The Man Who Saved the Union (48 page)

A change was required. Grant determined to extricate his army from its close quarters with Lee and move south across the James River. “Once on the south side of the James River,” he told Halleck, “I can cut off all sources of supply to the enemy except what is furnished by the canal”—the James River Canal, to Richmond’s west. He would then attack the canal and complete Lee’s encirclement.

The new strategy lifted the gloom of
Cold Harbor for Grant and, he thought, his men. “Our army is not only confident of protecting itself, without entrenchments, but that it can beat and drive the enemy whenever and wherever he can be found without this protection,” he told Halleck.

Yet for one as used to fighting as Grant,
not
fighting came as a challenge. Moreover, disengaging from the Confederate lines and marching south through hostile territory entailed the risk that Lee would attack him at his most vulnerable. “
But the move had to be made,” Grant reflected later. “And I relied upon Lee’s not seeing my danger as I saw it.”

What Lee saw was his own danger. He had to keep Grant off balance
and off the James River, his outlet to the sea. “
We must destroy this army of Grant’s before he gets to James River,” Lee told
Jubal Early, one of his generals. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.”

But Grant was too quick and clever for Lee. To cover his southward move he dispatched Phil Sheridan west to strike against the
Virginia Central Railroad. “
Every rail on the road destroyed should be so bent or twisted as to make it impossible to repair the road without supplying new rails,” he told Sheridan. At the same time he ordered General
David Hunter, currently in the Shenandoah Valley, to move against the railroad and then the James Canal. “
The complete destruction of this road and of the canal is of great importance to us,” Grant said. He expected his order to reach Hunter between Staunton and Lynchburg. “Immediately turn east by the most practicable road until you strike the Lynchburg branch of the Virginia Central road. From there move eastward along the line of the road, destroying it completely and thoroughly until you join General Sheridan.” Hunter should then drive for the canal. “Lose no opportunity to destroy the canal.”

Grant meanwhile readied to move his main army south. He shared his plans with a mere handful of officers, reasoning that broader distribution would inevitably alert Lee. As a result, when the order to march went down the line on the evening of June 12, the rank and file could only guess where they were bound. The advance guard forded the Chickahominy and dispersed the Confederate pickets there; Grant’s engineers threw over pontoon bridges for the others to cross upon. Lee didn’t miss Grant from the Cold Harbor front till the next morning when Grant’s army was halfway to the James. That river posed a more serious obstacle, being nearly half a mile wide at Grant’s point of crossing. But the engineers again came through, building a hundred-pontoon bridge in seven hours. At once the infantry, led by Winfield Hancock’s corps, headed across.

Grant observed the operation as it proceeded the next morning. “
His cigar had been thrown aside, his hands were clasped behind him, and he seemed lost in the contemplation of the spectacle,”
Horace Porter remembered. “The great bridge was the scene of a continuous movement of infantry columns, batteries of artillery, and wagon trains. The approaches to the river on both banks were covered with masses of troops moving briskly to their positions or waiting patiently their turn to cross.… Drums were beating the march; bands were playing stirring
quicksteps.… The bright sun, shining through a clear sky upon the scene, cast its sheen upon the water, was reflected from the burnished gun barrels and glittering cannon, and brought out with increased brilliancy the gay colors of the waving banners.”

Grant took quiet pride in the operation. “
Since Sunday we have been engaged in one of the most perilous movements ever executed by a large army, that of withdrawing from the front of an enemy and moving past his flank, crossing two rivers over which the enemy has bridges and railroads whilst we have bridges to improvise,” he wrote Julia on June 15. “So far it has been eminently successful and I hope will prove so to the end.” To Halleck he wrote: “
The enemy show no signs of yet having brought troops to the south of Richmond. I will have Petersburg secured if possible before they get there in much force.”

Halleck sent Lincoln a copy of Grant’s message. Grant had withheld his intentions from the president as from the rest of the administration. Lincoln now learned of the operation with appreciative pleasure. “
I begin to see it,” he wrote Grant. “You will succeed. God bless you all.”

