Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [401]
Aware that communications would be sporadic once Lieutenant General Grant launched his assault on Lee, Lincoln wrote him a letter that Hay described as “full of kindness & dignity at once.” He conveyed his “entire satisfaction with what you have done,” and promised that “if there is anything wanting which is within my power to give,” it would be provided. Grant graciously replied that he had thus far “been astonished at the readiness with which every thing asked for has been yielded.” The final line of Grant’s letter illustrated the profound difference between his character and McClellan’s. “Should my success be less than I desire, and expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you.”
Lincoln had heartily approved Grant’s plan to move in three directions at once: the Army of the Potomac would strike Lee head-on, forcing him to retreat south toward Richmond; Sherman would move through Georgia from west to east, with the aim of capturing Atlanta; Butler, meanwhile, would move northeast against Richmond from the James River. “This concerted movement,” Lincoln reminded Hay, was what he had wanted all along, “so as to bring into action to our advantage our great superiority in numbers.” Still, on the eve of battle, Lincoln felt great “solicitude” for his lieutenant general, telling Browning that while he had complete confidence in Grant, he feared that “Lee would select his own ground, and await an attack, which would give him great advantages.”
Lincoln’s fears proved prescient. As Grant moved south, Lee awaited him in an area just west of Fredericksburg known as the Wilderness—an unforgiving maze of craggy ravines and slippery bogs, dense with vines and thorn bushes. The gloomy terrain provided cover for Lee’s earthworks and prevented Grant’s superb artillery from being used: it effectively negated the Union’s superiority of numbers. Nonetheless, Grant pushed relentlessly south to Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, slightly northeast of Richmond, engaging Lee in a hideous struggle. Men on both sides had to climb over the dead and dying, “lying in some places in piles three and four deep.” Grant’s biographer calls the campaign “a nightmare of inhumanity,” resulting in 86,000 Union and Confederate casualties in the space of seven weeks. “The world has never seen so bloody and so protracted a battle as the one being fought,” Grant told his wife at the end of the first nine days, “and I hope never will again.” He later admitted in his memoirs that he “always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made.”
Grant buried the dead and sent the wounded to Washington, where they arrived by the thousands. Noah Brooks recorded the heartbreaking scene as steamers reached the city wharves, carrying the “shattered wrecks” of brave soldiers. “Long trains of ambulances are in waiting, and the suffering heroes are tenderly handled and brought out upon stretchers, though with some of them even the lightest touch is torture and pain.” The ghastly scene, repeated day after day, was hard for Washingtonians to bear. Judge Taft was present at the wharves one morning when three thousand wounded soldiers disembarked, “some with their heads bound up and some with their arms in a Sling,” others limping along. As each steamer landed, crowds gathered around, hoping to recognize in “a maimed and battle-stained form, once so proud and manly,” a husband, son, or brother. Elizabeth Blair fled the city, admitting that “the lines [of] ambulances & the moans of their poor suffering men were too much for my nerves.”
“The carnage has been unexampled,” a depressed Bates lamented in his diary. Even the optimistic Seward acknowledged in his European circular that “it seems to myself like exaggeration, when I find, that, in describing conflict after conflict, in this energetic campaign, I am required always to say of the last one, that it was the severest battle of the war.” The immense tension