In the spring of 1862, the most powerful men in Washington wanted Ulysses Grant fired, disgraced, and sent home. Senators demanded it. Generals whispered for it. Newspaper editors printed it in bold type.
The case against him seemed airtight. Abraham Lincoln listened to all of it, the delegations that filled his office, the letters from men whose political support he needed, the reports from officers who had seen the carnage at Shiloh with their own eyes. He heard every argument. Then he said something none of them expected.
“I can’t spare this man. He fights. ”
Nobody listened. They went right back to building the case, the petitions, the backroom conversations, the editorial columns.
They treated Lincoln’s defense of Grant as a momentary lapse, a sentimental attachment to a man who didn’t deserve it. They were wrong. Not a little wrong, but catastrophically, historically wrong. Before Grant became the man Lincoln refused to fire, his record entering the Civil War was, to put it charitably, uneven.
He had resigned from the peacetime army in 1854 under circumstances never fully explained, with rumors of drinking following him out the door. The years between had not been kind. He failed at farming. He failed at real estate.
When Fort Sumter fell, he was working in his father’s leather goods shop in Galena, Illinois. When he received his colonelcy in the summer of 1861, it was partly because Illinois was desperate for officers with any professional military experience. Grant had graduated from West Point in 1843 and served competently in the Mexican War. He took the 21st Illinois Infantry and turned it from a disorganized mob into a functioning unit.
His early operations in Missouri were aggressive enough to draw attention. When he captured Fort Donelson in February of 1862, demanding unconditional surrender, he became the first major Union general to win a significant victory in the Western Theater. The newspapers loved it. Lincoln promoted him to major general of volunteers.
Then came Shiloh. In early April 1862, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston led roughly 45,000 men north from Corinth, Mississippi, intending to destroy Grant’s Army of the Tennessee before it could link up with Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio. The attack on the morning of April 6th achieved almost total surprise. Grant’s men were camped near a small Methodist church called Shiloh Meeting House on the west bank of the Tennessee River.
Johnston hit them before breakfast. The first hours were chaos of a particular and terrible kind. By afternoon, parts of the Union line had been pushed back more than a mile. A place called the Hornet’s Nest, where a handful of Union brigades held on through repeated assaults, became the axis of the day’s fighting.
Johnston was killed leading a charge. The Confederates eventually captured the Hornet’s Nest and pressed toward the river. Grant rallied what he had, positioned artillery on the high ground, found Buell’s arriving reinforcements, and held through the night. On April 7th, he counterattacked.
By afternoon, the Confederates were retreating to Corinth. The battle was a Union victory by any objective measure, but the cost was staggering. Nearly 13,000 Union casualties over two days. The Confederates lost almost as many.
Combined losses at Shiloh exceeded the total American casualties in the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined. The country had not understood what kind of war it was fighting. The reaction was volcanic. Newspapers called it a massacre.
They called for Grant’s head. Reports surfaced, some true, some exaggerated, some invented, that Grant had been drunk on the eve of battle, that he had been caught off guard, that men had died in their tents. General Henry Halleck, Grant’s immediate superior, essentially relieved him of command in everything but name. Grant stood around for weeks with no role, no orders.
He nearly quit. He wrote to William Tecumseh Sherman, who had fought alongside him at Shiloh, and said he was thinking of leaving. Sherman talked him out of it. “Stay,” Sherman said.
Wait. In Washington, the pressure on Lincoln was real and sustained. This was a coordinated effort by people with genuine influence. They made the case in practical, political terms.
Grant is a liability. The country has lost confidence in Grant. Replace him. Lincoln asked questions.
How many men did we lose? How many did the Confederates lose? Who holds the field? He was not satisfied with the narrative.
He wanted the operational facts, and the operational facts told a different story than the one in the newspapers. Lincoln was making an argument that almost nobody in his political circle was capable of making. The Union needed generals who would close with Confederate armies and stay closed with them, who would absorb punishment and keep pressing. The Army of the Potomac had George McClellan, who had spent a year building a magnificent army and then moved it at a pace suggesting he feared what would happen when it actually fought.
John Pope had lasted about sixty days before Robert E. Lee made him look foolish at Second Bull Run. Grant at Shiloh had been hit harder than any Union commander yet, and on the second day he had counterattacked. That was almost everything.
Meanwhile, Halleck accumulated forces near Corinth and moved at a pace so glacial, sometimes less than a mile a day, that when he finally arrived, the Confederate army had simply evacuated. In July of 1862, Lincoln brought Halleck to Washington as general-in-chief. Grant, almost by accident, found himself back in command of his district. What followed was the Vicksburg campaign, one of the most methodical in American military history.
Grant tried one approach and it didn’t work. He tried another and it didn’t work. He ran supply boats past the Vicksburg batteries at night. He marched his army through Louisiana bayous, then crossed the river below the city and cut loose from his supply lines.
