April 27, 1822–July 23, 1885
HIGHEST RANK:
Union General
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Taurus
NICKNAMES:
Useless, Sam, Unconditional Surrender
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“The truth is I am more of a farmer than a soldier. I take no interest in military affairs, and, although I entered the army thirty-five years ago and have been in two wars, in Mexico as a young lieutenant, and later, I never went into the army without regret and never retired without pleasure” (to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck).
On April 6, 1862, the history of warfare in North America took an abrupt turn for the terrible. On the west bank of the Tennessee River near a place called Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, five Federal divisions began their morning with a bang—or, more accurately, thousands of bangs. Alerted by pickets just after sunup that an army of Rebels was on its way from the southwest along the Corinth road, the bluecoats exchanged their coffee cups for cartridges and began frantically deploying to meet the great mass of butternut that was even then bearing down on them. The vast Union encampment, however, had not been laid out with defense in mind—everyone was convinced that Albert Sydney Johnston and his Confederates were all the way down in Corinth, huddled behind elaborate defenses. But Johnston had brought his army up, determined to strike a blow at his enemies before they could do the same to him. His appearance was a complete and unnerving surprise.
Ulysses Grant loved horses and refused to tolerate any sort of animal cruelty. After witnessing a teamster beating his horses, Grant ordered the man to be tied to a tree for six hours “as a punishment for his brutality.”
At just over one hundred yards, the serried Rebel ranks halted and unleashed a devastating salvo, punching great holes through General Benjamin Prentiss’s hapless division. Before long, perhaps two hours, that division would all but cease to exist as a fighting unit. The others would fare little better by the end of the day. Shiloh—the costliest, most savage battle yet seen in America, named incongruously for a nearby church—had begun.
Ulysses S. Grant had heard the rumble of guns from his base across the river, at Savannah. Pittsburg Landing was the forward encampment of his army—those were his men getting shot at. By the time he boarded a riverboat and raced to the battlefield, the onslaught was more than an hour old and just heating up. For the next nine hours and more, in fighting of thunderous, unprecedented ferocity, the oncoming Confederates pushed their confused enemies inexorably back, taking one Union camp after another—each of which offered up Yankee goodies that barefoot Johnny Rebs were not in the habit of passing by. Their plundering, along with pockets of fierce and desperate Union resistance, served to slow the rout to a fighting retreat. Grant, cool and alert amidst the crashing violence, used the time he had to organize a last line of defense—a bristling cordon of cannon to prevent his army from being pushed like a crumbling levee into the waters of the Tennessee. With the sun dropping fast, 8,000 exhausted Rebels made a final attempt to break Grant’s line, only to wade into a flood of shot and shell from field pieces, siege guns, and the arching ordnance of Union gunboats. The attack disintegrated.
The Southerners recoiled, satisfied with their tremendous victory. Albert Sidney Johnston, Jefferson Davis’s favorite general, lay dead on the battlefield. But his army was truly victorious. It had caught five Yankee divisions almost literally with their pants down, and proceeded to shove them, as if by a giant push broom, out of their tent cities into a precarious bridgehead on the banks of the Tennessee. The Federal losses were appalling, including 7,000 men killed or wounded and 3,000 captured. Some forty pieces of artillery had been wrecked or captured. Strung out along the river like refugees, thousands of unnerved farm boys in blue cowered and milled about, a veritable army of broken deserters. Little wonder so many of Grant’s subordinates were thinking about retreat across the Tennessee. Indeed, not a few of them had been thinking about it for hours, since before the cacophonous roar of battle had faded.
One of them was William Tecumseh Sherman, who had handled his division remarkably well that long day under the circumstances. A sensitive cynic and recovering depressive who was only just learning how terribly talented he was at war, Sherman had begun to take a shine to Grant. That night, as rain soaked the two armies and the acres of dead and dying that lay between them, Sherman went looking for his superior to pick his mind. He found Grant standing beneath a tree, his slouch hat and overcoat drawn tight against the weather, a cigar clenched in his teeth. The commanding general, who had recently suffered a riding accident, had been resting his lame leg at a field hospital. But the screaming, and the sawing, and the effusion of blood and viscera had been too much for him, driving him away to find peace in this dark, wet sanctuary. “Well Grant,” said Sherman through the downpour, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”
Grant sucked the glow back into his cigar. “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow though.”
