On August 12, Lincoln summoned Colonel John Eaton to the White House and, after desultory conversation, unburdened his mind. “Do you know,” Lincoln inquired, “what General Grant thinks of the effort now making to nominate him for the presidency? Has he spoken of it to you?”10 No longer in close contact with him, Eaton agreed to go to City Point and sound out Grant. When he arrived, the two men talked past midnight, Grant pouring out his sorrows about the Crater episode and the botched chance to take Petersburg in June. They then discussed rumors that Stanton might be replaced, and while Grant hoped Stanton would be retained, he favored Rawlins as his successor. Finally, Eaton gently nudged the conversation to whether Grant might be tempted to run for president. Eaton was startled by his unwonted vehemence. “We had been talking very quietly, but Grant’s reply came in an instant and with a violence for which I was not prepared. He brought his clenched fists down hard on the strap arms of his camp-chair. ‘They can’t do it! They can’t compel me to do it!’”11 Once again, Grant understood the war’s intertwined military and political dimensions. “I consider it as important for the cause that [Lincoln] should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field,” he insisted.12 When Eaton saw Lincoln again, the president pumped him for Grant’s answer and he told how forcefully Grant had disavowed all political ambition. “The President fairly glowed with satisfaction,” Eaton wrote. “‘I told you,’ said he, ‘they could not get him to run until he had closed out the rebellion.’”13
What Grant did next attests to new political maturity, or perhaps new calculation: he began to write shrewdly crafted letters showing his complete agreement with the Lincoln administration. Previously he had shied away from such pronouncements. Now he thundered forth about southern perfidy and his unwillingness to compromise with slaveholders. All the while, he reaffirmed his distance from politics while, paradoxically, signaling sympathy with Lincoln. On August 16, he issued a plea for northern unity to Elihu Washburne, denouncing those who would divide the North and warning explicitly against any political settlement that preserved slavery:
Our peace friends, if they expect peace from separation, are much mistaken. It would be but the beginning of war with thousands of Northern men joining the South because of our disgrace allowing separation. To have peace “on any terms” the South would demand the restoration of their slaves already freed. They would demand indemnity for losses sustained, and they would demand a treaty which would make the North slave hunters for the South. They would demand pay or the restoration of every slave escaping to the North.14
When Lincoln saw this statement, he promptly sent Washburne to secure Grant’s permission to release it. Two days later, Grant expressed similar sentiments in a missive to Daniel Ammen, stating emphatically that “it would be better to be dead than to submit longer” to terms dictated by the South.15
The moment marked a watershed in Grant’s life as he developed an avowed ideological commitment to the war as profound as his military contribution. Widening his outlook, he transcended the ethic of a mere soldier and, under Lincoln’s tutelage, showed a touch of statesmanship. His new militance on abolition, coupled with his encouragement of black recruitment and devotion to “contraband” welfare, established a political outlook that would govern the rest of his career, setting an agenda from which he never deviated.
On August 18, twenty-five Radical Republicans met in New York City at the home of former mayor George Opdyke and agreed to call for a new Republican convention, with many pinning their hopes on Grant. Less than a week later, the Republican National Committee, also meeting in New York, decided that Lincoln’s reelection prospects were nil. As their emissary, the journalist Henry J. Raymond, told Lincoln bluntly, “The tide is setting against us,” and he advised the president to dispatch a peace commissioner to Richmond to negotiate an agreement that wouldn’t obligate the South to renounce slavery.16 To his eternal credit, Lincoln refused to trim his views on emancipation or contemplate a craven settlement. Against this backdrop, he asked his cabinet in late August to sign a document they were not allowed to read. Its opening sentence stated: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected.”17 In the event he became a lame-duck president, Lincoln said, he wished to have a free hand to cooperate with the incoming administration to save the Union.
