The Personal memoirs and Military history of U.S. Grant versus the record of the Army of the Potomac

Preface

I

This volume has grown from what was, at first, intended to be a brief memorandum of review for private use. It is offered to the public, not as an attempt to write or correct history, but earnestly to ask that history already written shall be remembered.

y

Contents

PAGE CHAPTEB 1

I. Introductory

II. Generai. Grant's Command

Chapter I. Introductory

With the emphasis of rapidly approaching death upon his words, General Grant concludes the Preface to his " Personal Memoirs " with the words : " I have used my best efforts, with the aid of my eldest son, F. D. Grant, assisted by his brothers, to verify from the records every statement of fact given. The comments are my own, and show how I saw the matters treated of whether others saw them in the same light or not.

" With these remarks I present these volumes to the public, asking no favor but hoping they will meet the approval of the reader."

While through and between the characteristic lines, and woven among statements of facts, errors and omissions, in the work thus proffered as an applicant for place in history, the thoughtful reader finds much that surprises him, and much that justice forbids should pass unnoticed ;

no one can wish to doubt the sincerity of words thus written, though obvious infatuation sadly burdens faith with wonder.

Naturally one hesitates before taking ground agamst testhnony given as General Grant's has been. There cannot but be difadence in opposing one so exalted by his countrymen. It b no grateful task to stand before the tomb at Riverside and bring evidence against the words of hhn whose form lies there. But there are voices calling from other graves; there are memories shrining other names precious to comrades and countrymen ; and it were craven to stand in acquiescent silence while bias strives anew to mar the record of manly effort with

detraction.

It is not contemplated to attempt a technical criticism of the plans, on which were based the campaigns of General Grant. However military authorities may review them from the vantage ground of science; however strong may seem the theoretic proof that other plans, if carried out with equal energy and the same support, might, or would, have attained the same results at a less cost of life and time and treasure, — the fact remains established and accepted, that success crowned the adopted method with practical approval. The campaigns of General Grant have spoken for themselves for more than a score of years. Doubtless the study of his operations will bear fruit should war come again

INTRODUCTORY. 3

upon our land ; but it is not purposed now tp enter upon tlie labor of conjecturing what might have been or may be. „ tt c n 4-"

It is the "Personal Memours ot U. b. Ijrant, in their relation to the record upon which they purport to be founded, which now invite attention; for in them have been revived issues oi the past which might well have been left beneath the veil that time was kmdly drawing over them, and through them false impressions find their way to-day into the hearts and minds of thousands. ,

In examining the legacy General Grant has left, no reflection should be east upon his exercise of the undoubted right to preferences for individuals among those cooperating with or under hhn. Such preferences were inevitable. They were within his prerogative as much as any exercise of judgment. Neither will an attempt now be made to defend those of whom tL Memoirs appear to treat unjustly further than may be necessary to iUustrate the character of the offered statements. Within the compass of the work designed, an exhaustive criticism would be impossible. The object a^ned at now is to rneite investigation which shall decide the historic mine of this widely jmhUshed work

Had General Grant confined himself to expressions of opinions, none would gainsay his riffht; but when, in sustaining his opinions, he throws broadcast on the winds assertions as to facts, the record claims its place beside his statements. Some portions of the evidence seem to have escaped the notice of the author of the Memoirs and his assistants, and the reader is now asked to examine somewhat of the matters treated of in the light of neglected facts and authorities.

It is difficult to separate the " Personal Memoirs" of General Grant from the "Military History of U. S. Grant." So identical in subject matter, so harmonious in style and treatment, so consistent in mutual inconsistency, and so united in intent are the two works, it is impossible to escape the conviction that each is but the duplicate and authorized complement of the other. While General Grant has noticeably intensified some reflections contained in General Badeau's books, he has offered no protest to anything therein, except in the single instance of General Butler's operations at Bermuda Hundred. Moreover, he makes several references to "Badeau's history of my campaigns " as reliable authority, and thus accepts and endorses the statements of the earlier work. Constant effort will be made, however, to keep distinct all references to either.

Able pens have commented on events leading up to the operations of 1864 and 1865, and it is only to the record of the campaigns of those years, in which the Army of the Potomac participated, that attention will now be directed.

