Grant Takes Command

Bruce Catton

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504024211
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito militare

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian's "lively and absorbing" biography of Ulysses S. Grant and his leadership during the Civil War ( The New York Times Book Review ). This conclusion to Bruce Catton's acclaimed history of General Grant begins in the summer of 1863. After Grant's bold and decisive triumph over the Confederate Army at Vicksburg, President Lincoln promoted him to the head of the Army of the Potomac. The newly named general was virtually unknown to the Union's military high command, but he proved himself in the brutal closing year and a half of the War Between the States. Grant's strategic brilliance and unshakeable tenacity crushed the Confederacy in the battles of the Overland Campaign in Virginia and the Siege of Petersburg. In the spring of 1865, Grant finally forced Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, thus ending the bloodiest conflict on American soil. Although tragedy struck only days later when Lincoln—whom Grant called "incontestably the greatest man I have ever known"—was assassinated, Grant's military triumphs would ensure that the president's principles of unity and freedom would endure. In Grant Takes Command, Catton offers readers an in-depth portrait of an extraordinary warrior and unparalleled military strategist whose brilliant battlefield leadership saved an endangered Union.

CHAPTER ONE

Political Innocent

Officially, John A. Rawlins went to Washington to carry dispatches telling how Vicksburg had been won. To be sure, the great victory spoke for itself so plainly that the written tale did not make much difference; but if the victory was clear the man who had won it was not. In this summer of 1863, Washington was more interested in Ulysses S. Grant than in any other man alive, but it knew very little about him. Except for a few people like Major General Henry W. Halleck, the General-in-Chief, and the industrious Illinois Congressman Elihu Washburne, hardly anyone had so much as set eyes on him. It was time to get him into better focus, and if Grant could not be present in person it would be worthwhile to talk to his right-hand man.

Rawlins got a warm reception. He reached Washington on July 30, went first to the War Department to talk with Halleck and with Halleck’s assistant adjutant general, Colonel J. C. Kelton, and he wrote happily to Grant: “It is worth a trip here to see how delighted they are over your success. There is nothing left undone by them to make me feel that I am here properly.” They were impatient, said Rawlins, only because Grant had not yet told them which of his subordinates he wanted to have promoted; the implication being that any favors Grant asked for would be done. Rawlins also reported that Halleck heartily endorsed, “as being proper as well as wise,” the surrender terms by which Grant’s 31,000 Confederate prisoners had been released on parole—a matter on which Halleck earlier had been somewhat critical.¹ After this pleasant meeting Rawlins went to the White House to see the President and the cabinet. To President Lincoln Rawlins presented the following letter:

SIR: the bearer of this, Lieut. Col. John A. Rawlins, is the assistant adjutant-general of the Army of the Tennessee. Colonel Rawlins has been connected with this army and with me in every engagement from the battle of Belmont to the surrender of Vicksburg. Colonel Rawlins goes to Washington now by my order as bearer of the reports of the campaign just ended, and rolls and paroles of prisoners captured. I would be pleased if you could give Colonel Rawlins an interview, and I know in asking this you will feel relieved when I tell you he has not a favor to ask for himself or any other living being. Even in my position it is a great luxury to meet a gentleman who has no ax to grind, and I can appreciate that it is infinitely more so in yours.

I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

U. S. GRANT²

President and cabinet members were favorably impressed. By this time they had met a great many officers from the staffs of commanding generals, but they had not yet seen anyone quite like Rawlins. He was pale, the pallor made more striking by his burning eyes and his luxuriant dark beard; a profane ascetic Puritan whom the War Department’s special observer of westerners, Charles A. Dana, characterized as “a very industrious, conscientious man who never loses a moment and never gives himself any indulgence except swearing and scolding.” (Grant once told a friend that he kept Rawlins on his staff “to do my swearing for me.”) Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who tended to be suspicious of all army officers, confessed that he was “much pleased with him, his frank, intelligent and interesting description of men and of army operations.” Mr. Welles went on to say that he liked Rawlins’s “unpretending and unassuming manners” and said that “the unpolished and unrefined deportment of this earnest and sincere patriot and soldier pleased me more than that of almost any other officer whom I have ever met.” Welles confessed that Rawlins “was never at West Point and has had few educational advantages,” but he said that Rawlins was a sincere friend of General Grant, “who I think sent him here for a purpose.”³

