Abraham Lincoln’s support for Ulysses S. Grant is usually reduced to a simple formula: Lincoln needed a general who would fight, Grant fought, and the war ended. But the written record Lincoln left behind—letters, telegrams, notes, and the diary entries of his secretary John Hay—shows something more deliberate. It shows a president who understood Grant before the victories made that understanding safe, and who defended him when doing so cost him politically.
By the winter of 1861–62, Lincoln was in a crisis without a clean solution. The Army of the Potomac, the great eastern force meant to march on Richmond and end the rebellion, sat idle in its camps under George McClellan. McClellan had built the army, drilled it, and inspired fierce loyalty in his men. He simply would not fight with it.
Lincoln tried every available lever. He visited McClellan personally, sent letters urging action, and sat through endless councils of war. McClellan, for his part, treated Lincoln with barely concealed contempt, once leaving the president waiting in his parlor for an hour before going to bed without seeing him. Lincoln endured it, not because he liked it, but because he had run out of alternatives.
In February 1862, something changed in the Western theater. A general named Ulysses S. Grant attacked Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and took it. He immediately moved against Fort Donelson and took that too, demanding and receiving unconditional surrender from the Confederate commander.
Northern newspapers turned the phrase into a nickname within days: Unconditional Surrender Grant. Lincoln had been asking for a general who would fight. Here was a man who had struck twice in two weeks and won both times. Two months later, that judgment was tested.
At Shiloh, on April 6–7, 1862, Confederate forces launched a surprise attack on Grant’s army at Pittsburgh Landing, driving his men back toward the river in brutal, chaotic fighting. Reinforcements arrived overnight, and on the second day Grant counterattacked and regained the ground. The cost was staggering: roughly thirteen thousand Union casualties, with Confederate losses nearly as high. The Northern press erupted, calling Grant incompetent, reckless, and drunk.
Politicians in Washington lined up to demand his removal. Lincoln refused. The line that survives from this moment, “I can’t spare this man. He fights,” was spoken, not written.
Witnesses, including William Tecumseh Sherman, recorded slightly different wordings, but the substance is the same. Lincoln did not claim Grant was blameless. He did not say Shiloh had gone well. He said the man fights, and he would not let him go.
Lincoln had spent nearly a year dealing with generals who refused to fight. McClellan, Halleck, and Buell all had impressive reputations and endless reasons not to attack. Grant was the one general who had taken the war directly to the enemy, who had attacked and kept attacking, even when the cost was high. Lincoln refused to discard that, and he said so publicly enough that the comment spread.
A year later, the pressure returned, this time worse and from closer to home. During the winter and spring of 1863, Grant was trying to solve the Vicksburg problem. Vicksburg, Mississippi, sat on high bluffs commanding a crucial bend in the Mississippi River. Taking it would split the Confederacy, regain full control of the river, and sever Texas, Arkansas, and western Louisiana from the eastern states.
Lincoln had called it the key, saying the war could never end until that key was in the Union’s pocket. Grant’s early approaches failed. Canal projects, bayou expeditions, and attempts to come at the city from different angles all bogged down in mud and floodwater. The press was merciless, and then came a more alarming development.
Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois, Grant’s earliest and most reliable champion, began sending signs that Grant might have lost his way. If Washburne was wavering, nearly everyone was. Lincoln’s response, recorded later, was stark: “Even Washburne, who has always claimed Grant as his by right of discovery, has deserted him and demands his removal. And I really believe I am the only friend Grant has left.
Grant advises me that he will take Vicksburg by the 4th of July and I believe he will do it. And he shall have the chance. ”
That was not a safe political position. Midterm elections loomed, war weariness gripped the North, and Congress was full of angry men with newspapers amplifying every attack.
The easiest move would have been to remove Grant and claim he was responding to public concern. Lincoln would not do it. He told visiting critics he was waiting for results. On July 4, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered.
In a letter written even before the surrender, Lincoln had already called Grant’s May campaign one of the most brilliant in the world. After the fall of the city, his political risk was vindicated completely. But the vindication was not the point. Months earlier, when even Grant’s own patron had turned against him, Lincoln had said he should have his chance.
The document at the center of this story is dated April 30, 1864. By then, Grant had been brought east and promoted to lieutenant general, the first officer since George Washington to hold that rank. He was general in chief of all Union armies, but he chose to make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac in order to direct operations against Robert E. Lee personally.
The Overland Campaign—the brutal series of battles from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor, and on toward Petersburg—was about to begin. Lincoln sat down and wrote Grant a letter. John Hay recorded in his diary that the president read it to him before sending it and called it admirable, full of kindness and dignity. Lincoln told Grant he was entirely satisfied with what he had done up to that time, and he explicitly acknowledged a limit: “So far as I understand it.