INTRODUCTORY. 5

The " Military History of U. S. Grant/' written by General Adam Badeau, Military Secretary and Aide-de-Camp to General Grant, was published in 1881. In 1883 Charles Seribner's Sons published " The Virginia Campaign of 1864 and 1865," written by General Andrew A. Humphreys, Chief of Engineers U. S. Army. The well-known intimate acquaintance of General Humphreys with all the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, he having served continuously therein from 1861 to the close of the war in 1865 ; the positions of Chief of Staff of the Army, and afterwards of Corps Commander, in which he had served with marked distinction during the campaign of which he wrote ; his acknowledged ability as a soldier thoroughly schooled and experienced ; and his character as a man, — all combine to render his work an authority of the highest order. It is believed that not one material fact as recorded by him has been questioned or controverted. To this General Grant bears silent but positive testimony. Although General Humphreys has noted and corrected some of the deviation^ from the record into which General Badeau had wandered, and which General Grant has persistently followed, the entire ignoring in the Memoirs of the name of General Humphreys, as far as the matters treated of will in any way permit, is the only discoverable evidence that General Grant, or his assistants, have been aware of the existence of

" The Virginia Campaign of 1864: and 1865." The supposition that they were in actual ignorance of this authority cannot be entertained; nor can it be believed that they would have failed to produce antagonistic authorities had such been obtainable.

It is proposed, therefore, for the convenience of the reader, to use, with very little other reference, the work of General Humphreys, as embodying substantially the established record, as far as it shall be necessary to examine it.

CHAPTER II. GENERAL GRANt's COMMAND

Entering upon the proposed examination, it is well, especially for the non-military reader, to recall the position from which General Grant contemplated and judged the events of the closing- year of the war. His authority and jurisdiction first suggest themselves in this connection.

On March 9, 1864, by order of the President, General Grant assumed command of the armies of the United States, and under circumstances very different from those that had been accorded to any predecessor. The battle of Gettysburg had been fought and won ; the armies in the field were veteran troops inured to all the demands of war ; and at last it had come to be acknowledged by the government at Washington, in theory at least, that but one chief must, or could, direct. The Army of the Potomac had not fought and suffered altogether in vain. With his commission as lieutenant-general there were pledged by the President to General Grant absolute freedom of action and the heartiest support for all his plans. That the pledge was redeemed General Badeau bears testimony when he says : " Probably no commander ever found a government more anxious to assist him, or more efficient in carrying out his plans ; " ^ and again, when stating the effective strength of the armies under General Grant's command to be five hundred and thirty-three thousand men, he says : " Over this force Grant was as absolutely supreme, as free to dictate its every movement, as any general not a monarch who ever took the field." ^ The new era had dawned for the general-in-chief.

Of the forces composing his command, a brief summary only is necessary. He found the Union armies divided into seventeen distinct commands which had hitherto been acting separately and independently. He writes : " I determined to stop this. To this end I regarded the Army of the Potomac as the centre, and all west to Memphis along the line described as our position at the time, and north of it^ the right wing ; the Army of the James, under General Butler, as the left wing, and all the troops south, as a force in the rear of the enemy." ^

His general plan, as stated, was to concentrate all the force possible against the Army of Northern Virginia on the south bank of the Rapidan, and against the Army under General Joseph E. Johnston at Dalton, Georgia. To this end, he arranged for a simultaneous movement all along the line of his extended command. General Sherman v/as to move from Chattanooga, having General Johnston's army and Atlanta for his objective points. General Crook, commanding in West Virginia, was to move from the mouth of the Gauley Kiver, and, with a cavalry force and artillery, strike the Virginia and Tennessee Kailroad. General Sigel, who was in command in the Valley of Virginia, was to advance up that valley. General Butler was to advance by the James River, having Richmond and Petersburg as his objective. General Banks, in the department of the Gulf, was ordered to assemble at New Orleans all the troops he had, in time to join the general move, Mobile to be his objective.

The armies were to move for the accomphshment of a single object. They were to act as a unit as far as such a thing was possible over such a vast field. General Lee, with the capital of the Confederacy, was the main end to which aU were to work. General Johnston, with Atlanta, was so important an obstacle in the way of accomplishing the main result as to be almost an independent objective. All other troops were to be employed exclusively in support of the two chief movements. This was the plan.' Truly a mighty plan, and a tremendous line of battle, that would tax the full ability and closest care of the mightiest merely human mind to guide in concert to success.

Of his lieutenants in chief subordinate commands. General Sherman, commanding his extreme right wing, was notedly his intimate friend and trusted adviser; and General Meade, commanding the centre, was known to him as the commander who, but three days after being placed at the head of the Army of the Potomac when in motion to overtake General Lee's invading army, had fought and won the battle from which dated the downfall of the Confederacy.

