On the night of March 8, 1864, a short, rumpled man in a travel-stained linen duster walked into the lobby of Willard’s Hotel in Washington City. He was accompanied by his thirteen-year-old son, and nobody met him. The administration had sent delegates to greet his train, but the arrangements had fallen through, so Ulysses S. Grant, the most celebrated Union general of the war, checked in like an unsung traveler from the hinterlands.
The registration clerk glanced at him and offered a room on the top floor, which Grant accepted without complaint. Then the clerk turned the register around to note the room number and saw the signature: U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois.
The clerk suddenly remembered a fine bridal suite on the second floor and rushed from behind the desk to carry the general’s bag himself. That evening, Grant came downstairs for dinner. For a few minutes, the dining room was quiet. Then people began to look, and look again.
Whispers multiplied. Someone stood, hammered a table with a knife, and announced that General Grant was in their midst. The diners rose to their feet and cheered, three cheers for the man from Galena, who rose, fumbled with his napkin, bowed to all points of the compass, and sat back down to finish his meal. He was then escorted to the Executive Mansion, where a presidential reception was underway.
The room was overflowing with the curious, and when Grant was ushered in, the crowd parted. At the far end of the lane stood Abraham Lincoln, all six feet four of him, with a collar one size too big and a necktie broadly and awkwardly tied. He stepped forward with hand outstretched and a broad smile. When they shook hands, the commander in chief’s three-year search for a general ended.
“Why here you are, General Grant,” Lincoln said. “Well, this is a great pleasure, I assure you. ”
The next day, March 9, before the entire cabinet, Grant became the first lieutenant general since George Washington. As general in chief, he commanded every man in a blue uniform, roughly 662,000 soldiers, of whom about 533,000 were ready for combat.
Lincoln had spent three years learning what it took to lead an army. He had come to the presidency without military experience, though he had a brief taste of it in 1832, when he was elected captain of his militia company during the Black Hawk War. He never saw combat, but the service gave him a liking for leadership. When he returned to New Salem, he declared he would run for the legislature, and that decision changed his life.
Now he was commander in chief at the moment the Union faced its greatest threat. From the start, there was no honeymoon. On the day after his inauguration, word arrived from Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter that his food would run out in six weeks. Lincoln announced that the forts would be reinforced and resupplied.
On April 12, 1861, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for ninety days, moved troops into Washington by way of Annapolis to avoid trouble in Baltimore, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus between Washington and Philadelphia. He soon faced his first major military disaster. On July 21, 1861, Union forces under Irvin McDowell were routed at Bull Run.
Lincoln spent the next day absorbing the defeat and the next years cycling through generals. He elevated George B. McClellan, who took a defeated mob and built it into an army. But McClellan was cautious, contemptuous of his commander in chief, and slow to act.
He once kept Lincoln waiting in his parlor and then went to bed rather than meet him. In February 1862, Lincoln’s son Willie died of typhoid fever, and the president staggered into his secretary’s office and wept. The war did not pause. Lincoln pushed for winter campaigns.
He ordered McClellan’s army forward, but McClellan preferred the Peninsula Campaign, and Lincoln reluctantly agreed. The army crept toward Richmond, then was driven back by Robert E. Lee. Lincoln removed McClellan from his role as general in chief, leaving him only in command of the Army of the Potomac.
He brought Henry Halleck east to serve as general in chief, but Halleck proved little more than a first-rate clerk. Throughout this period, Lincoln was learning. He came to understand that an army was an extension of its commander. He saw initiative in Grant, who captured Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862.
Lincoln promoted him to major general. When critics complained that Grant was a liability, Lincoln replied, “I can’t spare this man; he fights. ”
Lincoln also came to see the war as more than a military matter. He struggled with slavery, doubting whether the federal government had the constitutional power to abolish it.
But military necessity drove him. In July 1862, he remarked, “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. ” After the Battle of Antietam, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and he worried how the common soldier would respond. He visited the army at Sharpsburg and found no mutinous spirit.
The defeats continued. McClellan was replaced by Ambrose Burnside, whose attack at Fredericksburg in December 1862 was an unmitigated disaster. Lincoln paced his room in anguish, crying, “If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it. ” Burnside was replaced by Joseph Hooker, who was beaten at Chancellorsville in May 1863.