Welles was right. In his march toward victory on the Mississippi Grant had put a heavy foot straight through one of Abraham Lincoln’s most delicate political deals: the maneuver by which the President, in the summer of 1862, had given Major General John A. McClernand of Illinois what amounted to a promise of top command in the Vicksburg campaign. During the winter, with Halleck’s support, Grant had steadily cut McClernand down to size, making him a corps commander in Grant’s army rather than an independent commander of an army of his own; then, a few weeks before Vicksburg fell, Grant removed the man altogether, sending him back to Illinois and going on to victory without him. McClernand was full of energy, ambition and old-fashioned temper, and he had been demanding justice ever since; he was also uttering veiled threats to tell some tales that would do Grant no good. Near the end of June he had written to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton asking for “an investigation of Gen. Grant’s and my conduct as officers from the battle of Belmont to the assault of the 22nd,” and not long afterward he wrote to President Lincoln demanding an investigation of Grant’s conduct and his own from start to finish, saying that this “would bring to light many things, both military and personal, which are unwritten or unheeded.”⁴

McClernand obviously was threatening to restate the old charge that General Grant now and then drank more than his situation required. But McClernand had to be obtuse as well as vengeful to suppose that at this late date the authorities would waste any time on this accusation. It had been said too often, and it meant too little, and anyway a review would simply confirm what everybody already knew—that Grant was the most successful of all Federal generals, a man who had captured two Confederate armies en bloc. It was most unlikely that Grant’s position could be shaken by anything McClernand might say about occasional deviations from strict sobriety. Still, a little fence-mending could do no harm. Grant after all had crushed a presidential favorite and upset a presidential program, and it might be just as well to make sure that the President understood what Grant had done and why he had done it. As Welles suspected, Rawlins had been sent for a purpose. It may be that General Grant was not the utter political innocent he is sometimes thought to have been.

Army command in the Civil War was no job for a political innocent, and the McClernand case illustrates the fact. McClernand was a dedicated War Democrat, and now and then the army needed such men no matter how badly they lacked military capacity; in this war a general’s ability to win and keep the support of friendly civilians in his rear might actually outweigh his failure to deal with the armed foes in his front. Lincoln had given McClernand a special assignment, not because he supposed that he was an especially competent soldier but because McClernand’s political influence in the West would bring the army recruits and political support which it had to have if the Mississippi valley was to be won. McClernand had done precisely what President Lincoln hoped he would do. It is possible that Grant, who discarded the general after this particular and priceless contribution had been made, had likewise carried out the President’s wishes.

Anyway, Rawlins was on hand to explain everything, and Welles thought he did it very well. He gave evidence about McClernand, said Welles, proving that he was “an impracticable and unfit man—that he has not been subordinate and intelligent but has been an embarrassment, and instead of assisting has really been an obstruction to army movements and operations.” Welles admitted that Rawlins’s statements showed prejudice, but he felt that Rawlins did prove that “there can hardly be a doubt McClernand is at fault, and Rawlins has been sent here by Grant to satisfy the President of the fact. In this I think he has succeeded.”⁵

Grant objected to McClernand for two reasons. The first was that McClernand just was not a competent general. This became obvious on May 22, when the army made a dismally unsuccessful assault on the Vicksburg lines because McClernand insisted that his corps could break through if the rest of the army supported it properly—an argument that collapsed in blood and dust when the assault was made and failed. What was even worse, however, as Grant saw it, was that it was impossible to get along with McClernand under any circumstances. When he was not arguing with Grant McClernand was arguing with the other corps commanders, William T. Sherman and James B. McPherson, and after the May 22 disaster it was clear that there would be no harmony in the Army of the Tennessee as long as McClernand stayed there. Grant placed a high value on harmony, by this time Lincoln placed a high value on Grant … and so McClernand was kept on the shelf, and to give the affair special point Sherman and McPherson were promoted; already major generals of volunteers, they were now made brigadier generals in the regular army. Rawlins was made brigadier general of volunteers, McClernand’s corps had already been taken over by Major General E. O. C. Ord, and there was no more backbiting in Grant’s army.

