Never Call Retreat, page 35
The people who were so eager to see Grant did not quite know what they were looking at. There was something baffling about him. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., looked him over and concluded that he "had no gait, no station, no manner."
There was a scrubby look about him, said Dana, "rather the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink," and Dana felt that except for the hard look in the clear blue eyes Grant looked like a half-pay character who had nothing to do but hang around the entrance to Willard's, cigar in mouth. There was a certain air of resolution about him, to be sure, but one can see Dana shaking his head disapprovingly as he finished the comment: "To see him talking and smoking in the lower entry of Willard's, in that crowd, in such linen, the general in chief of our armies on whom the destiny of empire seems to hang!"5
Men who were much less supercilious than Dana were equally puzzled. After the war a man who had served with Grant in the west talked about the relationship between Grant and the soldiers: "He was a man in whom the men had confidence, but they did not love him. He'd ride past without their knowing it. A few of the army knew him by sight. Logan, Smith, McPherson would raise a ripple of applause every time they went by; Grant never did." This man agreed with General Banks that the soldiers who took Vicksburg were a tough lot—"entirely cowhands, western men, fierce-fighting western men in for work and in for the war," Banks called them—and he could sum up their feeling toward Grant only by saying: "They knew him and trusted him and he knew them. He could stand any hardship they could stand and do their thinking besides."
A woman who saw Grant frequently in Washington noted that even in a crowd he always seemed to be alone. He was friendly and approachable, but he had "a peculiar aloofness," and she felt that a mysterious atmosphere surrounded him; "He walked through a crowd as though solitary."0 The crowds would always be about him, from now to the end of his life, and it would be his fate to go through them alone. Probably he never was more alone than he was on March 10, when he finished his ceremonial chores at the White House and went down to Brandy Station to visit headquarters of the Army of the Potomac.
This army had been in the back of everybody's mind all through the debate on the bill to have a lieutenant general. If Grant's promotion made people see him as a presidential candidate it also made them see him as a new broom. There was a feeling that a new broom was needed; a suspicion, right or wrong, that this army was never used to its full potential. Its officer corps complained bitterly that the administration played politics with military matters, and the administration in turn complained that the officers' own political bias sapped the army's will to win, and there was a good deal of truth in both complaints. Months earlier, when Gideon Welles suggested that it might be well to put someone in Meade's place, the President burst out: "What can I do with such generals as we have? Who among them is any better than Meade? To sweep away the whole of them from the chief command and substitute a new man would cause a shock and be likely to lead to combinations and troubles greater than we have now." As a matter of fact, shortly after Vicksburg the War Department did plan to replace Meade with Grant, and Grant protested vigorously, saying that "my going would do no possible good" and pointing out that officers of the Army of the Potomac would certainly resent having an outsider brought in to take command. Now he was here, the outsider, and as Grant left for Brandy Station Mr. Lincoln told John Nicolay that he hoped the new lieutenant general could "do something with the unfortunate Army of the Potomac."7
Under such circumstances, the reception at headquarters was bound to see everyone stalking around stiff-legged. Major General Andrew A. Humphreys, Meade's capable chief of staff, wrote that Grant's reception was "of the simple frankness which high-toned soldiers give each other, yet there could be perceived something (arising chiefly from his own manner) that indicated that it was the visit of a rival commander of a rival army." Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, chief of artillery in the V Corps, and a good reflector of the state of mind of the army's old-line officers, wrote of Grant with disdain touched with a faint, cynical hope that things might turn out for the best: "It is hard for those who knew him when formerly in the army to believe that he is a great man; then he was only distinguished for the mediocrity of his mind, his great good nature and his insatiable love of whiskey. He will doubtless now be placed in supreme command of all the armies; and as the radicals must see that they have nothing more to gain by prolonging the war, we shall probably have matters pushed with great energy in the coming campaign." A few days later, after he had actually looked at the man, Wainwright conceded that he was "not so hard-looking a man as his photographs make him out to be," but felt that he was "stumpy, unmilitary, slouchy and western-looking; very ordinary, in fact."8
When Humphreys wrote of high-toned soldiers and their simple frankness he was undoubtedly thinking of Meade. Of all the officers at headquarters Meade was the one with whom Grant had no trouble at all. A meeting that must have been an immense strain for both men passed off well. Meade opened by saying he supposed Grant might want some westerner—Sherman, perhaps—to command the Army of the Potomac, and he said that if this was the case Grant should not hesitate to make the change; he, Meade, would understand, would give up his place without a murmur, and would serve to the best of his ability in any post the general-in-chief chose for him. Grant replied that he had no intention of putting anyone in Meade's place, and when he wrote his Memoirs, long afterward, he said that "this incident gave me even a more favorable opinion of Meade than did his great victory at Gettysburg." Meade told his wife that he was "very much pleased with General Grant," and said Grant "snowed much more capacity and character than I had expected." It was settled, then, that Meade would continue as he was; but it was settled, too, that Grant as commander of all the armies would make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, moving where that army moved, keeping Halleck in Washington as chief of staff to handle paper work and housekeeping details. Meade could make no objection to this, but he did write Mrs. Meade that "you may now look for the Army of the Potomac putting laurels on the brows of another rather than your husband."9
The laurels went where Meade thought they would go, especially after the newspaper correspondents—who were not fond of Meade anyway—took to referring to the Army of the Potomac, casually, as "Grant's army." The command arrangement was clumsy, it inevitably produced friction, and only the fact that Grant and Meade were dedicated men kept the friction from becoming ruinous. Everybody felt that Grant's constant presence betrayed a feeling (notoriously shared by the White House and the War Department) that someone had to ride herd on this army. Its officers would have been more than human if they had not resented it. Grant's responsibility, however, went far beyond the Army of the Potomac. Every soldier the country had was his to command. It was reported (a little inaccurately) that he was being given an absolutely free hand. The President said that he neither knew nor wanted to know his military plans. Grant's fundamental concern was grand strategy. It was up to him to devise and execute the broad design that would destroy the Southern Confederacy.