Grant considered Petersburg, a rail junction on the Appomattox River twenty miles south of Richmond, to be an outer work of the Confederate capital; seizing its rail lines would help him starve Richmond and Lee’s army. Grant guessed that Petersburg was poorly defended, and he ordered an attack as his army approached the town. General
William F. Smith drove back the defenders, who indeed were few and inexperienced, consisting primarily of old men and young boys. But then he paused, awaiting reinforcements, which through a miscommunication were slow to arrive. By the time the second assault occurred, Lee had gotten more of his own troops into place. Two days of heavy fighting left the Confederates in control of Petersburg and several thousand Union troops dead or wounded.

Grant lamented the opportunity lost. “
I believed then, and still believe, that Petersburg could have been easily captured,” he wrote later. There was nothing to be done now except mount a siege. “
We will rest the men and use the spade for their protection until a new vein can be struck,” he told Meade.

Grant judged that his move south of the James marked the beginning of his endgame with Lee. He had tried to slug it out in the Wilderness and at
Cold Harbor and discovered he couldn’t bear the cost. So he would settle for a siege, a more deliberate but no less certain version of the war of attrition he had commenced at the Rapidan. “
Our work progresses here slowly
and I feel will progress securely until Richmond finally falls,” he wrote Julia from City Point, where he established his headquarters.

With Lee contained near Richmond and Sherman dogging Johnston in Georgia, victory was inevitable, Grant thought. All that was required was patience on the part of the Union’s advocates. “
You people up North must be of good cheer,” he wrote Chicago acquaintance
Russell Jones. “Recollect that we have the bulk of the Rebel Army in two grand Armies both besieged and both conscious that they cannot stand a single battle outside their fortifications with the Armies confronting them. The last man in the Confederacy is now in the Army. They are becoming discouraged, their men deserting, dying and being killed and captured every day. We lose too but can replace our losses. If the rebellion is not perfectly and thoroughly crushed it will be the fault and through the weakness of the people North. Be of good cheer and rest assured that all will come out right.”

B
ut good cheer was scarce in the North in the summer of 1864. The Virginia campaign thus far had been singular for its slow progress and sobering casualties. In killed, wounded and missing, Grant had lost some sixty thousand since crossing the Rapidan, and he was only marginally nearer Richmond than when he started. Lee looked no closer to surrendering than he had in May; if anything, the Confederate performances at
Cold Harbor and Petersburg suggested that the rebel troops had more fight left in them than Grant’s troops did. Northern newspapers wondered how long the army would follow Grant; even members of the Lincoln administration began to register doubts. “
The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all,”
Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, wrote in his diary. “The hospitals are crowded with the thousands of mutilated and dying heroes who have poured out their blood for the Union cause.”

Lincoln shared Welles’s concern, and he decided to pay Grant a visit. He traveled by river steamer down the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay and up the James to City Point. Grant greeted him at the wharf. “
I hope you are very well, Mr. President,” he said.

“I am in very good health,” Lincoln replied. “But I don’t feel very comfortable after my trip last night on the bay. It was rough, and I was considerably shaken up.”

A messmate of Grant’s with unusual powers of procurement stepped forward. “Try a glass of champagne, Mr. President,” he said. “That is always a certain cure for seasickness.”

Lincoln demurred. “No, my friend, I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very stuff.”

Grant offered to escort the president along the Union lines. Lincoln accepted. Horace Porter grinned at the sight of the president on horseback. “
Like most men who had been brought up in the West, he had good command of a horse,” Porter said. “But it must be acknowledged that in appearance he was not a very dashing rider.… By the time he had reached the troops he was completely covered with dust, and the black color of his clothes had changed to Confederate gray. As he had no straps, his trousers gradually worked up above his ankles, and gave him the appearance of a country farmer riding into town wearing his Sunday clothes. A citizen on horseback is always an odd sight in the midst of a uniformed army, and the picture presented by the President bordered on the grotesque.”