Lincoln wept when he heard the news. Hooker was replaced by George Gordon Meade, a Pennsylvanian, and Lincoln said he would fight well on his own dunghill. Meade won at Gettysburg in July 1863, but Lincoln was horrified that Lee escaped back into Virginia. He called it the greatest disaster of the war.
That same month, the New York draft riots erupted, the worst riots in the nation’s history, leaving over a hundred dead over three days. Lincoln’s call for a draft was without precedent in American law, and he feared it would be struck down in court. He had already ignored Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling that his suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. By late 1863, Grant’s victory at Chattanooga on November 25 gave the Union control of Tennessee.
But Lincoln, instead of ordering a pursuit into Georgia, sent part of Grant’s army to relieve Knoxville. Grant saw it as a missed chance, but he had begun to develop a grander strategy. He believed the war would be won south and west of Richmond. He recommended no more offensives against the Confederate capital directly, but instead a movement from Suffolk, Virginia, toward Raleigh, North Carolina, which would force Lee to evacuate Virginia.
He proposed an offensive against Mobile, Alabama, and he understood that final victory depended on crowding a beaten enemy without letting up. Lincoln was interested. In December 1863, Congressman Elihu Washburne, Grant’s congressional sponsor, introduced a bill to revive the rank of lieutenant general, a rank last held by George Washington. Lincoln admitted he knew little about Grant and asked who else knew him.
Washburne mentioned J. Russell Jones of Chicago, an old friend of Grant’s. Jones was summoned to Washington, and he brought with him a letter Grant had written, in which Grant insisted he had no political ambition and only wanted to see the rebellion suppressed. Lincoln was deeply gratified.
“My son,” he said, “you will never know how gratifying that is to me. ”
Congress passed the measure, and Lincoln approved it on February 29, 1864. Grant received word on March 3 that he was to report to Washington. He assumed he would remain in the West, but the government was staking everything on him.
That is how he found himself in the dining room of Willard’s Hotel, cheered by strangers, and then in the Blue Room, shaking the hand of the president. Grant immediately moved to join Meade’s army at Brandy Station, Virginia. The spring of 1864 brought the Overland Campaign, and the first terrible meeting between Lee and Grant came at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5 and 6. The two-day bloodbath cost the Union tens of thousands of casualties.
Lincoln was distraught. “My God, my God, twenty thousand souls sent to their final account in one day; I cannot bear it. ” A New York Tribune reporter returned from the front and delivered a personal message from Grant: “Whatever happens, there will be no turning back. ” Lincoln was so moved he embraced the startled reporter and kissed him on the cheek.
The losses in May and early June gave ammunition to Grant’s critics, including Senator Benjamin Wade, and even Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, began calling Grant a butcher. But Lincoln stood by him. When he learned the Army of the Potomac had crossed the James River to try to capture Petersburg in June 1864, Lincoln said, “I began to see it. You will succeed.
God bless you all. ”
The crucial matter of reelection remained. Union victories at Mobile Bay, Atlanta, and Cedar Creek finally assured it. In November 1864, Lincoln won 55 percent of the votes cast.
The soldier vote cost him only his native Kentucky, which still had not forgiven him for the Emancipation Proclamation. With the end in sight, Edwin Stanton reminded Lincoln that he, as president and commander in chief, must guide how the war should be closed. That message was conveyed in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the shortest on record, with malice toward none and charity for all. He told Grant and Sherman he wanted submission and no more bloodshed.
“Let them up easy,” he said. He had no desire to plunge the South into political anarchy. On April 11, 1865, Stanton offered his resignation, reminding Lincoln of their agreement that he would stay until the conflict ended. Lincoln tore the letter up and embraced him.
That night, Lincoln spoke to a cheering crowd. It was not a victory speech. It was somber, reflective, strangely muted. He had won the war.
Now he was preparing himself and the nation for an uncertain future, one he would lead as a civilian president. Some in the crowd were disappointed. One man, shaking with anger, reportedly blurted that it was the last speech Lincoln would ever make. Three evenings later, on April 14, 1865, that agitated actor, John Wilkes Booth, made good on his promise.
Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre and died the next morning, leaving another civilian president to win the peace.