In seventeen days, he fought five separate battles, won all five, and trapped a Confederate army of 30,000 men inside Vicksburg’s fortifications. On July 4th, 1863, the same day Lee’s army was retreating from Gettysburg in the rain, Vicksburg surrendered. The Mississippi River was open. The Confederacy had been cut in two.
Lincoln wrote Grant a personal letter, an unusually direct admission of error. He told Grant he had feared the campaign was a mistake, that he had doubted the wisdom of cutting loose from supplies, that he had been wrong. Grant was right and he was wrong. The country was slower to catch up.
The Eastern press still covered the war in Virginia as if that were the only theater that mattered, and in Virginia, things were going badly again. Burnside led the Army of the Potomac into catastrophe at Fredericksburg. Hooker was dismantled by Lee at Chancellorsville, losing to a Confederate army half his size. Meade fought well enough at Gettysburg to turn Lee back, but then pursued so cautiously that Lee’s army escaped across the Potomac intact.
None of them had a clear theory of how to win the war. Lee’s army kept existing. In March of 1864, Lincoln brought Grant East and gave him command of all Union armies. The officers of the Army of the Potomac were skeptical that a Western general truly understood what they were up against.
They had learned to respect Lee to a degree that approached paralysis. Grant told them early on that he was aware they were accustomed to doing something and then asking what Lee was going to do next. He intended to make Lee think about what Grant was going to do. The Overland Campaign was the most brutal sustained military operation in American history up to that point.
Grant fought for two days in the Wilderness, the same dense Virginia thickets where Lee had wrecked Hooker, without a decisive result. The casualties were appalling. The woods themselves caught fire, and wounded men burned to death in the undergrowth. Every previous commander of the Army of the Potomac had, after a bloody tactical setback, pulled back across the river and given Lee the pause he needed to recover.
After two days in the Wilderness, Grant turned south. When the men realized they were not retreating, that the column was moving toward Richmond, they began to cheer. Someone had finally decided the direction of march. What followed was six weeks of grinding, relentless engagement.
The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, the North Anna, Cold Harbor. The newspapers turned on Grant again with ferocity. They called him a butcher. Lincoln was running for re-election in a year when the war’s unpopularity was a genuine threat.
The peace faction argued the war could not be won. Lincoln kept Grant in command. He absorbed the criticism. He gave his general the time, resources, and protection from political interference to see the strategy through.
What Grant’s critics could not see was that Lee’s army was bleeding, too. Lee couldn’t replace his losses anymore. Grant understood that if he maintained contact, if he refused to give Lee the operational pauses that had allowed previous commanders to be defeated in detail, Lee would eventually run out of army. After Cold Harbor, a frontal assault Grant himself would later say he regretted ordering, Grant moved again, swinging the entire army south of Richmond and crossing the James River before Lee fully understood what was happening.
He nearly captured Petersburg. The opportunity was not fully seized, but Grant had maneuvered Lee into exactly the position he wanted: a siege the Confederacy could not sustain. While Grant kept Lee pinned at Petersburg, Sherman drove through Georgia toward Atlanta. Phil Sheridan dismantled the Confederate army in the Shenandoah Valley.
David Farragut closed Mobile Bay. The coordinated pressure was doing what three years of disconnected operations had failed to do. Atlanta fell on September 2nd, 1864. Lincoln won re-election in November by a margin that would have seemed impossible three months earlier.
The people who had wanted Grant fired had argued there was a less costly path to victory. That argument was never substantiated because it was never true. Lee’s army had to be fought, had to be held in contact, had to be ground down until it stopped being an army. The people who opposed Grant were not stupid or corrupt.
The failure was one of framework. They were measuring Grant by standards that had nothing to do with winning the war: appearance, decorum, minimizing painful headlines. The qualities that win wars of attrition look from the outside a lot like recklessness. Lincoln saw through the appearances to the function.
Does this man produce results? The answer kept coming back yes. Donelson. Shiloh turned back.
Vicksburg taken. On April 9th, 1865, in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse at Appomattox Courthouse, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses Grant. The terms were generous.
Lee said they were more than he expected. Grant said the war was over, and there was no point in humiliating men who would have to become citizens again. Lincoln did not live to see it confirmed. He was shot on April 14th and died the following morning.
But he had lived long enough to know that Petersburg had fallen, that Lee was in retreat, that the general he refused to fire in 1862 had delivered the result he had believed since 1862 that general would deliver. The historical record does not begin with Appomattox. It begins in the spring of 1862 with a president sitting in a room full of powerful men demanding he fire his best general, saying four words that turned out to be the most consequential military judgment of the Civil War. He fights.
That was the whole argument. In four years of the bloodiest conflict the American continent had ever seen, with generals who organized brilliantly and found creative reasons to avoid decisive battle at every turn, the man who kept fighting was the man who won. Lincoln was right. Nobody listened.
The war listened for them.