Such an attitude was a little crazy, at least to officers who thought they knew better than Grant. (And there was no shortage of those.) Grant had been receiving reinforcements since late afternoon, to be sure. And the Rebels had shot their wad in the long battle that day. But so had Grant’s men—thousands killed and captured, thousands more shattered in spirit. As everybody at the top knew, these were volunteers and raw recruits. They had been surprised, whipped, and deprived of their kit and baggage. They had LOST. You couldn’t just order them to take it all back in the morning. Better to skedaddle across the river to safety and fight another day.
But Grant was different. Relying on his reinforcements, and the strength of his veteran commanders, he endeavored to resuscitate his battered army with his own indomitable spirit. Very early the next morning, he offered simple, straightforward commands to his subordinates that got them off in the right direction and left the details of battle to them as circumstances required. His contribution to their effort was his sublime, self-assured calm and infectious enthusiasm. The thought of retreating had literally never occurred to him—nor had it occurred to him the previous February at Fort Donelson, another occasion in which his troops had rallied decisively after being thrown back in a grueling match. As had been the case at Fort Donelson, Shiloh was a test of wills: both sides had reached the breaking point. Whichever side attacked next, won.
Believing they would make short work of the broken Federals the following day, the late Johnston’s Confederates—now under the command of P. G. T. Beauregard—slept the sleep of the confident, satisfied from a day that, despite its consuming destruction, had seemed like Christmas in April with its Yankee largesse. At first light, Grant’s men went forward into Rebel ground that had lately been theirs, driving enemy pickets before them in a haunting reverse of the previous day’s events. The armies grappled again, loosing storms of lead into each other in a series of awful, concussive melees. By mid-afternoon, the Southerners had had it, forcing Beauregard to organize a fighting retreat back to Corinth. He left behind him more than 10,500 killed, wounded, or missing. Shiloh was a holocaust: More casualties were inflicted in two days of fighting than in all of America’s previous wars combined.
But Grant was left standing on the field. His forces had been surprised and thrown back, but that didn’t count for much in his world. He had gotten up off the ground and kicked his assailant in the teeth with a dirty boot. That counted for much in his world. “The art of war is simple enough,” said Grant. “Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can and as often as you can and keep on going.” Phil Sheridan, who ultimately became Grant’s cavalry tsar, said that Grant “was the steadfast center about and on which everything else turned.” President Lincoln would one day praise Grant for “his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose.” But how does one describe or encapsulate the genius that allowed this gentle, soft-spoken little man to become the conqueror of the South? William Sherman, who knew the sphinx-like fighter from Point Pleasant, Ohio, better than most, said it best: “He is a mystery to me and I believe also to himself.”
He was a mystery to his father, too, who nicknamed him “Useless” as a boy. Virtually everything about Ulysses was paradoxical or misleading, including his name. He was christened Hiram Ulysses Grant, only to be accidentally renamed Ulysses Simpson Grant in the paperwork that got him into West Point (Simpson was his mother’s maiden name). The academy, which gave him the only skills he ever really used and that allowed him to become one of the most important figures of the century, was his father’s idea—Hiram “Useless” had no desire to go whatsoever, and would never take to regimentation, studying, uniforms, or killing. Short and slightly built, he did not care for athletics. He was a lousy student. Though an extraordinarily gifted artist, he would proclaim a lack of interest in painting later in life and abandon it altogether. His other talent, riding, made him famous at the Point; nobody—nobody—could handle horses like Grant. Where did he end up upon graduation? The infantry. There were no spots available in his first and natural choice, the cavalry. (Sigh.)
