Ulysses S. Grant

by Michael Korda

  Had they paid more attention at West Point to reading Vauban, Louis XIV’s builder of fortifications, they would have realized the folly of trying to reinforce a poor position with a weak one, but Grant saw the opportunity at once. He landed Brig. Gen. Charles F. Smith—a crusty, competent, “scientific” soldier, who by coincidence had been Grant’s chief instructor at West Point—on the west bank of the Tennessee about two miles north of Fort Heiman, and the Confederate commander immediately abandoned it. That left Fort Henry exposed to fire from Foote’s gunboats and to an overland enveloping attack carried out swiftly by Grant, so Fort Henry too was abandoned, its 2,500-man garrison marching on two dirt tracks over muddy, rugged country to join the Confederate forces at Fort Donelson, on the west bank of the Cumberland.

  Grant took the opportunity of sending Smith, who seemed to relish having escaped from his teaching position at West Point into real warfare, to destroy the Memphis & Ohio railroad bridge over the Tennessee, in effect stranding the Confederates; then moved his forces through cold, wet weather and thick mud in two columns to invest Fort Donelson.

  He had taken Fort Heiman on February 4, he took Fort Henry on the sixth, and he had surrounded nearly twenty thousand Confederate troops in Fort Donelson by the fourteenth. By the night of February 15–16, Grant’s left wing, under Smith, pierced the elaborate Confederate defenses, and Confederate generals John Floyd and Gideon Pillow fled, abandoning command to the hapless Buckner, who surrendered to Grant on the sixteenth, after their famous exchange of correspondence.2

  Thus in twelve days Grant had opened up the way into Tennessee, captured the largest number of Confederate prisoners and guns since the war began—it was in fact the largest surrender in the history of North America to date—and achieved the first major Union victory of the war. Grant’s troops were now only seventy miles from Nashville, and within a few days, as the news traveled north by telegraph, he would be proclaimed a national hero by the press and promoted to major general of volunteers.

  Because he smoked cigars (when he could afford them), admiring citizens sent him cigars by the box—a tidal wave of tobacco that would continue to the end of his life. He became, like Freud and Winston Churchill in a later age, a chain smoker of cigars, seldom photographed without one; in the end, like Freud, he would die of his addiction, from cancer of the jaw and throat.

  But in 1862 that was far in the future. Grant did not have long to enjoy his success. No sooner had he put up his second star than he was in trouble again. Buell, taking advantage of Grant’s victories, at last moved to take Nashville, and was followed there by Grant, who had been named “Commander of the Military Department of Western Tennessee”—a title that was vague but implied that he was Buell’s superior officer. This provoked Halleck, who must have felt that he had created a monster, to complain to the new general in chief in Washington, George B. McClellan, who had replaced the ailing Scott (and in whose waiting room Grant had twice sat fruitlessly waiting for an interview), that Grant had quit his command to go to Nashville, failed to keep him (Halleck) informed, and was probably drinking again. McClellan wired back that Halleck should “not hesitate to arrest him at once,” but Halleck contented himself with giving Gen. C. F. Smith command of the advance into Tennessee, while ordering a shaken Grant to remain at Fort Henry to await further investigation.

  Grant finally managed to smooth Halleck’s ruffled feathers; the rumors of his drinking were disposed of by Rawlins—although there remains a strong possibility that they were true—and by March 1862 Grant was once again headed south, in command of forty thousand troops. Smith seems to have taken all this intrigue calmly and was happy enough to give up a command he had never sought—Grant had not been one of his more successful pupils at West Point, but he seems to have recognized in him superior qualities of leadership. Grant’s commanders now included at least two unusual characters, Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, temporarily in disgrace and assumed by many to be insane, but who would soon rise to become one of the most successful Union generals, and Lew Wallace, the future author of Ben Hur and governor of the Territory of New Mexico, who would play a leading role in ending the career of Billy the Kid.

