For Grant, morale and teamwork were always vitally important, and the venomous Smith had violated that code of soldierly conduct. It was his berating of Meade that Grant mentioned in relieving Smith from command. Smith had declared he could not serve with Butler, and when it was decided to retain Butler, his days were numbered. With his backbiting tendencies, Smith had simply overplayed his hand. As Rawlins wrote, Grant dismissed Smith “because of his spirit of criticism of all military movements and men . . . and his disposition to scatter the seeds of discontent throughout the army.”35 Rawlins, never shy about Grant’s drinking, made no mention of liquor entering into the decision. Whatever his reasons for keeping Butler, the need for it surely rankled Grant. As Dana told Rawlins: “I see that the General has backed down on Butler but I hope that he will fix it so that that military lawyer will not be able to ruin the end of the campaign as he has ruined and foiled the beginning.”36
By the summer of 1864, northern victory seemed tantalizingly close, if only Richmond or Atlanta were taken. Given the outsize casualties under Grant, Republicans needed a major southern city to fall before the election to demonstrate genuine progress. By now Sherman preached a doctrine of total warfare that grew ever more militant. By late 1863, his letters to Grant throbbed with a burning sense of vengeance as he planned to widen the war to engulf civilian society, obliterating the South’s productive capacity. When Grant gave Sherman his marching orders in April 1864, he provided him with extraordinary autonomy in his impending campaign against Joseph Johnston’s army and Atlanta. The brief orders allowed Sherman to fill in the blanks as he attacked Johnston in the mountainous terrain of northwest Georgia. From afar Grant followed Sherman with admiration, later contending that his campaign toward Atlanta had been “managed with the most consummate skill, the enemy being flanked out of one position after another all the way there.”37
As his men trooped south, Sherman took note of enemy resilience. “No amount of poverty or adversity seems to shake their faith; niggers gone, wealth and luxury gone, money worthless . . . yet I see no sign of let up.”38 Only violence on a massive scale, he believed, could subdue such a hardy and refractory breed. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” he wrote. “The worst of the war is not yet begun.”39 Sherman wanted to implant in his men a fighting spirit that would alter the whole balance of the war. He also wished to inflict psychological damage on the southern people because the North was “not only fighting hostile armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as the organized armies.”40 Better to bring the war to a speedy conclusion by hard fighting, he thought, than prolong the suffering of the conflict.
Atlanta beckoned as the peerless prize, home to arsenals and foundries, munition plants and machine shops, a place so crammed with manufacturing facilities that Sherman prophesied “its capture would be the death-knell of the Southern Confederacy.”41 Its extensive railway network sped food to Lee’s faraway army. As Sherman’s army moved forward it was a force of nature, an unstoppable juggernaut, pushing Johnston’s army closer to Atlanta, and Jefferson Davis monitored its progress with “intense anxiety.”42 Many running battles Sherman fought with Johnston were inconclusive, but they had a common denominator: they brought him inexorably closer to Atlanta’s outskirts. He wanted to circle the city, cut off its rail links, isolate it, and starve it out.
On July 20, Sherman notified Grant that Johnston had been replaced by John Bell Hood. While Grant respected Hood as “a gallant brave fellow,” he greeted the news with quiet jubilation and smiled knowingly.43 Much like Lee, Johnston had fought cautiously, sticking to defense and buying time for the Confederacy, while Grant thought Hood “would dash out and fight every time you raised a flag before him, and that was just what we wanted.”44 In Grant’s view, Hood was prone to “rash and ill-advised attacks,” and he was certain Sherman would outgeneral him.45 Grant and Sherman hoped Hood would stand and fight in Atlanta rather than recede into the hinterland, a move that would yield the city but not the gray-coated army. Sherman’s arrival on the city fringes provoked an exodus of fear-stricken residents. He believed it crucial that Grant keep Lee pinned down, unable to assist the rebel army in Atlanta—exactly the sort of integrated strategic thinking Grant had favored.