And that was what mattered to General Grant. An army commander had enormous powers, by the book, but this meant little unless there was a good understanding with the generals who had to carry out the commander’s orders. No matter what the book said, in this war the man who gave the orders finally ruled by consent of the governed: a point painfully impressed on Major General Ambrose E. Burnside when he tried to use the Army of the Potomac after the disastrous battle of Fredericksburg.⁶ Grant’s attitude came out clearly while Rawlins was in Washington, when Secretary Stanton proposed that Grant be brought east and given command of the Army of the Potomac.

This was an assignment Grant did not want, and the big reason he did not want it was the notorious fact that the Army of the Potomac’s officer corps was hopelessly divided into cliques, jealous and full of suspicion, quick to resent any implication that an “outsider” might someday be brought in to take charge. Dana and Halleck sounded Grant on the matter, learned how he felt, and managed to talk Mr. Stanton out of his plan. On August 5 Grant wrote to Dana, confessing that “it would cause me more sadness than satisfaction to be ordered to the Command of the Army of the Potomac.” He went on to explain:

Here I know the officers and men and what each Gen. is capable of as a separate Commander. There I would have all to learn. Here I know the geography of the Country, and its resources. There it would be a new study. Besides more or less dissatisfaction would necessarily be produced by importing a General to command an Army already well supplied with those who have grown up, and been promoted, with it.… I feel very grateful for your timely intercession in saving me from going to the Army of the Potomac. Whilst I would disobey no order I should beg very hard to be excused before accepting that command.

A little later he wrote in the same vein to Congressman Washburne:

Had it not been for Gen. Halleck and Dana I think it altogether likely I would have been ordered to the Potomac. My going could do no possible good. They have there able officers who have been brought up with that Army, and to import a Commander to place over them certainly could produce no good. Whilst I would not positively disobey an order I would have objected most vehemently to taking that Command, or any other except the one I have. I can do more with this Army than it would be possible for me to do with any other without time to make the same acquaintance with others I have with this. I know that the soldiers of the Army of the Ten. can be relied on to the fullest extent. I believe I know the exact capacity of every General in my Command to command troops, and just where to place them to get from them their best services. This is a matter of no small importance.

Grant was not the only one who saw the danger. Late in July the powerful antislavery leader from Massachusetts, Senator Henry Wilson, got wind of the proposed appointment and sent a stiff protest to Washburne, saying he hoped Grant would have nothing to do with the job. “I fear,” wrote Senator Wilson, “if he should take the Potomac army that he would be ruined by a set of men in and out of that army. I am confident his great success has excited envy, and that if an opportunity should offer he would be sacrificed.”

Senator Wilson spoke as an unrelenting abolitionist who believed that the “set of men” who dominated the Army of the Potomac wanted to fight the Rebels without fighting slavery. The abolitionists suspected that although they as radical Republicans were running the war the nation’s principal army somehow was under the control of soft-war Democrats; and what was interesting just now was that Wilson was hurrying to Grant’s support although Grant had never been either a Republican or an abolitionist. Wilson told Washburne that he had been talking with Dana, who assured him that Grant “is in favor of destroying the cause of this civil war—of overthrowing slavery—and that his army is deeply imbued with the same feeling. I am glad to hear from so good a judge such an account of Grant and his noble army.”⁷

Washburne got confirmation on this point from Grant himself. When he wrote to the Congressman about his unwillingness to command the Army of the Potomac Grant explained his position in detail:

The people of the North need not quarrel over the institution of Slavery. What Vice President Stephens acknowledges the Corner Stone of the Confederacy is already knocked out. Slavery is already dead and cannot be resurrected. It would take a standing army to maintain slavery in the South if we were to make peace today, guaranteeing to the South all their former Constitutional privileges. I never was an Abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one Nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace reestablished I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.⁸

