Abraham Lincoln’s written record on Ulysses S. Grant is not what most people expect. The public story is simple: Lincoln needed a general, Grant delivered victories, and the war ended. But the private record is different. Letters, telegrams, and diary entries from Lincoln’s secretary John Hay show a president who understood Grant before the results arrived to confirm it.
Lincoln defended Grant when defending him was politically costly. He put that defense in words precise enough that 160 years later, you can still hear exactly what he meant.
To understand why Lincoln’s written words about Grant matter, you have to understand what came before them. By the winter of 1861-1862, Lincoln was in a crisis with no clean solution. The Army of the Potomac sat in its camps under George McClellan doing almost nothing.
McClellan was an organizational genius. He created the army, drilled it, equipped it, and inspired almost devotional loyalty in his men. He just would not fight with it.
Lincoln’s correspondence from this period reads like a record of a president trying every available lever to move a general who refused to be moved. He visited McClellan personally. He sent letters urging action. He sat in councils of war.
McClellan treated Lincoln with contempt he barely bothered to conceal. In private letters, he referred to the president as the gorilla. One evening, he left Lincoln waiting in his parlor for an hour and then went upstairs to bed without seeing him at all.
Lincoln endured it. Not because he liked it, but because he had run out of alternatives. He was watching the Western theater more and more closely.
In February 1862, something changed. Grant attacked Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and took it. Then he moved immediately against Fort Donelson and took that, too, demanding and receiving unconditional surrender from the Confederate commander.
Northern newspapers turned that 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 attention would be tested. Shiloh, April 6th to 7th, 1862, was one of the bloodiest engagements of the war’s first year. Confederate forces launched a surprise attack on Grant’s army at Pittsburgh Landing, driving his men back toward the river.
Reinforcements arrived in the night. The second day saw Grant counterattack and regain the ground, but the cost was staggering. Roughly 13,000 Union casualties, with Confederate losses nearly as high.
The Northern press erupted. Grant was incompetent, they said. Reckless. Drunk. Politicians in Washington lined up to demand his removal. Some of his staunchest supporters began to wobble.
Lincoln did not. The line that survives from this moment, “I can’t spare this man. He fights,” is not from a letter or telegram. It was spoken.
Different witnesses, including William Tecumseh Sherman, recorded slightly different wordings. But the substance is the same. When pressed to get rid of Grant, Lincoln refused.
He did not say Grant was blameless. He did not say Shiloh went well. He said, “He fights.”
By April 1862, Lincoln had spent almost a year dealing with generals who would not fight. McClellan, Halleck, Buell. Men with impressive resumes who could always find a reason not to attack.
Now, the one general who had taken the war directly to the enemy was under pressure to be removed because his attack had been costly. Lincoln refused. He refused publicly enough that his comments spread.
Those eight words were the first and most important thing Lincoln ever said about Grant. And he said them before the big victories arrived to make defending Grant safe.
A year later, the pressure came again. This time it was worse, and it came from closer to home.
In the winter and spring of 1863, Grant was struggling to solve the Vicksburg problem. Vicksburg, Mississippi sat on high bluffs commanding a crucial bend in the Mississippi River. Take Vicksburg and the Union would split the Confederacy in two.
Lincoln famously called it the key and said, “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.”
Grant’s early approaches to the city failed. Canal projects, bayou expeditions, attempts to come at the city from different angles. One scheme after another bogged down in mud and high water.
The Northern press was merciless. Then something more alarming happened. Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois, Grant’s most reliable political champion, began to send nervous signs that perhaps Grant had lost his way.
If Washburne was wavering, it meant almost everyone had. Lincoln’s response, recorded later, is telling.
“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.”
Think about the political pressure around that decision. Spring 1863. Midterm elections on the horizon. War weariness in the north. The easiest thing in the world is to give the crowd what it wants.
Lincoln would not do it. He told visitors who came to complain about Grant that he was waiting for results. He held that line essentially alone.
On July 4th, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered. In a letter to Congressman Isaac Arnold written even before the surrender, Lincoln had already called Grant’s May campaign one of the most brilliant in the world.
After the city fell, Lincoln’s political risk was vindicated completely. But the vindication is not the point. The point is that months earlier, when even Washburne had turned, Lincoln said, “He shall have the chance.”
The document at the center of this story is dated April 30th, 1864. By then, Grant had been brought east and promoted to lieutenant general, the first officer since George Washington to hold three-star rank in the US Army.
He was general in chief of all Union armies, but he chose to make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. The Overland Campaign was about to begin.
Lincoln, who had spent years writing prodding, frustrated notes to his other generals, sat down to write Grant something different. John Hay recorded in his diary that the president read him the letter before sending it and called it admirable, full of kindness and dignity.
It begins quietly. Lincoln tells Grant he is entirely satisfied with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it.
In that one clause, Lincoln acknowledges a limit. He is saying, “I am not at your headquarters. I do not see what you see. From where I sit, reading reports and watching results, I am entirely satisfied.”
Then he goes further. He admits that during Grant’s campaigns, he had often thought of writing him with suggestions, ideas, cautions, alternative plans.
He says in effect, “I thought of sending those suggestions. I now 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.”
A president is telling his general in writing that the general’s judgment in the field has been better than what the president himself could have devised from Washington.
Lincoln then makes a promise. He tells Grant he sees the broad plan for the coming campaign and that he will not obtrude his own views. He will not interfere unless Grant asks for help.
He closes the letter with a benediction that manages to be both formal and utterly sincere. “And now with a brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you.”
Grant answered the next day. His letter is short, but it does exactly what it needs to do.
He writes that Lincoln’s confidence is acknowledged with pride, not as vanity, but as the reaction of a man aware of the weight that confidence carries. He promises, “It will be my earnest endeavor that you and the country shall not be disappointed.”
