by Ron Chernow
The upshot of the victory was that Grant threw up a new line of entrenchments, forcing Lee, exhausted and suffering from sciatica, to broaden his defensive line despite waning manpower. Grant’s strategy was working better than he knew. Lee’s lines were stretched so taut that on November 2 he warned Jefferson Davis that without a fresh infusion of troops, “I fear a great calamity will befall us.”48 Adam Badeau marveled at how coolly Grant directed all the moving pieces of the war machinery from City Point. “While here, Grant goes out to the very front, is under fire for hours together, and at the same time he receives despatches from Sherman a thousand miles away, and directs the movements of his army at Atlanta, of another in Louisiana, of the forces at Mobile; and smokes his cigar in calm and quiet all the while,” he informed Edwin Booth.49
By the time Porter visited Atlanta in late September, Sherman had already broached to Grant the idea of crossing Georgia with sixty thousand men, breaking loose from his supply lines and battening off rich farmland so that “Grant will have to learn of my whereabouts . . . by means of scouts . . . and possibly depend largely upon the news obtained from rebel newspapers,” Sherman said presciently.50 Not quite sure what Sherman would do next, Grant fortified his army with new recruits. Meanwhile Jefferson Davis blustered that he would maul Sherman’s supply lines and force him into an ignominious retreat, reminiscent of Napoleon from Moscow, which Grant found amusing. “Davis has not made it quite plain who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat through Georgia and Tennessee,” he joked.51 Grant’s major reservation about a march to the sea, shared by Lincoln, was that John Bell Hood’s army might lurch northward and jeopardize Tennessee unopposed. Unfazed, Sherman promised he would dispatch George Thomas to the state with sixty thousand men to safeguard its security. In his flamboyant style, Sherman assured Grant he would accomplish the “utter destruction” of Georgia’s roads, houses and people. “I can make the march and make Georgia howl.”52
On October 11, when it looked as if Hood would veer into middle Tennessee, Grant gave Sherman the option of pursuing Hood—the choice he favored—or setting out across Georgia for Savannah. Sherman preferred Georgia and “smashing things to the sea.”53 He aimed to shift the whole calculus of the war, lunging across a broad swath of southern territory, not to hunt down an army but to demolish the civilian foundations of the war. His fiery procession would make a major statement about unmatched northern might versus southern weakness. This wasn’t a European war, with two mercenary armies fighting each other, Sherman contended, but a civil war where the pride of the southern populace had to be humbled. “If we can march a well appointed Army right through [Jefferson Davis’s] territory, it is a demonstration to the World, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist,” he told Grant.54
Recognizing Sherman’s zeal, Grant let him pursue his favored course. “Sherman is a man with so many resources,” Grant later said, “and a mind so fertile, that once an idea takes root it grows rapidly.”55 He gave Sherman credit for the idea of the march to the sea and its superb execution. He showed guts and daring by allowing Sherman to patent this new style of warfare despite stubborn opposition from Halleck and, more surprisingly, from Rawlins. Grant later declared he would only have trusted Sherman and Sheridan to accomplish such a hazardous undertaking. Lincoln registered grave misgivings. “The President feels much solicitude in respect to Sherman’s proposed movement and hopes that it will be maturely considered,” Stanton notified Grant.56 Despite this, Grant sided with Sherman’s audacity. “On mature reflection,” he telegraphed Stanton, “I believe Sherman’s proposition is the best that can be adopted . . . Such an Army as Sherman has, (and with such a commander) is hard to corner or capture.”57
Grant loaded rations and ammunition aboard vessels that would steam down the eastern seaboard and rendezvous with Sherman at Savannah or another coastal spot. He approved Sherman’s campaign of robust destruction, but within specified limits. When Sherman inquired if Grant was “willing that I should destroy Atlanta and the railroad,” Grant advised, “Destroy in such case all of military value in Atlanta” (italics added).58 Braced to lay down a ribbon of destruction, Sherman exhibited a bravado that contrasted sharply with Grant’s solemnity. As he telegraphed on October 19, “I propose to abandon Atlanta, and . . . sally forth to ruin Georgia and bring up on the sea-shore.”59
By November 1, with Hood’s army marching north, Grant reversed position and told Sherman his first order of business should be to destroy that army. An anguished Sherman replied that Thomas could check any adverse moves by Hood: “If I turn back the whole effect of my campaign will be lost.”60 Always hesitant to second-guess field commanders, Grant wired him to proceed with his plan to traverse Georgia. By November 15, having destroyed everything of military value in Atlanta, Sherman inaugurated his three-hundred-mile march to the sea. He left a town “smouldering and in ruins,” he wrote, “the black smoke rising high in air, and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.”61 The departing rebels also contributed to the destruction of the city. Sherman’s army largely followed the railroad, plucking up rails as they went, heating them in bonfires, then twisting them around nearby trees or telegraph poles. He also had “bummers” fan out across the countryside to collect every morsel of food they could find. As he had warned Grant, Sherman and his army vanished into a black hole, severing telegraphic communication with City Point and Washington and cutting loose from any supply base. Grant scanned Richmond papers for any snippets of news about the march. Unnerved by the news blackout, Lincoln turned to Grant for reassurance, then told listeners, “Grant says they are safe with such a general [as Sherman], and that if they cannot get out where they want to, they can crawl back by the hole they went in at.”62 A confident Grant expected Sherman to crack the South wide open. “The Confederacy is a mere shell,” he told a reporter. “I know it. I am sure of it. It is a hollow shell, and Sherman will prove it to you.”63 The more he later learned about the unity and esprit de corps of Sherman’s army, the more enamored Grant grew of the sixty thousand men who were “as good soldiers as ever trod the earth; better than any European soldiers, because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought.”64
