American Experiment (152 page)

In the North, talk had grown of compromise and peace. “Copperheads,” as their detractors called them, organized to resist the draft and force Washington to end the war. On the floor of the House, Clement Vallandigham of Ohio charged Lincoln with despotism and failure. A wave of desertions swept through the Northern armies. Some of the farmboys-turned-soldiers resented Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Why should they fight and die for “niggers”? Some soldiers felt their officers were incompetent. Finding the war meaningless as well as miserable, and knowing the heavy burdens falling on their womenfolk on the farm, thousands simply walked away from camp and headed home. The Army of the Potomac alone reported 85,000 men absent. Some were caught, and gunfire occasionally punctuated the quiet of the Union camps throughout the winter of 1862–63 as alleged deserters were shot.

Would spring mean new hope? Northern power was mounting as masses of men and matériel were thrown into the fray, but somehow superior numbers and munitions did not bring victory. The problem was leadership. Lincoln had run through a string of generals—McDowell, Pope, McClellan, Burnside. He wanted a man who could
fight
and
win.

Such a commander was emerging in the West. Stumpy, plain-dressed, constantly smoking or chewing on a cigar, forty-one-year-old Major General Ulysses S. Grant hardly cut a heroic military figure. To some he was known mainly as a sometime drunk within the army and a failure outside it. Rival generals dismissed his February 1862 victory at Fort Donelson, the North’s first striking success in the war, as a fluke; scandal-hungry
reporters overlooked his calm courage at the battle of Shiloh and charged him with being drunk on the field.

Urged that Grant be removed from his western command, Lincoln answered with jokes, but to a Pennsylvania politician he responded with feeling: “I can’t spare this man—he fights.” A Confederate general took the measure of the man: not a genius, but “clear-headed, quick and daring.” One of Grant’s officers summed him up as neither bully nor bon vivant, but only a “plain business man of the republic.” As 1863 dawned, the next piece of business was seizing the fortress of Vicksburg.

Vicksburg in early 1863 was still a frustrating target. Perched on a bluff above the east bank of the Mississippi, the city was protected by swamps and strong fortifications to the north, while shore batteries seemed to block any assault via the river. As the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi—even more, the last link between the eastern and western halves of the Confederacy—it was fully manned. Still, General John Pemberton held Vicksburg with a force slightly smaller than the Union besiegers, which made it all the more galling for the Northern commanders that during the winter they had tried six different means of getting at Pemberton’s army and all had failed. In despair, William Tecumseh Sherman of the Army of the Tennessee had suggested a retreat back to Memphis for regrouping, but Grant had demurred. The Northern people, Grant said, would not countenance another setback. “There was nothing left to be done,” as he later put it, “but to
go forward to a decisive victory.
”

Sometimes fortune favors the bold. This time Grant would move
south
of the fortress and then try to beat the Rebels in detail. The notion of deliberately marching troops deep into enemy territory, with an insecure supply line and with two enemy columns ready to pounce on them, appalled Sherman and his fellow officers, but they had confidence in Grant. As the rains began to ease off in mid-April, the Army of the Tennessee moved down the muddy roads of the west bank, opposite the fortress. Admiral David Porter, after running his gunboats past the Confederate batteries at night, ferried the Union army piecemeal across the river.

In trapping the enemy had Grant and Porter become trapped? Some thought so: the Unionists were on the dangerous side of the river, under Confederate guns. But Grant was just where he wanted to be—on dry ground and within grappling reach of the enemy. He pushed his army, a compact triangle of about 43,000 men, forward between Pemberton and the veteran Rebel general, Joseph Johnston, who commanded a newly assembled force in Jackson, to the east. On May 14 one prong of the mobile triangle stabbed into Jackson, putting Johnston to flight. While a Union
detachment stayed behind destroying rail lines and military stores, the other two prongs of Grant’s main force cut back to grasp Pemberton, who was advancing cautiously out of Vicksburg. After twice pushing their foe back toward the fortress, Grant’s men attacked Vicksburg itself.

