THE APPROACH OF VICTORY
1. The War to the End of 1863.
The events of the Eastern theatre of war have been followed into the early summer of 1863, when Lee was for the second time about to invade the North. The Western theatre of war has been left unnoticed since the end of May, 1862. From that time to the end of the year no definite progress was made here by either side, but here also the perplexities of the military administration were considerable; and in Lincoln's life it must be noted that in these months the strain of anxiety about the Eastern army and about the policy of emancipation was accompanied by acute doubt in regard to the conduct of war in the West.
When Halleck had been summoned from the West, Lincoln had again a general by his side in Washington to exercise command under him of all the armies. Halleck was a man of some intellectual distinction who might be expected to take a broad view of the war as a whole; this and his freedom from petty feelings, as to which Lincoln's known opinion of him can be corroborated, doubtless made him useful as an adviser; nor for a considerable time was there any man with apparently better qualifications for his position. But Lincoln soon found, as has been seen, that Halleck lacked energy of will, and cannot have been long in discovering that his judgment was not very good. The President had thus to make the best use he could of expert advice upon which he would not have been justified in relying very fully.
When Halleck arrived at Corinth at the end of May, 1862, the whole of Western and Middle Tennessee was for the time clear of the enemy, and he turned his attention at once to the long delayed project of rescuing the Unionists in Eastern Tennessee, which was occupied by a Confederate army under General Kirby Smith. His object was to seize Chattanooga, which lay about 150 miles to the east of him, and invade Eastern Tennessee by way of the valley of the Tennessee River, which cuts through the mountains behind Chattanooga. With this in view he would doubtless have been wise if he had first continued his advance with his whole force against the Confederate army under Beauregard, which after evacuating Corinth had fallen back to rest and recruit in a far healthier situation 50 miles further south. Beauregard would have been obliged either to fight him with inferior numbers or to shut himself up in the fortress of Vicksburg. As it was, Halleck spent the month of June merely in repairing the railway line which runs from Corinth in the direction of Chattanooga. When he was called to Washington he left Grant, who for several months past had been kept idle as his second in command, in independent command of a force which was to remain near the Mississippi confronting Beauregard, but he restricted him to a merely defensive part by ordering him to keep a part of his army ready to send to Buell whenever that general needed it, as he soon did. Buell, who again took over his former independent command, was ordered by Halleck to advance on Chattanooga, using Corinth as his base of supply. Buell had wished that the base for the advance upon Chattanooga should be transferred to Nashville, in the centre of Tennessee, in which case the line of railway communication would have been shorter and also less exposed to raids by the Southern cavalry. After Halleck had gone, Buell obtained permission to effect this change of base. The whole month of June had been wasted in repairing the railway with a view to Halleck's faulty plan. When Buell himself was allowed to proceed on his own lines and was approaching Chattanooga, his communications with Nashville were twice, in the middle of July and in the middle of August, cut by Confederate cavalry raids, which did such serious damage as to impose great delay upon him. In the end of August and beginning of September Kirby Smith, whose army had been strengthened by troops transferred from Beauregard, crossed the mountains from East Tennessee by passes some distance northeast of Chattanooga, and invaded Kentucky, sending detachments to threaten Louisville on the Indiana border of Kentucky and Cincinnati in Ohio. It was necessary for Buell to retreat, when, after a week or more of uncertainty, it became clear that Kirby Smith's main force was committed to this invasion. Meanwhile General Bragg, who, owing to the illness of Beauregard, had succeeded to his command, left part of his force to hold Grant in check, marched with the remainder to support Kirby Smith, and succeeded in placing himself between Buell's army and Louisville, to protect which from Kirby Smith had become Buell's first object. It seems that Bragg, who could easily have been reinforced by Kirby Smith, had now an opportunity of fighting Buell with great advantage. But the Confederate generals, who mistakenly believed that Kentucky was at heart with them, saw an imaginary political gain in occupying Frankfort, the State capital, and formally setting up a new State Government there. Bragg therefore marched on to join Kirby Smith at Frankfort, which was well to the east of Buell's line of retreat, and Buell was able to reach Louisville unopposed by September 25.