  Halleck had finally managed to achieve overall command of the area and conceived a plan in which Buell and Grant (once he was restored to command) would move south, meet at Pittsburg landing on the Tennessee, and concentrate their forces, then push on to Memphis. This plan was jeopardized almost at once by Buell’s slowness—it is possible that Buell had not forgiven Grant for preempting his flotilla and his limelight to undertake the attack on Fort Henry—so that Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing before Buell, to face a larger Confederate force under the command of generals A. S. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard.

  Whether Grant was drinking or not remains open to question, but he was certainly not at his best. It may be that the quarrel with Halleck and the temporary loss of his command had shaken his confidence, or that Julia Grant was still on her way south to be with him, or that he wasn’t confident that Buell would arrive in time to be of any use. Or it may simply be that Rawlins’s concentration was focused elsewhere and that Grant had access to whiskey again (the one item that was never in short supply in both armies). For whatever reason, Grant spread his forces out loosely on the south side of the Tennessee River, and placed his own headquarters at Savannah, nine miles west (and downstream) of Pittsburg Landing, and on the opposite side of the river, which meant that he had to commute back and forth by river steamer every day. He later claimed that he was waiting anxiously for the arrival of Buell, who had agreed to meet him at Savannah, but that seems unlikely—word could have been left there for Buell to ride down to Pittsburg Landing as soon as he arrived, and it is just faintly possible that Grant didn’t want to risk anybody in his army seeing him drunk. In any event he seems to have had no idea that the Confederate forces were concentrating at Corinth and moving directly toward Pittsburg Landing to drive his army into the river.

  The first warning the army received came in the late afternoon of Saturday, April 5, in the shape of thousands of terrified rabbits and deer, clearly being driven through the woods by something, which began to run through the Union encampments. Behind the fleeing wildlife were more than 41,000 Confederate soldiers, who had marched out of Corinth and were now within two miles of the Union lines. Several sharp firefights took place that night between outlying Union troops and Confederate skirmishers, but nobody seems to have bothered to inform Grant, who was nine miles away and had unwisely telegraphed Halleck before going to bed: “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack being made upon us.” Only a few miles away Johnston dismissed Beauregard’s more cautious appraisal of the Confederate situation by saying, “I would fight them if they were a million!”

  Good as his word, at dawn Johnston attacked, flinging his full forces against the Federals—most of whom were only just waking up or boiling their coffee—in one long, extended savage blow that took Grant’s whole army by surprise, as well as Grant himself, who heard the firing as he breakfasted. Still ignorant of where Buell was with his twenty thousand men, Grant limped on board a steamer—he had taken a severe fall from his horse a few days earlier—and set off toward Pittsburg Landing. He stopped at Crump’s Landing, where he had inadvisably placed Lew Wallace, to order Wallace to advance toward Pittsburg Landing—Wallace, as ill informed as Grant, took the wrong road, however, and thus left Grant short of five thousand men—then proceeded toward the ever-increasing noise of heavy fire, concern and some confusion evident on his face to those who accompanied him.

  The closer Grant got, the more obvious it was to him how badly he had miscalculated. It was late in the morning when he finally arrived at Pittsburg Landing, and from the river, and even from the shore once he had landed, he could see nothing. In the age before smokeless gunpowder, the battlefield was obscured by clouds of dense, gritty smoke, and in any case Grant was looking up at a seemingly impenetrable thicket of scrub and second growth, f
rom which thousands of panicked Union troops were emerging, with or without their weapons, to huddle beside the river.

  Now that Grant realized he had allowed himself to be outwitted by Johnston, he was calm again. He would have agreed with Wellington’s appraisal of his situation before Waterloo, “By God, Bonaparte has humbugged me!” and, also like Wellington, who had to hold out all day until Blücher arrived with his Prussians, Grant would have to hang on by the skin of his teeth until Buell arrived to join him. Since his cavalry was useless in the rough, heavily wooded country, bisected by creeks and streams, Grant ordered them to round up the Union stragglers and drive them back to plug the gaps in the battle lines. Having done this, he sent messengers off to look for Buell, and went forward to have a closer look. Nothing he saw was encouraging—he would later remark that in places the dead lay so thick and close to each other it would have been possible to walk across a field without putting a foot on the ground—and from all accounts his left was being pushed back to the river, without any sign that the Confederate advance was slowing.

