Crucible of Command Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by William C. Davis

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

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  Set in 12-point Dante

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  ISBN 978-0-306-82246-9 (e-book)

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  24681097531

  FOR BIRD, WHO GAVE ME THE IDEA

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps

  Preface

  Introduction: Icons

  1Sons and Fathers

  2School of the Soldier

  3Fighting on the Same Side

  4Times of Trial

  5A Crisis Made for Them

  6“What Has Become of Gen. Lee?”—“Who Is General Grant?”

  7Lee Frustrated and Grant Victorious

  8Shiloh and Sevens

  9Lee Victorious and Grant Frustrated

  10“What have we to live for if not victories?”

  11Two Rivers to Cross

  12July 1863

  13Hints of the Inevitable

  14“If defeated nothing will be left us to live for.”

  15“A mere question of time.”

  16Meeting Again

  17Grant and Lee in 1868

  18The Last Meeting

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  MAPS

  1.Grant and Lee’s War, 1861–1865

  2.The Virginia Theater of the War

  3.Grant and Lee in Mexico, 1846–1848

  4.The Battle of Cheat Mountain, September 12, 1861

  5.The Battle of Belmont, November 7, 1861

  6.The Battle of Fort Donelson, February 15, 1862

  7.The Battle of Shiloh, April 6, 1862

  8.The Seven Days, June 25–July 1, 1862

  9.The Second Manassas Campaign, July 17–August 30, 1862

  10.The Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862

  11.The Battles of Iuka and Corinth, September 19 and October 3, 1862

  12.The Battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862

  13.The Battle of Chancellorsville, May 1–6, 1863

  14.The Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863

  15.Grant’s Approaches to Vicksburg

  16.The Battles for Chattanooga, November 24–25, 1863

  17.The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864

  18.The Battles around Spotsylvania Court House, May 8–19, 1864

  19.Grant’s Crossing of the James, June 13–16, 1864

  20.The Siege of Petersburg, June 1864–April 1865

  21.Grant’s Pursuit of Lee to Appomattox, April 3–9, 1865

  PREFACE

  A FEW WORDS about the approach to writing this book are in order. Those who actually consult the footnotes of the following bibliography will quickly note the heavy preponderance of primary sources used. Indeed, very sparing use has been made of secondary works, and most of those cited are for purposes of correcting errors found in them, or as recommended further readings. The secondary literature on Grant and Lee is vast and of dramatically varying quality. Of special note, Douglas Southall Freeman’s monumental R. E. Lee is still imposing after three-quarters of a century, though Freeman’s want of objectivity and occasional carelessness with sources somewhat dims its authority. Elizabeth Pryor’s 2007 Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters is exhaustively researched and in the main an outstanding exploration of the inner Lee, often through writings not previously available, though she sometimes makes unwarranted leaps of interpretation from her sources. No counterpart to Freeman exists for Grant. Brooks D. Simpson’s 2000 Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822–1865 and his earlier Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 are together thorough, well researched, and generally balanced. Joan Waugh’s recent U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth is an outstanding companion taking Grant from 1865 through posterity. Of course, William S. McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant, A Biography in 1981, though it suffers from rather too much presentism.

  These works, and the myriad others available, have been used sparingly or not at all, but not out of disdain. This is not a conventional biography. It is, rather, an exploration of the origins and development of Grant’s and Lee’s personalities and characters, their ethical and moral compasses, and their thinking processes and approaches to decision making—in short, the things that made them the kind of commanders they became. With that in mind, the safest course seemed to be to stay within the sources of their own time, written at the moment by those who knew the men and witnessed their acts, and as much as possible to use the directly contemporary writings of the men themselves. Hence, even Grant’s incomparable Personal Memoirs plays little role here, for it was written twenty years after the fact, and inevitably influenced by fallible memory and the natural instinct for self-vindication. Lee left no memoirs, but even his few recorded postwar conversations about his campaigns see small use, for they, too, suffer from self-justification. Some may question this approach, for surely some later secondary writers and modern historians may have useful, even penetrating, insights into what made Grant and Lee great leaders. That is so, but the goal in Crucible of Command is for its conclusions to come as directly from the actions of the principals as possible, uninfluenced by the later interpretations of others. That may not make the insights here any better than others, but at least they have the virtue of coming directly from the men themselves and their immediate circles of friends and family.

  Having said that this is not a conventional biography, it is worth emphasizing that there is much that is new here from sources ignored or newly discovered, especially on the all-important youth of both men. There are also numerous cases of attention given to correcting errors in some secondary works, especially Freeman and occasionally Pryor, on matters germane to the portraits here limned. This is done out of respect and solely to set the record straight, since in the future, as in the past, readers and students will rely most heavily on these classic and timeless works, making correction where needed all the more important.

