomas disagreed. He wanted to get more horses—and more men—before moving, and he did not want to start out in the terrible weather that had set in. Thomas did not move, and on December 6, Grant issued an unequivocal order: “Attack Hood at once and wait no longer for a remount of your cavalry. There is great danger of delay resulting in a campaign back to the Ohio River.”⁴³

The next day Grant told Stanton that if Thomas did not attack “promptly, I would recommend superceding him with Schofield.” Halleck replied that if Grant wanted Thomas out he would have to remove him himself, since neither Lincoln nor Stanton was prepared to do so. Initially, Grant demurred; on December 8, instead of sacking Thomas, he sent him a message of encouragement: “Now is one of the finest opportunities ever presented of destroying one of the three armies of the enemy. If destroyed, he can never replace it,” and “a rejoicing…will resound from one end of the land to another.” In contrast to Grant’s high road of rhetoric, Halleck took the low. He told Thomas the next day, “General Grant expresses much dissatisfaction at your delay in attacking the enemy. If you wait till General Wilson mounts all his cavalry, you will wait to doomsday.”⁴⁴

Thomas could see what was coming. I have “done everything in my power to prepare,” he wrote Grant, but the troops “could not have been gotten ready before this.” He added that if Grant “should deem it necessary to relieve me I shall submit without a murmur.” When Grant, at City Point, got this message, he replied that he had suspended the drafting of an order to replace Thomas. He had, he declared, “as much confidence in your conducting a battle as I have in any officer; but it seemed to me you have been slow.” Grant added the hope that the need to issue an order relieving Thomas would not recur and that “the facts will show that you have been right all along.”⁴⁵

Grant was being disingenuous. He had no faith that Thomas would move. When Thomas reported the hills covered with ice and said he would attack as soon as there was a thaw, Grant exploded: “If you delay attack longer the mortifying spectacle will be witnessed of a rebel army moving across the Ohio River, and you will be forced to act, accepting weather as you find.” Thomas still was the Rock of Chickamauga—he replied he would not attempt to attack over terrain heavily crusted with ice. Grant’s patience gave way, and he made a reckless move that only luck—or rather, George H. Thomas—caused him not to regret.⁴⁶

John A. Logan was a flamboyant horseman, in some ways resembling Sheridan. Grant liked him and privately wished Sherman had chosen him rather than the pious O. O. Howard to command the Army of the Tennessee. Though Logan had been a Democratic congressman, Grant saw him not as a politician, but as an audacious soldier. At this time, Logan was at City Point, and Grant sent him to Nashville, by way of Louisville, with a secret order which was to be presented to Thomas if he had not attacked by the time Logan arrived. The order relieved Thomas of his command and gave it to Logan. Perhaps because he realized, after Logan had left, how dangerous it was to send off a man who lusted for a command with so explosive a piece of paper, or perhaps because Grant too was intensely restless, he set out for Nashville himself. He got as far as Washington—and Logan had reached Louisville—when he learned the news. As Thomas put it privately—he should have said it to Grant, in just these words—“We have whipped the enemy.”⁴⁷

On December 15 Thomas attacked, and Hood was defeated in fighting that day and the next. The last major Confederate threat was stopped. Grant got word of the attack at the War Department at 11:00 P.M. on December 15 and immediately responded: “I was just on my way to Nashville but receiving a dispatch…detailing your splendid success of today, I shall go no further.” Fifteen minutes later Thomas’s own modest factual report came in, and Grant sent a more formal wire: “I congratulate you and the army under your command for to-day’s operation, and feel a conviction that tomorrow will add more fruits to your victory.” It was a cool and contingent acknowledgment of a great success. Thomas was given no greater recognition by Grant during the war or afterward. He received none of the praise or prominence that Grant gave Sherman and Sheridan.⁴⁸