These events were watched in the North with all the more anxiety because the Confederate invasion of Kentucky began just about the time of the second battle of Bull Run, and Buell arrived at Louisville within a week after the battle of Antietam while people were wondering how that victory would be followed up. Men of intelligence and influence, especially in the Western States, were loud in their complaints of Buell's want of vigour. It is remarkable that the Unionists of Kentucky, who suffered the most through his supposed faults, expressed their confidence in him; but his own soldiers did not like him, for he was a strict disciplinarian without either tact or any quality which much impressed them. Their reports to their homes in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, from which they mostly came, increased the feeling against him which was arising in those States, and his relations with the Governors of Ohio and Indiana, who were busy in sending him recruits and whose States were threatened with invasion, seem, wherever the fault may have lain, to have been unfortunate. Buell's most powerful friend had been McClellan, and by an irrational but unavoidable process of thought the real dilatoriness of McClellan became an argument for blaming Buell as well. Halleck defended him loyally, but this by now probably seemed to Lincoln the apology of one irresolute man for another. Stanton, whose efficiency in the business of the War Department gave him great weight, had become eager for the removal of Buell. Lincoln expected that as soon as Buell could cover Louisville he would take the offensive promptly. His army appears to have exceeded in numbers, though not very much, the combined forces of Bragg and Kirby Smith, and except as to cavalry it was probably as good in quality. If energetically used by Halleck some months before, the Western armies should have been strong enough to accomplish great results; and if the attempt had been made at first to raise much larger armies, it seems likely that the difficulties of training and organisation and command would have increased out of proportion to any gain. Buell remained some days at Louisville itself, receiving reinforcements which were considerable, but consisted mainly of raw recruits. While he was there orders arrived from Lincoln removing him and appointing his second in command, the Virginian Thomas, in his place. This was a wise choice; Thomas was one of the four Northern generals who won abiding distinction in the Civil War. But Thomas felt the injustice which was done to Buell, and he refused the command in a letter magnanimously defending him. The fact was that Lincoln had rescinded his orders before they were received, for he had issued them under the belief that Buell was remaining on the defensive, but learnt immediately that an offensive movement was in progress, and had no intention of changing commanders under those circumstances.
On October 8 a battle, which began in an accidental minor conflict, took place between Buell with 58,000 men and Bragg with considerably less than half that number of tried veterans. Buell made little use of his superior numbers, for which the fault may have lain with the corps commander who first became engaged and who did not report at once to him; the part of Buell's army which bore the brunt of the fighting suffered heavy losses, which made a painful impression in the North, and the public outcry against him, which had begun as soon as Kentucky was invaded by the Confederates, now increased. After the battle Bragg fell back and effected a junction with Kirby Smith. Their joint forces were not very far inferior to Buell's in numbers, but after a few more days Bragg determined to evacuate Kentucky, in which his hope of raising many recruits had been disappointed. Buell, on perceiving his intention, pursued him some distance, but, finding the roads bad for the movement of large bodies of troops, finally took up a position at Bowling Green, on the railway to the north of Nashville, intending later in the autumn to move a little south of Nashville and there to wait for the spring before again moving on Chattanooga. He was urged from Washington to press forward towards Chattanooga at once, but replied decidedly that he was unable to do so, and added that if a change of command was desired the present was a suitable time for it. At the end of October he was removed from command. In the meantime the Confederate forces that had been left to oppose Grant had attacked him and been signally defeated in two engagements, in each of which General Rosecrans, who was serving under Grant, was in immediate command on the Northern side. Rosecrans, who therefore began to be looked upon as a promising general, and indeed was one of those who, in the chatter of the time, were occasionally spoken of as suitable for a "military dictatorship," was now put in Buell's place, which Thomas had once refused. He advanced to Nashville, but was as firm as Buell in refusing to go further till he had accumulated rations enough to make him for a time independent of the railway. Ultimately he moved on Murfreesborough, some thirty miles further in the direction of Chattanooga. Here on December 31, 1862, Bragg, with somewhat inferior numbers, attacked him and gained an initial success, which Rosecrans and his subordinates, Thomas and Sheridan, were able to prevent him from making good. Bragg's losses were heavy, and, after waiting a few days in the hope that Rosecrans might retreat first, he fell back to a point near the Cumberland mountains a little in advance of Chattanooga. Thus the battle of Murfreesborough counted as a victory to the North, a slight set-off to the disaster at Fredericksburg a little while before. But it had no very striking consequences. For over six months Rosecrans proceeded no further. The Northern armies remained in more secure possession of all Tennessee west of the mountains than they had obtained in the first half of 1862; but the length of their communications and the great superiority of the South in cavalry, which could threaten those communications, suspended their further advance. Lincoln urged that their army could subsist on the country which it invaded, but Buell and Rosecrans treated the idea as impracticable; in fact, till a little later all Northern generals so regarded it.