  Be bold, be bold, and everywhere be bold.

  —Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

  INTRODUCTION: ICONS

  IN THE SPRING of 1869 an enterprising merchant in Liverpool, England, tried luring customers into his showroom by mounting an exhibition of wax figures of distinguished Americans. A number beneath each bust referred visitors to a leaflet identifying the subjects. The likenesses were poor, but the leaflet even worse as it mismatched names with numbers. A head of recent Confederate president Jefferson Davis appeared on the sheet as Abraham Lincoln. More perplexing still, the guide reversed the descriptions for numbers 339 and 340, Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, misidentifying each as his archrival in the recent America
n Civil War. When visitors from the United States protested, the exhibitor refused to acknowledge error. He knew Grant from Lee, even if these silly Americans did not.1

  They first met as fellow soldiers in Mexico in 1847 in a moment both remembered and then forgotten by the time they met again in vastly different circumstances. No one then would have confused their identities or thought them remotely similar. Lee aptly stood for those fine old landed families now fallen on difficult times—the plantations gone or losing profitability, the wealth spent, their only influence now based on their names and the worth of their characters. The fortunes and small empires of the eighteenth century were dissolving in a new America. No wonder, then, that the longer Lee lived the more pessimistic became his view of a world in which he and his like were being displaced by a generation striving to replace the old order with a meritocracy of entrepreneurism, hard work, and imagination. Grant was one of those new Americans, and optimism was the fuel that drove him and his like.

  Had there been no Civil War, Lee might have left a mark as a colonel of cavalry, or even a brigadier if he lived long enough. Grant likely would have made none at all, though both appeared, and would have continued to appear, in histories of the war with Mexico. The events of their generation created them and, call it coincidence or destiny, each proved to be the ideal man in the right place, and at the perfect moment. Then came the war, which accelerated everything both for them and their country at a pace seldom matched by plodding Time. That war made them both, and in it each revealed his singular attributes of personality and character. At the same time each demonstrated what few then or later chose to see: as thinkers and decision makers, as soldiers and as leaders, as men in command, they could be almost indistinguishable one from the other. They were hardly so identical as to give an excuse for numbers 339 and 340 being mistaken for each other, but take away the names and the faces and judge them by their acts, and their differences could be measured in motes.

  The myths long ago replaced the men. Like favorite fairy tales that children beg to hear again and again, they give us portraits as we want them to be: familiar, comfortable, and unchallenging. Some are hardly flattering. Grant the butcher. Grant the drunkard. Grant the corrupt. Yet there is also Grant the magnanimous. Grant the peacemaker. Lee has fared better in mythology, even at the hands of his onetime enemies. Myths about him from his own time have now mostly disappeared—Lee the “woman-whipper”—replaced by the Lee who never called the enemy the “enemy.” Lee the champion of reconciliation. For more than a century our eyes have teared at the oft-told tale of him, when president of Washington College after the war, threatening an instructor with dismissal if he spoke again disparagingly of General Grant—the great Confederate chieftain, still gallant in defeat, demanding respect for a noble and magnanimous victor. Yet almost certainly the story is just that: a myth.2

  The mythology serves purposes darker than sentiment, nothing more so than the currently popular, and arrantly nonsensical, assertion that Lee freed his inherited slaves in 1862 before the war was over, while Grant kept his until the Thirteenth Amendment freed them in 1865. The subtext is transparent. If Southerner Lee freed his slaves while Northerner Grant kept his, then secession and the war that followed can hardly have had anything to do with slavery and must instead have been over the tariff or state rights, or some other handy pretext invented to cloak slavery’s pivotal role.3 Losing a war is hard on the loser, but even more so when defeated while protecting an institution that Western culture has come to condemn unanimously. After decades of civil rights agitation in America have resulted in a vastly changed complexion to American society, an understandably defensive posture among many in the once-Confederate states welcomes anything showing Yankees like Grant to be venal hypocrites while Southerners like Lee were really committed to ending slavery. It is a powerful palliative to those displeased with the social realities of the present.

  In this instance, of course, the reality is that Lee probably never owned any slaves after 1848, and those he freed in December 1862 never belonged to him in the first place. They were the property of his late father-in-law, who provided for their freedom in his will and made Lee his executor. In fact, Lee originally hoped to hold them longer than the will dictated, to enhance inheritances that went to his own children. As for Grant, he only ever owned one slave and that for just a year, and freed him in 1859 even when the failed Grant himself was virtually bankrupt and sorely needed the $1,000 or more the man might have brought him at auction. There were occasionally one or two slaves with his wife and family in the early war years when his wife joined him with the army in a slave state, but they belonged to her father who loaned them to her, and were all freed by state action nearly a year before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. In short, the slaves that Lee did free never belonged to him; the slaves that Grant supposedly failed to free were never his to free.

