Ulysses S Grant Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Preface

  One - LIVING A TROUBLED LIFE

  Two - 1861: SEEKING A CHANCE TO FIGHT

  Three - WINTER 1862: CAPTURING FORTS HENRY AND DONELSON

  Four - SPRING 1862: SALVAGING A VICTORY AT SHILOH

  Five - 1862-1863: SURVIVING FRUSTRATION UPON FRUSTRATION

  FIRST ATTEMPTS TO CAPTURE VICKSBURG

  Six - MAY-JULY 1863: VANQUISHING VICKSBURG

  GRANT’S DIVERSIONS

  AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULT

  MOVING INLAND: PORT GIBSON AND RAYMOND

  CAPTURING JACKSON, THE STATE CAPITAL

  CHAMPION’S HILL AND THE BIG BLACK RIVER

  ASSAULTING AND BESIEGING VICKSBURG

  CONFEDERATE SURRENDER

  LEGACY OF THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN

  Seven - AUTUMN 1863: SAVING CHATTANOOGA

  GRANT OPENS THE CRACKER LINE

  GRANT ORGANIZES A BREAKOUT

  THE LEGACY OF CHATTANOOGA AND GRANT’S WESTERN EXPERIENCES

  Eight - EARLY 1864: PLANNING A NATIONAL CAMPAIGN

  GRANT TAKES CHARGE

  Nine - SUMMER 1864: ATTACKING LEE’S ARMY

  THE WILDERNESS: DAY ONE

  THE WILDERNESS: DAY TWO

  GRANT MOVES FORWARD

  SPOTSYLVANIA COURT HOUSE

  THE NORTH ANNA RIVER

  COLD HARBOR

  CROSSING THE JAMES RIVER

  Ten - 1864-1865: TIGHTENING THE NOOSE

  Eleven - EARLY 1865: WINNING THE WAR

  SHERMAN MARCHES THROUGH THE CAROLINAS

  UNION PROGRESS IN VIRGINIA

  DINWIDDIE COURT HOUSE AND FIVE FORKS

  BREAKTHROUGH AT PETERSBURG

  THE CHASE TO APPOMATTOX

  Twelve - GRANT’S WINNING CHARACTERISTICS

  GRANT VERSUS LEE

  OVERVIEW OF GRANT’S CAMPAIGNS

  GRANT’S WINNING CHARACTERISTICS

  A LOOK AT GRANT’S STATISTICS

  CONCLUSIONS

  Appendix I - HISTORIANS’ TREATMENT OF ULYSSES S. GRANT

  Appendix II - CASUALTIES IN GRANT’S BATTLES AND CAMPAIGNS

  Appendix III - THE CRITICAL ELECTION OF 1864: HOW CLOSE WAS IT?

  GRANT INSIDERS

  GRANT’S MAJOR OPPONENTS

  GRANT’S UNION HANDICAPS

  WARTIME VIEWS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to my loving wife,

  Susan Weidemoyer Bonekemper;

  my ever-supportive parents,

  the late Edward H. Bonekemper II and Marie H. Bonekemper;

  my inspirational Muhlenberg College history professor,

  Dr. Edwin R. Baldrige;

  and my departed British/Bermudian Civil War

  connoisseur and friend, John W. Faram.

  INTRODUCTION

  Many casual readers of Civil War history come to the conclusion that Robert E. Lee wrought miracles with an outnumbered army and that, by contrast, Ulysses S. Grant was a butcher who slaughtered his own men and won solely by brute force and sheer numbers. Over decades of reading about the Civil War, I have come to contrary conclusions about both men.

  Discussions about Robert E. Lee with my late father-in-law, Alfred W. Weidemoyer, led to our concluding that Lee had escaped blame for his many failures during the war and to my writing How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War. A brilliant and well-read friend’s insistence that Grant was a butcher has encouraged me to write this book. As I wrote this book, my continuing research only deepened my conviction that Grant was a great general whose reputation was besmirched by early Civil War historians who had motives of their own and that his generalship has never received the credit it deserves for winning the Civil War.