  By noon, however, Sherman—ever the optimist—had reported more hopeful signs, and by one o’clock Buell himself finally appeared and met with Grant aboard his steamer. Grant urged Buell into action, and for once Buell moved quickly, and by late afternoon, the Confederate rush had been slowed by a series of fierce artillery clashes and vicious hand-to-hand fighting. Grant did not know it yet, but luck had touched him again. Confederate general A. S. Johnston had been hit in the thigh; thinking it was a minor wound, he ignored it, continuing to urge his troops forward. When his staff finally got him off his horse and pulled his boot off, it was full of blood. It was too late to save Johnston, who bled to death on the battlefield, and command passed to Beauregard, who had not shared Johnston’s optimism about the attack in the first place.

  With Johnston’s death the steam went out of the Confederate attack. As the dreadful day ended in a torrential rainstorm, Grant took refuge in a battlefield hospital, but he could not stand the blood, the screams, and the cries of the wounded and the dying (shades of the tannery), and took shelter under a tree. Sherman found him there in the dark, whittling a stick with his pocketknife and smoking a cigar, his hat pulled low over his eyes. As the story goes, Sherman said, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant went on whittling and, without looking up, said, “Yes, lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

  And so it would prove. Grant attacked in the morning—now, he finally had all Buell’s twenty thousand men and Wallace’s five thousand, the author of Ben Hur having at last found his way to the battlefield—drove the Confederates back, and by nightfall they were back in Corinth again. Shiloh was, to that date, the biggest battle ever fought on American soil, and the casualties came to nearly thirty thousand killed, wounded, and missing. More Americans were killed at Shiloh than in all previous American wars combined—the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War—a grim statistic that was to shock both the North and the South alike.

  Grant, though Shiloh was not his finest moment as a general, had at least not been paralyzed by Johnston’s surprise attack or by the sheer ferocity of the fighting, as Burnside would be at Fredericksburg, and Hooker at Chancellorsville. He had dispersed his forces poorly, reacted slowly, and arrived on the scene late, but once he was there he didn’t lose his nerve. He stood his ground against superior numbers and won.

  Nevertheless his victory brought down upon his head a torrent of criticism and abuse. The “butcher’s bill” of Shiloh, once it reached the press, fueled speculation that Grant had been caught napping, that he had deployed his forces ineptly, that he had been incapacitated by drink. Newspapers and members of Congress called for an investigation, while Halleck, shaken by the storm of criticism, did not attempt to defend Grant—quite the contrary.

  Grant did little to defend himself—perhaps on the wise advice of Rawlins—and stayed as silent as Achilles in his tent, though he toyed with the idea of resigning from the army until talked out of it by Sherman. In time the storm blew over, chiefly because Lincoln never lost his confidence in Grant, and also because it began to dawn on people that Shiloh, however bloody, was a victory, and that the war would not be won without casualties.

  When Jesse Grant, enraged at the criticism of his son, took to writing furious letters to the newspapers defending him, Grant wrote his father a firm letter that made it clear that the son was now grown up. “I have not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts at my defense. I require no defenders and for my sake let me alone…. Do nothing to correct what you have already done, but for the future keep quiet upon this subject.”3 It is hard not to sense the satisfaction with which Grant must have written this letter.

  Demoted to Halleck’s second in command, Grant glumly accompanied Halleck on a tortuously slow advance toward Corinth, Mississippi—Halleck, once out from behind his desk, moved at a snail’s pace—until news came that Halleck had been ordered to Washington to replace McClellan as general in chief, a job that might, in fact, have been made to order for him, and at which he would excel—while Grant was to replace him as commander of Union forces in the West.