The story just gets stranger. During the War with Mexico, he served with both of America’s preeminent military leaders—Zachary Taylor in the north, and Winfield Scott on the coast, receiving two brevets for bravery in a conflict he considered morally repugnant. After being assigned to the remote Pacific northwest, he pined for his beloved wife, the daughter of a man who not only had eagerly supported the Mexican War but who also owned slaves, something else that Grant found unethical. His solution to loneliness was to drink, which he didn’t do very well at all. It never required much whiskey to get Grant stumbling, bullet-proof drunk. Compelled to resign his commission in 1854 on account of his bibulous behavior, he embarked upon a series of professional failures the likes of which American history has rarely witnessed in a future president. He borrowed money and even slaves to help his doomed farm; got work as a real estate agent, but could neither sell houses nor collect rent with anything approaching competence; hit up his hostile father for loans; looked for work along the streets of St. Louis; pawned his possessions to buy Christmas presents for the kids; and peddled firewood he had cut himself. His younger brothers finally took him in as a clerk in their Galena, Illinois, leather goods shop—a cruel irony, considering the fact that the stench and gore of his father’s tannery had always made Grant sick as a child.
Then war came.
Within a few years he would be the closest thing to a generalissimo that America had ever produced, holding a rank, lieutenant general, that Congress had resurrected especially for him—an almost incredible reversal of fortune. But he had a hard time convincing folks in 1861 that he wasn’t the incompetent, sulking lush that everyone seemed to believe he had become. He managed to get a colonelcy and a regiment of miscreants to drill, but his most important acquisition was a patron in Elihu Washburne, congressman from Galena, Illinois. A friend of the president’s, Washburne helped Grant get a brigadier general’s star in the volunteers. After whipping his men into shape, he saw action at Belmont in November, a battle that did little more than offer newbies on both sides an opportunity to fire their rifles at a moving target. But bigger things were waiting just around the corner.
In February 1862, Grant managed to get permission from his overly prudent superior Henry Halleck to lead an expedition into Tennessee with the support of ironclads under the command of Flag Officer Andrew Foote. The resulting campaign changed the entire complexion of the war in the West. Foote’s floating monsters managed to pummel Fort Henry on the Tennessee River into surrender, but not before most of its garrison escaped to Fort Donelson, ten miles away on the Cumberland. Without hesitating, Grant decided to send his force overland to take the second fort, wiring Halleck of his intentions almost as an afterthought. Donelson proved a tougher nut to crack: Foote’s ironclads got much worse than they gave and were forced to retire for repairs, and the Rebel garrison, reinforced before Grant’s army showed up, was as large as the Union force, making a successful siege all but impossible. Recovering from Confederate attacks that nearly achieved a breakout, Grant launched a final furious assault, completing the encirclement and rendering the fort’s defenses untenable. “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted,” he famously and quite brashly informed his enemy. “I propose to move immediately upon your works.” It proved effective. Fort Donelson fell, yielding a slew of prisoners, control of western Tennessee, and use of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers.
Soon hailed throughout the North as “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, he had become a hero, giving his president and his country the first major success of the Union war effort. But then came the April bloodbath at Shiloh, horrifying a public that had just recently been singing Grant’s praises. Body counts on such a hitherto unknown scale were too ghastly, even in exchange for a Confederate reversal and Albert Sidney Johnston’s corpse. The incident gave Henry Halleck the excuse he was looking for to treat his famous underling like excess baggage. As he crept toward Corinth in what may have been the slowest advance of the Civil War, the sluggardly Halleck kept Grant in tow as a sort of glorified page. Convinced that he had shot his bolt, Grant prepared to pack for home and what would doubtless have been another slide into undignified financial disaster. Then Sherman paid him a visit, and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. In the frenetic speaking style that had become one of his dubious hallmarks, Sherman jabbered on and on about how things can turn around if you just stick it out, and somehow it worked.
