Essay: Through the Wilderness with Sam Grant (Complete) (Part 2 of 9)
He delivered on his charge, as only he could.
Part 2
Sherman declared that Grant’s decision to press on to Spotsylvania, notwithstanding the crushing blow suffered in the Wilderness, was “the grandest act of his life.” In retrospect, Sherman was not quite right: Grant’s grandest acts occurred later, during Reconstruction, but those later acts never would have come about if not for his leadership in the Wilderness.
Up in D.C., the streets of the Federal capital erupted in celebration when news arrived that Grant had moved south beyond the Wilderness, and Lincoln, deeply grateful for Grant’s resolution and perseverance in the face of the stiffest resistance, remarked that “if any other General had been at the Head of that army it would now have been on this side of the Rapidan.”
Lincoln, indeed, was right in believing that Grant was the one commander he could turn to who was capable of carrying the Overland Campaign through to its strategic objective. The only other potential candidate with the fierce grit needed to lead such a campaign, Sherman, couldn’t have succeeded in Virginia as Grant did.
In the first place, of course, Sherman never would have been a serious contender for such a commission in early 1864. As a subordinate general in the Western theater and one whose psychological stability had been questioned earlier in the War, Sherman wouldn’t have inspired the necessary loyalty and acceptance from the corps commanders of the Eastern Army and wouldn’t have been endorsed by Lincoln’s senior military adviser, General Henry Halleck, or his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.
Not that Grant himself cut an impressive figure or had anything like military panache: He was slouched, ordinary, and unimpressive in stature and presence, was known to be an alcoholic, had been a failure in his private business affairs, and had had only a mediocre career in the Old Army after the Mexican-American War. But Grant’s shining victories as the senior field commander in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee during the Civil War had unquestionably elevated his reputation to a unique status.
Second, even if Lincoln had considered appointing Sherman to head the Army of the Potomac, when it came down to the field movements and tactics required to parry Lee’s army, it’s doubtful Sherman would have had the same vision and the same willingness to accept extreme risks that were critical to Grant’s success. He showed as much the year before, when he had firmly recommended against Grant’s risky and unconventional Vicksburg Campaign:
With its command of high bluffs and formidable gun batteries, the Vicksburg fortress controlled a tight bend in the Mississippi River and was extensively defended by Rebel forces and strong ramparts on the landward side. After several alternative efforts to crack the Rebel hold on Vicksburg had failed, Grant undertook a sweeping roundabout movement of more than 150 miles, maneuvering his troops at top speed and most of the time with minimal supply lines and living off the land—a high-risk approach that defied established military conventions.
Grant formulated the plan on his own, with little or no input from his staff, and when he first shared the details, Sherman recommended against the Mississippi portion of the plan and tried hard to convince Grant that it wouldn’t work.
Grant first circumvented the fortified batteries of Vicksburg with a daring nighttime dash of gunboats down the River and by engineering three Union corps down the water-logged Louisiana side of the Mississippi while tricking the Rebels with feints to the north of the fortress; then he ferried his forces by night across the Big Muddy at Bruinsburg Landing below Grand Gulf, Mississippi; battled his way cross-country to the northeast, outpacing and breaking away from any possible line of supply wagons; broke the Rebel defenses at Jackson, briefly occupying the Mississippi capital; and then turned back westward, smashing through two high-paced brutal battles before reaching Vicksburg and investing the eastern ramparts of the city in a gripping siege.
In the moment when Grant and Sherman rode up together to the Chickasaw Bluffs just above Vicksburg on May 18, 1863, a jubilant and astounded Sherman confessed to Grant that until that final moment he still hadn’t thought the campaign was going to succeed. After a siege that lasted until the 4th of July, the Rebels holding the city finally surrendered, and Grant captured an entire Confederate army of 30,000 soldiers.
Probably the most brilliant military campaign of the Civil War, featuring a series of maneuvers found nowhere in any military manual of the time, and Sherman had tried to talk Grant out of it!