The assault failed, but the battle had been won. Pemberton’s army now was trapped in Vicksburg; Johnston’s reinforcements were scattered on roads and troop trains for many miles around; the Army of the Tennessee, now resupplied, had a tight grip on the river stronghold. Sherman, riding with Grant to inspect the lines, was jubilant: “This is a campaign; this is a success if we never take the town.”

The war was more than a campaign, however; it was a conflict in many theaters, and back on the eastern front the Federals were floundering after another defeat. In late April a refurbished Army of the Potomac, under a breezily confident new commander, Joseph Hooker, had marched forth to do battle once again with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Hooker hoped to maneuver behind Lee, trap him at Fredericksburg of recent sad memory, and then crush him with the Union’s superior numbers. Instead, Lee met Hooker’s thrust head-on, blocking it for a time near the hamlet of Chancellorsville. At first, the Union men seemed to be winning the fight as the gray-clad troops slowly fell back through thick forest and tangled underbrush.

Lee, badly outnumbered, seemed at last to be cornered, but he was setting a trap of his own. While his men slowly retreated, Lee sent “Stonewall” Jackson with 28,000 men on a fourteen-mile march, circling far around Hooker’s right flank. At dusk on May 2 Jackson’s men burst screaming out of the shadowy underbrush, routing an entire Union corps and knocking the Federals back toward the Rappahannock. Darkness, Northern reinforcements, and the accidental wounding of Jackson by his own men stopped the attack. Hooker still had strong forces left, but Lee simply outgeneraled him during the next two days, and the remaining Federals pulled back to the north bank of the Rappahannock.

“My God!” an ashen-faced Lincoln had exclaimed on getting the news of Chancellorsville. “What will the country say?” Once again the South felt a surge of pride, tempered by the news of Stonewall Jackson’s death after the amputation of an arm and the onset of pneumonia. Lee’s textbook victory made him the military hope of the Confederacy. A son of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Revolutionary War fame, a West Point graduate, married to the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, a gallant officer in the Mexican War, Lee had seemed the natural choice as commander of Virginia’s armed forces when he chose his native slate over the Union
at the start of the war. He had directed such a slow and fumbling campaign in western Virginia during the first months of the war, however, as to be called “Granny Lee” and almost lose his reputation before he could win it. But then, in battle after battle, he had developed such qualities of resourcefulness, mobility, audacity, imagination, resoluteness, and an almost intuitive understanding of enemy plans as to make him the supreme tactician of the war.

A tactician—but now the South needed a strategist. Grant had Vicksburg in his grasp, thus threatening to cut the Confederacy in two. The blockade was tightening. Union forces were threatening to attack in central Tennessee, even launch a joint army-navy operation into Charleston. Now, in May 1863, Confederate leaders took anxious counsel together. Some wanted to strike west, liberate Tennessee, and break Grant’s grip on Vicksburg and the Mississippi. But Lee pressed for a more daring plan—to reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia and then strike north through the Shenandoah Valley into the fertile Pennsylvania countryside, thus lightening the pressure on Richmond and forcing the Union to pull troops from the west; this would inspire the Peace Democrats in the North, perhaps win recognition from European powers, and possibly even result in the capture of Washington. The tactician had turned strategist.

In June, in search of the decisive victory of the war, Lee slipped his army toward the Shenandoah Valley and plunged northward. Things went handily at first. Confederate columns scattered Union detachments in the valley, crossed the Potomac, speared through Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and reached the outskirts of Harrisburg. Hooker proposed to the President that, while Lee moved north, the Federals should move south and seize Richmond; Lincoln responded drily, “I think
Lee’s army,
and not
Richmond,
is your true objective point.” Still looking for a fighter, the President accepted Hooker’s resignation and chose George Gordon Meade as commander of the main Union forces in the East. In Pennsylvania, Lee was already finding that instead of encouraging Peace Democrats, his advance—especially his seizure of livestock and food, and the capture of Pennsylvania Negroes and dispatch of them south to slavery— had aroused Northern anger to a new pitch.