Early in the winter, before he knew that he would soon be made general-in-chief, Grant had tried his hand at over-all planning. He limited himself at first to affairs in his own sphere, the west, and on January 15 he sent Halleck a plan for bisecting the cotton South. He wanted to begin by having Sherman march east from Vicksburg to the railroad center of Meridian, under orders to destroy the railroads along the Mississippi-Alabama line so completely "that the enemy will not attempt to rebuild them during the rebellion." Then Grant would take Mobile, that ripe plum which he and Banks and Farragut had been wanting to pluck ever since the fall of Vicksburg. This done, he would strike with two powerful armies, one going from Chattanooga to take Atlanta and the other coming up from Mobile to take Montgomery. He considered Sherman and McPherson the proper commanders for these armies.
Less than a week later he submitted a supplementary plan involving the war in the east. He began by coolly asking whether "an abandonment of all previously attempted lines to Richmond is not advisable, and in lieu of these one be taken farther south." Specifically, he suggested that an army of 60,000 men go inland from Suffolk, Virginia, near the great Federal base at Hampton Roads, and head for Raleigh; and as soon as Raleigh was taken this army could move on Wilmington. All of this "would virtually force an evacuation of Virginia and indirectly of East Tennessee"; it would pull Lee's army down into the Carolinas, and "it would draw the enemy from campaigns of their own choosing, and for which they are prepared, to new lines of operations never expected to become necessary." He outlined the same plan to Thomas, saying that these movements would threaten the Confederacy's lines of interior communications so sharply that they could no longer bring large armies against the main Federal forces in the field; and he warned that before any of this could be done Longstreet and his troops must be driven out of East Tennessee.10
Thus Grant planned before he had authority, and the plan does not much resemble what he finally did. He talks here about paralyzing the Confederacy by isolating its different areas, crippling its communications and forcing its armies to operate where they would not; essentially, the design is to translate the quick movements of the Vicksburg campaign into continental terms. It is a western plan, based on a truth westerners had discovered—that Confederate geography is too big for Confederate resources. Coming east, talking with the President and Secretary of War and taking a firsthand look at Meade's army, Grant learned that his planning had to be adjusted to certain realities.
The first of these was that "forward to Richmond" was still a compelling slogan. A presidential election was approaching, and politically it was out of the question to abandon the offensive in Virginia, as it had been out of the question a year earlier to abandon the Mississippi River campaign, return to Memphis, and go down to Vicksburg overland, east of the river. Like it or not, the attempt that had been too much for McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker must be made again, and Grant's announcement that he would travel with Meade's army indicated that he knew it. Incidentally, he found that Meade's army was a better instrument than he had supposed, and before the spring was over he frankly admitted this in a letter to Halleck: "The Army of the Potomac is in splendid condition and evidently feels like whipping some body; I feel much better with this command than I did before seeing it."11
In addition, he discovered that his plan for the two-pronged offensive in the west would not work because the administration had committed itself to Banks' old dream of a lucrative campaign up the Red River. This snapped off one of the prongs; the troops that would have moved against Mobile were going to be tied up indefinitely in a floundering march through cotton toward Texas. Sherman, to be sure, began his Meridian campaign early in February, tearing up mile after mile of railroad and displaying a sinister zeal for destroying Southern property; in his report he boasted that "Meridian, with its depots, store-houses, arsenal, hospitals, offices, hotels and cantonments, no longer exists." The Confederates believed that he intended to go on and seize Mobile but he did not, possibly because his cavalry failed him. He had 7000 horsemen led by an unfortunate brigadier named W. Sooy Smith, and these, coming down from Corinth to help him, ran into Bedford Forrest and 2500 Confederates near Okolona and were roundly whipped, and Sherman presently marched his men back to Vicksburg, smoke lying across the land where he had been.12 Mobile was neither taken nor threatened, and the general-in-chief had to make a new plan.
