On July 11, out of the blue, Grant received a mysterious summons from Halleck to confer with him in Corinth. When Grant asked whether he should bring his staff, Halleck replied cryptically, “This place will be your Head Quarters. You can judge for yourself.”123 A major change of military leadership had shaken Washington. After the failure of the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia, Lincoln had wearied of the dilatory tactics and imperious personality of George B. McClellan and made Halleck his military adviser and general in chief. McClellan first heard of Halleck’s appointment in the newspapers and told his wife, with his usual contempt, that Lincoln had “acted so as to make the matter as offensive as possible—he has not shown the slightest gentlemanly or friendly feeling and I cannot regard him as in any respect my friend.”124 In private, McClellan spewed more venom, snarling that Stanton was “the most depraved hypocrite & villain” he had ever known and, as for Halleck, it would be “grating to have to serve under the orders of a man whom I know by experience to be my inferior.”125 As Lincoln soon learned to his regret, Halleck had a brilliant theoretical mind, but was a world-class procrastinator on a par with McClellan and no less likely to disparage threatening subordinates.
Advising Halleck to come to Washington posthaste, Lincoln urged him to place the western army under Grant and Buell. When Grant arrived in Corinth, Halleck kept him in the dark, slowly twisting in the wind about his promotion. Then, right before he left on July 16, Halleck signed an order placing a huge plot of real estate under Grant’s control. His District of West Tennessee would be bounded by the Mississippi River on the west, the Ohio to the north, and the Tennessee to the east. Now added to Grant’s previous Army of the Tennessee was the sizable Army of the Mississippi that Pope had headed. Six days after Halleck left for Washington, Grant was still guessing what was afoot with Halleck and what position he might occupy. As shown in a letter to Washburne, Grant repaid Halleck’s condescension and secret betrayals with awed respect: “I do not know the object of calling Gen. H. to Washington but if it is to make him Sec. of War, or Commander-in-Chief, Head Quarters at Washington, a better selection could not be made. He is a man of gigantic intellect and well studied in the profession of arms. He and I have had several little spats but I like and respect him nevertheless.”126
In restoring Grant’s command, Halleck broke up the enormous army he had led to Corinth. Deprived of troops and resources that might have made his new position more significant, Grant was thrown on the defensive amid a hostile population. Cavalry officer Philip H. Sheridan remembered how Grant “plainly showed that he was much hurt at the inconsiderate way in which his command was being depleted.”127 Nonetheless, as he set up headquarters in Corinth, in a gracious house decorated with fragrant foliage, Grant was at last free of somebody staring over his shoulder and meddling with his decisions. In the fullness of time, Halleck’s departure gave Grant much more room to maneuver. Remote from Washington, he was less ensnared in backbiting politics and less endangered by any party faction. Unfortunately he still hovered on the periphery of the nation’s attention, which was riveted on events in Virginia, and this bias in perception would always harm his historic reputation.
In late August, federal fortunes took a disastrous turn at the second battle of Manassas. It was there that the snickers about Robert E. Lee, once mocked as the risk-averse Granny Lee, gave way to admiration that deepened into southern veneration. Having united disparate commands into the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee distilled Confederate fighting power into one supremely effective weapon. At Second Manassas, aided by talented generals such as Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, he gave the demoralized federals a thorough thrashing.
