In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive his commission from Abraham Lincoln as lieutenant-general at the head of all Union armies. After several years of frustration at a parade of unsuitable commanders, the president had finally found the man who was going to defeat the army of North Virginia from Robert E. Lee and thus end the civil war. The choice was surprising to many who had known Grant in the past. Ten years earlier, in April 1854, Captain Grant had resigned under a cloud.
In one of the unexpected developments in history, the military profession Grant “had always hated,” in the words of his biographer Bruce Catton, “ultimately turned out to be the calling that had been made for him.” How could an ambivalent soldier who had been removed from the military for several years – and who had drifted from one civilian occupation to another in search of elusive success – been able to lead a vast force to victory and save the Union?
Grant’s predecessors at the head of the Union army were much more accomplished in military art and science. Winfield Scott, whose experience dates back to the War of 1812, had led the army since 1841. George B. McClellan, who replaced Scott who was aging at the start of the Civil War, was a skilled administrator who organized the Army of the Potomac . In the 1850s, McClellan had studied the Crimean War as a member of an official delegation of American observers. Henry W. Halleck, the author of Elements of military art and science, was considered a master theorist.
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However, McClellan and Halleck were reluctant to take decisive action on the field. After the Battle of Shiloh, it took nearly a month to advance 20 miles south to attack the vital junction of the Confederate railroads in Corinth, Mississippi. Lincoln became so frustrated with McClellan’s inaction that he responded to the October 1862 general’s request for more horses with an exasperated telegram: “I just read your dispatch on sore, tired tongues [sic] horses. Will you forgive me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam which tire anything?
On the other hand, Grant had never been an enthusiastic student of military art and science. Even his fiercely loyal lieutenant William T. Sherman doubted “Grant’s knowledge of grand strategy and the books of science and history”. He specifically told his friend that in a letter of March 1864, in which he also concluded that Grant’s triumph owed in large part to his basic “common sense” and to his “main characteristic”, an unshakable “faith” in victory. This faith was justified by a fortuitous combination of qualities that enabled Grant to become one of the most extraordinary military leaders in American history.
Portrait of Ulysses S. Grant shortly after becoming a brigadier general at the start of the American Civil War.
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He did not give up.
Grant did not adopt much doctrine, but he did take a relentlessly aggressive approach to war. In his memoirs, he records an incident which reveals his philosophy. In 1863 Union General William Rosecrans refused the order to advance to meet an enemy force while Grant besieged Vicksburg, the key to control of the Mississippi River, because Rosecrans asserted that it would violate the “military maxim” of not not fight two of the decisive battles at the same time. “Grant was not at all impressed:” If that’s true, “he observes,” the maxim was not applicable in this case. ” It would be wrong to be beaten in two decisive battles fought on the same day, but it would not be wrong to win them. “
Grant has always promoted activity and forward movement to stay still. Even in victory, he would be frustrated by his subordinates’ failure to pursue the retreating enemy. When, in the summer of 1864, Grant informed the cautious Halleck, back in Washington, of his refusal to disengage Lee and to withdraw troops to quell the resistance project in the North, Lincoln replied in language that summed up Grant’s tenacious approach: “I saw your dispatch express your refusal to break your grip where you are.” I don’t want either. Hang in there with a bull dog gripe [sic], and chew and choke as much as possible. “
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He was brave.
Sherman said to his colleague James Harrison Wilson: “I am a cursed man and smarter than Grant; I know much more than he does about war, military history, strategy and great tactics; I know more about the organization, supply and administration and everything else than him; but I’ll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He doesn’t care what the enemy does out of his sight, but it really scares me! “
Grant’s refusal to be paralyzed by imagining what the enemy was doing due to a revelation at the start of the war when he was leading a regiment for the first time, in pursuit of Confederate Colonel Thomas Harris in Missouri. “As we approached the front of the hill where we expected to see Harris’ camp, and perhaps find his men ready to meet us, my heart kept increasing more and more until ‘I think it was in my throat,’ remembers Grant in his memoirs. But when he was lucky enough to find the camp abandoned, “Grant’s heart returned to its place”. He learned the vital lesson that his adversary “had been as afraid of me as I had been him … From this event at the end of the war, I never felt any trepidation in the face of an enemy, even if I always felt more or less anxiety. “
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He swept the setbacks.