When the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago in late August, it brushed aside the militant views of War Democrats. Instead a determined peace faction pushed through a platform that renounced the war as an outright failure, demanded a “cessation of hostilities,” called for a convention to restore peace, and reaffirmed states’ rights. Many in this group believed abolition posed an insuperable obstacle to peace. On August 31, the convention nominated for president George B. McClellan, who was perfectly willing to trade emancipation for peace. Twenty years later, when composing his Memoirs, Grant still seethed over those distant events in Chicago, not deigning to mention McClellan by name: “The convention which had met and made its nomination of the Democratic candidate for the presidency had declared the war a failure. Treason was talked as boldly in Chicago at that convention as ever it had been in Charleston.”18 Grant was no less shocked by the vanity of General Winfield Scott Hancock, who garnered a single vote in Chicago. “He was so delighted that he smiled all over,” Grant reminisced. “You could not even sit behind him without seeing him smile. He smiled all over. It crazed him. Before that we got on well. After that he would hardly speak to me.”19
All predictions about the presidential race became obsolete on September 2 when Sherman marched into Atlanta. Fanatically determined to take the town, Sherman had promised he would leave Atlanta “a used up” community when he got through with it.20 The next day, Sherman greeted Lincoln with the news that would help reelect him: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”21 Following a rough summer, Lincoln’s prayers were answered, his despair abruptly converted into joy. After turning Atlanta into a military garrison, Sherman did not want to have to feed its citizens or assign extra troops to guard a sullen, restive population and ordered the evacuation of all residents. When the mayor pleaded that such an exodus would result in “appalling and heart-rending suffering,” Sherman replied in lapidary prose: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against these terrible hardships of war.”22
Jefferson Davis knew that Atlanta, as a critical railway hub, had acted as linchpin of the southern war economy and that its loss would “close up those rich granaries from which Lee’s armies are supplied. It would give [the Union] control of our network of railways and thus paralyze our efforts.”23 The psychological effect was incalculable: Lincoln would be swept into office amid surging confidence while the South experienced a corresponding sense of doom. “I have never seen such a sudden lighting up of the public mind as since the late victory at Atlanta,” wrote Theodore Tilton, the northern editor of the Independent. “This great event, following the Chicago platform—the most villainous political manifesto known to American history!—has secured a sudden unanimity for Mr. Lincoln.”24 Toppled by this tonic to northern spirits, John C. Frémont abandoned his insurgent candidacy, Republicans fell into line behind Lincoln, and McClellan disavowed the “peace plank” in the Democratic platform in short order.
On the evening of September 4, when he transmitted the official news of Sherman’s victory, Samuel Beckwith found Grant smoking quietly before his tent with Rawlins. Grant already had an inkling of what had happened in Atlanta since rebels in Petersburg shouted the news to Union pickets. Now he perused the telegram “silently at first, and then, in a loud voice and with much satisfaction, he informed his companions of the contents. They greeted the announcement with a cheer. Of course the news spread like wildfire and the rejoicing soon became general.”25 Grant sent a congratulatory dispatch to Sherman and then, in an act of psychological warfare, fired a salut
e that evening from every battery near rebel lines.