Hoping to import western élan to the eastern seaboard and with Grant shadowed by charges of drinking and insubordination, Lincoln had placed John Pope in charge of the new Army of Virginia. A West Pointer with a round, open face and long jutting beard, prone to bombastic self-assertion, the garrulous Pope had seemed an attractive alternative to the slow-moving McClellan. Then at Second Manassas, he stumbled straight into the grand trap cunningly laid by Lee. The resultant defeat dented Pope’s massive ego, vanity, and bluster and he was completely deflated. With the northern public plunged into unfathomable gloom, Lincoln fell into a terrible depression. In view of Pope’s disgrace, Lincoln executed a startling volte-face and restored Little Mac to command the combined armies in Virginia. Despite a host of misgivings, the president believed McClellan alone could revive army morale shattered by the recent disaster. For McClellan, of course, the move made perfect sense. As he told his wife with typical modesty: “Again I have been called upon to save the country.”128
Among the military men who disappointed Lincoln was Halleck, whose career went downhill after Second Manassas. He had been recommended for his new job by Pope and their reputations plummeted together. Afflicted by insomnia and hemorrhoids during the late-summer crisis in Virginia—he ingested opium to dull the pain—he fell apart under pressure. Later on Lincoln confided that Halleck “broke down—nerve and pluck all gone—and has ever since evaded all possible responsibility—little more than a first-rate clerk.”129 Just how low Halleck sank in Lincoln’s estimation was made apparent that autumn when Attorney General Edward Bates ventured at a cabinet meeting that Halleck should command the army in person. According to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Lincoln said “that H. would be an indifferent general in the field, that he shirked responsibility in his present position, that he, in short, is a moral coward, worth but little except as a critic and director of operations, though intelligent and educated.”130
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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Exodus
AS DROUGHT SETTLED over northern Mississippi that summer, parching streams that might nourish soldiers and horses on the march, Ulysses S. Grant, ensconced in Corinth, settled in for a period of defensive operations distinguished by small, hard-fought skirmishes. With guerrilla bands marauding through his district, he had to defend long railway lines, telegraph wires, and wide rivers located deep in enemy territory. Local inhabitants acted as spies, monitoring his every move. All the while, Halleck hollowed out his command, forcing him to divert several divisions to Don Carlos Buell to fight rebels in eastern Tennessee. Grant no longer engaged in wishful thinking about latent pro-Union sentiment simmering in the region. As he saw southerners flocking to partisan cavalry units and smuggling contraband, the Confederacy struck him as more monolithic and formidable than ever.
Such civilian support for the rebellion would lead to a broadening of the war’s scope, an evolution previewed by Washburne telling Grant how the Lincoln administration would pursue “a vigorous prosecution of the war by all the means known to civilized warfare.”1 On August 2, Grant was instructed to “live upon the land,” possibly spawning clashes with farmers. Endorsing a ruthless new phase of operations, Halleck urged Grant to blur distinctions between southern soldiers and citizens: “If necessary, take up all active sympathizers and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves and take their property for public use.”2 However tough his style of warfare, Grant never behaved vindictively toward the southern people. “I do not recollect having arrested and confined a citizen (not a soldier) during the entire rebellion,” he maintained.3
Colonel Theodore Bowers, new to Grant’s staff, told how Grant protected local residents from rough handling by his soldiers. One day Grant “came across a straggler who had stopped at a house and assaulted a woman. The general sprang from his horse, seized a musket from the hands of a soldier, and struck the culprit over the head with it, sending him sprawling to the ground.” From the time he was a boy, Grant had defended the weak and felt especially protective toward defenseless women. “He always had a peculiar horror of such crimes,” his future aide Horace Porter remarked. “They were very rare in our war, but when brought to his attention the general showed no mercy to the culprit.”4
Reluc
tantly accepting the arduous nature of a protracted conflict and knowing he might not return home for the remainder of the war, Grant brought Julia and the children to Corinth. Condemned to a vagabond existence, they had boarded with Jesse and Hannah in Covington, but Julia was no more popular now with her in-laws than before, when she was rejected as a spoiled southern belle. “Julia says that she is satisfied that the best place for the children is in Covington,” Grant reported to his sister Mary. “But there are so many of them that she sometimes feels as if they were not wanted.”5 Grant hoped Julia and William Hillyer’s wife might share housekeeping duties in St. Louis, where Julia could see Colonel Dent. That May, Grant had instructed Julia that he did not want her to own slaves any longer “as it is not probable that we will ever live in a slave state again.”6
As the Union army pushed deeper into the Mississippi Valley, fugitive slaves sought asylum in Grant’s camps; every time he sent out an expedition, it came back trailed by a flock of hopeful runaways. Ohio chaplain John Eaton likened the influx to “the oncoming of cities” and said “a blind terror stung them and an equally blind hope allured them, and to us they came.”7 “Masters and Mistresses so thronged my tent as to absorb my whole time,” Sherman groused.8 Grant’s thinking underwent a metamorphosis about what to do with them. In early June, he still blamed intransigent abolitionists for prolonging the war, but action in Washington recast the issue. Congress had already passed legislation preventing the return of runaway slaves, even if their masters were loyal. Then, in July, Congress passed the Militia Act, which enhanced the status of free blacks by enabling them to serve at reduced wages in northern militia as part of each state’s federally assigned quota of recruits. Lawmakers also approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared “forever free of their servitude” slaves who fled from disloyal masters to Union lines. The act, however amorphous and poorly worded, was a step in the right direction. The two laws shifted the tenor of the war as Union armies in the South became instruments of liberation, not just agents of punishment. That same month Lincoln decided to issue his Emancipation Proclamation to cover slaves in areas not yet occupied by Union forces.
