by Ron Chernow
The Crater wasn’t the only atrocity exciting public comment. A day earlier, Jubal Early had torched Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, leaving three thousand residents homeless. For Lincoln and Grant, it was the last straw. Philip H. Sheridan, Grant’s bantam cavalry commander, recalled that his assignment was to confront Early and “put an end to incursions north of the Potomac,” which had hitherto turned Grant’s army from its main purpose of destroying Lee and capturing Richmond.72 The next day, Grant wired 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.”73 On August 3, Lincoln, alarmed that Washington might be needlessly exposed, dissented sharply, telling Grant to “please look over the despatches you may have received from here . . . and discover if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here, of ‘putting our army South of the enemy’ or of following him to the death in any direction.”74 Nevertheless, Lincoln confirmed Sheridan’s appointment. Grant was determined to stop Jubal Early and lay waste to the Shenandoah Valley, which had furnished its agricultural bounty to Lee’s army for too long.
With Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan in place, the North now possessed an unbeatable team that surpassed Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston in its eagerness for combat and winning ways. The whole dismal parade of career hacks and self-promoting political generals on the Union side had been weeded out, giving way to a new fighting breed. Phil Sheridan, a pint-size man of cocky ferocity, was especially spoiling for a fight, convinced his cavalry could ride roughshod over anybody. Sheridan would command thirty thousand men in the Shenandoah Valley, eight thousand of them cavalry.
Born to poor Irish parents and reared in Somerset, Ohio, Sheridan, thirty-three, had fiery eyes, high cheekbones, and a handlebar mustache. He had been a middling student at West Point, his stay troubled by disciplinary problems. Already betraying a turbulent nature, he was suspended for a year after menacing a Virginia student with a bayonet. People tended to find “Little Phil,” bowlegged and five feet five inches tall, risible in appearance, and Lincoln famously mocked him as “a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.”75 George Templeton Strong wisecracked that Sheridan had “hair so short that it looks like a coat of black paint.”76
Sheridan moved with a vigorous stride. An inspirational force in battle, mounted on his black horse Rienzi, he seemed to be everywhere at once, a whirlwind of martial ardor. It was a matter of pride with him to fight in the front ranks, to which his men responded with adoration. “With the first smell of powder,” said a journalist, “he became a blazing meteor, a pillar of fire to guide his own hosts.”77 Hotheaded, profane, excessively sure of himself, he never backed down or ran from trouble and was known for his salty comments. Like Grant, Sheridan had a pugnacity that refused to quit, and Sherman described him as “a persevering terrier dog, honest, modest, plucky and smart enough.”78 Quite unlike Grant, Sheridan was blunt and hard-drinking and almost foamed at the mouth when angry.
A superb judge of military talent, Grant made few errors in the generals he selected or cashiered. When he first met Sheridan at a railway station early in the war, Grant found him “brusque and rough,” but he came to glory in his high spirits.79 Most of all, he prized Sheridan’s thorough preparations for battle and magnetic presence, sometimes rating him higher than Sherman. “He belongs to the very first rank of soldiers, not only of our country but of the world,” Grant later commented. “I rank Sheridan with Napoleon and Frederick and the great commanders in history.”80 If there was an element of fraternal rivalry in Grant’s relationship with Sherman, he displayed a purely paternal regard for Sheridan and was “as proud as a mother of a handsome son,” said Augustus Chetlain.81 Sheridan reciprocated this high regard, saying Grant “inspired me with confidence; he was so self-contained, and made you feel that there was a heap more in him than you had found out.”82
Lincoln’s telegram sent Grant rushing north for consultations to straighten out the command structure in the Shenandoah Valley. At Monocacy Junction in Maryland, Grant accepted the resignation of David Hunter, giving Sheridan undisputed control of troops in the Shenandoah Valley and Maryland. Grant gave him license for total warfare in the valley—a view congenial to Sheridan. “As war is a punishment,” the latter believed, “if we can, by reducing its advocates to poverty, end it quicker, we are on the side of humanity.”83 Now Grant ordered Sheridan and his Army of the Shenandoah to ransack the valley so “that nothing should be left to invite the enemy to return . . . Such as cannot be consumed destroy.”84 Sheridan had few qualms about incinerating farms, destroying crops, and propagating terror. By August 8, a British soldier fighting with Confederate forces reported “columns of smoke . . . rising in every direction from burning houses and burning barns.”85