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ASIDE FROM RANDOM FIGHTS and skirmishes between pickets, the Virginia war wound down to the low-level intensity of a siege in autumn 1864. By late October, colder weather and impassable roads hindered major troop movements. Mired in this stalemate, Grant lobbied for more troops and entertained visiting dignitaries at City Point. Stories of his drinking still circulated, Gideon Welles writing in December that “[Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus] Fox says Grant occasionally gets drunk . . . There were such rumors of him when in the West.”65 With Rawlins’s return, such rumors mostly subsided. When Grant sat for a portrait by the Norwegian painter and Union officer Ole Peter Hansen Balling, he asked Grant why he served only water to visitors. “How could I permit a drop of liquor or wine in my camp,” Grant replied, “with all the newspaper slander I receive?”66
In September and October, Grant derived patent excitement from sitting around the campfire in the evening and reading aloud to fellow officers the spirited dispatches from Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. He was especially heartened by the reappearance of Rawlins, whose health had marginally improved during his furlough, but who was immediately bothered by the damp weather. “The day he arrived General Grant saw that he was still far from well, and said with much distress, when Rawlins was out of earshot, ‘I do not like that cough,’” wrote Porter.67
All year long, Grant had remained foursquare behind black recruitment and aiding runaway slaves. “Every negro that comes in is taken into the service now, the best specimens physically being enlisted in companies already organized and the others are employed as laborers in some of the Departments or sent North,” Grant informed Halleck that summer. “I will add also that every expedition going out brings back all the negroes the
y can find.”68 He supported recruiting the maximum number of black soldiers, telling Sherman to arm as many as possible on his swing through Georgia: “As far as arms can be supplied either from surplus on hand or by capture I would put them in the hands of negro men.”69 By late September, even Robert E. Lee had to entertain the idea of enlisting free blacks and slaves as teamsters and laborers.
That summer, Grant made a difficult decision to suspend prisoner exchanges. Prison camps on both sides teemed with a hundred thousand prisoners, many confined under deplorable conditions. With the rebellion running short of able-bodied men, such exchanges, Grant thought, could only benefit the Confederacy. “Every man released, on parole or otherwise, becomes an active soldier against us,” he argued. “If we commence a system of exchanges which liberates all prisoners taken we will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated.”70 A policy that could seem heartless to northern soldiers languishing in southern prisons, Grant reasoned, was only fair to northern soldiers in the field. He also believed devoutly that he held Lee’s best soldiers in captivity and he did not care to release them.
On October 1, Lee proposed a prisoner exchange of soldiers captured outside Richmond. To his credit, Grant confronted Lee about whether he planned to exchange black troops on the same basis as whites. Lee responded that he had no intention of handing over fugitive slaves turned Union soldiers and said those “belonging to our Citizens are not Considered Subjects of exchange.”71 Grant rebuffed these obnoxious conditions, notifying Lee that “the Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her Armies the rights due to soldiers.”72 As the correspondence wore on, Lee treated Grant to a frosty lecture on the right of southern slave owners to reclaim black soldiers who had been their slaves, and his stilted language revealed something about his bad faith in defending this abhorrent practice: “The constitutional relations and obligations of the Confederate government to the owners of this species of property, are the same as those so frequently and so long recognized as appertaining to the government of the United States, with reference to the same class of persons, by virtue of its organic law.”73 The insistence on retaining black prisoners remained official Confederate policy until June 1865.
In a mark of Grant’s confidence in the war’s successful finale, he foresaw that, before too long, he would be able to switch his headquarters to Washington and spend the bulk of his time with his family in Burlington. “How anxious I am that this time should come,” he told Julia, allowing his mind to wander to more pleasant times. “There has not been one hour since this war commenced that I have been relieved from anxiety.”74 For the foreseeable future, he knew his duties would restrict him to the eastern seaboard. As he pondered domestic matters for the first time in years, he urged Julia to bring to Burlington the able young woman who had cooked for them in Galena. “I want of all things good cooking when I get back home. It makes the greatest difference in my feeling well.”75 His thoughts strayed to his investments in railroad and copper stocks and his wish to have an annual income of $6,000 at the war’s close. In a startling act of generosity, he informed Julia that he had written to Colonel Dent, who was ailing, and invited him to live with them. Aside from his love for Julia, this invitation perhaps reflected the newfound confidence and exalted stature Grant had attained during the war, making him less vulnerable to any bullying from his hypercritical father-in-law.
