Never Call Retreat (45 page)

"You would be much interested in the teaching of our soldiers. It seems very queer to see grown men & women learning their a b ab's & making great staggering letters on their slates with great muscular exertion & a grin of satisfaction at producing one less drunk than the rest. Almost every regiment now has its school house & in some the first sergeants already make out their morning reports without assistance. This afternoon I observed a relief marching off guard at the parapet, and the last man lagging behind. I rode up intending to blow him sky high, but when I got there found that he had his gun in his right hand & his spelling book in his left & was so intent on the latter that he didn't see where he was going. I considered a moment & rode back to my place with a merciful wink at the neglect of duty."
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Perhaps it mattered little if the President talked boldly to one man and cautiously to another when he discussed Negro suffrage. A Negro who went soldiering with a gun in one hand and a spelling book in the other plainly was on his way to some place where he had never been before, and if all men had to accept that prodigious fact the difference between ten percent and Wade-Davis was not as big as men thought it was. Curious things began to happen. The House of Representatives, which had mustered 101 votes for the administration in the speakership contest, presently passed Davis' harsh bill, 73 to 59. No one opposed the measure except the hard core that opposed the administration on everything, at least fifty members did not vote at all, and if the President made the least effort to rally his supporters to defeat this bill there was no evidence of it. A little later the bill passed the Senate in a way equally curious, 26 to 3, with twenty Senators absent. And then Mr. Lincoln killed the bill with a pocket veto—that is, he simply refrained from signing it—and he issued a public statement which was the most curious part of the whole business.

He was unprepared, he said, by a formal approval of the Wade-Davis bill, to commit himself inflexibly to any single plan of reconstruction; he was also unprepared to destroy the ten percent governments already set up in Arkansas and Louisiana, or to assert that Congress was competent under the Constitution to abolish slavery in the states. At the same time, he hoped that a constitutional amendment killing slavery would soon be adopted, he was satisfied that the Wade-Davis plan was "very proper" for the loyal people of any state that chose to adopt it, and he was ready to go ahead with the Wade-Davis program in all such cases . . . all in all, he would not sign this bill but he would more or less go along with it if that was what people wanted.

This aroused Wade, Davis, and other radicals to a fine pitch of fury, showed that the President was not ready for a showdown on whether Congress or the executive would finally call the turn on reconstruction, and left the deep question of political rights for the former slave open for future determination; very far in the future, possibly. And it led Attorney General Bates to conclude that the friends of the Negro in Congress had gone quite mad.

"The Negro is ever uppermost in their thoughts, and is sure to give a sable tinge to every subject of legislation that comes before either house," he wrote. "And yet, strange to say, there has not been a single proposition calculated in the smallest degree to give any substantial advantage to the
freed-men,
by establishing their
status,
and giving them locality, stability and consistent social relations. The subject is used only as a topic (very sensitive) for electioneering—not at all for the good of the Negro."
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4. Solitary in a Crowd

BITTERLY
OPPOSED
on all other matters, Thaddeus Stevens and Sunset Cox did have one thing in common. Each man had reservations about Ulysses S. Grant.

How men felt about Grant became important, as 1864 began. Everyone was looking ahead to reconstruction, but it was necessary to remember that the war had not yet been won; to find a soldier who could win it was not really a function of Congress, but it was nevertheless a matter of concern. Grant looked more like a winner than anybody else, and after Bragg's beaten army drifted down the far slope of Missionary Ridge it was as certain as anything could be that Grant was going to be given the top command. Congress now had before it a bill to revive the old rank of lieutenant general in the army, and if the bill passed Grant would unquestionably get the job, which meant that he would rank every other Union soldier from Halleck on down; and both Stevens and Cox were opposed.

Neither man had anything in particular against Grant, but neither wanted to see him get this promotion. Cox had been disillusioned about him. As a good party man Cox had known moments, in the fall, when Grant looked like the answer to Democratic prayer: he was one of the most non-political of army officers, but he had voted for Buchanan in 1856 and if he was anything at all politically he must be a Democrat, so after Chattanooga there was a good deal of talk of making him the party's candidate for President in 1864. But before 1863 ended Cox wrote to Barlow that this would not do. Grant had gone on record—in a letter to a Republican Congressman—as saying that slavery was dead beyond hope of resurrection, and had declared flatly that although he wanted peace restored he would not "be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled." No one who talked that way could hope to get the Democratic nomination, and Cox told Barlow: "I regard the above expose of Gen. Grant's position as ending his chances for any Democratic support & as rendering Gen. McClellan a political 'necessity'—as our candidate."
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Grant was not enough of a Democrat for Cox, and at the same time he may have been a little too much of one for Stevens. It was hard to tell, because although Stevens was most outspoken it was not always easy to know what his outspoken words really meant. All that was clear now was that he was quibbling. He could see no point in reviving the rank of lieutenant general; the existing law gave the President power to put any major general in command of all of the armies, and "I think that we had better wait before we decorate this hero until the war is over." Stevens shared this position with James A. Garfield, who had ceased to be chief of staff of the Army of the Cumberland and had become instead a Congressman from Ohio. Garfield pointed out that "the President already has full power to select any major general from the regular or volunteer service to serve as General-in-Chief," and he felt that if the legislation was meant to honor a distinguished soldier for services rendered "I argue against its propriety at this time when the great race for the prizes of the war is not yet ended."
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To make Grant a lieutenant general was automatically to make him some sort of presidential candidate. Nobody especially wanted it that way, but nobody could prevent it because this was after all a political war and the principal military command was a political post no matter how hard everyone tried to pretend that it was not. Grant himself was highly disturbed by the prospect. He insisted that to become President was "the last thing in the world I desire," and said that it would be "highly unfortunate for myself, if not for the country." He said this in a letter to a friend in Illinois, and he went on to make it most explicit: "I am not a politician, never was and hope never to be, and could not write a political letter. My only desire is to serve the country in her present trials. To do this efficiently it is necessary to have the confidence of the Army and the people. I know no way to better secure this end than by a faithful performance of my duties. So long as I hold my present position I do not believe that I have the right to criticize the policy or orders of those above me, or to give utterance to views of my own except to the authorities at Washington, through the General-in-Chief of the Army. In this respect I know I have proven myself a good soldier. ... I infinitely prefer my present position to that of any civil office within the gift of the people."
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Neither quibbles nor disclaimers made any difference. The general mood now was to turn the entire military problem over to Grant and hope that he could handle it, and to give him increased rank was to serve notice on all other generals that this man was going to be boss. Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, who had been Grant's political sponsor ever since the early summer of 1861, was backing this bill, and he really had little trouble with it. It was passed on February 26 and President Lincoln signed it on February 29. On the next day the President appointed Grant lieutenant general, the Senate confirmed the appointment within twenty-four hours, and on March 8 in obedience to orders Grant reached Washington and presented himself at the White House.