Atlanta’s conquest cemented the bond uniting Grant and Sherman, who spoke generously of each other. Grant told Sherman, “You have accomplished the most gigantic undertaking given to any General in this War and with a skill and ability that will be acknowledged in history as unsurpassed if not unequalled. It gives me as much pleasure to record this in your favor as it would in favor of any living man myself included.”26 In a reciprocal spirit, Sherman assured Grant that “I have always felt that you personally take more pleasure in my success than in your own and I appreciate the feeling to its fullest extent.”27
Grant often doesn’t receive the credit that properly belongs to him for Atlanta’s fall. He was Sherman’s boss and authored the interconnected strategy that guided Sherman’s campaign. With Grant’s advent as general in chief, the Union theaters of war no longer functioned as separate realms. Most important, Grant had kept up his harassment of Lee to prevent him from reinforcing Hood in Atlanta. Aside from Grant’s strategic acumen, Sherman credited the telegraph network with “the perfect concert of action between the armies in Virginia and Georgia during 1864. Hardly a day intervened when General Grant did not know the exact state of facts with me, more than fifteen hundred miles away as the wires ran.”28 Grant’s strategic achievements were inseparable from the advanced telegraphy of the Union side, which strung 15,389 miles of wire during the war, operated by an army of 1,500 linemen and operators.29
Since the essence of Grant’s style of warfare was to exert unceasing pressure on his opponents, he didn’t allow Sherman to rest on his laurels. “So soon as your men are sufficiently rested, and preparations can be made,” Grant instructed him on September 10, “it is desirable that another campaign should be commenced. We want to keep the enemy constantly pressed to the end of the war.”30 Two days later, with discussions of a march to the sea in the air, Grant dispatched Porter to Atlanta to confer with Sherman. “I do not want to hamper him any more in the future than in the past with detailed instructions,” Grant said. “I want him to carry out his ideas freely in the coming movement, and to have all the credit of its success.”31
Aside from Sherman, the other potent weapon in Grant’s arsenal was Sheridan, and on September 15 he left to confer with him in Charles Town, West Virginia, near Harpers Ferry. Sheridan had conducted a wild spree of devastation, burning wheat and hay and rounding up sheep, cattle, and horses. Grant’s visit was propelled by a message from Lincoln, who expressed dismay that Early still controlled the Shenandoah Valley and wanted Grant to beef up Sheridan’s forces to attack him. Grant set out with such a plan and also intended to prod Sheridan into disrupting two railroads and a canal that nourished Lee’s army. As Grant chatted with Sheridan, a sergeant loitering outside growled about Grant: “I hate to see that old cuss around. When that old cuss is around there’s sure to be a big fight on hand.”32 Before Grant could produce his battle plan, Sheridan unpacked a parcel of maps and, while the two men paced, spoke confidently about his ability to confront Early’s army at Winchester, in northwest Virginia. Impressed by his confidence, Grant didn’t even bother to take his own plan out of his pocket. “Could you be ready to move by next Tuesday?” he asked. “Oh, yes,” Sheridan reassured him. “I can be off before daylight on Monday.”33 This was an assertive commander after Grant’s own heart, and he decided not to linger in West Virginia “for fear it might be thought that I was trying to share in a success which I wished to belong solely to him.”34 Perhaps Grant remembered Halleck trying to steal credit from him and shrank from committing the same error. He again showed he knew how best to motivate commanders by delegating authority to them—a trust that worked well with the talented, but could backfire with incompetents.
Grant went next to Burlington, New Jersey, to make provision for sending his children to school there. All summer long, he had thought of settling his family in Princeton because of its proximity to Philadelphia and Washington. In his elevated status, he set aside his old daydream of living on the West Coast and now thought exclusively in terms of residing in the corridor of politics and business along the eastern seaboard. When he and Julia were unable to find a suitable house in Princeton or Philadelphia, her brother Fred had found them a “nice cottage pleasantly situated” in Burlington, a two-story house with a wide verandah and ivy creeping up the sides.35 The boys would go to a military school while Nellie attended Miss Kingdon’s School. During his day in Burlington, Grant was mobbed by the townsfolk. As he strolled toward the train station, a young woman said, “General, you have already done so much for us, that we expect a great deal more.” When Grant replied, “I expect from Gen. Sherman more than from any other man in the country,” the remark popped up in the New York Tribune.36 Having lost his privacy, Grant confessed a touch ruefully to Julia: “It is but little pleasure now for me to travel.”37
Upon returning to City Point, Grant told his officers how he had instructed Sheridan to “whip” Jubal Early. The verb “whip” struck one officer as unorthodox. “I presume the actual form of the order was to move out and attack him,” he said. “No, I mean just what I say,” retorted Grant. “I gave the order to whip him.”38 And that is exactly what thirty-three-year-old Sheridan did. On September 19, in an all-day battle, he clashed with Early’s army at Winchester, and this bloody, seesaw contest climaxed with a classic infantry charge that sent Confederate soldiers “whirling through Winchester,”39 wrote Sheridan’s chief of staff, in a phrase soon parroted by the northern press. While both sides suffered 4,500 casualties, Sheridan’s victory was unmistakable. Grant recommended his promotion to brigadier general in the regular army and he ascended to this new rank with lightning speed. As usual, Grant wanted his victorious commander to capitalize on victory, urging him to “push your success and make all you can of it.”40
On September 22, Sheridan scored another triumph against Early at Fisher’s Hill. He battered the rebel army with a shattering blow in the late-afternoon light, only darkness saving it from total destruction. Grant knew these Union triumphs in the Shenandoah Valley would have extensive ramifications for Lee’s army. “Keep on,” Grant exhorted Sheridan, “and your work will cause the fall of Richmond.”41 In a sign of Grant’s expanding power in Washington, Stanton kept Julia closely apprised of events. “Sheridan fought another great battle yesterday,” he wired her on September 23, “and won a splendid victory.”42 Thanks to Sheridan, Grant knew the rebel army wouldn’t endanger Washington any time soon. On October 7, Sheridan boasted to Grant of having burned more than two thousand barns and seventy mills and rounded up three thousand sheep, a scorched-earth policy that prompted a massive flight of residents from the Shenandoah Valley and effectively depopulated it. Even the most hardened skeptics in Grant’s army began to feel sanguine, even ebullient, about Union chances in the war.