  In these pages, I attempt to summarize Grant’s Civil War battles and campaigns with a particular focus on whether his casualties reflected butcher-like conduct. I conclude that he conquered the western third of the Confederacy with a minimum of casualties, drove a stake into the middle of the Confederacy with minimal losses again, and then came east to win the war with tolerable casualties in less than a year. Far from being a butcher, Grant relied on maneuver, speed, imagination, and persistence—in addition to force—to win the Civil War.

  In addition to my narrative and arguments, I have included three appendices that support my position. Appendix I contains a summary of historians’ treatment of Grant—from the “Lost Cause” historians of the early post-war period to those who have reconsidered and revived his record. Appendix II contains a comprehensive summary of various parties’ estimates of the casualties that both sides suffered in the battles and campaigns in which Grant was involved; it provides casualty estimates drawn from a variety of Civil War books, articles, and documents. Finally, Appendix III discusses the surprising closeness of the presidential election of 1864, an election that affected Grant’s approach to battle in 1864 and the outcome of which was affected by Grant’s aggressive nationwide campaign of that year.

  Preface

  THE GREATEST CIVIL WAR GENERAL

  Why has Grant so often been labeled a butcher and Robert E. Lee a hero? Accusations that Grant was butchering his own soldiers first began during the war—particularly during his aggressive 1864 campaign against Lee to secure final victory for the Union. During that campaign (the Richmond or Overland Campaign), Mary Todd Lincoln said, “[Grant] is a butcher and is not fit to be at the head of an army.” On June 4, 1864, Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “Still there is heavy loss, but we are becoming accustomed to the sacrifice. Grant has not great regard for human life.” One Southerner said at the time, “We have met a man this time, who either does not know when he is whipped, or who cares not if he loses his whole army.”1

  The “butcher” accusations continued in the early post-war period. As early as 1866, a southern writer, Edward Pollard, referred to the “match of brute force” to explain Grant’s victory over Lee. Even northern historians criticized Grant. In 1866, New York Times war correspondent William Swinton wrote in his Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac that Grant relied “exclusively on the application of brute masses, in rapid and remorseless blows.” John C. Ropes told the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts that Grant suffered from a “burning, persistent desire to fight, to attack, in season and out of season, against entrenchments, natural obstacles, what not.”2

  Beginning in the 1870s, former Confederate officers played a prominent role in criticizing Grant—especially in comparison to Lee. Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early, in an 1872 speech on Lee’s birthday, said, “Shall I compare General Lee to his successful antagonist? As well compare the great pyramid which rears its majestic proportions in the Valley of the Nile, to a pygmy perched on Mount Atlas.” In the 1880s, Lieutenant General Evander M. Law wrote, “What a part at least of his own men thought about General Grant’s methods was shown by the fact that many of the prisoners taken during the [Overland] campaign complained bitterly of the ‘useless butchery’ to which they were subjected. ...”3

  Likewise, Lee’s former adjutant, Walter H. Taylor, elevated Lee at Grant’s expense in General Lee: His Campaigns in Virginia 1861-1865 with Personal Reminiscences, which was published in 1906. Of the Overland Campaign, Taylor said: “It is well to bear in mind the great inequality between the two contending armies, in order that one may have a proper appreciation of the difficulties which beset General Lee in the task of thwarting the designs of so formidable an adversary, and realize the extent to which his brilliant genius made amend
s for the paucity of numbers, and proved more than a match for brute force, as illustrated in the hammering policy of General Grant.” Taylor also claimed that “[Grant] ... put a lower estimate upon the value of human life than any of his predecessors. ...”4

  Sometimes the accusation has been more subtle, as in Robert D. Meade’s 1943 book on Judah Benjamin: “In the spring of 1864 Grant took personal command of the Union Army in Virginia and, with a heavily superior force, began his bludgeoning assaults on Lee’s weakened but grimly determined troops.” A 1953 dust jacket on a Bruce Catton book said (contrary to Catton’s own views): “[The Army of the Potomac’s] leader was General Ulysses S. Grant, a seedy little man who instilled no enthusiasm in his followers and little respect in his enemies.” In 1965, pro-Lee historian Clifford Dowdey said of Grant: “Absorbing appalling casualties, he threw his men in wastefully as if their weight was certain to overrun any Confederates in their path. In terms of generalship, the new man gave Lee nothing to fear,” and described Grant as “an opponent who took no count of his losses.” A 1993 article in Blue & Gray Magazine referred to the “butcher’s bill” of the first two weeks of the Overland Campaign.5

