A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant

8. A Faith in Success

8 A Faith in Success I believe determination can do a great deal to sustain one. —Ulysses S. Grant The spring of 1865 reached full bloom in late April and early May. During this traditional time of renewal and rebirth, northerners rightly expected to be in full-throated celebration of war’s end, but instead they wore the black of mourning for their fallen president. With Father Abraham gone—“Now he belongs to the ages,” Secretary of War Stanton eulogized at Lincoln’s deathbed—the country instinctively looked to Grant, the man who had earned the nation’s trust and confidence by first earning that of the now dead president. Indeed, Grant had succeeded where a roll call of generals had failed, men whose military training, experience in the field, and even charisma all suggested that they should have worn the victor’s wreath, not the diminutive, taciturn westerner who a friend said “could remain silent in several languages.” How could this man with a perpetually rumpled coat and reputation for drink, who did not look or act the part of a great warrior like a George McClellan was wont to do, win the war? Acknowledging that the causative factors for any historical event are complex beyond ready explanation, the paramount reason for Grant’s overwhelming success as a military commander, and thus by extension the Union’s ultimate victory, was his analytical determination.1 Over the years, historians and others have offered alternative explanations for Grant’s success, some appearing almost before the ink of Lee’s signature at Appomattox had dried. A few of these arguments are persuasive and therefore worthy of consideration. The 156 a GeneraL WHo WiLL FiGHt long-acknowledged maxim that “God favors the biggest battalions” at first glance seems obvious and beyond challenge. Nevertheless, all Americans, including Grant and his contemporaries, know of the Americans’ unlikely victory over the British in the Revolution. More recent memory provides the cautionary tale of the twentieth century ’s industrial and economic American Goliath being checked, if not slain, by the David of North Vietnam. Such exceptions aside, typically the combatant who marshals the largest battalions and greater resources enjoys the best chance of success, and such was the case for Grant in the Civil War. From a strategic perspective, the United States maintained an overwhelming advantage throughout the war in both manpower and industrial capacity, the details of which are so familiar that repetition here is unnecessary. At the operational and tactical level, in almost every instance Grant’s combat power equaled or surpassed that of his opponent, with the notable exception of the Vicksburg campaign, where poor Confederate leadership negated a southern numerical advantage. Clearly, Grant won in the end because of overwhelming resources. But is it that simple? To attribute Grant’s success exclusively or even primarily to this wealth of resources is to ignore his record and the record of his predecessors in high command. In his first major battles at Forts Henry and Donelson, Union and Confederate forces in the region were appreciably the same, both in number and in experience. Lincoln’s observation to Irwin McDowell in the summer of 1861, “You are green, it is true; but they are green also; you are all green alike,” is equally applicable to the war’s western theater in the spring of 1862. A few months after Donelson at Shiloh, on the battle’s first day both armies mustered about forty thousand, and, while some credit the timely arrival of the Army of the Ohio with saving Grant’s command, Grant maintained and the evidence suggests that, with the appearance of Lew Wallace’s division from his own Army of the Tennessee, Grant would likely have achieved the same outcome against an exhausted and spent Confederate foe.2 The Overland campaign two years later against Robert E. Lee is perhaps the most frequently cited instance where the Union advan- A Faith in Success 157 tage in manpower and material was the deciding factor, and there is no denying that if Grant had not enjoyed such an advantage in resources his generalship would have been sorely tested against such a shrewd and capable opponent. Nevertheless, the point here is to compare, not Grant to Lee, but Grant to his predecessors in command of the Army of the Potomac, all of whom enjoyed an equal, if not greater, material advantage over Lee as did...