Finally, and most fundamentally, Sherman couldn’t have taken ownership of the Union’s overall military effort with the same effectiveness as Grant because Sherman, unlike Grant, didn’t really believe the North could win an ultimate victory in the War—not if ultimate victory, as Lincoln and Grant now saw it, meant the elimination of slavery and the pacification of the South:
Sherman was convinced that ending slavery and stamping out the slavery-based economy of the Southern States would require the Union Army to wage an all-out war in every county throughout the South, burning and destroying plantations and the structures of civil control held by the recalcitrant ruling classes of the Confederacy, and, most likely, driving into foreign exile or imprisoning two or more generations of hot-headed Southern white males and repopulating the South with abolitionist entrepreneurs from the North. Short of that, he believed, Southern white society would never capitulate.
It was, in part, Sherman’s unvarnished expression of such profound pessimism about the ultimate War effort that got him tagged as unstable.
As much as he idolized Lincoln and Grant, Sherman didn’t think the North had the will, the fortitude, or the conviction to do what he believed would have to be done. Among other things, he knew from personal experience that much of the white population in the North held attitudes about African Americans that were practically as racist as the Southern slaveholders’, and that a large portion of the popular opposition to the expansion of slavery in States like Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio reflected more a desire to prevent an influx of African Americans into the North and West than a moral condemnation of slavery in the South.
(Perhaps it was his own doubts and lack of conviction about the North’s ultimate willpower to change the culture of the South that later led Sherman, at the conclusion of the War, to accept surrender of the Confederate forces he defeated in North Carolina on initial terms that would have allowed the existing Rebel State governments to remain in power and with amnesty for all Confederates—commitments quickly vetoed by Stanton and Grant because they crossed into political matters beyond Sherman’s military authority and ran against the more ambitious visions of victory then inspiring many politicians in Washington.)
Along with the colossal costs of the War, the perception of an unending military stalemate on the fields of Virginia had fueled the growing pessimism that pervaded the citizenry of the North in the spring of 1864, as the Nation headed into the Presidential election season.
The Democratic opposition to Lincoln was crystallizing into two clamorous factions: the Peace Democrats, who advocated an immediate cessation of the War and the negotiation of a peace agreement on terms likely to be accepted by the South, even if that meant recognizing the independence of the Confederacy (basically a total victory for the South); and the so-called War Democrats, who favored continuing the War, at least in the near term, but only for the limited purpose of restoring the Union if possible, thus implying the indefinite perpetuation of slavery and the preservation of the South’s economic and social way of life (essentially a loss for the North in the eyes of the Republicans).
The Northern Democrats’ alternatives for compromise and capitulation were hardly far-fetched.
Just a year and a half before, in his December 1, 1862 Message to Congress, President Lincoln himself had proposed a compromise to end the War through a Constitutional amendment designed to induce the gradual abolition of slavery over a period of 37 years by promising the payment of Federal compensation for the emancipation of slaves:
The amendment would have provided compensation to each Southern State that abolished slavery before 1900 in the form of Federal bonds with a common value for each slave in the State (presumably the per-slave value to be paid over, in turn, to each freed slave’s former owner, per the Just Compensation Clause of the Fifth Amendment).
Lincoln reasoned that it would be far more sensible economically for the United States to make payments on the bonds in the distant future (after 1900), when the population of the Nation would be much greater, than to incur at the present time the enormous costs and sacrifices required to continue prosecuting the War.
Any State that had abolished slavery and received the Federal compensation but then attempted to reinstate slavery would be required under the amendment to repay the value of the bonds and any interest paid on the bonds back to the Federal Government.
Any slave freed before the end of the War would remain free, and the former owner of the slave would receive the applicable amount of Federal compensation directly, provided the slaveholder had not been disloyal to the Union (i.e., had not actively supported the Rebellion).
The proposed constitutional amendment would also have stipulated that Congress could appropriate money to relocate and recolonize freed slaves with their own consent to foreign lands.
Not surprisingly, Lincoln’s proposal fizzled. There wasn’t enough support in Congress to advance the recommended constitutional amendment, and the leaders of the Rebellion rejected the idea out of hand.
Believing it fundamentally immoral and contrary to the natural rights of man to treat any human being as property, most of the anti-slavery Republicans in Congress would never support the payment of compensation to former slaveholders for the freeing of slaves. A majority of the Republican caucus wouldn’t abide a compromise on slavery.
