Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [24]
It may be too that Grant at last realized his own strengths. He was not a thinker, like the unfortunate General McClennan, who thought so long and hard about a campaign that it never got anywhere, leading Lincoln to complain that McClennan had “a case of the slows,” and exasperating the president until he finally asked if he could borrow the Army of the Potomac since McClennan wasn’t using it. Grant, on the contrary, was a man of action, and movement was what stimulated him, not thought. He would try something, and if it failed he would try something else, but his instinct was always to keep moving forward against the enemy.
Napoleon, when asked what his method was of beginning a battle, replied, “On s’engage, et puis on voit.” Much as Grant, according to his memoirs, disliked Napoleon, his view of battle was the same—he attacked the enemy, and then he waited to see what happened. One senses in the words of Grant’s about his anticlimactic attack on Harris, a dawning understanding that he had found, at last, something he could do better than other men. He was courageous, he had common sense, he could read a map, and, like the child he had been, he would never go backward and retrace his steps once he had started out. In an army full of commanders busily planning how to win a war without fighting a battle, Grant sought one out. The elements of military genius were all there, hardened and annealed by the experience of Mexico and the years of failure—now at last he had the opportunity to use them.
While Grant marched his men up and down the dusty Missouri roads in pursuit of Harris, larger events were taking place in Springfield and Washington, D.C. President Lincoln was anxious to create enough brigadier generals to command the rapidly growing volunteer army, and Representative Washburne, a fellow Illinois politician, convinced the president that at least one of these new generals should come from his own district. Lincoln, who never forgot the rule that “all politics are local,” allowed Washburne to name his pick. Since Grant was the only Galena man appointed a colonel, Washburne put his name down for promotion to the rank of brigadier general, and by the time Grant returned from the fruitless chase after Harris he read in the newspaper that he was now Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
Only a few months ago he had been ex-captain Sam Grant, slouching behind the counter of his father’s store, wrapping packages. Now, he wore the single gold star of a brigadier general on his shoulders and, surrounded by his staff, rode into Cairo, Illinois, to set up his headquarters at the Cairo Hotel, which no less an authority than W. H. Russell, the famous war correspondent of the London Times, would describe as a hell hole of heat, vermin, and flies.
Russell’s interest in Cairo, Illinois, like Grant’s, is a point worth noting. At this early stage of the Civil War, the belief on both sides was that one big battle would bring the other side to its senses. If nothing else the first Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas, as it is known in the South) would shortly prove that this assumption was doubtful. Fought within sight of Washington, D.C., in what are now its suburbs, Bull Run was a devastating defeat for the North. Although crowds of civilians had come out by carriage to see the battle, as if it were a parade, Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell’s army was badly mauled by the army of Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard. McDowell lost nearly three thousand men and twenty-seven cannon, as most of his troops broke and ran. A determined pursuit might have won Beauregard Washington, but the victorious Confederates were as exhausted as their defeated opponents.
Three things emerged from the disaster that would