Writing to Grant on July 25, Washburne coached him on how to advance in the military by adhering closely to Lincoln’s new policy. “The negroes must now be made our auxiliaries in every possible way they can be, whether by working or fighting. That General who takes the most decided step in this respect will be held in the highest estimation by the loyal and true men in the country.”9 Having received these marching orders from his political patron, Grant heeded his advice and succeeded in the war for far more than just his military prowess. By subscribing to administration policy on slavery, he stood apart from renegade generals like George McClellan, a reactionary Democrat and an open racist who hated the thought of abolition, or generals like John Frémont and David Hunter, who brazenly issued freelance emancipation proclamations in their departments.
On August 11, Grant issued new orders to bring his practice into conformity with federal guidelines. He laid down strict instructions that no runaway slaves should be returned to masters, and they should be employed as teamsters, cooks, hospital attendants, and nurses. Most important, large numbers were set to work erecting fortifications. For all that, Grant carefully warned his men not to woo slaves from their masters, but only accept them if they showed up of their own volition. Since the slaves were often ragged, ill clad, and frightened, Grant made sure they were issued shoes, pants, and tobacco, and he wrote tenderly about them in letters: “I don’t know what is to become of these poor people in the end.”10 What he did know was that spiriting away slaves would destroy the southern economy in a steady progression toward total warfare.
Too thinly manned to hold so much acreage in northern Mississippi and western Tennessee—fifty thousand men was a pittance in this huge territory—Grant had to postpone major offensive operations. In September, he eyed warily the movements of two Confederate generals in the area. Leading fifteen thousand men, Sterling Price seized from a Union garrison the town of Iuka, a critical supply depot and railroad junction near Corinth in northeast Mississippi. Price hoped it would serve as a platform for invading Tennessee. A lawyer and politician born in Virginia, who fought gallantly in Mexico and then resided in Missouri, the silver-haired Price was a portly man with a rosy complexion and receding hairline. Earl Van Dorn had a shock of unruly hair, a truculent glare, and a bold handlebar mustache. Educated at West Point, he had experience in Mexico and fighting Indians. Grant’s main fear was that Van Dorn would roar up from the south while Price swarmed in from the east, the two Confederate armies squeezing Corinth in a pincer movement. To head that off, he prepared to seize the initiative and assail Price at Iuka before Van Dorn strengthened him. Had Price and Van Dorn acted swiftly, they might have trapped him. Instead they gave him the necessary time to fortify his forces and assume the offensive.
The Confederate pause also allowed Grant to recuperate from another bout of ill health. For several weeks, he had lost his appetite, shed pounds, and awakened with cold night sweats. Fatigued, he told Julia in mid-September that he never got more than five hours’ sleep and had skipped sleep altogether twice the previous week. With his devout belief in concentrating forces, he was trying desperately to marshal his scattered troops before taking on Price at Iuka. His plan envisioned a double-pronged strike that would have General William S. Rosecrans sneak up on Iuka from the south while General Edward O. C. Ord crept in from the northwest. With his irrepressible optimism, Grant hoped to surround the Confederates and bag Price’s army or annihilate it. It was a simple plan, albeit one that required pinpoint accuracy. Once Price was taken care of, Grant planned to turn his attention to Van Dorn.