  Historian Gregory Mertz said it well:Grant enjoyed little of the “glory” for his contributions to the [Army of the Potomac’s] ultimate success, and was the recipient of much of the blame for the “disasters.” Despite moving continually forward from the Wilderness to Petersburg and Richmond, ultimately to Appomattox, and executing the campaign that ended the war in the East, Grant has received little credit, and is most remembered for the heavy losses of Cold Harbor, which tagged him with the reputation of a “butcher.”6

  Even today, examples abound. In 2001, a reporter wrote: “Despite occasional flashes of brilliant strategy and admirable persistence, Grant still comes off looking like a butcher in those final months.” Another reporter, writing in 2002 and regarding him as an intellectual lightweight, referred to “last-in-class types, such as Ulysses S. Grant.”7

  The “butcher” label has indeed been tenacious. Civil War historian Don Lowry explained, “Grant has often been depicted as a butcher whose only strategy was to overcome the smaller enemy force by attrition, knowing that he could replace his losses more easily than Lee.” As military historian Gordon C. Rhea put it, “The ghost of ‘Grant the Butcher’ still haunts Civil War lore.” An earlier historian, E. B. Long, reluctantly concluded, “Grant the butcher is a hard myth to extinguish.” Proving his thesis, an early 2003 Associated Press release stated, “Ask most schoolchildren and they will tell you that Robert E. Lee was a military genius while Ulysses S. Grant was a butcher who simply used the North’s advantage in men and material to bludgeon the Confederates into submission.”8

  Grant’s armies incurred the bulk of their casualties in the war-ending 1864 Overland Campaign from the Washington area to Richmond/Petersburg against Lee’s army. This campaign reflected Grant’s war-long philosophy that “The art of war is simple enough. 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 moving on.”9 That campaign also represented a deliberate effort by Grant and President Abraham Lincoln to take advantage of the fact that, during the prior two years, Robert E. Lee had chewed up his Army of Northern Virginia and rendered his army, and the Confederacy, vulnerable to a nationwide offensive campaign that would bring the hostilities to a final halt. The Overland Campaign was part of Grant’s national effort to demonstrate Union strength and ensure the reelection of Lincoln. However, it resulted in Grant’s being accused of “butchery.”

  In fact, an average of “only” 15 percent of Grant’s Federal troops were killed or wounded in his battles over the course of the war—a total of slightly more than 94,000 men. In contrast, Grant’s major Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee, who is often treated far more kindly by historians, had greater casualties both in percentages and real numbers: an average of 20 percent of his troops were killed or wounded in his battles—a total of more than 121,000 (far more than any other Civil War general). Lee had 80,000 of his men killed or wounded in his first fourteen months in command (about the same number he started with). All of these casualties have to be considered in the context of America’s deadliest war; 620,000 military men died in that war, 214,938 in battle, and the rest from disease and other causes.10

  Both Grant and Lee were aggressive generals, but only Grant’s aggressiveness was consistent with the strategic aims of his government. The Confederacy needed only to avoid conquest, but Lee acted as though the Confederacy had to conquer the North. On the contrary, the Union had the burden of conquering the South, and Grant appropriately went on the offensive throughout the war. He won in the West, won in the Middle, won in the East, and won the war. In summary, Lee needed a tie but went for the win, while Grant needed a win, went for it, and achieved it.

  Grant’s successes also have been seriously slighted. He accepted the surrender of three entire Confederate armies—at Fort Donelson in 1862, Vicksburg in 1863, and Appomattox Court House in 1865. No other general on either side accepted the surrender of even one army until Sherman, with Grant’s blessing, accepted the North Carolina capitulation of the remnants of the Confederate Army of Tennessee in mid-April 1865.