  He was now, at last, in charge.

  Chapter Six

  NO SOONER DID GRANT have what he wanted—or appeared to want—than he slipped into one of his periodic slumps. In the fall of 1862 Halleck was in faraway Washington, Grant was deep in Mississippi, the outrage over the casualties at Shiloh was beginning to die down, put into perspective by what appeared to be an endless series of costly and shameful Union defeats at the hands of Robert E. Lee in the East, Mrs. Grant had joined him, and there was even talk, which would soon be fulfilled, of making Grant a major general in the Regular Army, as opposed to a mere major general of volunteers. On the other hand Grant now found himself military commander in an area almost the size of Western Europe, with social, political, and military problems that would have daunted Caesar. To say that Grant was not equipped for this role is putting it mildly. His previous experience in administration, after all, had been as a quartermaster of army supplies in the small garrison of Fort Vancouver and as a clerk wrapping packages in his father’s shop in Galena, under the watchful eyes of his younger brothers. His generals seemed unsure whether Grant was in command of them or not, and perhaps as a result the attack on the wily Confederate general Sterling Price at Iuka, Mississippi, by Generals Edward O. Ord and Rosecrans, and Rosecrans’s defense of Corinth were inconclusive and needlessly bloody battles, productive of very little except casualties. Grant was in the dumps.

  Grant was a quick learner but not necessarily a happy one. It is one thing to know how to fight a battle, quite another to learn how to command other generals to fight one, and while he was pleased enough to have Halleck off his back, he had not entirely grown used to handling Halleck’s duties as well as his own. Washington expected him to win victories, and that he had done; but now Washington expected him as a military commander to deal with political difficulties as well, since he alone represented the United States in what was, practically speaking, enemy territory. Like Ike in North Africa or France, Grant would have to become a politician, an administrator, and a diplomat as well as a general, and none of this came as easily to Grant as fighting did. Not surprisingly he began by putting his foot in it.

  It is in the context of this that his notorious General Order #11, expelling Jews from his territory, must be judged. That Grant was enraged by the number of Northern traders who followed his army down the Mississippi, buying up cotton at rock-bottom prices from the defeated Southerners and making fortunes by trading with the enemy, is easy enough to understand—anything to do with trade and money was always an irritant to Grant, to whom the whole subject was a closed book. He was himself not only honest to a fault, but totally hopeless at any kind of business transaction, and the fact that he was now surrounded by people who were good at that kind of thing (and making a fortune out of it) must have b
een hard for Grant to bear. It did not help that one of them was his own father, Jesse Grant, that astute old rogue, in partnership with a Jewish businessman, or that several members of the Dent family were doing so as well. When Grant lost his temper, it was volcanic and usually short-lived, and General Order #11 was in any case swiftly withdrawn when it reached Lincoln’s attention. It has been suggested that Grant’s staff, possibly the ubiquitous Rawlins, put into his head the notion that most of the traders he objected to were Jewish, but it seems more likely that Grant suffered from the subliminal anti-Semitism of most American Anglo-Saxons of his day where business affairs were concerned, and that when he lost his temper he attacked the Jews rather than his father and his in-laws—a process we would now call “scapegoating.”

  Inaction, overwhelming responsibilities for which he was unsuited, and some doubt about what to do next were certainly part of the problem, but worse was to come. Up until then Grant had consoled himself with the thought that he enjoyed Lincoln’s confidence, but two events put doubt into Grant’s mind. The first was a visit from a well-known and respected newspaperman, Charles A. Dana, whom Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, had sent to scout out, on Lincoln’s behalf, whether there was any truth to the rumors about Grant’s drinking that were being spread by his enemies. Dana, as matters would turn out, liked Grant, and his reports to Washington were favorable, but it cannot have eased Grant’s nerves to know that he was being watched by somebody who had the ear of both the secretary of war and the president.