When Lincoln gave him a postmortem on the meeting, Grant was struck by the president’s “generous and kindly spirit toward the Southern people” and the absence of “a revengeful disposition”—attitudes to be reflected in Grant’s own charitable behavior toward the South.44 Lincoln delighted Grant with his description of how the shriveled Stephens was bundled up in a gray woolen overcoat several sizes too large. As Lincoln recalled, “The cabin soon began to get pretty warm and after a while [Stephens] stood up and pulled off his big coat. He slipped it off just about as you would husk an ear of corn. I couldn’t help thinking as I looked first at the overcoat and then at the man, ‘Well, that’s the biggest shuck and the smallest nubbin I ever laid eyes on.’”45
Grant’s bond with Lincoln deepened when he helped to resolve a family dilemma concerning twenty-one-year-old Robert Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, who had graduated from Harvard College. Good-looking and genial, Robert had been criticized for evading war service—criticism all the more mortifying since he was eager to serve. Mary Lincoln, having already lost two children, didn’t care to risk a third and grew wildly emotional on the subject. Lincoln hesitated to cross her as her mental instability grew more evident. Although he tried to steer Robert to Harvard Law School, the ploy didn’t succeed. With relations already awkward and distant with his eldest son, Lincoln hit on an ingenious way to appease both Mary and Robert. On January 19, he sent Grant a tactful letter that began with a beautiful, if slightly unrealistic, line: “Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend.” He then stated his son’s wish “to see something of the war before it ends” and asked if Robert could join Grant’s military family.46 Lincoln even extended an unusual offer to pay his army expenses. From Annapolis, Grant hastily replied on the blank bottom half of Lincoln’s letter, offering Robert an adjutant’s job on his staff with the rank of captain. On February 21, Robert Lincoln reported for duty at Grant’s headquarters. Sympathetic to the president’s predicament, Grant guarded Robert from perilous situations and often relegated him to meeting visiting dignitaries. With his bright, amiable manner, Robert Lincoln became a popular figure at headquarters whose presence only made the president more eager to visit City Point, as perhaps Grant had hoped.47 It is unlikely that Mary Lincoln was ever reconciled to her son’s presence in the war, even at such a relatively safe spot.
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EARLY 1865 WITNESSED the slow-motion unraveling of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was gradually thinned out by massive desertions amounting to about a regiment per day. Tattered men in large groups appeared in Grant’s camps, surrendering their weapons. “Hundreds of men are deserting nightly,” Lee confessed to Jefferson Davis as such departures shaved off 8 percent of his army in January, followed by a further 8 percent in February.48 Driven by poor food, withheld pay, and rapidly depreciating Confederate currency, rebel soldiers were rendering their own bleak verdict on the war’s future course. In early February, Grant obtained a poster showing Lee reduced to begging from local farmers, pleading with them “to sell or loan as much Corn Meal & Molasses as they Can spare.”49 Southern conscription covered boys as young as fourteen and men as old as sixty.50
Grant believed the southern people, once ardent to fight, had shed their taste for bloodshed. “Everything looks to me to be very favorable for a speedy termination of the war,” he predicted in mid-February, wondering whether rebel leaders would flee or be ousted by their citizens.51 Inside the Confederate cabinet, Secretary of State Judah Benjamin argued strenuously that blacks must be recruited or Lee would have to abandon Richmond.52 The Confederate legislature approved a bill to enlist slaves in the army, sidestepping the explosive question of whether to emancipate them. Its most eloquent proponent was Lee, who urgently needed fresh troops. “I think those who are employed [as soldiers] should be freed,” he argued. “It would be neither just nor wise, in my opinion, to require them to serve as slaves.”53 The Charleston Mercury noted the absurdity of the whole enterprise: “Assert the right in the Confederate Government to emancipate slaves, and it is stone dead.”54 After the Virginia legislature endorsed the bill for recruiting black soldiers, one or two black companies were assembled and briefly paraded in the Richmond streets, but they came too late to prop up the beleaguered cause. Grant tracked with consuming interest this controversy in Richmond newspapers. Slavery was slowly crumbling, as evidenced by a precipitous drop in the market price for slaves. As the Richmond war clerk John Jones indicated in his diary, “Here the price of slaves, men, is about $5000 Confederate State notes, or $100 in specie. A great depreciation. Before the war they commanded ten times that price.”55
All the while, plowing remorselessly through the Deep South, Sherman eradicated supply bases and transportation networks that kept Lee’s army alive. By early January, with Savannah secure, Sherman was ready to “sally forth again,” telling Grant of his plans to carve a path of destruction through Columbia and Camden, South Carolina, followed by Wilmington and Raleigh in North Carolina. “The game is then up with Lee,” Sherman stated, “unless he comes out of Richmond, avoids you, and fights me: in which event, I should reckon on your being on his heels.”56 His options vanishing, Lee would soon face an unpalatable choice: either stay in Richmond and sacrifice the rest of the South, or head southward, fight in the open, and be squeezed between Sherman’s and Grant’s converging armies. Lincoln allegedly gave humorous expression to this by saying, “Grant has the bear by the hind leg while Sherman takes off the hide.”57
Rolling through Georgia, Sherman’s army had collected fugitive slaves at every turn. When the question arose of shipping them to City Point, Halleck interceded to stem any such movement: “Our experience is that negroes brought north during the cold weather from a warm climate are almost useless; moreover, they suffer very much from cold.”58 Sherman still complained that jubilant blacks flocking to his army hampered its progress. To deal with this surplus population, he devised one of the war’s most innovative measures. The federal government had confiscated four hundred thousand acres of land. In mid-January, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside the Sea Islands and a large strip of territory along the Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida coasts for settlement by landless black families. They would be offered forty-acre plots in self-governing communities. By June, this remarkable experiment in reconstruction offered new life to forty thousand former slaves, although the land titles given out had not yet acquired lasting legal power. Sherman was an improbable author for this most progressive order and later explained that he had done it as a temporary wartime measure at the behest of Stanton.