On March 9, General Grant received his commission as lieutenant-general. On March 10, he for the first time visited the Army of the Potomac, and, as General Humphreys states,^ then announced to General Meade his intention of making his headquarters with that army. March 11, he returned to Washington, and at once started for Nashville to install his successor in the command of the western, or right, wing of his army. On March 17, he formally assumed command of all the armies. On March 23, he arrived again at Washington, and on March 26, established his headquarters at Culpeper, a little country town, not fifteen miles from the Rapidan, " a few miles south of the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac," ^ and about seventy miles by rail southwest from Washington.

The order announcing the advancement of 1 Va. Camp., p. 5. ^ Mem., vol. ii., p. 121.

GENERAL GRANT'S COMMAND. H

General Grant to the supreme command was issued March 12, 1864, as foUows : —

"Major-General Halleck is, at his own request, reheved from duty as General-in-Chief of the Army, and Lieutenant-General U. S. Grant is assigned to the command of the Armies of the United States. The headquarters of the army will be in Washington, and also Avith Lieutenant- General Grant in the field." ^

On March 11, 1862, the President had issued War Order No. 3, as follows: -Major-General McUellan, having personally taken the field at the head of the Army of the Potomac,"^ untH otherwise ordered, he is relieved from the command of the other military departments, he retaining command of the Department of the Potomac."

These orders, separated by an interval of just two years, while they furnish another indication of the scope conceded to General Grant, do not appear to show that the question of the proper location for the headquarters of the general-in-chief had been positively settled. The old plan of division still obtained. WhHe the fact seems to have been accepted that where the personal presence of the directing chief could most aid the accomplishment of the plans in hand, there he should be, and there his headquarters must for the time perforce accompany him, it was evi-

2 All italics are the writer's unless otherwise stated.

dently held that the permanent location should still remain at Washington. That there were strong practical arguments sustanung this ^as* conclusion General Grant bears witness. Writing of his arrival in Washington to assume his new command, he says :

"It had been my intention before this to remain in the West, even if I was made lieutenant-general ; but when I got to Washington and saw the situation, it was plain that here was the point for the commanding general to be. Wo one else could, probably, resist the pressure that would be brought to bear upon him^ to desist from his own plans and pursue others."

General Badeau states the same, and adds : "The transcendent miportance of the issues in Virginia, upon which the fate of both the national and the rebel capital depended, made it apparent at the outset that the new general-mchief must either remain at Washington, in order to direct the movements in that vicinity, or take the field in person with the Army of the Potomac. For the entire rebel strength culniinated in Virginia; whatever efEorts were made elsewhere, however sturdy a defence at the bouth or West, only here could the battles be fought which would absolutely end the war."^

Elsewhere this same authority would seem to have offered strong arguments against the latter alternative of assuming a personal command ot the Army of the Potomac, or any other of the armies composing his forces. Having stated the firm determination of General Grant to neglect none of the advantages of force or skill, to leave no door open for failure, but to apply all the resources at his command to secure the success of his plans for the overthrow of the rebellion/ he repeatedly impresses upon his readers the fact^ necessary to be borne constantly in mind, " that the campaign from the Rapidan was only one part of a comprehensive scheme." ^ His impression (evidently the correct one) of the proper and only location of the point from which the influence of a guiding chief could best be exercised, may be inferred from his statement, that on May 12, before Spottsylvania Court House, '' Grant's headquarters were in a thickly-wooded dell, from which it was impossible to distinguish any portion of the field, hut the necessity of remaining at a j^oint where he could be readily reached by every corps commander left him no option:'^ If that necessity existed upon the comparatively contracted field at Spottsylvania Court House, with practically but two corps claiming his attention (for General Meade was there in command of the Army of the Potomac), it certainly applied with equal if not greater force upon the mighty field which, stretching from Virginia and the Ohio Eiver to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic Ocean to and beyond the Mississippi River, claimed the care of the general-in-chief . General Grant had been elevated to the chief command expressly that he might give his constant and most energetic supervision to this field ; and only from Washington could he readily, and without loss of time or power, reach the seventeen component parts of his widespread command.