Whatever high spirits Grant experienced at Hood’s advent were shortly dashed by a shocking development as the Atlanta contest got under way: the death of thirty-five-year-old General James B. McPherson, who commanded the Army of the Tennessee. On July 22, he was felled by a bullet while out surveying Confederate defenses. Riding straight into a band of rebel skirmishers, he waved his hat at them as he rode away and they shot him in the back; evidently he died within an hour, his bloodied horse limping back riderless into camp. A tall, genial young man, McPherson had graduated first in his class at West Point. At his death, he was engaged to a young woman in Baltimore. A courteous Methodist who never cursed, he had endeared himself to Ulysses and Julia Grant. Sherman had imagined that if anything ever happened to him and Grant, McPherson would be summoned to direct the Union war effort, and Grant eulogized him as one of the “ablest, purest and best generals” he had.46
It fell to Captain Samuel Beckwith, the chief cipher operator, to deliver the heartbreaking news to Grant in his tent. He handed the dispatch to Grant, who “read it silently. He was hard hit, I could readily see that. His mouth twitched and his eyes closed as if he were shutting out the baleful words. Then the tears came and one followed the other down his bronzed cheeks as he sat there without a word of comment.”47 Shaken to his core, Grant wrote a rare condolence letter to McPherson’s grandmother that belied Grant’s image as stolid and unemotional. With simple eloquence, he expressed “personal love for the departed. He formed for some time one of my military family. I knew him well. To know him was but to love him . . . Your bereavement is great, but cannot exceed mine.”48
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BY JULY 1864, with spirits slumping in the North and Lincoln’s election prospects dampened by the abysmal rate of casualties in Virginia, Grant dreamed of the bold breakthrough that would replenish the Union cause. After frenetic spring fighting, the pace had slackened and Grant took advantage of this hiatus to improve his entrenchments. The long Petersburg siege led to slow-motion torment for soldiers in the dank, filthy trenches, who had to duck to avoid bullets. As Grant wondered how to end this stalemate—his aggressive temperament chafed at the tedium of a siege—he was extremely open to any unconventional ideas that appeared.
During the Vicksburg siege, he had experimented with digging a mine under enemy defenses and blowing them up. The aborted explosion had left only a gaping crater. Nonetheless, in late June 1864, Grant endorsed a similar plan from Ambrose Burnside. The impetus came from Colonel Henry Pleasants, whose Pennsylvania volunteers included miners skilled at excavating tunnels, one of whom boasted, “We could blow that damn fort [at Petersburg] out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.”49 On June 25, these erstwhile miners began gouging out a tunnel that would secretly span the hundred yards separating Union and Confederate lines. Repeating the reason he had invoked for the quixotic schemes at Vicksburg, Grant wrote in his Memoirs that he approved the plan “as a means of keeping the men occupied.”50 It exercised a special fascination for Burnside, who wished to exorcize the stigma of his ruinous performance at Frederickburg. The mining scheme promised to punch a hole in Petersburg’s defenses and possibly deliver the entire city to Union forces.
At first Meade thought Burnside would complete his mine in a little more than a week, but the work proved laborious, hampered by underground springs and quicksand. The miners, wielding primitive tools, had to figure out how to ventilate galleries with fresh air. Burnside planned to have the main tunnel branch off into chambers, with gunpowder stored in each. While some officers had misgivings about the project, Grant understood his men
’s restlessness in the baking heat and allowed it to proceed.51 Many of Grant’s soldiers were unaware of the surreptitious plan, but by July 17, Grant heard reports that the other side had learned of it and launched a similar project in reverse. As the date of the mine detonation neared, Confederate soldiers sank shafts to plumb where the Union galleries stood.
On July 23, the excavation ended its initial phase. The main gallery ran 511 feet long, terminating 23 feet below the Confederate parapet. All that remained was to pack the tunnel with eight thousand pounds of explosives and blow the rebels to kingdom come. To set the stage for this, Grant concocted a characteristic ruse: he sent out a corps under Hancock with Sheridan’s cavalry to wreck the Virginia Central Railroad, drawing a large portion of Lee’s troops to the north side of the James. Sheridan proved adept at deception: under cover of night, he sneaked his men back across the James, carpeting a pontoon bridge with moss and earth to muffle the tramp of soldiers. Then by day he sent them across the James again to create the illusion that most of Grant’s army was being evacuated. Steamboat captains blew shrill whistles, adding to the charade of a sudden retreat. The main aim of this subterfuge was to weaken Petersburg’s defenses, making them vulnerable to the hole Grant hoped to blow through them. When this maneuver was completed, he was ready to ignite the mine and pour fifteen thousand troops into the fray.