On October 19, Sheridan capped his stellar campaign in the Shenandoah Valley with the battle of Cedar Creek. At dawn Confederate forces struck hard at Sheridan’s men in a surprise attack, driving them back four miles and capturing twenty pieces of artillery. Sheridan had been in Washington, but when he returned to the fray that afternoon, he rallied his panic-stricken men on horseback in masterly fashion. Spying one division on rising ground, “I rode to the crest of the elevation, and there taking off my hat, the men rose up from behind their barricade with cheers of recognition,” Sheridan recalled.43 Riding along the line of battle, he led a counterattack that nearly caused Early’s army to evaporate under pressure. Confederate soldiers flung away their weapons as they fled, bringing down the curtain on the war’s last major battle in the valley. “Affairs at [the] time looked badly,” Sheridan wired Grant, “but by the gallantry of our brave officers and men disaster has been converted into a splendid victory.”44 Sheridan’s famous ride would be enshrined in art and poetry, converting him into a national hero.
Grant had loaded enormous responsibility upon Little Phil’s shoulders, a trust amply repa
id. When he received a dispatch about the Cedar Creek victory, he decided to have some fun with his staff, telling them first the sad news of how Sheridan’s forces that morning had been “driven in confusion” from the battlefield. “That’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” he asked his staff, who echoed, “It’s too bad, too bad!” “Now just wait till I read you the rest of it,” he said, a mischievous gleam in his eye, then related the afternoon victory. As Porter said, “The general seemed to enjoy the bombshell he had thrown among the staff almost as much as the news of Sheridan’s signal victory.”45 In homage to Sheridan, Grant ordered another hundred-gun salute. With the Shenandoah Valley in ruins, Grant no longer had to agonize over offensive threats from that direction and could concentrate his troops around Petersburg.
With Sherman and Sheridan on the move, Grant didn’t remain idle. On September 29, in a surprise raid, the Army of the James under Ben Butler had captured Fort Harrison, which formed part of Richmond’s outer defenses and was studded with big guns. Typically for Grant, he had an ulterior strategic motive: to force Lee to strengthen Richmond and thereby weaken Petersburg. When Grant rushed over to the captured fort, he found himself stepping gingerly over dead bodies strewn across the ground. “He turned his looks upward to avoid as much as possible the ghastly sight,” wrote Porter, “and the expression of profound grief impressed upon his features told, as usual, of the effect produced upon him by the sad spectacle.”46 Despite Confederate bombardment, Grant clambered to the fort’s parapet and was vouchsafed a closeup glimpse of church spires rising in central Richmond. Then, with his legs folded under him and projectiles bursting around him, the placid Grant sat down on the grass and penned orders for further attacks. According to Badeau, “A dead man lay at his feet whose head had been taken off; the blood and masses of hair from the scalp of wounded Rebels were scattered around; while Grant wrote, shells flew over the fort by the score . . . two burst immediately over his head, but he never looked up, tho’ men and officers . . . ran for cover from the fragments.”47