We learn from General Badeau : " During the last year of the war, while Grant was actually in the field, most of his orders to important subordinates were transmitted first to Halleck, and by him repeated in Grant's name. So, also, many of the reports of generals at a distance were addressed originally to Halleck, as Chief of Staff, and then forwarded to Grant. The lieutenant-general himself, was obliged to send all his telegrams to Washington, as his only line of communication lay through that city ; and he therefore proposed that, for the sake of uniformity, all his messages for the government should be addressed to the Chief of Staff of the Army. In consequence, very few communications passed direct between the general-in-chief and the President or the Secretary of War." ^

This, of course, was the only method practicable in the absence of the commanding general from the seat of government and centre of communication. It was evidently hoped, if not expected, that under the new dispensation it would be found more satisfactory than previous experiments could be said to guarantee. On the night of May 4, while the Army of the Potomac was crossing the Rapidan, General Grant and General Meade, while upon the southern bank discussing plans for the morrow, received the information that Generals Sherman, Butler, and Crook had advanced as contemplated and ordered. Thereupon General Badeau's enthusiasm writes : " It had never happened before in the history of war that one man directed so completely four distinct armies separated by thousands of miles and numbering more than a quarter of a million soldiers ; ordering the operations of each for the same day, and receiving at night reports from each that his orders had been obeyed. The cooperation so long desired and planned had at last begun." ^

Subsequent experience, soon to be encountered, hardly sustained this sanguine conception. It was three o'clock on the afternoon of May 7, when a messenger from Washington reached General Grant, with the information that General Butler had landed his force at City Point on the 5th, and that General Sherman expected to give battle to General Johnston on the Tth.^ It was not until noon of May 9th that General Grant learned that on the 7th, in a dispatch to Washington containing " dubious " news, General Butler had applied for reinforcements.^ It was only on May ITth that the lieutenant-general received the news of General Sigel's defeat at Newmarket on the 15th, and learned that General Butler had been shut up within his intrenchments at Bermuda Hundred on the 16th ; the information reaching him in General Halleck's despatch, reading : " Sigel is in full retreat on Strasburg. He will do nothing hut run ; never did anything else. . . . Butler is falling back. Don't rely on him." ^

From the James Eiver, on June 24th, General Grant informed the President as follows : " During the last raid, the wires happened to be down between here and Fortress Monroe, and the cable broken between there and Cherrystone. This made it tahe from twelve to twenty-four hours, each way, for desi^atches to pass. Under such circumstances, it id as difficult for me to give orders or directions, because 1 coidd not tell how the conditions might change during the transit of despatches.''^ ^

These instances, taken at random from the acknowledged record, would seem to intimate that if the cooperation so long desired and planned had at last begun, it was at best but partial and temporary, and that the necessity of remaining at a point where he could be readily reached by his subordinate commanders offered serious objections to the continued presence of

General Grant with any one of the armies of his command.

General Badeau suggests another argument which seems to bear upon this point. Writing of the relations which existed between General Grant and General Meade, and the opinion entertained by some of those attached to General Grant's person and headquarters that it would have been better had General Meade been relieved from the command of the Army of the Potomac, he says : " If Grant could communicate direct with his corps commanders, it was believed that he might convey or infuse something of his own spirit and character, but the result of having a middleman was to make the whole organization wooden. Meade severed the nerve between the general-in-chief and the army. He was a non - conductor." ^ It would seem that this, also, applies with greater force to the greater command, — in fact, that the application of the idea embodied in the argument to the management of all the armies in the field, was the prime reason calling for the elevation of General Grant to the high rank he held.

This appears to have been President Lincoln's impression. Having seen General Grant's despatch of August 1, 1864, directing the dispositions to be made after his discovery of the fact that General Wright's pursuit of General Early " was feeble because of the constant and contrary orders he had been receiving from Washington, while I (Grant) was cut off from immediate communication by means of our cable across Chesapeake Bay being broken/' ^ he despatched to General Grant, under date of August 3, 1864, as follows : —

" I have seen your dispatch in which you say, ' I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field, mth instructions to put himself south of the enemy, and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also/ This I think is exactly right, as to how our forces should move. But please look over the dispatches you may have received from here, even since you made that order, and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here of ' putting our army south of the enemy,' or of ' following him to the death ' in any direction. / repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it."

General Grant replied that he " would start in two hours /or Washington'''^

The character of the existing channels of communication in and through Washington was well known to General Grant even before he left his western command. It certainly could not have surprised him that when, on July 12, 1864, General Early threatened Washington during the absence of the general-in-chief, the result was what General Badeau terms "a period of confusion and distracted counsels, of blunders in the cabinet and mismanagement in the field, almost unparalleled during the war." ^ He does not appear to have been surprised when General Hunter informed him " that he was so embarrassed with orders from Washington moving him first to the right and then to the left that he had lost all trace of the enemy." ^ When, in speaking of the orders he forwarded to General Sheridan, about October 10th, he says : " But this order had to go through Washington where it was intercepted ; and when Sheridan received what purported to be a statement of what I wanted him to do it was something entirely different,"^ he seems simply to be relating an incident such as he had contemplated when deciding that in Washington was the point for the commanding general to be.