Aside from the drubbing Lee gave him at Fredericksburg, Ambrose Burnside is best known to history for his flourishing side-whiskers, called “sideburns” in homage to him, and the massive bald dome of his head. Elegant, gracious in his manners, he was, like Rosecrans, popular and respected, but, in Grant’s estimation, scarcely “fitted to command an army. No one knew this better than himself. He always admitted his blunders, and extenuated those of officers under him beyond what they were entitled to.”52 With the mine set to explode on July 30, Burnside planned to employ a division of highly motivated black troops, who wanted “to show the white troops what the colored division could do,” said an officer.53 They had distinguished themselves guarding Grant’s huge wagon train, but stood somewhat apart from the rest of the Army of the Potomac. Black soldiers still had to contend with the ingrained prejudice that they couldn’t perform complex maneuvers. At the last minute, Meade objected “that if we put the colored troops in front . . . and it should prove a failure, it would then be said, and very properly, that we were shoving those people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.”54 Agreeing with Meade, Grant decided to use Burnside’s three divisions of white soldiers at the mine blast. It was an ill-fated change, for the black division had received special training while the whites hadn’t. Their three commanders drew slips to see who would lead the charge and the choice fell on General James H. Ledlie. In the estimation of one officer, “Ledlie was a drunkard and an arrant coward . . . It was wicked to risk the lives of men in such a man’s hands.”55
On July 28, in yet another tactical deception, Grant ordered a cessation of artillery fire against Petersburg as an eerie silence fell over the front line. He wanted to dupe the enemy into thinking he was furtively slinking away. At the same time, Rawlins, just back from Washington, was irked to learn that Grant had taken advantage of his absence to indulge in alcohol. “I find the General in my absence digressed from his true path,” the long-suffering Rawlins told his wife. “The God of Heaven only knows how long I am to serve my country as the guardian of the habits of him whom it has honored. It shall not be always thus.”56 The time had long since passed when he had vowed to quit his staff if Grant touched a drop of forbidden liquor.
Grant and his staff eagerly awaited the mine explosion, hoping for a spectacular turn in the fighting. After a false start, the mine was triggered a little before 5 a.m. on July 30. With a fearsome roar, the earth was torn asunder, spewing a colossal cloud of dirt, dust, and smoke as broken muskets whirled into the sky, killing a rebel regiment and demolishing an artillery battery. Body parts lay scattered everywhere. One observer compared the lethal cloud to “an immense mushroom whose stem seemed to be of fire and its head of smoke.”57 The blast carved a crater 30 feet in depth, 60 feet in width, and 170 feet in length. One Confederate gunner remembered the dust column “hurtling downward with a roaring sound, showers of stones, broken timbers and blackened human limbs . . . the gloomy pall of darkening smoke flushing in an angry crimson” before the rising sun.58 Then came the thunderous boom of 110 Union cannon and 50 mortars swinging into cooperative action.
Initially staggered by the blow, the Confederates fled in disarray instead of mounting a response. All seemed to proceed according to plan until Ledlie’s division rushed into the breach and lost its way. Ledlie was nowhere to be found as his men milled around amid the smoking debris. Although Cemetery Hill commanded a direct route into Petersburg and was a mere three hundred or four hundred yards away, it wasn’t taken. As Grant explained, he hadn’t wanted Burnside’s corps “to stop in the crater at all but push on to the top of the hill.”59 Burnside ignored these instructions while Ledlie was holed up in a bombproof trench, taking refuge in a bottle of rum. Instead of circumventing the breach, the troops had tried to rush through it and were trapped by the Crater’s steep sides. They stood there adrift, defenseless, exposed to Confederate fire. “The shouting, screaming, and cheering,” wrote Horace Porter, “mingled with the roar of the artillery and the explosion of shells, created a perfect pandemonium . . . the crater had become a caldron of hell.”60
Simply dressed in a blue blouse and trousers in the blazing heat, Grant rode down to the front after the detonation, negotiating the final portion on foot, his face pasted with dust and sweat. Distracted soldiers brushed past him, not knowing it was Grant. He jumped over the parapet, exposing himself to enemy fire, and saw that the chance to advance had been fumbled. “These troops must be immediately withdrawn,” he ordered. “It is slaughter to leave them here.”61 Even though the Confederates had been caught off guard, giving Burnside’s men plenty of time to rush forward and capture Petersburg, the opportunity had been squandered. It was not so much the conception of the plan as its execution that had proven gravely defective.
