Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [36]
Despite yet another fall from a horse, which laid him up for two weeks, Grant was soon joined in Vicksburg by Julia and their children. In their presence he relaxed until October 1863, when Lincoln ordered him to go with all possible speed to Chattanooga, where a Union army was in desperate straits, and take command there.
Grant moved quickly and took in the situation swiftly—General Rosecrans had been badly beaten by Confederate general Braxton Bragg in the bloody Battle of Chickamauga and was now surrounded in Chattanooga, his army demoralized and starving. Grant relieved Rosecrans, replaced him with Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, opened up a new supply line down the Tennessee River, and, taking personal command, broke the siege of Chattanooga. Waiting only for Sherman to join him, he then moved to attack Bragg’s supposedly impregnable positions on Missionary Ridge, and in a brutal uphill frontal attack—no fancy maneuvering here—drove Bragg back and took six thousand Confederate prisoners.
It was another stunning victory, so widely applauded that it seemed almost inevitable, given the nature of American politics, that Grant would be nominated for the presidency by either the Republicans or the Democrats in ’64.
In two years of war Grant had not only proved that he knew how to fight and how to command an army, but also that he knew how to beat the enemy. Like Lincoln, he learned on the job and did not let his ego get in the way. Dogged determination, the ability to take a licking and come back fighting, above all the realization that the enemy’s difficulties were at least as great as his own, and perhaps greater—the notion that had struck him with such clarity way back in 1861 when he was still an inexperienced colonel of volunteers pursuing Colonel Harris’s Confederates through the countryside around the village of Florida, Missouri—all these had finally matured him into that rarest of men, a successful commander.
Grant was flattered at the offers he received, but not tempted, and was by now wise enough to let Lincoln know it. With a sigh of relief, no doubt—for Lincoln wanted a second term as much as any American president—he persuaded Congress to revive the rank of lieutenant general, nominated Grant be the first to receive that rank, and then called him to Washington to put him in command of all the Union armies.
Chapter Seven
GRANT ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON on March 8, 1864—the last time he had visited the capital was to try to persuade the War Department that he was not responsible for the theft of one thousand dollars when he had served as a quartermaster during the Mexican War—and quietly checked in at Willard’s Hotel, accompanied by his fourteen-year-old son Fred. The desk clerk was astonished when the man in the dusty, wrinkled, shabby uniform signed the register, “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Ill.” As the news of his presence spread through the hotel, crowds gathered in the lobby to watch Grant, having put his son to bed, come downstairs to smoke a cigar. Then he walked across Lafayette Park to the White House, where the Lincolns were holding a reception. Leaving his battered black slouch hat with a servant, he joined the crowd in the East Room, an awkward, ill-dressed figure, uneasy, as he always was in social situations without Julia to tell him what to do. Lincoln, either because he had been tipped off or because he recognized the new lieutenant general, came over to him, shook Grant’s hand, pulled him into the center of the room, and introduced him to Mrs. Lincoln, saying, “Why look,