But General Grant himself suggests another objection to the location of the headquarters of the armies of the United States with one of the armies in the field, when, bringing his gravest imputation, often repeated in substance, against General Warren, he says : " Warren's difficulty was two-fold : when he received an order to do anything, it would at once occur to his mind how all the balance of the army should be en-

1 Mil. Hist , vol. ii., p. 444. ^ Mem., vol. ii., p. 319.

gaged so as properly to cooperate with him. His ideas were generally good, but he would forget that the person giving him orders had thought of others at the time he had of him. In like manner, when he did get ready to execute an order, after giving most intelligent instructions to division commanders, he would go in with one division, holding the others in reserve until he could superintend their movements in person also, forgetting that division commanders could execute an order without his presence. His difficulty was constitutional and beyond his control. He was an officer of superior ability, quick perceptions, and personal courage to accomplish anything that could be done with a small command." ^ In other words, an instinctive impulse on General Warren's part to combine in his single person, at one and the same time, the army, corps and division commands and cares, and the resultant inability to confine himself to his proper sphere of action, neutralized his usefulness in spite of his ability, perception and courage. General Grant mentions no instance where General Warren exhibited the fault imputed to him; but he does state what would seem to be an illustrative case in point, when he relates that, on May 10th, the general-in-chief, whose attention had been absorbed by the battle waged by the Army of the Potomac, ordered General Burnside, who at the time was not under General Meade's orders, to fall back from a position he had gained within a few hundred yards of Spottsylvania Court House, completely turning General Lee's right, as he (the general-in-chief ) did not at the time know of the advantage that had been gained.^

No one will dispute the greatness of the fault thus imputed to General Warren ; but many will fail to see, even through the sophistries of General Badeau, how this specific trait, so reprehensible in a subordinate, can become commendable and prove unerring judgment in a superior.

Why the opinion formed by General Grant on his arrival in Washington, March 9th, " that here was the point for the commanding general to be," was changed in the few hours intervening between that arrival and his visit to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, is not stated in terms. General Badeau says, in addition to what has already been quoted as bearing on this point, that " from the moment, therefore, when it was decided that he should be entrusted with supreme command. Grant had no doubt whatever of his duty or his design. In Washington he would not stay in time of war ; he must then direct in person the campaigns of that renowned Army of the Potomac which had passed through so many vicissitudes, encountered so many hardships, and withstood so many dangers, and still seemed as far from its goal as if those vicissitudes and hardships and dangers liad never been endured."^ Whether there is any connection between this statement of General Badeau and the remark of General Grant elsewhere that " it was not an uncommon thins* for my staff-officers to hear from Eastern officers, ^ Well Grant has not met Bobby Lee yet/ " ^ can only be inferred. Whether the ultimate decision was one of the " judgments, made apparently at the moment, which he never reversed, and which the world has never seen reason to reverse," ^ it is not necessary now to decide.

Whether General Sigel would have retii-ed as rapidly as he is said to have done, or General Butler have caused what General Badeau calls " the total failure of one part of his scheme ; a part too, which he had every reason to expect would have proved of so great assistance,'' had they been more immediately under the direction of the lieutenant-general, who had planned their movements for them; whether General Banks would have failed so utterly, or his failure have so entirely " eliminated the use of forty thousand veterans whose cooperation in the grand campaign had been expected ; " whether General Hunter would have been better able to interpret the orders he received, or to locate the enemy with greater accuracy than has been credited to him ; whether General Early could have terrified as thoroughly as he is supposed to have done the government at Washington, or Generals Forrest and Morgan have preyed at will upon the Federal communications in the west; whether, in fact, any advantage would have been gained, had the directing general remained at a point where he could be readily reached by, and from which he could readily reach, his subordinates in command of his widespread forces, can never now be positively known.

It is sufficient for the present purpose to note that, with reference to his command. General Grant confessedly did not maintain a position such as his authorized historian distinctly states was necessary for the commander of an army to occupy ; and that his choice and decision, while undoubtedly in his judgment for the best, not only were open to, but invited, criticism. Under such circumstances, no matter how complete the triumph which ultimately crowned the vicissitudes, hardships and dangers of the Army of the Potomac, Generals Grant and Badeau, as historians of the campaign of 1864 and 1865, labor at an irremediable disadvantage. Of this the desperate rhapsodies, penned by General Badeau and complacently adopted by General Grant, bear witness.