Belatedly Burnside threw his black division, commanded by Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, into the maelstrom. By this time Union soldiers stood entrapped in a deep hole, easy targets for Confederate grenades. The black troops, who behaved gallantly, simply swelled the churning mass of soldiers meandering around. By now, the rebels, yelling racial epithets, had counterattacked and hurled grenades down at the black troops, who had no place to hide. In a burst of sadistic behavior, rebel soldiers responded with “a bayonet thrust” to cries for water from injured black soldiers.62 Those who attempted to surrender were killed. Union forces suffered nearly four thousand dead, wounded, or missing—more than twice the number of their opponents—five hundred of them black.
Horace Porter recalled a sepulchral silence as Grant rode away from the scene of the disaster. He knew he had frittered away a chance to level a crippling blow at the Confederacy. When he finally broke the stillness, he remarked, “Such an opportunity for carrying a fortified line I have never seen, and never expect to see again.”63 In his Memoirs, he blamed Burnside and Ledlie without detailing the hideous carnage. In later years, he also claimed Gouverneur Warren had fatally hesitated to exploit the advantage opened by the Crater: “If Warren had obeyed orders we would have broken Lee’s army in two and taken Petersburg.”64 Grant was not blameless, having given these incompetent officers too much latitude, then compounded his error by remaining curiously detached from the operation in its early stages. In time he confessed that he was culpable in allowing Ledlie—the worst division commander in Burnside’s corps—to spearhead the fatal charge. “I knew that fact before the mine was exploded, but did nothing in regard to it. That is the only thing I blame myself for.”65
Theodore Bowers, an aide, watched the toll taken on Grant, writing that “as the evidences of the disgraceful conduc
t of all concerned develop and thicken, Grant grows sicker at heart.”66 With his army enveloped by “gloom and despondency,” Grant lay helpless with grief, confined to bed, his hopes deflated.67 He came to consider the Crater disaster “the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”68 Meade and Burnside immediately descended into a round of mutual recriminations. Meade favored a court-martial for Burnside, whereas Grant just wanted him to exit quietly while a court of inquiry parceled out blame. In the end, Burnside was discreetly eased out of service.
After Cold Harbor and earlier fruitless attempts to take Petersburg, Grant knew the northern public would interpret the horrifying episode in an unforgiving mood. Many journalists wrote him off as no better than his predecessors. “Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the opening of Grant’s campaign?” the New York World asked tartly.69 Inside Lincoln’s cabinet, Gideon Welles confessed to “an awakening apprehension that Grant is not equal to the position assigned him. God grant that I may be mistaken, for the slaughtered thousands of my countrymen who have poured out their rich blood for three months on the soil of Virginia from the Wilderness to Petersburg under his generalship can never be atoned in this world or the next” should he “prove a failure.”70
On July 31, with wounded men still lying in the bloody chasm, Grant and Rawlins conferred for five hours with Lincoln and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox at Fort Monroe. Grant asked to tour Norfolk, which he had never seen, before the party boarded a steamer. “The visit was very short for the heat was terrible,” Fox explained, “so we pushed off towards the open ocean to get a sniff of the ocean sir.” Lincoln may have needed a chance to express his grave apprehensions to Grant in private. Nevertheless, he kept up his implicit trust in his ability to win the war, Fox noted, because Grant frankly owned up to the obstacles. “Neither Grant or the Pres[iden]t seemed cut down by the Petersburg affair . . . Genl Grant in our former visit told the Pres[iden]t that he should meet with several rebuffs but that he would finally get the place.”71