On February 1, Sherman began his march through the Carolinas, candidly trumpeting his intention to make the inhabitants “fear and dread us.”59 True to his words, his campaign would be indelibly engraved in southern memory, feeding a deep-seated hatred of Yankees. As a precaution, Grant shipped supplies to predetermined spots along the coast in case Sherman needed them and he promised to reinforce him, if necessary, with thirty thousand men. Exactly as Grant had hoped, Lee diverted troops to halt Sherman’s progress, critically undermining his defense of Richmond. Like Grant, Sherman thought that Lee, however fine a tactician, was a poor strategist who would play straight into their hands. “If Lee is a soldier of genius,” Sherman lectured, “he will seek to transfer his army from Richmond to Raleigh or Columbia. If he is a man simply of detail, he will remain where he is and his speedy defeat is sure. But I have little fear that he will be able to move; Grant holds him in a vise.”60 Lee’s circumscribed vision became a matter of even greater moment when he was elevated to command all Confederate armies in early February 1865.
Like Sherman, Grant recognized the psychological value of a Union army streaking through southern towns hitherto spared a firsthand glimpse of war. Southern newspapers, Grant noted, proclaimed that Sherman’s army “was nothing better than a mob of men who were frightened out of their wits.” As
the hard-charging army then passed their way, showing an invincible spirit, “the people became disabused and they saw the true state of affairs.”61 Sherman mapped a route through South Carolina, cradle of the rebellion, that would take him to the state capital at Columbia, which he endowed with special strategic worth. “I expect [Jefferson] Davis will move Heaven & Earth to catch me,” Sherman told Grant. “Richmond is not more vital to his cause than Columbia and the heart of South Carolina.”62 Sherman’s sixty thousand battle-tested veterans, now tough, wiry, and resilient, had to ford numberless swamps and rivers in all sorts of weather. They stormed ahead with crusading fervor, burning everything of strategic value in their path. Although their rapacity in Georgia can be exaggerated, they directed a special animus against South Carolina for having started the war.
Sherman’s march formed only one element of Grant’s multifaceted plan to end the conflict. The latter announced a new Department of North Carolina, with John Schofield in command, its mission to take Wilmington and Goldsboro and create new supply sources for Sherman. Grant secretly dispatched twenty-eight thousand troops to New Bern and the Cape Fear River on the Atlantic coast with orders to get a railroad there in working shape to speed the movement of Union troops. This would enable Schofield’s army to team up with Sherman in case Lee abandoned Richmond and brought the war farther south. On the surface, Grant seemed idle in Virginia when, in reality, he was spinning intricate webs to catch Lee. “I shall necessarily have to take the odium of apparent inactivity, but if it results, as I expect it will, in the discomfiture of Lee’s Army, I shall be satisfied,” Grant notified Stanton.63 To counter his initiatives, the Confederate government on February 22 appointed Joseph Johnston to oversee all Confederate forces in the Carolinas.
Sherman’s push through South Carolina reached a new phase of heightened intensity on February 17 when his army entered Columbia, the small but charming state capital. Many residents of Charleston and Augusta had mistakenly repaired there as a sanctuary from Sherman’s wrath. For vengeful Union troops, the South Carolina capital was a fit place to punish the hotbed of sedition. Grant and Sherman always insisted that the fire that engulfed large sections of Columbia was set by retreating Confederates, describing this as standard practice when southern armies surrendered towns. Sherman and his staff pitched in to quell the sudden conflagration, but charges also arose that Sherman’s soldiers, giving way to a rowdy spirit, spread the flames with cotton dipped in turpentine. By the time Sherman and his entourage left the town on February 23, much of it lay in smoking ruins.