For the battle of Iuka, Grant took up position in Burnsville, which lay between Corinth and the enemy town. Before dawn on September 19, Ord began to advance on Iuka from the northwest, but was told by Grant to delay his final push until he heard gunfire from the south, signaling Rosecrans’s arrival. Ord halted four miles short of town. With the poor country roads of northern Mississippi, Rosecrans’s movements were hampered by thick woods and plentiful streams and he didn’t reach Iuka till late afternoon. Unfortunately, the wind blew the wrong way, and owing to this “acoustic shadow,” neither Ord nor Grant heard Rosecrans engaging the enemy and being driven back that evening. In frustration, a baffled Rosecrans sputtered, “Where in the name of God is Grant?”11 Not until nightfall did Grant even know a battle had occurred.
In his usual bold style—momentum was everything for Grant—he ordered Ord and Rosecrans to renew their attack at dawn and Iuka fell in short order. Once again, the second day of battle had determined the outcome. Exploiting a critical road overlooked by Rosecrans, Price and his troops fled the town with ghostly ease. Around 9 a.m. Grant arrived in the empty town and took over the storehouse of Confederate supplies. If he had little to show for his conquest, he had blocked Price from entering Tennessee, which, he believed, would have amounted to “a catastrophe.”12 For the moment, he retained a high opinion of Rosecrans, although it was about to be tested.13 A West Point graduate, Rosecrans was a cordial, outgoing man who enjoyed debating the fine points of Catholic theology and was well liked by his troops, who referred to him affectionately as “Old Rosy” in homage to his rubicund complexion and name. Grant thought him “a fine fellow” and a brave soldier, but with his usual exaggerated trust in people, he found it hard to believe Rosecrans secretly planted newspaper stories against him and promoted himself at his expense.
Right after taking Iuka, Grant went to St. Louis to improve his health and lobby Major General Samuel R. Curtis for additional troops. One correspondent observed that he appeared “remarkably well, although bearing some marks of the fatigues of his summer campaigns.”14 While in St. Louis, according to one well-placed onlooker, Grant indulged in a drinking binge. Franklin A. Dick, a St. Louis lawyer, bumped into Grant’s old friend Henry T. Blow, Taylor?
??s brother, who said Grant was “tight as a brick,” as Dick tattled promptly to Attorney General Edward Bates. “Believing, as I do, that much of our ill success results from drunken officers, I intend to do my duty in reporting such crime upon their part.”15 Bates duly conveyed to Stanton the letter, which wound up on Halleck’s desk. If the incident occurred as Dick alleged, it conformed to the pattern of Grant allowing himself a spree, not at moments of responsibility, but in the aftermath of a major battle when he briefly traveled to another city and could relax his vigilance. His men would then never see him drink and he was temporarily free of Rawlins’s supervision. Grant usually had enough control over his drinking urges that he could confine his binges to such occasions.
In Sterling Price, Grant had met a strong-willed adversary. Not resigned to the loss of Corinth—Grant had returned there on September 30—Price teamed up with Van Dorn, assembled a force of twenty-two thousand soldiers, and headed for the town. The battle began on October 3 with high-pitched yells from hell-bent rebel soldiers and proved of short duration but unusual savagery. Showing uncommon fury, the Confederates pounded their foes with waves of attacks that herded them back to the town’s inner defenses. This first day featured such a broiling sun that soldiers were forbidden to cook on open fires. Old Rosy was all over the battlefield, rallying his men. After one day his clothing was sprinkled with blood and pocked with bullet holes. When night came, water wagons rumbled through the Union camp, dispensing water to dehydrated soldiers. By noon the next day, Rosecrans counterattacked, putting the thirsty, exhausted rebels to flight and leaving a battlefield strewn with corpses. For such a short time span, the death toll was gigantic: 2,500 for the blue, 5,000 for the gray.