Grant didn’t endorse promiscuous destruction. Previously he had issued orders to Hunter stating that “indiscriminate marauding” should be avoided, that only supplies absolutely necessary for troops should be taken, and that receipts should be issued so loyal people could be reimbursed.86 The order was perhaps more honored in the breach than the observance, as when Hunter’s men looted and burned Lexington, Virginia, that June. Now in early August, Grant wrote: “It is not desirable that the buildings should be destroyed, they should rather be protected, but the people should be informed that so long as an Army can subsist among them, recurrences of these raids must be expected.”87
Grant felt vindicated during his brief trip north, having redirected troops in Maryland to northern Virginia. He was also heartened by Admiral David Farragut’s victory at Mobile Bay on August 5, achieving a long-sought objective. Grant knew, as he told Sherman, that Sheridan would “push the enemy to the very death.”88 Sherman wired back his pleasure that Sheridan would “worry Early to death. Let us give these southern fellows all the fighting they want and when they are tired we can tell them we are just warming to the work.”89 Whatever the gloom hanging over the North, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan exhibited a combative spirit that would ultimately lead to victory. Grant had also won a major bureaucratic showdown, neutralizing Halleck’s power. As Bowers told Rawlins, “He has settled Halleck down to a mere staff officer for Stanton. Halleck has no control over troops except as Grant delegates it. He can give no orders and exercises no discretion. Grant now runs the whole machine independently of the Washington directory.”90 Simplifying the command structure and concentrating power in Grant’s hands would work to speed up Union victory.
By late August, Lee felt the pain of the terrifying tourniquet Grant was applying to his army, telling Jefferson Davis, “I think it is [the enemy’s] purpose to endeavor to compel the evacuation of our present position by cutting off our supplies . . . It behooves us to do everything in our power to thwart his new plan of reducing us by starvation.”91 In early September, Lee confirmed that Grant was forcing him to fly blind in his own territory and react to Union initiatives. It was clear that Grant was in charge, setting the tempo and agenda and cramping Lee’s style. “The enemy’s position enables him to move his troops to right or left without our knowledge,” Lee said, “until he has reached the point at which he aims, and we are then compelled to hurry our men to meet him, incurring the risk of being too late to check his progress.”92
On the morning of August 9, Grant had just returned to City Point when the war came unexpectedly to his headquarters on the James River. A Confederate agent, John Maxwell, slipped through Union lines, clambered aboard a barge loaded with shells and ammunition, and planted gunpowder and a timing mechanism. As he hurried from the scene, a huge explosion threw up a towering shower of shells, bullets, splinters, iron bars, and human limbs, flinging them so high and far that fragments littered the ground a quarter mile away. By coincidence, Grant was then sitting in front of his tent, chatting with General George Sharpe, who had fre
tted about possible plots being hatched by nearby Confederate spies. Grant lived up to his image by exhibiting perfect sangfroid amid the mayhem. As the commissary chief Michael R. Morgan recalled, “I saw General Grant at his usual gait, walking up from his tent toward the adjutant-general’s tent, taking things coolly, and seemingly not thinking anything out of the ordinary was taking place.”93 Grant took no precautions aside from ducking behind a large tree. Theodore Lyman remembered things differently. “The only man who, at the first shock, ran towards the scene of terror was Lieutenant-General Grant.”94
Five minutes later, with his yard full of splinters and shell fragments, Grant filed a report with Halleck, claiming the death toll had reached fifty-three men, including thirty-eight black laborers. At first it was thought human error had triggered the mishap; seven years later, when Grant was president, a Virginian admitted the sabotage to Porter. The episode alerted Grant’s staff to shortcomings in headquarters security and how readily a rebel assassin could snuff out Grant’s life. Since Grant was congenitally heedless of danger and resisted extra security, his staff secretly organized a night watch to protect him. Grant never learned about this special layer of security until his second term as president.95
