Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [31]
Nevertheless his victory brought down upon his head a torrent of criticism and abuse. The “butcher’s bill” of Shiloh, once it reached the press, fueled speculation that Grant had been caught napping, that he had deployed his forces ineptly, that he had been incapacitated by drink. Newspapers and members of Congress called for an investigation, while Halleck, shaken by the storm of criticism, did not attempt to defend Grant—quite the contrary.
Grant did little to defend himself—perhaps on the wise advice of Rawlins—and stayed as silent as Achilles in his tent, though he toyed with the idea of resigning from the army until talked out of it by Sherman. In time the storm blew over, chiefly because Lincoln never lost his confidence in Grant, and also because it began to dawn on people that Shiloh, however bloody, was a victory, and that the war would not be won without casualties.
When Jesse Grant, enraged at the criticism of his son, took to writing furious letters to the newspapers defending him, Grant wrote his father a firm letter that made it clear that the son was now grown up. “I have not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts at my defense. I require no defenders and for my sake let me alone…. Do nothing to correct what you have already done, but for the future keep quiet upon this subject.”3 It is hard not to sense the satisfaction with which Grant must have written this letter.
Demoted to Halleck’s second in command, Grant glumly accompanied Halleck on a tortuously slow advance toward Corinth, Mississippi—Halleck, once out from behind his desk, moved at a snail’s pace—until news came that Halleck had been ordered to Washington to replace McClellan as general in chief, a job that might, in fact, have been made to order for him, and at which he would excel—while Grant was to replace him as commander of Union forces in the West.
He was now, at last, in charge.
Chapter Six
NO SOONER DID GRANT have what he wanted—or appeared to want—than he slipped into one of his periodic slumps. In the fall of 1862 Halleck was in faraway Washington, Grant was deep in Mississippi, the outrage over the casualties at Shiloh was beginning to die down, put into perspective by what appeared to be an endless series of costly and shameful Union defeats at the hands of Robert E. Lee in the East, Mrs. Grant had joined him, and there was even talk, which would soon be fulfilled, of making Grant a major general in the Regular Army, as opposed to a mere major general of volunteers. On the other hand Grant now found himself military commander in an area almost the size of Western Europe, with social, political, and military problems that would have daunted Caesar. To say that Grant was not equipped for this role is putting it mildly. His previous experience in administration, after all, had been as a quartermaster of army supplies in the small garrison of Fort Vancouver and as a clerk wrapping packages in his father’s shop in Galena, under the watchful eyes of his younger brothers. His generals seemed unsure whether Grant was in command of them or not, and perhaps as a result the attack on the wily Confederate general Sterling Price at Iuka, Mississippi, by Generals Edward O. Ord and Rosecrans, and Rosecrans’s defense of Corinth were inconclusive and needlessly bloody battles, productive of very little except casualties. Grant was in the dumps.
Grant was a quick learner but not necessarily a happy one. It is one thing to know how to fight a battle, quite another to learn how to command other generals to fight one, and while he was pleased enough to have Halleck off his back, he had not entirely grown used to handling Halleck’s duties as well as his own. Washington expected him to win victories, and that he had done; but now Washington