  To earlier generations they were the greatest heroes of their time, deservedly the most popular and, if they wished it, influential men in their sections. The country needed both of them after the war, and into the century beyond. The South needed Lee—Lee the unbeatable, the very image of the cavalier warrior—as a focus for pride transcending defeat. Around him they could build a soul-sustaining ethos as they developed the mantra that the Confederacy was never really vanquished; it just wore itself out whipping the Yankees. The South also needed Grant, and a certain kind of Grant, too; a soulless, mechanistic disciple of numbers served slavishly by acolytes and myrmidons like Sherman and Sheridan, all willing to follow him in trading ten lives in blue for every one of gray, overwhelming by raw power and resources rather than skill as a commander. Defeat manfully fighting a leviathan contemptuous of the laws of civilized warfare was not defeat. Rather, it was a moral victory that took the sting from surrender at Appomattox. With Lee at their head, Confederates could face the years after 1865 with high-held heads. Even in the gloomiest hours of Reconstruction, Southern men were not acquiescent in their disfranchisement. Like Lee, they were simply being patient with the Yankees.

  Ironically, the reunited Union needed a certain kind of Lee, too. There was no glory in besting a frothing rebel. Jefferson Davis would be vilified for years after the conflict as a tyrant and traitor responsible for the deaths of thousands of prisoners of war. He offered no texture, no nuance, to a North anxious in after years to have beaten the right sort of foe, and in the right way. Lee provided all of that, however. Defeating a knightly foe lent dignity to victory. From his supposedly anguished—and heavily romanticized—choice of loyalties in May 1861, through his series of near-miraculous victories, and on into his dignified and mostly restrained conduct after the war, he offered everything anyone could want in an enemy beaten. There could hardly be a greater irony than the fact that many Confederates would live into the next century to see the day when Lee’s image appeared on United States postage, the nation honoring the man who came closer than any other to dividing it permanently. In romance the vanquished became a spiritual victor.

  Of course, after 1865 the nation was perfectly happy with U. S. Grant. If the people understood rather little of the actual man, still he had provided most of their good news from 1862 through the surrenders. They liked the bulldog determination, the simple dress, the belligerent cigar, and the few yet unmistakable words. He seemed the culmination of the new American they wanted to be, emerging from the post-revolutionary generation with the “go ahead” optimism and energy to depend on their own sweat and merit rather than name and pedigree, determined to swallow the continent and make the world take notice. Moreover, an assassin had robbed them of the chance to exalt their Father Abraham, which left all of that unfulfilled adoration needful of another target, and Grant, in fact, was already arguably the most popular man in the Union, even more so than Lincoln, whose Democratic foes even lauded Grant at least so long as they thought he might be one of them.

  Until recently, time has been kinder to Lee than to Grant. Their meaning to
a modern generation has shifted, driven largely by our own political and social divides. Some in the New South, even in Lexington, Virginia, where he is buried and enshrined, are faintly uncomfortable, embarrassed even, that the section’s iconic hero rose to almost godlike stature in a contest ultimately rooted in slavery. They find it more difficult than their forebears to separate honoring a man for his intrinsic qualities of character, courage, and sacrifice, from distaste for the cause that propelled him into the American pantheon. Grant, on the other hand, after generations of being dismissed as a lucky general in spite of his failings, and a president so mired in corruption that his administration is best forgotten, has enjoyed a modest phoenix flight among historians, though the beating of its wings has disturbed little air in perceptions of the man among Americans in general.

  Their legacies are inextricably intertwined. Only facing Grant brought out Lee’s finest demonstrations of fortitude and resolution. Only defeating Lee made Grant second to Lincoln as the man of the century. They needed each other, and a nation divided in two and then reunited needed both of them in all their guises, often distorting the men themselves to suit a hunger for heroes and villains, not unlike the misshapen likenesses of those wax figures in Liverpool. After that first meeting in Mexico, they both had a long way to go to define the man each would be when they met each other again, and to determine whether they had the capacity to command.

  1

  SONS AND FATHERS

  A FATHER’S FAILURE shadowed the life of one; a father’s success taunted the other. The first tried to make up for his father by making himself a model of respectability, application, and duty to rebuild his family’s honor. The other struggled to live up to his father’s expectations and boasts. The one was born to no wealth with a First Family lineage money could not buy. The other lived in the most affluent home in town, with a name and lineage that meant nothing. Yet even in youth they shared common threads, awaiting only the loom of history to weave them together.