CHAPTER 17

Grand Strategy

GRANT was at Nashville when word came that the President had named him for the Senate to confirm as lieutenant general. Grant had been directing railroad rebuilding, gathering of supplies, minor troop movements, looking toward a spring drive to end the war west of the Alleghenies. He had approved a raid of Sherman’s army which made a swift, quiet march across the State of Mississippi to Meridian, burned an arsenal, two large hotels, and gristmills, destroyed railroads within a radius of twenty-five miles. Sherman said as he returned to Vicksburg that the enemy losses were $50,000,000. To Sherman on March 4, 1864, Grant wrote that he was ordered to Washington to take office as lieutenant general if the Senate confirmed the President’s appointment. His personal success in the war, Grant wrote Sherman, was due to the energy and skill of his subordinates, above all to Sherman and McPherson. “I feel all the gratitude this letter can express, giving it the most flattering construction.”

Sherman replied with groaning over the prospect of Grant’s leaving. “For God’s sake and your country’s sake, come out of Washington. . . . Come West; take to yourself the whole Mississippi Valley. Let us make it dead-sure, and I tell you the Atlantic slope and Pacific shores will follow its destiny as sure as the limbs of a tree live or die with the main trunk. . . . Here lies the seat of coming empire.” Sherman knew that for Grant, as for himself, the war was for a river and the point of whether that river should belong to one or several nations. Also both of them knew that political forces in Washington could hamstring the best of commanders.

Grant traveled toward Washington. His intention was (for Sherman had read him right) to return to Chattanooga and make that his headquarters, unless what he saw and heard in Washington told him he must stay East.

On March 9 the Cabinet, Halleck, Nicolay, and a few others assembled to hear two little speeches that were telegraphed to the wide world.

Lincoln, facing Grant, read four sentences: “General Grant, The nation’s appreciation of what you have done, and its reliance upon you for what remains to do, in the existing great struggle, are now presented, with this commission, constituting you lieutenant-general in the Army of the United States. With this high honor devolves upon you also a corresponding responsibility. As the country herein trusts you, so, under God, it will sustain you. I scarcely need add, that with what I here speak for the nation, goes my own hearty personal concurrence.”

Grant held a half-sheet of note paper. On it was a hurried lead-pencil scrawl. And he wasn’t sure what he had written to read off to the important though small audience. “His embarrassment was evident and extreme,” noted Nicolay. “He found his own writing very difficult to read.” The speech, however, as he finally made the grade, fitted Grant. He read, facing Lincoln, his three-sentence response: “Mr. President, I accept the commission, with gratitude for the high honor conferred. 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 devolving on me; and I know that if they are met, it will be due to those armies, and above all to the favor of that Providence which leads both nations and men.”

The two leaders then had a short talk. Grant asked what special service was required of him. “The President replied,” noted Nicolay, “that the country wanted him to take Richmond; he said our generals had not been fortunate in their efforts in that direction and asked if the Lieutenant-General could do it. Grant, without hesitation, answered that he could if he had the troops. These the President assured him he should have. There was not one word said as to what route to Richmond should be chosen.”

 

Meade and Lee still had come to no grapple. They had maneuvered and countermarched and clashed with minor detachments, the result a standoff.

Grant rode by rail to the Army of the Potomac headquarters at Brandy Station, talked with Meade, felt out the spirit of the officers and men, said nothing much.

Grant found Meade sincere, generous, open-minded, saying that Grant might want an officer to command the Army of the Potomac who had been with him in the West, possibly Sherman. Meade begged Grant not to hesitate about making a change; the work before them was so vast that the feelings or wishes of no one person should stand in the way of selecting the right man; he would serve to the best of his ability wherever placed. Grant told Meade he had no thought of a substitute for him, and as to Sherman, he could not be spared from the West.

