The Man Who Saved the Union (43 page)

After the battle, Dana found
Philip Sheridan, one of the corps commanders
whose troops made the spontaneous assault. “Why did you go up there?” Dana asked.

“When I saw the men were going up,”
Sheridan replied, “I had no idea of stopping them. The rebel pits had been taken and nobody had been hurt, and after they had started I commanded them to go right on. I looked up at the head of the ridge as I was going up, and there I saw a Confederate general on horseback. I had a silver whiskey flask in my pocket, and when I saw this man on the top of the hill I took out my flask and waved my hand toward him, holding up the shining, glittering flask.” Sheridan’s men interpreted this as an order. “The whole corps went up.”

“
Glory to God!” Dana reported to
Edwin Stanton that afternoon. “The day is decisively ours. Missionary Ridge has just been carried by the magnificent charge of Thomas’s troops, and the rebels routed.”

Grant was slightly more circumspect. “
Although the battle lasted from early dawn till dark this evening, I believe I am not premature in announcing a complete victory over
Bragg,” he wrote Halleck that night. “Lookout Mountain top, all the rifle pits in Chattanooga Valley, Missionary Ridge entire have been carried and now held by us. I have no idea of finding Bragg here tomorrow.”

G
rant’s announcement was not premature; Bragg withdrew what remained of his battered army to Georgia. But Grant was already looking past Chattanooga. “
The next thing now will be to relieve
Burnside,” he wrote Sherman. Grant appreciated the hundreds of miles Sherman’s army had marched already, and he initially sent Gordon Granger north to Knoxville. But when Granger moved too slowly for Grant’s tastes, he called on Sherman again. “
I made this change knowing Sherman’s promptness and ability,” he explained to Halleck. “If Burnside holds out a short time, he will be relieved.” To Burnside, Grant dispatched another stiffening message: “
Do not be forced into a surrender by short rations. Take all the citizens have, to enable you to hold out yet a few days longer.”

Sherman sent a cavalry column up the Tennessee Valley ahead of his main army to let Burnside know help was on the way. Sherman’s information indicated that if Burnside didn’t receive help by the first days of December he would have to surrender. The cavalry reached Knoxville during the night of December 3, delivering moral support and word that Sherman’s main army was close behind.

Sherman’s arrival persuaded
James Longstreet to lift the siege. As the Confederates pulled back, Sherman rode into the city. “
Approaching from the south and west, we crossed the Holston on a pontoon bridge,” he remembered. “And in a large pen on the Knoxville side I saw a fine lot of cattle, which did not look much like starvation. I found General Burnside and staff domiciled in a large, fine mansion, looking very comfortable.” Sherman was puzzled, and more so that evening. “We all sat down to a good dinner, embracing roast turkey. There was a regular dining table, with clean tablecloth, dishes, knives, forks, spoons, etc., etc. I had seen nothing of this kind in my field experience, and could not help exclaiming that I thought ‘they were starving.’ ” Burnside admitted that the siege of the city had never been complete and that he had been well supplied from the valley settlements throughout. He didn’t explain the reports to the contrary. Sherman held his tongue at the moment, but he later reflected, with unusual understatement: “Had I known of this, I should not have hurried my men so fast.”

37

T
HE
W
ESTERN
V
ICTORY
. C
ONFIRMATION OF THE
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LORIOUS
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EWS
. B
RAGG’S
O
VERWHELMING
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EFEAT
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IS
A
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C
RUMBLING
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WAY AND
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S
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. T
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ANNOT
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ADE TO
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ALLY
. I
MMENSE
A
DDITIONS TO
O
UR
C
APTURES.

The multiple heads on the
New York Times
story typified the reaction in the North to
Grant’s victory on the Tennessee. Lincoln lauded Grant and his army in a public letter of congratulations for the securing of eastern Tennessee. “
I wish to tender you, and all under your command, my more than thanks—my profoundest gratitude—for the skill, courage, and perseverance with which you and they, over so great difficulties, have effected that important object,” the president wrote. “God bless you all.”