Grant had been offended that Julia’s brother John defected to the Confederacy to manage a Mississippi plantation. When he was captured near Vicksburg by Union soldiers, Grant thought his imprisonment a salutary lesson and made little effort to free him. By August 1864, when it looked as if Dent would be sent north in a prisoner exchange, Grant remained caustic, telling his brother-in-law Fred, “I hope John has been thoroughly cured of his secesh sympathies by the long sojourn he has been forced to submit to with the people he defends.”76 In the end, Grant relented and negotiated John Dent’s release in early March 1865.
In Grant’s letters to Julia, there appeared a noticeable increase in his advice about their children, as if he were now overly compensating for lost time. He lectured his sons on spelling, urging them to write letters with a dictionary by their side, an ironic emphasis in light of Grant’s own erratic orthography. The most mischievous child was still young Jesse, who had contracted a sudden allergy to school. “As to Jess refusing to go to school I think you will have to show him that you are boss,” Grant advised Julia. “How does he expect ever to write letters to his Pa, or get to be Aide de Camp if he does not go to school and learn to write.”77
With a presidential election in the offing, Grant was drawn into a controversy over whether soldiers in the field should be allowed to cast ballots. Writing to Stanton on September 27, he displayed growing political maturity and made an eloquent argument for permitting this. Conceding that in the past this practice was faulted as “dangerous to constitutional liberty and subversive of Military discipline,” he noted the novel circumstance of having a large portion of the electorate under arms. “In performing this sacred duty, [soldiers] should not be deprived of a most precious privilege. They have as much right to demand that their votes shall be counted, in the choice of their rulers, as those citizens, who remain at home; Nay more, for they have sacrificed more for their country.”78 However much he wished to see Lincoln reelected, Grant remained studiously nonpartisan. Even though newspapers and campaign literature flowed freely in Union camps, he barred political meetings or attempts to harangue soldiers for particular candidates. In the end, many states permitted absentee ballots, although Grant, a Galena resident, couldn’t vote because Illinois didn’t allow that. At Stanton’s behest, Grant allowed Delaware soldiers to return home on furlough to vote in a state that denied voting rights in the field.
The election posed a major test of whether American democracy could persist under stringent wartime conditions, and everybody acknowledged the overriding importance of the outcome. “Seldom in history was so much staked on a popular vote,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said, articulating a familiar sentiment. “I suppose never in history.”79 Grant might consider a Union victory a foregone conclusion, but skeptics wondered how the North, with twenty million citizens, had been held at bay for two and a half years by five million recalcitrant white southerners. With so much at stake, the election dove straight down into gutter politics, with Democrats accusing “Black Republicans” of promoting “miscegenation”—a loaded word they introduced into the political lexicon during the campaign.
In the end, Lincoln received a resounding vindication, winning by a landslide 212 electoral votes versus 21 for McClellan, while the popular vote told a much less encouraging tale. Lincoln surpassed McClellan by fewer than half a million of four million votes, drawing only 55 percent of the popular tally. A later analysis of absentee ballots in twelve states showed soldiers helped to tip the scales toward Lincoln, favoring him with 78 percent of their votes versus 53 percent among civilian voters.80 Clearly soldiers wished to endow their service with transcendent meaning that would be negated by a Democratic victory and a negotiated settlement. Lincoln celebrated his win with a paean to American democracy, stating that the election “demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”81
Grant and his staff displayed considerable anxiety as they awaited election returns on November 8. That night, they gathered around a campfire and listened as Grant read aloud a succession of telegrams updating the results. With his puckish humor, Grant again played the prankster and kept telling officers that each new dispatch showed McClellan in the lead. Only after midnight—by which time many dejected officers had drifted off to bed—did he admit delightedly that it had all been a hoax and Lincoln had been ahead the whole time. The results endorsed Grant’s leadership no less than Lincoln’s. Through Stanton, Grant conveyed his congratulations to the
president. “The election having passed off quietly,” he wrote, “no bloodshed or riot throughout the land, is a victory worth more to the country than a battle won. Rebeldom and Europe will so construe it.”82
As Lincoln and Grant hoped, the Confederacy gazed with dismay at the election results since its whole strategy had been predicated on fomenting northern fears and defeating Lincoln at the polls. The southern shortage of manpower grew urgent. Every time another soldier in gray died, deserted, or was wounded, it meant a permanent shrinkage in rebel ranks. On November 7, in a shocking ideological reversal, Jefferson Davis endorsed a plan to buy forty thousand slaves who would take up arms for the South and receive freedom at the end of the war—that is, if the South won. The only alternative to this radical concession was total defeat, Davis concluded, but the response of constituents was overwhelmingly hostile. In the words of Howell Cobb of Georgia, who helped to create the Confederacy, “The day you make soldiers of [slaves] is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong—but they won’t make good soldiers.”83 The plan to arm slaves was the reductio ad absurdum of the entire war. In his bones Grant knew the Confederacy’s days were numbered, insisting in November that the rebels couldn’t “recover from the blow he hopes to give them this winter.”84