Good thing, too, because Grant’s next triumph would make military history and save the Union. Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the key to unlocking the South’s undoing. A fortified stronghold perched on heights that overlooked a bend in the Mississippi, it was akin to the perfect river sentinel, frowning down on the “Father of Waters” with more than enough large-caliber artillery to rain hell upon anything stupid enough to float on by without permission. Unassailable from the river, surrounded by swamps and lakes, it seemed impervious. Grant went at the problem in the fall of 1862, doing everything short of sending a squadron of balloons over the city to bomb it into submission. He sent columns of troops overland from north of the bastion, landed divisions by boat, had canals dug to redirect the river, but nothing worked. Wallowing about in the mud, his supply lines harassed by Rebel cavalry maestro Nathan Bedford Forrest, Grant began worrying his superiors once again and giving the newspapermen something to moan about. Then, the following year, he struck upon an idea so daring that many of his best subordinates, including Sherman, begged him not to try it. (Grant didn’t listen.) As the ships of Admiral David Porter sailed south on the current, bravely running the gauntlet beneath Vicksburg in a nighttime dash, Grant marched his men alongside them on the west bank of the Mississippi. Once well south of Vicksburg, the army was ferried in safety across the river and left to its fate on the east bank, deep within enemy territory. The Federal army was now totally on its own—Vicksburg lay athwart its supply lines to the north, and supply from the river was wholly unrealistic. Moreover, Grant had not only to deal with the defenders of his fortified target, but also with another Confederate army under Joseph Johnston that had come to Vicksburg’s aid. No wonder Grant’s lieutenants thought him soft in the head.
But he was way ahead of them all. Let loose like a virus in the flesh of his enemy, he lived off the produce of local farms and villages, moving without having to worry about lines of supply. The previous winter, morose with failure, the general had hit the bottle again. Now there was no whiskey in sight—in fact, the only possessions Grant brought with him, besides the uniform on his back, were a comb and brush. He descended on Joseph Johnston’s army at Jackson, Mississippi, and routed it. Then, when the defenders of Vicksburg sallied out to crush him, he turned on them and, in a pair of sharp fights, sent them hastening back into their defenses. It was all so brilliant and dazzling and ballsy that nobody seemed to notice when his attempts to storm the works of Vicksburg itself ended in bloody repulse (except, of course, the nearly four thousand dead and wounded incurred during the two all-out assaults—they definitely noticed). Things settled into a siege, and on July 4, 1863, the city finally surrendered. He rounded out the year by breaking the Confederate siege of Chattanooga in the dramatic assaults up Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. Grant had become the North’s trump card.
And the president himself had become his greatest fan. Outwardly, the two had nothing in common. Lincoln, eight inches taller than his favorite general, was an effusive storyteller and humorist who, among his other talents, excelled at admitting and delineating his own faults. Grant, by contrast, had so little to say about anything, at all times, that even those close to him were hard pressed not to wonder if anything at all was present in his head to be expressed. And when he did speak, it was almost never to admit a weakness—Grant’s abiding strength lay in a self-confidence that was manifest, indestructible. But they were both Midwesterners who had gravitated to Illinois. Both men had opposed the War with Mexico, one in his heart and the other on the floor of Congress, a shared experience of moral protest. And both men found themselves in agreement that the South must now be crushed utterly if there was to be any hope of peace. Both were looking to bring that other arm out from behind the Northern behemoth and start slugging away with both fists. Anything to shorten the war.
The president made his man a lieutenant general and set him at the head of all the nation’s armies. Putting his friend Sherman in charge of all the forces of the West, Grant took his place with George Meade, the victor of Gettysburg, and the Army of the Potomac. He did so not because the West was less important than the eastern theater, for it certainly wasn’t. But Robert E. Lee was in the East. And Lee had become a strategic target in and of himself—a symbol of Southern success and defiance that did much to prop up a sagging cause. And there were many in the Army of the Potomac who didn’t believe that Grant, who had cut his teeth on inferior foes on the Mississippi, understood what he was in for in Uncle Bobby, the great bugbear of Washington soldiers.
Perhaps they had a point. Grant went south and got ambushed in that primordial woodland known as the Wilderness—the perfect place for Lee to cancel Grant’s outrageous superiority in numbers and artillery. In the midst of the incredibly intense fighting, Grant, informed of horrific casualty figures and the possibility of disaster on his right wing, did a singular thing: He went into his tent, fell on his cot, and sobbed openly.