When the new Congress convened in December, the first resolution of the House, approved unanimously, thanked Grant and his army and called for the striking of a gold medal in his honor; the Senate shortly added its endorsement. Elihu Washburne introduced a bill authorizing the president to revive the rank of lieutenant general, last held permanently by
George Washington, and confer it on the commander “
most distinguished for courage, skill, and ability.” All in Congress understood that Grant was the sole candidate for nomination, but Washburne made the understanding explicit. “
Look at what this man has done for his country, for humanity and civilization,” the Illinois representative declared. “He has fought more battles and won more victories than any living man. He has captured more prisoners and taken more guns than any general of modern times.” Some members of Congress counseled waiting until the war was over to confer the honor; Washburne asserted that to delay would be to forget what military rank was for. “I want it conferred now
because it is my most solemn and earnest conviction that General Grant is the man upon whom we must depend to fight out this rebellion in the field and bring this war to a speedy and triumphant close.” The nation demanded no less, he said. “The people of this country now want a fighting and a successful general to lead their armies. They want a man who is willing to risk his own life upon the field. They have seen General Grant successful in every fight from Belmont to Lookout Mountain, and they now wish to see him marshal our whole armies and strike the last, greatest and most deadly blow at the rebellion.”

I
nevitably, given American democracy’s admiration for victorious generals, Grant’s name surfaced in discussions of who would be the next president. The Republicans had their candidate, Lincoln, who would run on a platform of completing the task at hand. The Democrats struggled to find both a candidate and a cause. The larger wing of the party, reflecting the party’s Southern antecedents, opposed the war and especially emancipation. But a minority of Democrats rejected the defeatism and surrender to slavery they considered implicit in the antiwar demands of the majority. One of the “War Democrats,”
Barnabas Burns of Ohio, wrote Grant in December 1863. “
Your successful military career,” he said, “your unfaltering devotion to your country in its darkest hours of trial, your indomitable energy in overcoming all obstacles, your consummate skill and dauntless courage on the field of battle, have all combined to call the public mind to you as the man to whom the affairs of this great nation should be committed at the close of the present incumbent’s term of office.” Would Grant consent to have his name presented as a candidate to a convention of the War Democrats in January?

On reading this letter Grant reflected on what remarkable turns life took. Three years earlier he had had to beg his father for a menial job in the family leather store; now he was being promoted for the most powerful job in America. “
The question astonishes me,” he replied to Burns.

Of course he had to decline the offer as unbecoming and wholly unsought. “I do not know of anything I have ever done or said which would indicate that I could be a candidate for any office whatever within the gift of the people,” he said. “I shall continue to do my duty, to the best of my ability, so long as permitted to remain in the Army, supporting whatever Administration may be in power, in their endeavor to suppress the rebellion and maintain national unity.” He wanted Burns to appreciate
that this response was no stratagem. “Nothing likely to happen would pain me so much as to see my name used in connection with a political office. I am not a candidate for any office nor for favors from any party. Let us succeed in crushing the rebellion in the shortest possible time, and I will be content with whatever credit may then be given me.”

Grant’s admirers—including those who saw him as a vehicle for their own political hopes—needed more than a single rebuff to be dissuaded.
Isaac Morris, a former Democratic congressman from Illinois, wrote Grant urging a reconsideration.

Grant amplified his rejection. “
I am not a politician, never was and hope never to be,” he declared. “In your letter you say that I have it in my power to be the next President! This is the last thing in the world I desire. I would regard such a consummation as being highly unfortunate for myself, if not for the country. Through Providence I have attained to more than I ever hoped, and with the position I now hold in the Regular Army, if allowed to retain it will be more than satisfied.… I scarcely know the inducement that could be held out to me to accept office, and unhesitatingly say that I infinitely prefer my present position to that of any civil office within the gift of the people.”