Yet the troops appreciated his coming. They gathered around and offered cheers to “Uncle Abe.” Most appreciative were the black troops who had fought at Petersburg. They saluted Lincoln as their commander but revered him as their liberator. They crowded close, some merely to touch his coat or his horse. Lincoln was obviously moved. “The President rode with bared head,” Porter recalled. “The tears had started to his eyes, and his voice was so broken with emotion that he could scarcely articulate the words of thanks and congratulation which he tried to speak.”

Lincoln spent the evening in front of Grant’s tent on a bluff above the James. He told stories of life in Illinois and among the political classes of Washington. As the shadows lengthened he sank deeper into his camp chair till his torso all but disappeared and he seemed entirely legs and arms, with the latter waving here and there to emphasize his anecdotes. He retired to his boat on the James and returned the next day to Washington.

Brief though it was, Lincoln’s visit established a new level of trust and understanding between the president and his commanding general. “They parted with unfeigned regret,” Porter said. “Both felt that their acquaintance had already ripened into a genuine friendship.”

42

L
INCOLN NEEDED ALL THE FRIENDS HE COULD GET
. T
HE
1864
ELECTION
loomed, and voters were restive that the war continued inconclusively more than three and a half years after its start. The Republican party reconfigured itself, with the addition of pro-war Democrats, as the National Union party and nominated Lincoln for a second term. The president eased Vice President
Hannibal Hamlin off the ticket in favor of Tennessee Democrat
Andrew Johnson, whom he had previously appointed military governor of the Volunteer State. Johnson’s background was as humble as Lincoln’s, but while life broadened Lincoln it seemed to narrow Johnson, who grew stubborn and suspicious as an adult. Yet his stubbornness favored the Union, and it disposed Lincoln to overlook Johnson’s rough edges.

The Democrats who maintained their party identity had difficulty deciding what to do. A few sought to nominate Grant despite his repeated denials of interest. Their efforts went nowhere. A larger group looked to another soldier, George McClellan. Grant had never figured out how to employ McClellan since assuming command of the Union armies, and the underoccupied general concluded that he should replace Lincoln as president. The delegates to the Democratic national convention, held at Chicago, nearly all thought the war had gone on too long, and they nominated McClellan on a platform demanding that “
immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” McClellan put some distance between himself and the platform, but he made clear that a vote for him was a vote against the war policies of the present administration.

McClellan ran formally against Lincoln but implicitly against Grant. The two generals—McClellan didn’t bother resigning his commission to
run for office—competed for the favor of voters and, via the voters, for the right to determine the fate of the Union. Each battlefield success for Grant was a boon to Lincoln and a setback for McClellan; each reversal for Grant was a blow to Lincoln and a gain for McClellan.

Grant rarely commented on politics except to decry the absence of spine in certain elected officials. And he would have been outraged at any accusation that he made military decisions for political reasons. But he understood that his army existed and persisted by the will of the people of the Union. “Be of good cheer,” he had said to his Chicago friend in urging that the people of the North continue to support the war. Grant understood that Lee might beat him yet if the Northern will to continue the fight flagged. And it might indeed flag if he couldn’t show greater progress than he had shown since spring.

To that end he authorized another assault on Petersburg. The lines hadn’t moved for over a month—the lines above ground, that is. Below the surface there was more action. Some Pennsylvania miners in
Ambrose Burnside’s Ninth Corps mimicked the tunneling Grant’s engineers had done at Vicksburg; they dug a passage that stretched more than five hundred feet to beneath the Confederate lines. Eight thousand pounds of gunpowder were carted into the tunnel and set in place. The fuse was lit shortly after three o’clock on the morning of July 30, and the troops of the Ninth waited anxiously for the explosion. Nothing happened. Two intrepid miners crawled along the tunnel to find out what had gone wrong; they discovered that the fuse had failed at a splicing point. They relit the fuse and hurried out of the tunnel. A bit before five o’clock an enormous explosion rocked the hillside around the tunnel, blasting the Confederate position above it and hundreds of Confederates too.