” He admitted he had often thought of sending suggestions and cautions, but had come to see they would not have helped. “In each case you have done what I wished or thought only of doing and with much more ability than I possessed. ” He promised not to obtrude his own views, to interfere only if Grant asked for help, to provide all the support he could, and otherwise to stay out of the way. He closed with a benediction: “And now with a brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you.
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Grant answered the next day. He wrote that Lincoln’s confidence was acknowledged with pride, not vanity, but as the reaction of a man aware of the weight that confidence carried. He promised it would be his earnest endeavor that the president and the country should not be disappointed. He noted he had never had cause to complain of the administration, that everything requested had been yielded, and that if his success was less than he desired and expected, the fault was not with Lincoln.
Two men who understood exactly what they were asking of each other had put their understanding in writing. Two days later, Grant crossed the Rapidan and fought the Battle of the Wilderness. Within weeks, the nation was reading casualty lists that stretched page after page. Within a year, Lincoln would be dead and Grant would be commander of a victorious army.
By August 1864, Washington was close to panic. Grant’s campaign had done what he promised. He had kept pressing Lee, forced him back, and pinned him inside the Richmond–Petersburg line. But the cost had been enormous, and newspapers called Grant a butcher.
Lincoln’s reelection prospects looked bleak, and there was serious talk inside his own party of replacing him. In that climate, some proposed pulling troops away from Petersburg to reinforce other operations. Grant did not want to do that. He understood that the siege was the choke point, and that time favored the Union only if the grip was not loosened.
On August 17, 1864, Lincoln sent him a telegram short enough to quote in full: “I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible. ”
This was the same pen that wrote the Gettysburg Address.
Here, Lincoln was writing in Grant’s register, using Grant’s own metaphor of the hold and sharpening it. It was a military instruction and a political shield in one sentence. If the siege had failed, the line would have been thrown back at Lincoln as evidence of stubbornness. He sent it anyway.
Grant reportedly laughed when he read it and said the president had more nerve than any of his advisers. In January 1865, with the end of the war in sight, Lincoln wrote Grant a different kind of letter, this one about his son. Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest, had not served at the front, and Lincoln felt the criticism. Robert himself wanted to join the army.
Mary Lincoln was desperate not to lose their boy. Lincoln asked Grant to take Robert onto his staff, as a volunteer aide, for a limited time. He was careful to say Robert should not be in the way, and then he added a line he did not have to add: he was making the request not as president, but as a friend. Grant agreed promptly.
Robert joined the staff at City Point in February 1865 and was present when Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. Throughout 1864 and 1865, politicians and visitors kept coming to the White House to complain about Grant, just as they had complained about every general before him. Lincoln’s response, recalled in various forms by several observers, boiled down to one consistent line: “I know not the plans of General Grant and I do not wish to know them. ” That was discipline, not ignorance.
Lincoln had spent years studying war, reading military treatises, and arguing strategy with McClellan. With Grant, he made a different choice. He read the reports, watched the results, sent encouragement and resources, and consciously stopped short of asking for detailed plans he might be tempted to second-guess. When someone pressed him about rumors that Grant drank, he reportedly said that if he knew what brand of whiskey Grant drank, he would send a barrel of it to his other generals.
Whether he said it exactly that way matters less than the fact that people believed he would. Twenty years later, dying of throat cancer at Mount McGregor, Grant looked back and wrote his personal memoirs. He called Lincoln “incontestably the greatest man I have ever known. ” Not the greatest president, but the greatest man.
Grant had served under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, fought against Lee, worked with Sherman, and met emperors, kings, and prime ministers. Out of all of them, Lincoln stood alone. Grant wrote that Lincoln had never pressed him to divulge his plans, even though he had every right to do so, and that this restraint was one of the greatest gifts a general could receive. He wrote that Lincoln’s assassination, just days after Appomattox, was the darkest day of his life.
Not Shiloh. Not Cold Harbor. The darkest day was the day the man who had said he could not spare Grant because he fought, who had been the only friend Grant had left during the Vicksburg campaign, who had promised not to interfere and told him to hold on with a bulldog grip, was killed when the war they had won together was barely over. The written record Lincoln left behind is specific.
“I can’t spare this man. He fights. ” “I really believe I am the only friend Grant has left. He shall have the chance.
” The April 30 letter with its admission that Grant’s judgment had exceeded his own. “Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible. ” “Not as president, but as a friend. ” These are not the words of a manager checking boxes.
They are the words of one man recognizing something in another and being willing to say it plainly, in letters, in telegrams, in conversations others wrote down. Lincoln’s great speeches were written for the country. The letters were written for Grant.
They show a president telling a general what he actually thought in the moment when it cost him something to think it, and a general, years later, writing down exactly what that had meant.