Despite the debilitating heat of a Virginia summer—“marching troops is nearly death,” Grant observed—the headquarters staff tried to make life as tolerable as possible.96 One commander attempted to divert Grant with a band that played patriotic and sentimental songs each evening, then discovered the lieutenant general was completely tone-deaf. “I’ve noticed that that band always begins its noise just about the time I am sitting down to dinner and want to talk,” Grant protested.97 The food at headquarters, though not lavish, was far superior to the grub of ordinary soldiers. “We live very well,” Ely Parker reported. “Ice cream and all sorts of nice cakes cover our table at every meal.”98
The one jarring note was the health of Rawlins, whose cough steadily worsened, exacerbated by dust from the constant procession of supply wagons. Grant expressed “no little anxiety about his illness,” said Porter.99 Rawlins’s condition became so incapacitating that he took a three-month leave to recuperate with his family in Connecticut. Some observers feared he had consumption from which he would never recover and wondered darkly what that would mean for the man who had ridden herd on Grant’s drinking problem for three years. “I fear [Rawlins] is permanently disabled, though I still hope he may recover,” James H. Wilson told Badeau. “His loss would be irreparable, particularly when the surroundings of the General are considered. Heaven help us when some of the influences I know to be at work shall attain the ascendancy.”100
Someone else might have resigned, but beyond unwavering loyalty to Grant and solicitude for his sobriety, Rawlins had an undying love of country. “Its greatness and glory is the one idea of my heart,” he told his wife, “after my love and duty to you and our little ones.”101 While on leave, Rawlins consulted a New York medical specialist who reassured him that his cough was merely chronic bronchitis. Others were far more skeptical, including Charles Dana, who met Rawlins in Washington and detected “signs of increasing disease.” Writing to Wilson, he did not mince words: “I fear there is no escape for him.”102
Grant was no stranger to psychosomatic symptoms, and his bitter disappointment at the Crater was mirrored in lassitude and jangled nerves, as his body expressed what his mind could not admit. “Grant is not at all well,” Provost Marshal Marsena R. Patrick wrote on August 18, “and there are fears that he is breaking down.”103 Bowers saw Grant’s military frustration mirrored in poor health over a ten-day period: “He feels languid and feeble and is hardly able to keep about, yet he tends to business promptly and his daily walk and conduct are unexceptional.”104 For Bowers, Grant’s low spirits bespoke his predicament as a man of action paralyzed by the lethargic tempo of the extended Petersburg siege. “I never before saw Grant so intensely anxious to do something,” he informed Rawlins. “He appears determined to try every possible expedient . . . The failure to take advantage of opportunities pains and chafes him beyond anything I have ever before known him to manifest.”105
Without Rawlins, Grant desperately needed Julia and the children, who visited City Point in August, staying for a day aboard a steamer. Grant still couldn’t entirely shake depression when apart from his family. Now briefly buoyed by their company, he was emotionally carefree in a way he seldom managed alone. Porter left a charming vignette of him roughhousing with his boys: “The morning after their arrival, when I stepped into the general’s tent, I found him in his shirt-sleeves engaged in a rough-and-tumble wrestling-match with the two older boys. He had become red in the face, and seemed nearly out of breath from the exertion. The lads had just tripped him up, and he was on his knees on the floor grappling with the youngsters, and joining in their merry laughter, as if he were a boy again himself.”106 Whenever she came to camp, Julia, a sprightly presence, enjoyed taking meals with the officers’ mess and was widely appreciated for her geniality. In the evening, when she and Ulysses sat alone in the corner, they appeared to Porter “as bashful as two young lovers spied upon in the scenes of their courtship.”107 In company, Julia called him “Mr. Grant” and “Ulyss” to his face and sometimes added a private name she had coined for him after Vicksburg’s fall—“Victor.”