He goes out of his way to say that he has never had any cause to complain of the administration, that everything asked for has been yielded, and that if his success is less than he desires and expects, the fault is not with Lincoln.
Read the two letters together. On one side, a president saying, “I thought of meddling, but I see now that your judgment has exceeded mine and I will not interfere.” On the other, a general saying, “I know what it means that you trust me. I will do everything in my power not to fail you.”
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 in something close to panic. Grant’s Overland Campaign had done what he told Lincoln it would do. It had kept pressing Lee, forcing him back, pinning him inside the Richmond-Petersburg line.
But the cost had been enormous. Newspapers called him a butcher. Lincoln’s prospects for re-election looked bleak.
In that climate, there were proposals to pull troops away from the Petersburg lines to reinforce operations elsewhere. Grant didn’t want to do that. He understood that the siege around Petersburg was the choke point.
On August 17th, 1864, Lincoln sent Grant a telegram from Washington. The original is 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.”
Bulldog grip. Chew and choke. This is the same pen that wrote the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.
Here, he is writing in Grant’s register, using Grant’s own metaphor of the hold and sharpening it. He is telling Grant, “I see what you’re doing. I agree with it. I am not going to let political pressure pull you away from it.”
It is a military instruction and a political shield in one sentence. Grant later reportedly laughed when he read it and said that the president had more nerve than any of his advisers.
In January 1865, with the end of the war clearly in sight but not yet grasped, 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. He was of military age, and Lincoln knew how that looked. Robert himself wanted to join the army. Mary Lincoln was desperate not to lose their boy.
The solution Lincoln settled on was to ask Grant to take Robert onto his staff. That would let Robert see the war up close in a real but relatively protected role.
Lincoln tells Grant that Robert wishes to see something of the war before it ends and asks if Grant would permit him to serve as a volunteer aide on your staff for a limited time. He is careful to say that he does not want Robert to be in the way.
And then Lincoln adds a line he did not have to add. He effectively says he’s making this not as president, but as a friend.
He could have simply ordered it as commander-in-chief. He doesn’t. Lincoln understood exactly what he was saying there.
Grant agreed promptly. Robert joined Grant’s staff at City Point in February 1865. He would be present when Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse.
Throughout 1864 and 1865, as casualty lists lengthened and war weariness deepened, politicians and visitors kept coming to the White House to complain about the general. This time the general was Grant.
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 is not ignorance. It is discipline. Lincoln had spent years studying war. He read military treatises. He poured over maps.
With Grant, he made a different choice. He read the reports. He watched the results. He sent encouragement and resources. And he consciously stopped short of asking for detailed plans he might be tempted to second-guess.
He even deflected criticism with jokes. When someone pressed him about rumors that Grant drank too much, he is supposed to have said that if he knew what brand of whiskey Grant drank, he’d send a barrel of it to his other generals.
The joke is funny. It is also a statement of priorities. Lincoln was saying, “I do not care about the gossip. I care about the fact that this man fights and wins and doesn’t stop because it’s hard.”
This story cannot really be told from one side. Twenty years later, writing his personal memoirs while dying of throat cancer at Mount McGregor, Grant looked back on the war and on the man he had served under.
He called Lincoln incontestably the greatest man I have ever known. Not the greatest president or the greatest statesman. The greatest man.
Grant knew what that meant. He had served under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott in Mexico. He had fought against Robert E. Lee. He had worked with William Tecumseh Sherman. After the war, he had traveled the world and met emperors, kings, and prime ministers.
Out of all of them, he wrote, “Lincoln stood alone.”
He wrote that Lincoln had never pressed him to divulge details of his plans, even though Lincoln had every right to do so. That this restraint was one of the greatest gifts a general could receive.
And he wrote that Lincoln’s assassination, just days after Appomattox, was the darkest day of my life. Not Shiloh. Not Cold Harbor. The darkest day was the day the man who had said, “I cannot spare this man. He fights,” was killed when the war they had won together was barely over.
If you read Lincoln’s words about Grant in order, you see a pattern. First, Lincoln’s support was not conditional on success. He defended Grant at Shiloh before Vicksburg. He stood essentially alone when even Washburne had turned against him.
Second, Lincoln’s trust was active, not passive. The April 30th, 1864 letter is not a note from a president who’s simply tired of meddling. It is the letter of a man who has watched a general’s performance closely, compared what happened to what he had privately thought should happen, and concluded with rare intellectual honesty that the general’s judgment has been better than his own.
Third, the relationship becomes personal. “Not as president, but as a friend.” That is how he frames the request to bring Robert onto Grant’s staff. Lincoln was careful with language. When he called a man friend in writing, he meant it.
And finally, you see from Grant’s side what that trust did for him. Before the war, Grant had been a failure by most conventional measures. The war gave him a field where his particular qualities mattered. Even then, he was nearly undone by rumor and political maneuvering more than once.
Lincoln was the constant who refused to let those things remove him. When Grant wrote that Lincoln was the greatest man he had ever known, he was acknowledging a debt, one professional and one deeply personal.
Lincoln left a written record, and the record is specific. He left, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” He left, “I really believe I am the only friend Grant has left. He shall have the chance.” He left the April 30th letter with its admission that Grant’s judgment had exceeded his. He left, “Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible.” He left, “Not as president, but as a friend.”
Those are not the words of a manager checking boxes on a performance review. They are the words of one man recognizing something in another man and being willing to say it plainly in letters, in telegrams, in conversations other people wrote down.
Lincoln’s greatness with language is usually located in the set piece speeches. But there is something in the letters and telegrams that the speeches can’t quite carry. The speeches were for the country. The letters were for Grant.
In those lines, you see 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. That record has been sitting in published collections for more than a century. It is worth reading.