So stupendous odds had turned on the outcome of the battle that erupted in the little town of Gettysburg on July 1, as commanders deployed their troops and sent them forward into a cauldron of noise and heat and smoke, of fear and pain and sudden darkness; as artillery pounded away, soldiers shot and stabbed and clubbed one another on Little Round and the Wheat Field and Cemetery Ridge, and famous regiments once a thousand strong melted away. Waiting in the War
Department’s telegraph room, Lincoln finally received the message he so desperately wanted: Lee was defeated, his troops moving back toward Virginia. Then came word from the Army of the Tennessee: Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant on the Fourth of July. Telegraph lines flashed the news across a joyous North.

“We have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now look how we steer,” Lincoln had said earlier, “or with one flop of his tail he will send us all into eternity.” His words seemed more apt than ever as Meade allowed the bulk of Lee’s troops to retreat south. Gideon Welles had never seen the President so upset and discouraged. “We had them in our grasp,” Lincoln kept saying. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours.” Further confirming his fears, the seesaw of war again teetered as autumn neared. General William Rosecrans’s Federals captured Chattanooga in southeast Tennessee, but Braxton Bragg’s Confederates counterattacked at Chickamauga, cracked and broke the Union line, pushed the Union forces back to Chattanooga, and laid the city under siege.

The whale’s tail was still flopping, but the Northern harpoon was sinking deeper. Given command of the armies of the west, Grant drove Bragg’s men off Lookout Mountain and then off Missionary Ridge, in a battle won by soldiers who stormed the ridge on their own, ahead of orders. Lincoln got the news a few days after returning from his Gettysburg Address trip. With Union ships once again plying the Mississippi, Bragg’s troops retreating into Georgia, and Grant’s divisions poised to break through the mountains and advance on Atlanta, the President was on the eve of achieving his great strategic aim of breaking the Confederacy in two.

Confederate hopes ebbed after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. “We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence,” Jefferson Davis said. Wrote a Confederate private captured at Vicksburg: “We have Lost the Mississippi and our nation is Divided and they is not a nuf left to fight for.” A Southern veteran of Gettysburg wrote his sister: “We got a bad whiping…. They are awhiping us … at every point.” He hoped the South would make peace so that he could “get home agane” alive.

In Richmond the Confederates’ diarist-at-large, Mary Chesnut, began her January 1, 1864, entry, “God Help My Country.” She had almost become used to social occasions attended by men without arms, without legs, men unable to see, unable to speak. “Gloom and unspoken despondency hang like a pall everywhere.” As she looked out on the endless Richmond rain, her main hope now was that the enemy would become bogged down. “Our safeguard, our hope, our trust is in beneficent mud, impassable mud.”

General Mud. But there was also General Industry, General Supply, General Transport, General Manpower—and General Grant.

Late in the afternoon of March 8, 1864, a train carrying Ulysses S. Grant, his teenage son, and two aides steamed into the Washington railroad station. No one was on hand to greet the man who was about to take command of the most powerful army the world had ever seen—and who had never set foot in his nation’s capital or met his commander-in-chief. Making his way to Willard’s Hotel on 14th Street, the general waited there until after nine in the evening, when he left for the White House. There, at one end of the Blue Room, Lincoln was greeting guests at one of his large receptions. Hearing a rising buzz of conversation at the other end, the President moved through the crowd toward the man who had just entered. “Why, here is General Grant!”

While the two men exchanged a few amiable words, other guests crowded in around them or climbed chairs and tables to get a better view. If some were disappointed in the appearance of this small scrubby man of forty-two, with his slight stoop and the wart on his right cheek, they did not show it. They needed a hero, and here was the Hero of the West. The next day the President commissioned Grant a lieutenant general, commanding all the armies—the rank previously given in full only to George Washington.

Leaders choose strategies, and strategies choose leaders. Grant was not only a proven fighter and winner but a general who could be counted on to carry out Lincoln’s long-frustrated strategy of attacking the enemy on all fronts simultaneously. Grant also could be expected to wage a continuous battle of attrition: instead of engaging the foe in one major struggle at a time and then pulling back to prepare for the next encounter—the pattern so far of the Civil War and of most wars—he would hammer the Confederates unceasingly, hanging on like a bulldog, grinding and wearing down the South to the point of exhaustion.