Yet the solicitations kept coming.
Francis Blair, the Missouri politician turned soldier, sent Grant another inquiring letter. Grant responded, “
It is on a subject upon which I do not like to write, talk, or think. Everybody who knows me knows I have no political aspirations either now or for the future.” He wished people would get the message. “I hope to remain a soldier as long as I live.”

G
rant’s emergence as his country’s warrior hero amazed many who had scarcely heard of him before Vicksburg and even now couldn’t credit that a man so young could have accomplished so much. Forty-one years old, Grant looked, if anything, younger than he had when the war began. He affected approaching middle age; when a supporter requested that he donate a clipping from his hair to be placed in a locket and sold at a benefit for disabled soldiers, but only if the supply wasn’t growing scarce, Grant responded, “
I am glad to say that the stock is yet as abundant as ever, though time or other cause is beginning to intersperse here and there a reminder that winters have passed.” In fact a photograph taken a short while later showed his hair as youthfully dark as ever. During the month after Chattanooga he toured eastern Tennessee, and the locals,
mostly Unionists, turned out to see the vanquisher of the Confederates. Grant’s entourage included his chief surgeon, a man in his fifties with graying hair; at more than one stop the crowds mistook the surgeon for the conquering general.

Grant’s apparent reversal of the aging process reflected his unusual comfort with war. At the time of secession he appeared older than his chronological age; a decade of frustration and failure had worn him down. Now he was refreshed by his string of victories. The terrible responsibility of sending soldiers to their deaths didn’t trouble his sleep. His conviction of the rightness of his cause afforded him proof against self-doubt, but so did something that was as much temperamental as political or moral. Other commanders—other leaders—second-guessed themselves: their plans, their preparations, their decisions. Grant, for reasons perhaps partly inborn and partly acquired, rarely revisited choices once made. He planned according to the information at hand; he prepared for all reasonable contingencies; he decided what to do as events unfolded. Then, calm in the conviction that he could have done no more, he accepted what destiny delivered.

H
is confidence grew with each victory and as he took the measure of his opponents. During the
Chattanooga campaign he and others on the Union side inferred that
Bragg and Longstreet didn’t trust each other and that
Jefferson Davis put little faith in either. Grant respected Bragg as a man, if not especially as a soldier. “
Bragg was a remarkably intelligent and well-informed man, professionally and otherwise,” he later wrote. “He was also thoroughly upright. But he was possessed of an irascible temper, and was naturally disputatious.… As a subordinate he was always on the lookout to catch his commanding officer infringing his prerogatives; as a post commander he was equally vigorous to detect the slightest neglect, even of the most trivial order.” Grant told a story that had circulated in the army before the war. Bragg was stationed at a distant post where he served simultaneously as commander of one of several companies there and as quartermaster of the whole post. In his capacity as company commander he requisitioned certain supplies; in his role as quartermaster he denied the requisition. According to the story, Bragg appealed the decision and then denied his own appeal. When the post commander discovered what was happening, he exclaimed, in uncomprehending
exasperation: “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!”

Longstreet was quite a different character, one bound to have trouble with Bragg, Grant thought. “He was brave, honest, intelligent, a very capable soldier, subordinate to his superiors, just and kind to his subordinates, but jealous of his own rights, which he had the courage to maintain. He was never on the lookout to detect a slight, but saw one as soon as anybody when intentionally given.”

As for Jefferson Davis, who had traveled to Tennessee just before Grant’s arrival at Chattanooga, to patch up the quarrel between Bragg and Longstreet, Grant had little but scorn. “Mr. Davis had an exalted opinion of his own military genius,” he said, on the basis of his observation of Davis at the War Department before secession and of Davis’s performance in the Confederate presidency. Grant was content—even pleased—for Davis to hold that opinion. “On several occasions during the war,” he observed afterward, “he came to the relief of the Union army by means of his
superior military genius
.”