It was perhaps the last gasp of doubt left in him, purged in a moment of weakness. Nobody had ever witnessed anything like it before. At any rate, he soon did another singular thing. As his men pulled out of their positions in the Wilderness, rather than direct them back north, as every previous Army of the Potomac commander would’ve done, he sent them east and south—a profound decision to maintain contact with the enemy that evinced roars of approval from the men, elated at having a fighter at the helm. Grant’s plan was to move to the left, sliding his army around in an attempt to get at Lee’s weak spots while never losing touch with him. He knew that he could use the proximity of Richmond as a weapon, forcing his opponent to position himself for the city’s defense. But the Rebel capital was never Grant’s object—the Army of Northern Virginia was. Lee obliged throughout the Overland Campaign, as it was called, clashing with Grant at Spotsylvania, North Anna, and Cold Harbor. The latter, in which Grant ordered a final all-out assault against entrenched positions, produced terrific slaughter—7,000 casualties in an hour. It was the only event that Grant regretted during his Civil War career. Undeterred, he kept sliding around Lee’s right and got the drop on him at Petersburg. There, P. G. T. Beauregard put up a valiant defense until Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia could show up and prevent the Federals from sweeping in to Richmond. The siege of Petersburg had begun.
Grant had bottled up his enemy—someone had finally beaten Lee. Throughout the final winter and spring of the war, Grant gradually extended his encirclement, stretching Lee to the breaking point and launching assaults to probe for weakness. After the Battle of Five Forks, the Rebel line at last became untenable, forcing a mass evacuation of forces west toward a very uncertain future. The following April, Grant ran his opponent down and received his surrender. Lee, wearing his dress uniform with a sash and gilt sword, was obliged to wait at the assigned meeting place for Grant, who showed up in an unbuttoned, mud-spattered uniform, devoid of sword or even spurs. The scene was perfectly apt.
Grant had never been comfortable in the army, yet summoned and directed its awesome power better than almost anyone. Unlearned in war almost in spite of a West Point education, he relied on common sense, surreal clarity of thought, and dogged persistence to fashion victory from adversity. Rarely has such a lethal combination of qualities resided in such an innocuous package.
The great unlikely warlord never again did anything so well as he did in those tumultuous years between 1861 and 1865—except write about it all in his outstanding memoir, published by Mark Twain. By then, dying of throat cancer from a life wreathed in cigar smoke, he had served two terms as president of the United States and traveled the world. Though rife with corruption and cronyism, his presidency witnessed a tenacious and ultimately doomed struggle on behalf of the freedmen, whose fate, Grant sincerely believed, was emblematic of the nation’s future. As a traveler, he was praised the world over—a symbol of America resurgent in all its rumpled, egalitarian glory. Once out of the limelight, he became a businessman and lost everything, bringing himself and his wife, Julia, perilously close to destitution. It was out of this that the memoir emerged—a pecuniary necessity that exposed its author as a literary prodigy. The thing saved Julia from a life of poverty, earning nearly half a million bucks after Grant’s death—a fitting denouement to a life that had witnessed unparalleled extremes of failure and ruin, all against the backdrop of a nation’s violent redemption and gilded comeback. Ulysses Grant may just be the quintessential American after all.
EASY RIDER
During much of the Vicksburg campaign, Ulysses Grant rode a horse named “Kangaroo.” Left by the retreating Rebels on the field at Shiloh, the animal—ugly, unkempt, neglected—wasn’t much to look at when Grant found him. But while most observers dismissed the horse as a lost cause, the general recognized what was, in fact, a thoroughbred. He took Kangaroo under his care and in time produced a mount that was the envy of his officers.