Grant’s losses from Cold Harbor to the Crater left him leery of launching a major attack against Lee, and his men were equally gun-shy of direct assaults. The alternative was to draw the Confederates from their substantial entrenchments, which was no easy matter. Failing that, Grant could only tighten the pressure on Lee by cutting railroads linking Petersburg and Richmond and points south, sacking the Shenandoah Valley. He believed he had made it impossible for Lee to send troops to Atlanta and forced him to reinforce Petersburg by recalling men from the Shenandoah Valley as Confederate recruits ran short. “Unless some measure can be devised to replace our losses,” Lee alerted the Confederate war secretary James Seddon, “the consequences may be disastrous.”108 “The rich men and slave owners are but too successful in getting out, and in keeping out of the services,” lamented the rebel war clerk John Jones in Richmond.109 Southerners knew that, unlike Lee, Grant could replenish his army. Whatever his frustrations, his tenacious choke hold on Lee’s army preyed on the minds of the southern populace, who knew Grant would never relent. In South Carolina, Mary Chesnut wrote resignedly that August, “Grant’s dogged stay about Richmond is very disgusting and depressing to the spirits.”110
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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Chew & Choke
AS AUGUST PROGRESSED, searing heat gave way to cooler weather and continual rain. Impatient to make headway, Grant pounded away at the rebels besieged in Petersburg, testing every chink in their armor. “Grant is striking out boldly in every possible direction . . . like a mad dog in a meat house,” said one soldier.1 Always fond of “demonstrations,” Grant feigned fresh troop movements on the James River to goad Lee into recalling troops sent to aid Jubal Early.
Abraham Lincoln delighted in Grant’s uncommon tenacity. In mid-August, fearful that a new draft would stoke more unrest in northern cities, Halleck urged Grant to send troops to deal with this eventuality. Grant balked from reluctance to relax his tight hold on Petersburg or give Lee a chance to send men to Georgia against Sherman. When Lincoln saw this response, he rejoiced in Grant’s grit and wired him: “I have seen your despatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bull-dog gripe, and chew & choke, as much as possible.”2 Grant was seated in front of his tent, conversing with staff officers, when he read this dispatch. Horace Porter recorded his gratified reaction: “He opened it, and as he proceeded with the reading his face became suffused with smiles. After he had finished it he broke into a hearty laugh . . . ‘The President,’” Grant announced, “‘has more nerve than any of his advisers.’”3 Despite the Crater disaster, Grant felt suff
iciently secure in his position that he suggested to Stanton that Halleck be transferred to Oregon and Washington, which would have effectively removed him from the war.
The summer of 1864 represented the nadir of northern hopes as spreading disillusionment with the war threatened Lincoln’s reelection. The appalling Virginia carnage had soured the public mood for further bloodshed. George Templeton Strong expressed the subdued mentality: “People seem discouraged, weary, and faint-hearted. They ask plaintively, ‘Why don’t Grant and Sherman do something?’ . . . Such is the talk of not only Copperhead malignants, but of truly loyal men with weak backbones.”4 No incumbent since Andrew Jackson had won a second term and it looked as if Lincoln might have to settle for one. New York power broker Thurlow Weed assured William Seward that Lincoln would lose in November. “Nobody here doubts it; nor do I see anybody from other states who authorizes the slightest hope of success . . . The people are wild for peace.”5 Horace Greeley was categorical: “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be elected.”6
There was constant speculation that Lincoln might have to withdraw his nomination in favor of Salmon Chase, Benjamin Butler, or even Grant, whose name figured in many such theories. In late May, disgruntled anti-Lincoln Republicans had met in Cleveland, formed a new party under the banner of Radical Democracy, and nominated John C. Frémont for president. When Democrats postponed their convention until late August, Noah Brooks thought this suggested the party might nominate “Grant or some other man whose availability will be made apparent by the campaign now in progress.”7 Of course, nobody knew Grant’s exact political affiliations, multiplying the number of election theories. Grant himself rebuffed all efforts to groom him as a prospective candidate. When asked to furnish material for a biography, he scoffed, “I could not think of such a thing. It would be egotistical and I hope egotism is not to be numbered among my faults.”8 James Wilson told Badeau that Grant “would rather see Sherman President than any man in the country, if Mr. Lincoln cannot be reelected.”9
