Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [4]
Hancock was handsome, socially secure, a flamboyantly brilliant soldier, wealthy, and a famous ladykiller, all the things that Grant was not, which may have had something—possibly everything—to do with Grant’s feelings about Hancock, but the fact remains that he was one of the very few people for whom Grant expressed an open dislike, among the others being Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, and Custer. As a rule Grant nursed his grievances silently—although the same cannot be said of Mrs. Grant.3
In war Grant’s reactions to those who attempted to impose on him were swift, sure, bleak, and when necessary, brutal. Indeed, his first serious dose of fame came in February 1862, when he responded to a courteous plea for terms of surrender sent to him under a flag of truce by his old West Point classmate and friend Simon Bolivar Buckner, whom Grant had besieged and surrounded at Fort Donelson, with a brief note that signaled to many people, among them President Lincoln, that here at last was a Union general who did not mince words and was not afraid to suffer casualties and close with the enemy. “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted,” wrote Grant in brusque reply to Buckner. “I propose to move immediately upon your works.”
Buckner later protested at these “ungenerous and unchivalrous terms,” but he nevertheless promptly surrendered to Grant with nearly fifteen thousand Confederate troops and forty cannon, the first real Union victory in nine months of war, and one that caught the fancy of the American public because “unconditional surrender” mirrored Grant’s initials, so that for a time he was known in the press as “Unconditional Surrender Grant.”
If Buckner supposed that chivalry was a matter of concern to Grant, or that their old days together at West Point, or the fact that he had once loaned Grant money, would have a mellowing effect on Grant, he had misjudged his opponent badly. Grant was fair—he would be generous to a fault toward Lee at Appomattox—but chivalry, as Buckner should have known, played no part in his concept of war. For Grant, the least romantic of generals, the fastest way—indeed, the only way—to get the war over with was to fight and win. It went largely unnoticed at the time that Grant had suffered nearly three thousand casualties to two thousand on the Confederate side to win at Fort Donelson—casualties did not frighten Grant or shake his determination to fight, then or later.
Grant hated war, had no illusions about it, and disliked all attempts to disguise its brutality with chivalrous concepts or fancy uniforms. It was about killing, and he recognized from the very beginning of the war what few other Union generals were willing to face at the time, which was that there would have to be a whole lot of killing done—more than anybody on either side could possibly imagine—before the war was won.
Among the many puzzles about Grant is where he learned that simple lesson about war, which eluded and continues to elude so many generals, and what made this unassuming, deceptively quiet, shabbily dressed man, with a long history of personal failure and disappointment, turn almost overnight into a formidable commander of men.
He, who had failed at almost everything he tried, succeeded quite suddenly as a general, infused with unmistakable self-confidence and unshaken by the noise, carnage, and confusion of battle. People—particularly his old