And neither would the rebelling Confederates, who believed they could hold their ground militarily until the European powers recognized the independence of the Confederacy and the Union lost its will to pursue the fight.
By May of 1864, Lincoln, like most of his fellow Republicans, had come to embrace the end of slavery and the “reconstruction” of the Southern States (yet to be fleshed out) as the War’s aims and was no longer openly promoting the idea of a compromise.
Nevertheless, nearly everyone, including the Radical Republicans, realized that if Lincoln lost reelection, the War would probably end by achieving even less progress toward the abolition of slavery than Lincoln had proposed in 1862.
And most everyone also understood that Lincoln had no hope of being reelected without the decided success of Grant’s ambitious military strategy.
As much as Grant’s decision of May 7, 1864 to move on toward Spotsylvania following the Battle of the Wilderness had raised spirits in the North, the public’s recoil from the costly Overland battles that followed and its impatience for a faster end to the War, combined with the growing political gloom of the Republicans, soon swept away the euphoria.
The famous dashing George McClellan, Lincoln’s own prior choice as general in chief and erstwhile face of the Union war effort, had come out very publicly as a War Democrat, and in the spring and summer of 1864 he was actively generating popular support in the North for reining in the conduct of the War and for appeasing the social and economic interests of the South, with which he sympathized.
Later, at the end of August, McClellan would accept the nomination as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President opposing Lincoln in the November election.
In hopes of countering the growing popular appeal of McClellan and the Democrats, Lincoln ran under a “National Union” banner, bringing a Democrat, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, onto the ticket as his running mate.
By July, Grant’s forces had settled into a protracted siege of Petersburg, south of Richmond, while Jubal Early’s Rebel troopers were once again menacing the outskirts of Washington. Respected Republican leaders candidly advised Lincoln that his reelection was “impossible.”
On August 23, Lincoln was so pessimistic that he wrote a note (the so-called “Blind Memorandum,” which he folded up and sealed and had each member of his Cabinet sign on the outside without reading) acknowledging that it seemed “exceedingly probable” he and Johnson would lose the election and pledging that his administration would “so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration” the following March, since the new President “will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
But while Grant’s action on May 7 may not have guaranteed Lincoln’s reelection, it was a necessary and enabling precondition.
Grant’s (and Sherman’s) entire strategy—thus Lincoln’s reelection bid for all practical purposes—would have been stillborn if Grant had not pressed onward from the Wilderness. Lee would have shifted additional Rebel forces to thwart Sherman’s advance in Georgia, and the public patience in the North wouldn’t have abided another reversal in Virginia. Grant’s perseverance at that critical juncture opened the gate to all that followed.
Lee, too, persevered. Once again, when he detected Grant’s movement down the Brock Road, Lee acted without delay and beat Grant to Spotsylvania Court House, where his men hurriedly built strong defensive works.
Some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the War occurred at the Mule Shoe salient and the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania, after which Grant again swung east and south to race Lee toward the next major clash of the armies at North Anna River and then, after that, at a series of battles that ended in early June at Cold Harbor, just about 10 miles east-northeast of Richmond, across the marshy bottoms of the Chickahominy River.
After sacrificing waves of men against Lee’s defenses during the Battle of Cold Harbor with no advantage gained, a despondent Grant knew for certain that what he had feared was true: The Rebel Army of Northern Virginia, despite its casualties, remained bolt strong and could effectively stymie any Union advance on Richmond from the north and east.
Ruminating for several days over his predicament at Cold Harbor, Grant decided on a major phase change in his campaign—a shift in plans that depended, characteristically, on the boldest actions and the greatest risk.
Launching Phil Sheridan and his cavalry toward Charlottesville and the Shenandoah to draw away Lee’s cavalry, Grant orchestrated several pivoting maneuvers to get over the Chickahominy and stealthily shift his infantry corps one last time to the southeast, then executed a stupendous and logistically brilliant crossing of the James River on June 15-17.
Many of the soldiers were ferried across the James on boats from Wilcox Landing, but much of the Army of the Potomac and its artillery and supplies crossed over an amazing 2,200-foot-long pontoon bridge, strung between Weyanoke Neck on the north bank and Flowerdew Hundred on the south, constructed by Union Army engineers in just seven hours—the longest pontoon bridge used in military history since Xerxes crossed the Hellespont.