He may not have known that he was doing it—probably did not, for he acted by instinct in such matters, and to explain why he did what he did was usually beyond him—but in the summer following Pemberton’s surrender Grant moved through the political maze with a good deal of skill. He laid the McClernand affair to rest; he dodged the threat of a transfer to that graveyard for the hopes of ambitious generals, the Eastern army; and he quietly asserted his dedication to the principle of an antislavery war, which the abolitionists could ponder over at their leisure. At the same time he was emerging as a hero of the Northern Democrats, whose principal organ in the east, the New York World, found room to quote extensively from a speech made in St. Louis by Major General Frank Blair, commander of a division in Sherman’s army corps. Blair was vigorously rebutting McClernand’s attempt to take credit for the Vicksburg campaign, and he declared that “when any ambitious or vainglorious chieftain comes back and attempts to claim for himself great deeds which have immortalized and ought to immortalize General Grant, the whole army of Grant will repel the idea and we will proclaim everywhere that the leading spirit, the great chief and leader of the expedition, was General Grant.”

The World printed this with approval, ignoring the fact that Blair’s real target was the eminent War Democrat McClernand and implying that the speech really showed that the victory at Vicksburg was not a Republican achievement at all. What Blair said, the World argued, proved that neither Halleck nor Stanton deserved any credit for what had been done; the victory was all Grant’s.⁹

The victory was his, and so was the responsibility. No matter how he played the political caroms, Grant’s real job was to find out what his army ought to do next and then to go and do it. He felt at first that his men were worn out and needed to spend a good deal of time resting and refitting; but it was widely known that troops kept their health better on the march than they did in camp, it seemed likely that Vicksburg’s steamy summer heat would induce a ruinous sick list, and anyway to lie idle was not appealing; and Dana notified Secretary Stanton that Grant “has no idea of going into summer quarters” and wanted to strike another blow. What Grant needed, said Dana, was “to be informed whether the Government wishes him to follow his own judgment or to co-operate in some particular scheme of operations.” Grant waited for word from Halleck, confessed privately that “I have but little idea what is to be done with our western forces,” and studied the situation to see what chances were open.¹⁰

There were certain possibilities: accompanied, as usual, by various problems.

East of Vicksburg Sherman with 50,000 men had driven Confederate Joseph E. Johnston, who had 31,000, away from the city of Jackson, where Johnston had come to rest when his efforts to raise the siege of Vicksburg failed. Neither Grant, Sherman nor Halleck himself felt that Johnston really needed to be pursued; the weather was fearfully hot, the roads were bad, and it seemed that if Johnston would just get out of Mississippi and go wherever he chose in Alabama that would be good enough. Sherman, who believed that a summer campaign in this climate was impossible anyway, predicted blithely that Johnston’s 31,000 would quickly “perish by heat, thirst and disappointment,” and he brought his own troops back to Vicksburg, summing up the Jackson operation with the exultant report: “The inhabitants are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated for 30 miles around.” The devastation was real enough—Sherman’s men were becoming expert at that sort of thing—and Grant suspected that Johnston’s army was so demoralized that it would lose half of its numbers before a new campaign began. He also believed that Pemberton’s paroled force was evaporating and that even if the men were finally exchanged very few of them would ever fight for the Confederacy again. These estimates were somewhat too optimistic, but one fact was clear: Mississippi was wide open, and Union troops here could do about as they pleased.¹¹

Grant suspected that much the same was true of the area beyond the big river. This vast stretch of land, the trans-Mississippi Confederacy, running from the Missouri line to the Rio Grande, its western border dissolving somewhere in the dusty Indian country, was commanded by the distinguished, mysteriously ineffective strategist, General Edmund Kirby Smith. Smith was cruelly handicapped because he was almost totally cut off from the rest of the Confederate world, he had been unable to reduce the Federal pressure on Vicksburg even with the life of the Confederacy at stake, and Grant had such a low opinion of his force that he told Halleck that Smith had to use half of his army to keep the other half from deserting.¹² That this might be another bit of overoptimism mattered little; the trans-Mississippi offered the Federals no strategically important targets, and it called for campaigning only to protect the flanks of Federal forces in Missou...