Grant returned to Washington and told Lincoln he would go West, be gone about nine days, then return and direct operations from Eastern headquarters. And that evening he started West. He had been formally put in command, Halleck relieved. He had changed his mind about staying West. “When I got to Washington and saw the situation it was plain that here [East] was the point for the commanding general to be.” No one else could resist for him the pressure to change plans, to follow other plans than his own. And even before starting West, he saw that orders were issued giving Sherman command of all Western armies, McPherson to take Sherman’s department, John A. Logan being given McPherson’s corps. He rode to Nashville, talked with Sherman on a campaign plan, huge but simple, as Sherman put it: Grant “was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston.” That was all. The two of them believed they would start a never-ending hammering, a pressure of irresistible pincers—and close out the war.

 

A wagon train crossing the Rappahannock on a pontoon bridge. From a photograph.

 

 

Short Phil Sheridan in Washington early in April did not look the part he was to play. Grant had appointed him to head the combined cavalry of the Army of the Potomac. Sheridan was only five feet five inches high, less than a hundred and thirty pounds in weight—and a total stranger to Washington and service in the East. So young-looking he was—and only thirty-three years old. Cool and guarded he was, refusing to tell anybody how to win the war.

A black-haired Irish Catholic boy who went from Perry County, Ohio, to West Point, Sheridan had followed soldiering ever since. He seemed made for the army life, and as a fighter leading men against odds had proved his wild and stubborn ways at Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. Grant heard doubts spoken in Washington about Sheridan. They would soon find out whether Sheridan could fight, answered Grant. Lincoln dismissed one request for his opinion of Sheridan with saying he was “one of those long-armed fellows with short legs that can scratch his shins without having to stoop over.”

In snow and rain of the last week in March, Grant and Rawlins, his chief of staff, set up headquarters at Culpeper Court House with the Army of the Potomac. Into their hands came daily reports and dispatches from troops on a line that ran 1,200 miles from the Atlantic to the Rio Grande, 21 army corps, 18 departments, with 800,000 men enrolled, 533,000 present and fit for duty. On a day soon to come the armies were to move, Butler up the James River, Grant and Meade across the Rapidan, Sigel up the Shenandoah, Averell in West Virginia, Sherman and Thomas from Chattanooga, and Banks up the Red River toward Texas.

Hitherto armies had acted independently, “like a balky team, no two ever pulling together,” said Grant, as he explained to Lincoln that each army was to hammer away and keep on with the hammering against the enemy armies, enemy railroads and supplies, “until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him.” Grant and Meade in the East, and Sherman and Thomas in the West, were to be a giant nutcracker having the South crushed when they should finally meet. Thus Grant outlined the grand strategy to Lincoln.

Grant was to hit Lee so hard in Virginia that Lee could send no help to Johnston in Georgia. Sherman was to hit Johnston so heavily in Georgia that Johnston would never shift troops to Lee in Virginia. So they hoped and planned.

Grant’s orders to his scattered subcommanders were relayed through Halleck at Washington. Meade as commander of the Army of the Potomac received orders and suggestions from the near-by headquarters of Grant. But the newly arrived corps under Burnside was not under Meade, because Burnside ranked Meade as an older head of the Army of the Potomac; so Burnside was taking his orders from Grant.

The Burnside corps had mobilized at Annapolis, its veterans of Roanoke, the Peninsula, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Knoxville being joined by new recruits that included several Negro regiments.

 

The grinding drama of drums and blood and agony went on. The lines of boys in blue poured south and ever south, fractions of them returning horizontal and groaning in ambulances; others by thousands in shallow rain-soaked graves where hurried burying squads had shoveled them over, still others by thousands, as at Shiloh, Malvern Hill, Gettysburg, with ribs and skulls picked clean and bare by scavenger birds, rain and sunlight finally giving them an ancient and inviolable dignity.

Three years of these rocking lines of destroyers seeking each other and unable to destroy to an end. Three years of it and no foreteller had foretold it as it happened. Inexorable laws and deep-running forces of human society and national life had operated.