The plan he at last evolved was based on a simple idea: the Federal power must strike wherever it could with all the force it had, and it must make certain that all of its blows were co-ordinated. This was fairly elementary, but it had never been tried before, and Grant drily summed up the past by saying that heretofore "the armies in the East and West acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two pulling together." What he proposed now was precisely what Mr. Lincoln had been urging (without the least success) for two years and more: to keep pressure on the Confederacy on many points at once in the knowledge that some of the pressure points were bound to collapse.13
On April 9 Grant gave Meade a letter marked FOR YOUR PERUSAL ALONE, setting forth the details.
When the campaign opened, Meade was to march south from the Rapidan with a directive of Biblical simplicity: "Lee's army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also." At the same moment, Sherman was to move south from Chattanooga with a similar directive, "Joe Johnston's army being his objective point and the heart of Georgia his ultimate aim." Grant hoped that Banks could disentangle himself from whatever he was getting into on the Red River in time to mount an offensive from New Orleans toward Mobile, but apparently he was not really counting on this; the principal offensives were to be those of Meade and Sherman.
Everything else the Federal forces did would be related to these two campaigns. Even purely defensive responsibilities would be discharged in such a way as to contribute to the offensive; an important point, because a great handicap for Federal commanders had always been the need to guard vital areas from Confederate counterstrokes. The Army of the Potomac itself had always been obliged to cover Washington even while it was trying to capture Richmond. It had been considered necessary to keep a fairly strong force in the lower Shenandoah Valley, in case someone tried to repeat Stonewall Jackson's game, and a substantial number of troops was kept in comparative idleness around Norfolk and Fort Monroe, guarding the lower Chesapeake and the tip of the Virginia peninsula.
Grant believed that these defensive duties could be performed just as well by armies that were advancing as by armies that were sitting still, and he issued orders accordingly. Ben Butler—by no means Grant's choice, but he was a presidential dispensation, and untouchable—was to make up a field army of 33,000 or more from the occupation troops around Norfolk and from South Carolina, and move up the James River toward Richmond; eventually, Grant hoped, Meade's army and Butler's could join hands south of the James and advance together. In the Shenandoah, Franz Sigel (another Presidential dispensation, unfortunately) was to advance toward the head of the valley, and a Federal force of cavalry and infantry was to cut eastward from West Virginia to join him. Altogether, the Confederacy would have to meet five offensives at once—in central Virginia, in northern Georgia, along the James, in the Shenandoah Valley, and (once Banks had made himself available) in front of Mobile.14
Nothing was going to work out as Grant had planned, but one thing was certain. The President at last had found the general he wanted, and if he could not win the war with him he could never win it with anybody. They saw the military problem in the same way, Grant's over-all design was exactly what Mr. Lincoln had long hoped to see put into effect . . . and the two men talked the same language. When Grant explained that an army with a defensive role must do its job in a way that would contribute to the offensive elsewhere, Mr. Lincoln nodded and said: "As we say out west, if a man can't skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does." This remark would have puzzled Meade, it probably would not have been made to Hooker, and it undoubtedly would have made McClellan wince; as the son of a tanner, Grant understood it. The President had a general-in-chief he could talk to.
But the general would walk solitary, alone with the weight of command. Shortly before the campaign opened Grant sent Mr. Lincoln a letter:
". . . since the promotion which has placed me in command of all the armies, and in view of the great responsibility and the importance of success, I have been astonished at the readiness with which everything asked for has been yielded, without even an explanation being asked. Should my success be less than I desire and expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you."15
5. The General and the Statesman
HOWELL COBB had a talent the Confederacy never quite knew how to use. He was meant to be a statesman. He looked like one, he acted like one when he had a chance, and he was fitted for the part both by experience and by natural endowments; and yet in this fourth winter of his necessitous country's independence he was limited to the command of state troops in Georgia, which offered him nothing much better than a vantage point from which to discuss the mistakes that were being made in Richmond.
A good many people were discussing the subject these days, because the times had grown hard and the war was not being won. Mostly, the critics centered their fire on Jefferson Davis, taking the traditional American view that if anything goes wrong the President must be at fault. As a member of the intimate circle surrounding that wan perfectionist, Vice-President Alexander Stephens, who criticized Mr. Davis with a sad but tireless persistence, Cobb knew all about that kind of talk; but as the new year began he felt that at least part of the trouble lay with Congress. After a visit to the capital he wrote candidly to Stephens: "What is wanting in Richmond is brains. I did not find the temper and disposition of Congress as bad as I expected, but there is a lamentable want of brains and good sound common sense."1
Stephens probably would have agreed—he felt that the times were so far out of joint that hardly anyone was behaving intelligently—but at the moment he believed national disaster was taking shape at the direct urging of the President, and it was hard for him to talk about anything else. Mr. Davis was calling on the Confederate Congress to pass an act suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.
Mr. Davis liked this no better than any other old-line Democrat would like it, but his hand was forced.