Grant loved horses, and horses loved him back. It was a gift that Ulysses had from the time he was a small boy, driving his father’s team of horses with striking ease. As a teenager, people from all around brought difficult mounts to the Grant home for “Ulys” to pacify and train. His fellow West Point cadets were in awe of his riding abilities, watching him once jump the academy’s most difficult mount over a bar set to a height that would’ve been virtually impossible for everyone else. The record stood for twenty-five years. After the conclusion of his second presidential term, during the Grants’ world tour, a stop in Turkey produced an historic equine moment. Sultan Abdul Hamid II honored his esteemed guest with a visit to the royal stables, telling the former president to choose any two horses to keep as his own. Stunned, like a kid in the world’s greatest candy store, Grant made his two choices, only to be told, “Any other two.” An amused Grant chose two other magnificent beasts, and had them shipped home. Named Leopard and Linden Tree, they ultimately established the Arabian purebred strain in North America that exists to this day.
As for all those who didn’t share his appreciation for horses, Grant could be uncharacteristically wrathful. Once, during the Overland Campaign in 1864, the general came across a teamster whose wagon was stuck in the mud beating his horses on the face. Grant, enraged, commanded the brute to stop. The man was defiant: “Who’s driving this team anyhow, you or me?” Grant immediately had the man tied to a tree “for six hours as a punishment for his brutality.” His staff had never seen him so undone.
GENERAL ORDER NO. 11
One of the most irritating parts of General Grant’s job during the 1862 attempts on Vicksburg was dealing with the illicit cotton trade. Cut off from the world’s markets, Southern planters sold their goods to throngs of Yankee traders and speculators who followed in the wake of the army’s advance south. Plenty of soldiers and officers dallied in the traffic as well, producing a situation that the government thought had grown out of control—profits that made their way back to Southern authorities, after all, could prolong the war. To get a handle on this burgeoning black market, Federal authorities gave their generals conflicting directives that were often impossible to enforce, insisting that only those traders with legal permits could carry on trade in cotton. Grant in particular found the whole situation untenable along the Mississippi. As a result, he sought to simply prevent traders from doing business in his jurisdiction.
It was against this backdrop that Grant, on December 17, formally expelled all Jews from the Department of the Tennessee. Fixating on several prominent Jewish traders in the area and allowing his own ignorance to run amok, the general simply began assuming that the vast majority of illegal merchants were “Israelites.” Officers on his staff did their best to prevent Grant from issuing “General Order No. 11,” but to no avail. Aside from being a heinous act of anti-Semitism, the proclamation was impossible to enforce—what to do, for instance, with the thousands of Jews fighting in his own army? Fortunately, the order was short-lived. Rightly pilloried in the press, the act appalled President Lincoln, who ordered that it be immediately revoked. That Grant did so the following month only because he had been ordered to, further impugns his judgment. It remains a strange and ugly smudge on his record.
THAT TOTALLY BITES
As if it weren’t bad enough watching all his attempts to take Vicksburg fail and having a hellraiser like Bedford Forrest cutting his supply lines to ribbons, Grant had a nasty shock one morning in February 1863. The night before, he had broken the usual habit of sleeping with his dentures in, and instead placed them in a bucket of water—which his servant, unaware of the dentition lying within, threw into the river early the next morning. Grant wouldn’t have replacement choppers for almost a month. No wonder he fell off the wagon and started drinking again.
Quick! Take the Picture!
Of all the close brushes with death that General Grant faced during the stunningly bloody war he helped to end, one of the scariest occurred … in a photographer’s studio. After being promoted to lieutenant general, Grant agreed to sit for the capital’s image-capturer par excellence, Matthew Brady. Unfortunately, the general didn’t show up until late in the day, when the sun was well on its way toward the horizon. To maximize what little sunlight remained, Brady sent an assistant up to the roof to open the shades on the skylight. Instead the fellow slipped and broke the skylight, sending huge shards of glass cascading down upon the illustrious subject, who had taken his seat as requested. Grant, who casually looked skyward to see the cause of all the commotion (the glass was two inches thick), gave “the most remarkable display of nerve” that the photographer had ever seen as the pieces crashed and shattered all around him. Now that’s coolness under fire. (Not a single bit of glass managed to hit him.)