In the concentrated six weeks of the Overland Campaign, from its launch in Culpeper on May 4, 1864 until Grant’s crossing of the James in mid-June, the Union lost 65,000 men and the Confederacy around 35,000—among the bloodiest military campaigns in American history.
But it wasn’t for nothing. Once the Rebels figured out that Grant had succeeded in moving his troops en masse to the south side of the James, they knew the Army of Northern Virginia’s defense of Richmond was doomed. On the eve of the Battle of Cold Harbor, Lee had remarked to Jubal Early that if Grant’s forces weren’t destroyed north of the James and Grant was able to get to the River, “it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”
And so it was. Once on the south bank of the James, Grant raced west to hit the Rebel forces east of Petersburg and south of Richmond and then dug in for a tight siege of Petersburg and its critical rail hub.
Come September, despite the lack of further military progress around Petersburg, Lincoln’s electoral prospects suddenly brightened. McClellan had been embarrassed, and his candidacy weakened, by the tension between his own positions as a War Democrat and the Peace Democratic planks of his party’s platform. And most decisively, the spectacular news broke in the North that on September 2, Sherman had marched victorious into Atlanta after the Rebel army abruptly vacated the city.
In the jubilation of Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, Lincoln’s reelection was assured.
With Lincoln’s victory, the Union forces advanced. By Christmas, Sherman had taken Savannah, and after a short pause, began his irresistible push into the wetlands of South Carolina, the cradle of the Rebellion.
And in the early weeks of 1865, extending into March, Grant tenaciously gnawed away at the Petersburg defenses. During this time, Lincoln visited Grant at his City Point headquarters and they discussed Lincoln’s vision for the world after the War.
Finally, on April 2, after a nine-and-a-half-month siege, Grant broke through into Petersburg. Lincoln met Grant in Petersburg on April 3, and they spent their last 90 minutes together, discussing Grant’s plans for defeating Lee and Lincoln’s desire to show leniency to the surrendering Rebel armies.
For his part, Lee had no intention of surrendering. He tried one last time to evade Grant, abandoning his defenses around the Rebel capital on the night of April 2-3 and fleeing west in a desperate effort to rendezvous with Johnston’s forces in North Carolina.
Hearing news he had despaired of ever hearing, that Richmond had fallen, Lincoln, accompanied by his son Tad, rushed to the Rebel capital by boat on April 4, and he spent a dream-like afternoon, a gift from the God of history, strolling, tall and gangly, dressed all in black with his stovepipe hat, among enthralled crowds of freed slaves on the shattered streets of Richmond. He managed, with a small military escort, to make his way on foot as far as the Confederate White House, which had been occupied two days before by Rebel President Jefferson Davis.
Ignoring Richmond for the moment, keeping his eyes fixed on his military objective, Grant dashed after what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia, harrying and penning in the Rebel troops, who were starving and growing thinner in numbers and strength by the day. Until, on April 9, 1865, Grant had them corralled, and Lee was forced to offer his surrender outside the village of Appomattox Court House.
Grant saw no need to take Lee and his exhausted men as captive prisoners of war; Lee’s surrender effectively ended the War, and, indeed, the other armies of the Confederacy that remained in the field elsewhere in the South quickly surrendered to their opposing Union commanders in the days that followed.
As much as he hated the cause for which Lee and his army had fought, Grant, consistent with Lincoln’s inclination, treated the Rebel soldiers with empathy and respect in surrender. He allowed Lee’s forces to leave freely (to be paroled on good behavior provided they laid down their weapons and pledged not to take up arms again against the Union), and he let the officers keep their sidearms and permitted many of the men to keep their personal horses, which they would need to work the fields when they returned to their homes.
Just five-and-a-half days after the surrender at Appomattox, President Lincoln was shot in Washington by a vigilante from Maryland who sympathized with the Confederacy, supported slavery, and violently opposed Lincoln’s developing ideas for Reconstruction of the South and citizenship rights for freed slaves. The next day, April 15, Lincoln died, and Andrew Johnson became President.