In April 1862, during the bloody two-day battle of Shiloh, Grant did not share the gloomy view of his colleagues. Sherman was demoralized by the fighting on the first day, while Don Carlos Buell, who arrived with reinforcements in the middle of the battle, advised retirement. Grant refused: “The far rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place to properly judge what is going on in front,” he said in his memoirs. The next day, he continues, “we had now become the attacking party. The enemy was pushed back all day, as we had been the day before, until it finally defeated in hasty retreat. ”
In May 1864, after fighting an expensive dead end in his first battle with Robert E. Lee, at in the desert, in Virginia, Grant surprised and delighted the army of the Potomac Union by not backing down, as they had done so many times before under different commanders. “Most of us thought … that the next day we should cross the river again,” recalls a captain of a Massachusetts regiment, “but when the order came, ‘By the left flank, walk! ‘, We found that Grant was not done that way. and we must continue the fight. Sherman also celebrated Grant’s decision: “When Grant shouted” Forward! After the desert battle, I said, “This is the greatest act of his life; now I feel that the rebellion will be crushed. “I wrote to her, saying it was a bold order to give, and … it showed the courage that had been made.”
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He believed in success, but did not romanticize the means to achieve it.
What Sherman called Grant’s “simple faith in success” has proven to be contagious. His confidence and determination also made others believe in themselves: “When you are done with your best preparations, you go into battle without hesitation … no doubts, no reservations,” Sherman wrote to Grant . “I tell you this is what made us act with confidence. Wherever I am, I knew you were thinking of me, and if I found myself in a difficult situation, you would come, if I was alive.
But Grant was not a mystic, nor was he reckless. His confidence was rooted in an unwavering sense of purpose, an unwavering nature, an ability to delegate responsibilities as opposed to micromanaging and the knowledge acquired through cold and careful observation over the years. In the Mexican War, he studied two commanders in action: Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, whose nicknames – “Old Fuss and Feathers” and “Old Rough and Ready” – sum up their antithetical styles. From Taylor, who has always “expressed his meaning so clearly that it could not be confused,” Grant learned the importance of clear and direct communication.
It was in Mexico, while serving as a regimental quartermaster and getting involved in as many battles as he could, that Grant had learned the decidedly unromantic aspects of the war: the ingenuity required to feed and supply an army, the risks of poor camp hygiene, the value of different types of expertise and the unequivocal brutality of combat. During the final year of the Civil War, as the number of victims increased and the horrors of trench warfare accumulated in Cold Harbor and Petersburg, Grant remained determined to destroy Lee’s army.
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General Grant stands in front of his field tent at his headquarters in Virginia.
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He quickly synthesized the information.
In addition to being a gifted writer, Grant was an expert listener – “at his best,” suggested a staff officer, in “sudden emergencies.” Faced with a new situation, as he arrived in the besieged town of Chattanooga in late 1863, Grant was “as silent as the sphinx” while the officers submitted their reports, according to an eyewitness. Then, after drawing “whole rounds of questions,” he began to write a series of dispatches. Biographer William McFeely explains the significance of this episode: “Grant’s orders and telegrams” demonstrated an understanding of the whole Western theater of war. From the disjointed reports communicated to him, he drew a coherent picture of the terrain of a region new to him and of the vast confused range of men who argued. “
He had a gift for seeing the “configuration of the earth”.
Grant’s memory for the field was photographic. A staff officer observed that after careful examination of a map, “he could follow its characteristics without referring to it again. In addition, he had an almost intuitive knowledge of topography and was never confused about the directions. This gift was complemented by superb horse riding, which allowed Grant to see for himself as much of the battlefield as possible.
In the oriental theater, which he studied for only eight weeks, Grant revealed a deep understanding of the strategic situation. He decided to leave the executive command of the Army of the Potomac for George G. Meade to give himself the time to manage a vast area of operations stretching from New England to New Mexico, from Minnesota to Mississippi. “Wherever Lee goes,” he ordered Meade, “you will go there too.” Keeping Lee’s army engaged, Grant unleashed Philip Sheridan’s cavalry on the Shenandoah Valley, the granary of Confederation, and freed Sherman to march south, destroying the railways, supplies and morale.
He never lost sight of the bigger picture.
Yet none of this would have been possible had Grant not also understood the broader political context of the war and aligned his battlefield efforts with the goals of the Lincoln administration. While the latter went from preserving the Union to freeing slaves in the Confederation with the 1863 emancipation proclamation, Grant’s policies and vision also changed. His manner of continuing the war and ensuring peace revealed a sure understanding of the political stakes of the war – and of the fact that the best hope of victory for the South was to undermine the political will of the North by prolonging the war.
For Grant, who in his youth had fought in the Mexican War, a conflict he did not believe, the Civil War was a war of principles. At the end of his memoirs, he summed up his usual lucidity by describing the Confederate cause as “one of the worst for which a people has ever fought, and for which there was the least excuse”.
Elizabeth D. Samet is the editor of The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysse S. Grant. His books include No Man’s Land: preparing for war and peace in America after September 11. She is an English teacher at West Point. This essay does not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.