Waiting for him was the lieutenant general's commission— and a universal curiosity. Nobody knew very much about this man. Most people, including the President himself, had never set eyes on him, and although his record as a soldier spoke for itself the man who had made the record had never actually become visible. Through some mix-up, nobody met Grant's train when he reached Washington, and he made his way to Willard's Hotel unescorted; registered, went to the dining room for dinner, and was no sooner seated there than everyone present recognized him. People stood up, craning their necks to see, and inevitably some man got up on a chair and cried: "Three cheers for Lieutenant General Grant!" There was much yelling and pounding on tables, and Grant, highly embarrassed, stood up, fumbled with his napkin, bowed all-inclusively, and then sat down and tried to go on with his meal. Presumably he did manage to eat something, but before long a Pennsylvania Congressman took him in tow, introduced him to everyone who could get within shouting distance, and then carried him off to the White House, where a weekly reception was in progress.

Here there was another mob scene. Grant met the President and Mrs. Lincoln, and learned that he was to come in next day for the formal presentation and acceptance of his new commission; then he was surrounded, and at last he found himself hoisted up on a crimson sofa where he had to stand so that everybody could see him. Reporter Noah Brooks called the crowd "the only real mob I ever saw in the White House," and described a wild disorder in which women suffered torn laces and crinolines and climbed on tables and chairs, partly to escape further damage and partly to get a better look at the general. Gideon Welles considered the whole business "rowdy and unseemly," and the general at last escaped, "flushed, heated and perspiring with the unwonted exertion."
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The people who were so eager to see Grant did not quite know what they were looking at. There was something baffling about him. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., looked him over and concluded that he "had no gait, no station, no manner."

There was a scrubby look about him, said Dana, "rather the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink," and Dana felt that except for the hard look in the clear blue eyes Grant looked like a half-pay character who had nothing to do but hang around the entrance to Willard's, cigar in mouth. There was a certain air of resolution about him, to be sure, but one can see Dana shaking his head disapprovingly as he finished the comment: "To see him talking and smoking in the lower entry of Willard's, in that crowd, in such linen, the general in chief of our armies on whom the destiny of empire seems to hang!"
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Men who were much less supercilious than Dana were equally puzzled. After the war a man who had served with Grant in the west talked about the relationship between Grant and the soldiers: "He was a man in whom the men had confidence, but they did not love him. He'd ride past without their knowing it. A few of the army knew him by sight. Logan, Smith, McPherson would raise a ripple of applause every time they went by; Grant never did." This man agreed with General Banks that the soldiers who took Vicksburg were a tough lot—"entirely cowhands, western men, fierce-fighting western men in for work and in for the war," Banks called them—and he could sum up their feeling toward Grant only by saying: "They knew him and trusted him and he knew them. He could stand any hardship they could stand and do their thinking besides."

A woman who saw Grant frequently in Washington noted that even in a crowd he always seemed to be alone. He was friendly and approachable, but he had "a peculiar aloofness," and she felt that a mysterious atmosphere surrounded him; "He walked through a crowd as though solitary."
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The crowds would always be about him, from now to the end of his life, and it would be his fate to go through them alone. Probably he never was more alone than he was on March 10, when he finished his ceremonial chores at the White House and went down to Brandy Station to visit headquarters of the Army of the Potomac.

This army had been in the back of everybody's mind all through the debate on the bill to have a lieutenant general. If Grant's promotion made people see him as a presidential candidate it also made them see him as a new broom. There was a feeling that a new broom was needed; a suspicion, right or wrong, that this army was never used to its full potential. Its officer corps complained bitterly that the administration played politics with military matters, and the administration in turn complained that the officers' own political bias sapped the army's will to win, and there was a good deal of truth in both complaints. Months earlier, when Gideon Welles suggested that it might be well to put someone in Meade's place, the President burst out: "What can I do with such generals as we have? Who among them is any better than Meade? To sweep away the whole of them from the chief command and substitute a new man would cause a shock and be likely to lead to combinations and troubles greater than we have now." As a matter of fact, shortly after Vicksburg the War Department did plan to replace Meade with Grant, and Grant protested vigorously, saying that "my going would do no possible good" and pointing out that officers of the Army of the Potomac would certainly resent having an outsider brought in to take command. Now he was here, the outsider, and as Grant left for Brandy Station Mr. Lincoln told John Nicolay that he hoped the new lieutenant general could "do something with the unfortunate Army of the Potomac."
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