While Grant defended Sherman’s behavior, neither man seemed unduly disturbed by what had happened. In his Memoirs, Grant commented drily that Union troops had helped to save Columbia, but that “the example set by the Confederates in burning the village of Chambersburg, Pa., a town which was not garrisoned, would seem to make a defense of the act of firing the seat of government of the State most responsible for the conflict then raging, not imperative.”64 Sounding more like an avenging angel, Sherman insisted that he hadn’t ordered the destruction of Columbia, but “I have never shed any tears over it, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for—the end of the war.”65 With Columbia gone, Charleston soon succumbed, and the two losses spread fear and lamentation through the South. The scenes that now unfolded heralded not simply impending Confederate defeat, but a brave new biracial world. In a sight scarcely credible to southern eyes, the black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry arrived in Charleston, lustily singing “John Brown’s Body.” The headline in The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper, captured the extraordinary symbolism: “Babylon Is Fallen!”66 Grant felt the war careering toward its climactic scene: “Everything looks like dissolution in the South. A few days more of success with Sherman will put us where we can crow loud.”67
A swelling cascade of Union victories ensued, with Wilmington falling to Schofield on February 22, shutting down the last major southern port. A restless Grant never quite knew Sherman’s location, but assumed he was hurtling toward Goldsboro and would soon join forces with Schofield. Belatedly Richmond newspapers awoke to the realization that Grant traced Sherman’s mysterious movements through their own columns. “The papers are requested to say nothing relative to military operations in South and North Carolina,” wrote the rebel war clerk John Jones on February 25, “for they are read by Gen. Grant every morning of their publication.”68
A winter of freezing Virginia temperatures meant that Grant’s campaign against Lee was paralyzed by snow and record cold. Heavy rains washed out roads, forcing Grant to wait until they dried. By late February, Grant assigned Sheridan to lead an expedition to wreck the railroads and the James River Canal that supported Lee’s army. In sending Sheridan toward Lynchburg, he contemplated that his cavalry would clear the Shenandoah Valley of Confederates, then link up with Sherman as the latter advanced north, “eating out the vitals of South Carolina,” as Grant phrased it.69 Sheridan’s horsemen rode through a heavy downpour that plastered their uniforms with mud. Sheridan balked at the idea of teaming up with Sherman to defeat Lee, thinking it essential that eastern soldiers from the Army of the Potomac should share in Lee’s defeat.
One day Grant spread out a map for Julia to show her the deployment of his armies and display his grand design. “You observe it is a perfect cordon from sea to sea again,” he told her. When she asked what came next, he replied, “Well, I am going to tighten that cordon until the rebellion is crushed or strangled.”70 Grant had reached his peak powers as a strategist, and Horace Porter noted that his operations now “covered a theater of war greater than that of any campaigns in modern history, and . . . required a grasp and comprehension which have rarely been possessed even by the greatest commanders. [Grant] was at this period indefatigable in his labors, and he once wrote in a single day forty-two important despatches with his own hand.”71
In late February, General Ord met with General Longstreet about prisoner exchanges and the problem posed by barter of newspapers, tobacco, and other items between pickets on opposing sides. Before long their talks touched on the possibility of their commanding generals hashing out a peace settlement. Ord argued that since northern politicians balked at such talks, only generals could make it happen. The honest Longstreet called it “a great crime against the Southern people and Army for the chief Generals to continue to lead their men to hopeless and unnecessary butchery.”72
The two men discussed a rather fanciful plan in which Longstreet’s wife would pass through Union lines with Confederate officers to meet with her cousin and old girlhood friend Julia Grant, who would reciprocate with a return visit to Richmond with Union officers. Julia, at City Point, seemed wildly excited by this diplomatic gambit. “Oh! How enchanting, how thrilling!” she told her husband. “Oh, Ulys, I may go, may I not?” Grant reined in her enthusiasm. “No, you must not . . . The men have fought this war and the men will finish it.”73 Initially Grant blessed the talks, and on March 2, Lee wrote to propose a meeting dealing with “the subjects of controversy between the belligerents.”74 Aware he was treading on tenuous ground, Grant submitted the matter to Stanton, who sharply disapproved and informed him that Lincoln “wishes you to have no conference with Gen Lee unless it be for the capitulation of Lee’s army . . . He instructs me to say that you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question.”75 In response, Grant reassured Stanton he wouldn’t venture into politics and would continue to prosecute the war “to the utmost of my ability.”76
The secessionist cause lay dying everywhere in the South. All through February, as the social life drained out of Richmond, those who could afford it fled in massive numbers toward outlying areas or safe havens in North Carolina. The Confederate government braced for the capital’s surrender, collecting tobacco that could be set ablaze at the entrance of Union troops. With something close to panic, government officials and their families prepared for an evacuation. At the War Of
fice, clerks stockpiled boxes and got ready to pack up the archives and move them away from prying northern eyes.
Grant’s main fear wasn’t that Lee would stand and fight. Rather he worried that Lee’s mobile army would suddenly take flight and dart south to North Carolina or drive west toward Lynchburg and eastern Tennessee, prolonging the war for a year. However passive he might appear, Grant knew his main job was to keep Lee’s army cooped up in Richmond and Petersburg until Sherman and Schofield merged their forces in North Carolina. If he applied too much pressure prematurely, the move could backfire, prompting Lee to scuttle south from Richmond and break up the crucial rendezvous of Union forces farther south.