certainly impaired his usefulness as a soldier. For the next six years he lived in St Louis, Missouri, earning a scanty subsistence by farming and dealings in real estate. In 1860 he removed to Galena, Illinois, and became a clerk in a leather store kept by his father. At that time his earning capacity seems not to have exceeded $800 a year, and he was regarded by his friends as a broken and disappointed man. He was living at Galena at the outbreak of hostilities between the North and South.
[For the history of the Civil War, and of Grant’s battles and
campaigns, the reader is referred to the article American Civil War.
To the “call to arms” of 1861 Grant promptly
responded. After some delay he was commissioned
colonel of the 21st Illinois regiment and soon afterwards
Grant’s
Civil War career.
brigadier-general. He was shortly assigned to
a territorial command on the Mississippi, and first won distinction
by his energy in seizing, on his own responsibility, the important
point of Paducah, Kentucky, situated at the confluence of
the two great waterways of the Tennessee and the Ohio (6th
Sept. 1861). On the 7th of November he fought his first
battle as a commander, that of Belmont (Missouri), which, if
it failed to achieve any material result, certainly showed him
to be a capable and skilful leader. Early in 1862 he was entrusted
by General H. W. Halleck with the command of a large
force to clear the lower reaches of the Cumberland and the
Tennessee, and, whatever criticism may be passed on the general
strategy of the campaign, Grant himself, by his able and
energetic work, thoroughly deserved the credit of his brilliant
success of Fort Donelson, where 15,000 Confederates were forced
to capitulate. Grant and his division commanders were promoted
to the rank of major-general U.S.V. soon afterwards,
but Grant’s own fortunes suffered a temporary eclipse owing to a
disagreement with Halleck. When, after being virtually under
arrest, he rejoined his army, it was concentrated about Savannah
on the Tennessee, preparing for a campaign towards Corinth,
Miss. On the 6th of April 1862 a furious assault on Grant’s
camps brought on the battle of Shiloh (q.v.). After two days’
desperate fighting the Confederates withdrew before the combined
attack of the Army of the Tennessee under Grant and the
Army of the Ohio under Buell. But the Army of the Tennessee
had been on the verge of annihilation on the evening of the first
day, and Grant’s leadership throughout was by no means equal
to the emergency, though he displayed his usual personal
bravery and resolution. In the grand advance of Halleck’s
armies which followed Shiloh, Grant was relieved of all important
duties by his assignment as second in command of the whole
force, and was thought by the army at large to be in disgrace.
But Halleck soon went to Washington as general-in-chief, and
Grant took command of his old army and of Rosecrans’ Army
of the Mississippi. Two victories (Iuka and Corinth) were won
in the autumn of 1862, but the credit of both fell to Rosecrans,
who commanded in the field, and the nadir of Grant’s military
fortunes was reached when the first advance on Vicksburg (q.v.),
planned on an unsound basis, and complicated by a series of
political intrigues (which had also caused the adoption of the
original scheme), collapsed after the minor reverses of Holly
Springs and Chickasaw Bayou (December 1862).
It is fair to assume that Grant would have followed other unsuccessful generals into retirement, had he not shown that, whatever his mistakes or failures, and whether he was or was not sober and temperate in his habits, he possessed the iron determination and energy which in the eyes of Lincoln and Stanton,[1] and of the whole Northern people, was the first requisite of their generals. He remained then with his army near Vicksburg, trying one plan after another without result, until at last after months of almost hopeless work his perseverance was crowned with success—a success directly consequent upon a strange and bizarre campaign of ten weeks, in which his daring and vigour were more conspicuous than ever before. On the 4th of July 1863 the great fortress surrendered with 29,491 men, this being one of the most important victories won by the Union arms in the whole war. Grant was at once made a major-general in the regular army. A few months later the great reverse of Chickamauga created an alarm in the North commensurate with the elation that had been felt at the double victory of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and Grant was at once ordered to Chattanooga, to decide the fate of the Army of the Cumberland in a second battle. Four armies were placed under his command, and three of these concentrated at Chattanooga. On the 25th of November 1863 a great three-days’ battle ended with the crushing defeat of the Confederates, who from this day had no foothold in the centre and west.
After this, in preparation for a grand combined effort of all the Union forces, Grant was placed in supreme command, and the rank of lieutenant-general revived for him (March 1864). Grant’s headquarters henceforth accompanied the Army of the Potomac, and the lieutenant-general directed the campaign in Virginia. This, with Grant’s driving energy infused into the best army that the Union possessed, resolved itself into a series, almost uninterrupted, of terrible battles. Tactically the Confederates were almost always victorious, strategically, Grant, disposing of greatly superior forces, pressed back Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to the lines of Richmond and Petersburg, while above all, in pursuance of his explicit policy of “attrition,” the Federal leader used his men with a merciless energy that has few, if any, parallels in modern history. At Cold Harbor six thousand men fell in one useless assault lasting an hour, and after two months the Union armies lay before Richmond and Petersburg indeed, but had lost no fewer than 72,000 men. But Grant was unshaken in his determination. “I purpose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer,” was his message from the battlefield of Spottsylvania to the chief of staff at Washington. Through many weary months he never relaxed his hold on Lee’s army, and, in spite of repeated partial reverses, that would have been defeats for his predecessors, he gradually wore down his gallant adversary. The terrible cost of these operations did not check him: only on one occasion of grave peril were any troops sent from his lines to serve elsewhere, and he drew to himself the bulk of the men whom the Union government was recruiting by thousands for the final effort. Meanwhile all the other campaigns had been closely supervised by Grant, preoccupied though he was with the operations against his own adversary. At a critical moment he actually left the Virginian armies to their own commanders, and started to take personal command in a threatened quarter, and throughout he was in close touch with Sherman and Thomas, who conducted the campaigns on the south-east and the centre. That he succeeded in the efficient exercise of the chief command of armies of a total strength of over one million men, operating many hundreds of miles apart from each other, while at the same time he watched and manœuvred against a great captain and a veteran army in one field of the war, must be the greatest proof of Grant’s powers as a general. In the end complete success rewarded the sacrifices and efforts of the Federals on every theatre of war; in Virginia, where Grant was in personal control, the merciless policy of attrition wore down Lee’s army until a mere remnant was left for the final surrender.
Grant had thus brought the great struggle to an end, and was universally regarded as the saviour of the Union. A careful study of the history of the war thoroughly bears out the popular view. There were soldiers more accomplished, as was McClellan, more brilliant, as was Rosecrans, and more exact, as was Buell, but it would be difficult to prove that these generals, or indeed any others in the service, could have accomplished the task which Grant brought to complete success. Nor must it be supposed that Grant learned little from three years’ campaigning
- ↑ President Lincoln was Grant’s most unwavering supporter. Many amusing stories are told of his replies to various deputations which waited upon him to ask for Grant’s removal. On one occasion he asked the critics to ascertain the brand of whisky favoured by Grant, so that he could send kegs of it to the other generals. The question of Grant’s abstemiousness was and is of little importance. The cause at stake over-rode every prejudice and the people of the United States, since the war, have been in general content to leave the question alone, as was evidenced by the outcry raised in 1908, when President Taft reopened it in a speech at Grant’s tomb.