  Also overlooked by many are the numerous 1862 and 1863 successes of Grant in the West (Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi). Acting on his own, he occupied Paducah, Kentucky, in early 1862. He then moved on to quickly capture Forts Henry and Donelson, gain control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, and thereby put a dagger in the left flank of the Confederacy. Shortly thereafter, he recovered from a surprise Confederate attack, saved his army in a vicious two-day battle, and thus won a major victory at Shiloh, Tennessee.

  The next year, Grant, again without approval from above, moved his army from the west bank across the Mississippi River to get below Vicksburg, took a daring gamble to feed his army off the countryside, won a series of five battles in eighteen days against Confederate forces that cumulatively outnumbered his, and accepted the surrender of Vicksburg and a nearly 30,000-man army on July 4, 1863. This brilliant campaign resulted in splitting the Confederacy, opening the Mississippi to Union commerce, and impeding the flow of supplies and foodstuffs from Mexico and the Trans-Mississippi to Confederate armies east of that river. Just as significantly, the capture of Vicksburg and the simultaneous Union victory at Gettysburg had a combined devastating impact on morale throughout the South.

  In late 1863, Grant moved successfully into the “Middle Theater” of the war (the area from Nashville, Tennessee, to Atlanta, Georgia). That autumn Lincoln called upon Grant to save a Union army that was virtually besieged at Chattanooga in southeastern Tennessee. When Grant arrived there, Union troops and their surviving animals were on the verge of starvation. Under his leadership, the Federal forces quickly opened a new supply line, captured Lookout Mountain, carried Missionary Ridge, and drove the Rebel Army of Tennessee into the hills of northern Georgia. This November 1863 victory at Chattanooga set the stage for Sherman’s 1864 campaign toward Atlanta.

  Having ended Confederate control in the Mississippi Valley and eastern Tennessee and having won Lincoln’s confidence in his willingness to fight and ability to win, Grant was summoned to the East in early 1864 to close out the war. There the Union Army of the Potomac had squandered opportunities to pursue Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia after the battles of Antietam (1862) and Gettysburg (1863), and it had recoiled after the first major battle of each offensive campaign against Lee (Seven Days’, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville). That army had demonstrated that “... superior numbers and equipment alone did not win the war. Success was contingent upon the outcome of battles and campaigns, and the Army of the Potomac only became successful when it found someone who could use its resources to the utmost.”11 Grant was that someone.

  Appendix II of this book contains various estimates of the casualties incurred by Grant’s armies and their opponents. My best esti
mate is that Grant’s western casualties (1861-1863) were 36,688 while he imposed 84,187 casualties on his opponents; that his eastern casualties (1864-1865) were 116,954 while he imposed 106,573 casualties on Lee’s troops; and that Grant’s total Civil War casualties were 153,642 while he imposed 190,760 on the enemy. In light of the fact that strategy and tactics compelled him to be on the offensive throughout the war, these totals are convincing evidence of his intelligent execution of his mission.

  Far from being the butcher of the battlefield, Grant determined what the North needed to do to win the war and did it. Grant’s record of unparalleled success—including Belmont, Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, Iuka, Corinth, Raymond, Jackson, Champion’s Hill, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Petersburg, and Appomattox—establishes him as the greatest general of the Civil War.

  One

  LIVING A TROUBLED LIFE

  Ulysses Grant lives an industrious boyhood, reluctantly attends West Point, fights courageously in the Mexican War, leaves the Army, and struggles in civilian life.

  Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in the Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822. The family of Ulysses’ father, Jesse Root Grant, had moved from Connecticut to Pennsylvania and then to Ohio; the family of his mother, Hannah Simpson Grant, made a similar move from Pennsylvania to Ohio. The year after Ulysses’ birth, his father established a tannery east of Point Pleasant in Georgetown, Ohio, and the family moved there.1

  Young “Ulysses,” as he was called, loved working with horses but detested the tannery. By the age of nine or ten, he was earning respectable sums of money breaking horses and driving passengers all over Ohio. Beginning in 1827 or 1828, he attended a series of subscription schools and supplemented them with a year of study at the Maysville Seminary in Maysville, Kentucky (1836-1837), and another at the Presbyterian Academy in Ripley, Ohio (1838-1839).2