Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [38]
Grant’s strategy for winning the war must be seen against the political realities that concerned the president. Draft riots in the North (represented in our day on film in Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of New York) were violent and widespread. It was inevitable that growing numbers of the working-class poor in Northern big cities took unkindly to the idea of being conscripted into the army as cannon fodder in order to liberate large numbers of Negroes who would work for lower wages than themselves. The situation was exacerbated by a system that permitted those who had enough money to avoid the draft by paying for a substitute to take their place, an inequity that somewhat resembled the way in which the children of the middle class could avoid the draft by going to graduate school during the Vietnam War, one hundred years later.
Grant was aware of all this, and he did not need Lincoln to point out to him that if the pressure on Lee was lack of manpower and supplies, the pressure on him was time. After Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg, there was no longer any realistic possibility of the South winning the war, but if it dragged on too long in a series of bloody battles with lengthening casualty lists and no end in sight, there was still a chance for Lincoln to lose the election of ’64, and even if he did not, there was still a chance for Northern antiwar feeling to become socially divisive (again, think ahead one hundred years to what happened when substantial numbers of Americans lost faith in victory in Vietnam), either of which could produce a compromise peace. Grant would have to fight hard, but he would also have to press forward and finish the enemy off as quickly as possible.
Previous Union attempts had often been aimed at bypassing the Army of Northern Virginia and taking Richmond—McClellan’s disastrous 1862 campaign in the Peninsula, when Lee first acquired his reputation as the South’s leading general, had been a perfect example of this—but Grant contemplated no fancy footwork or elaborate attempts to outflank Lee. It was not his style.
Grant had in mind a three-pronged attack on the Confederacy, though in the event, only two of the prongs would do serious damage. He would attack Lee frontally, driving him back on Richmond; the odious but politically powerful Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler, who was already on the James River, to the southeast of Richmond, would advance on Richmond itself; while Sherman would march through Georgia, take Atlanta, then march on to the sea, cutting Richmond (and Lee’s army) off from supplies from the west or the south.
Grant’s was to be the main effort. Sherman, Grant knew, could be trusted to succeed, and to pursue a draconian policy of destruction along the way of his advance—for it was Sherman’s intention to burn and destroy as much as he could on his march. Butler, who had been thwarted again and again in his attacks on Richmond, without seriously inconveniencing Lee, was to make a more determined effort to threaten the town and give Lee at least some reason to fear for what might be happening behind him.
Butler, true to form, failed to deliver, but Grant, for once, was unable to replace him with a more determined or professional commander, or at least one who was less overbearing and brutally pigheaded—Butler was a politician first and a general second, and Grant was no match for him when it came to political influence that in Butler’s case went backstairs all the way up to the White House. He tried to fire Butler and replace him with General Smith, his old West Point instructor; he failed. Even his three stars were no match for Butler.
In the first week of May 1864, Grant moved south and crossed the Rapidan River with nearly 120,000 men—an immense force for the day—and plunged into the region that was known then—and has since become famous in military history—as “the Wilderness,” an area of about fifteen square miles of scrub forest, heavy, tangled second-growth woods, abandoned farms, steep gullies,