Grant did give Thomas a further assignment. After the victory at Nashville, he urged Thomas to pursue and destroy Hood’s army. If Thomas succeeded, he said, there would be “but one army left to the so-called Confederacy capable of doing us harm.” Grant himself would “take care of that and try to draw the sting from it, so that in the spring we will have easy sailing.” On the last day of the year Grant had Halleck tell Thomas that there must be no relaxation because of the victory: “Lieutenant-General Grant does not intend that your army shall go into winter quarters; it must be ready for active operations in the field.”⁴⁹

Grant was correct in his view that relaxing was not possible now, but there was no further need for much in the way of vast actions in the field. The Confederacy was beaten. All that was necessary before the fighting would stop was the passage of time, and the loss of a good many more lives. Thomas’s was the last great battle—the decisive one that Sherman, and possibly Grant, had hoped would be his. Grant knew now that the war would be won, but the knowledge gave him no personal peace. In fact, just before Christmas he was deeply depressed. He had had no word from Julia since a brief visit with her earlier in the month in Burlington, New Jersey, a town northeast of Philadelphia where she was living and the children were attending school. It was a time of anticlimax. “I am not very well today though nothing special is the matter,” he wrote her. He stayed in bed all day, “eating neither breakfast nor dinner and have not smoked a cigar.” He had an intestinal disorder and a headache—“I have taken ten pills and three Sedists Powders with but little effect.” (These were undoubtedly Seidlitz powders, a sodium bicarbonate concoction commonly used to fight both upset stomachs and hangovers.) Trying to lift himself from a gloom not made lighter by winter storms, he added, “Better weather and the fall of Richmond may be hoped for however this winter.” His mood was leaden, but the next day a letter from Julia “full of ambition of what you expect of me” brought him around, and when Fred arrived on Christmas Day, his depression lifted. Grant was just about to go riding when Fred appeared, so they saddled a second horse and father and son rode together. He arranged for Fred to visit both Meade’s headquarters and the front line and promised that he would get him back immediately after New Year’s Day so that he would miss no school. Quinine would keep his sickness under control, and the war news had brightened: “All well here now. The good news of the capture of Savannah received from Sherman is worth a great deal…. The Confederates are very despondent and say, some of them, their cause is already lost.”⁵⁰

On December 18, Grant had written Sherman, who could now receive mail by way of the navy, “I congratulate you and the brave officers and men under your command on the successful termination of your most brilliant campaign. I never had a doubt of the result. When apprehensions for your safety were expressed by the President, I assured him with the army you had, and you in command of it, there was no danger but you would strike bottom on salt-water some place.” He closed the letter with further congratulations “upon the splendid results of your campaign, the like of which is not read of in past history, I subscribe myself, more than ever, if possible, your friend, U.S. Grant.”⁵¹

Sherman responded with a long letter explaining his plans for an attack northward into the Carolinas and closed: “I do not like to boast, but believe this army has the confidence in itself that makes it almost invincible.” Then he turned to more personal matters: “I wish you could run down and see us; it would have a good effect, and show to both armies that they are acting on a common plan. The weather is now cool and pleasant, and the general health very good. Your true friend, W. T. Sherman.” Unluckily, Grant could not make the trip, but, on January 1, 1865, he sent Julia a newspaper clipping that he wanted her to save; it must have included a generous statement about him, for Grant commented, “Sherman’s letter shows how noble a man he is. How few there are who when rising to popular favor as he now is would stop to say a word in defense of the only one between himself and the highest command.” Sherman’s letter to Grant as well as one to Halleck had been full of ambitious plans, and he did not resist making suggestions about how the war should be fought to a conclusion. But despite Sherman’s ambition, Grant felt sure of his loyalty. In his private letter, he told Julia how glad he was that he had “appreciated Sherman from the first[,] feeling him to be what he has proven to the world he is.” There was no mention of Thomas.⁵²

Grant had ridden out a time of small despair. The common despondence of Christmas had been alleviated by a visit from his eldest son, by belated but welcome letters from his wife, and finally by a splendid tribute from a friend who was also a trustworthy judge of greatness. “Happy New Year,” he wrote Julia. “Fred starts home this morning and will tell you I am quite well.”⁵³