Thus Chattanooga, which it was hoped would be occupied soon after Halleck had occupied Corinth, remained in Southern hands for more than a year after that, notwithstanding the removal of Buell, to whom this disappointment and the mortifying invasion of Kentucky were at first attributed. This was rightly felt to be unsatisfactory, but the chief blame that can now be imputed falls upon the mistakes of Halleck while he was still commanding in the West. There is no reason to suppose that Buell had any exceptional amount of intuition or of energy and it was right to demand that a general with both these qualities should be appointed if he could be found. But he was at least a prudent officer, of fair capacity, doing his best. The criticisms upon him, of which the well informed were lavish, were uttered without appreciation of practical difficulties or of the standard by which he was really to be judged. So, with far more justice than McClellan, he has been numbered among the misused generals. Lincoln, there is no doubt, had watched his proceedings, as he watched those of Rosecrans after him, with a feeling of impatience, and set him down as unenterprising and obstinate. In one point his Administration was much to blame in its treatment of the Western commanders. It became common political talk that the way to get victories was to treat unsuccessful generals almost as harshly as the French in the Revolution were understood to have treated them. Lincoln did not go thus far, but it was probably with his authority that before Buell was removed Halleck, with reluctance on his own part, wrote a letter referring to this prevalent idea and calculated to put about among the Western commanders an expectation that whichever of them first did something notable would be put over his less successful colleagues. Later on, and, as we can hardly doubt, with Lincoln's consent, Grant and Rosecrans were each informed that the first of them to win a victory would get the vacant major-generalship in the United States Army in place of his present volunteer rank. This was not the way to handle men with proper professional pride, and it is one of those cases, which are strangely few, where Lincoln made the sort of mistake that might have been expected from his want of training and not from his native generosity. But in the main his treatment of this difficult question was sound. Sharing as he did the prevailing impatience with Buell, he had no intention of yielding to it till there was a real prospect that a change of generals would be a change for the better. When the appointment of Thomas was proposed there really was such a prospect. When Rosecrans was eventually put in Buell's place the result was disappointing to Lincoln, but it was evidently not a bad appointment, and a situation had then arisen in which it would have been folly to retain Buell if any capable successor to him could be found; for the Governors of Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, of whom the first named was reputed the ablest of the "war Governors" in the West, and on whom his army depended for recruits, now combined in representations against him which could not be ignored. Lincoln, who could not have personal acquaintance with the generals of the Western armies as he had with those in the East, was, it should be observed, throughout unceasing in his efforts to get the fullest and clearest impression of them that he could; he was always, as it has been put, "taking measurements" of men, and a good deal of what seemed idle and gossipy talk with chance visitors, who could tell him little incidents or give him new impressions, seems to have had this serious purpose. For the first half of the war the choice of men for high commands was the most harassing of all the difficulties of his administration. There is no doubt of his constant watchfulness to discern and promote merit. He was certainly beset by the feeling that generals were apt to be wanting in the vigour and boldness which the conduct of the war demanded, but, though this in some cases probably misled him, upon the whole there was good reason for it. On the other hand, it must be considered that all this while he knew himself to be losing influence through his supposed want of energy in the war, and that he was under strong and unceasing pressure from every influential quarter to dismiss every general who caused disappointment. Newspapers and private letters of the time demonstrate that there was intense impatience against him for not producing victorious generals. This being so, his own patience in this matter and his resolution to give those under him a fair chance appear very remarkable and were certainly very wise.
We have come, however, to the end, not of all the clamour against Lincoln, but of his own worst perplexities. In passing to the operations further west we are passing to an instance in which Lincoln felt it right to stand to the end by a decried commander, and that decried commander proved to possess the very qualities for which he had vainly looked in others. The reverse side of General Grant's fame is well enough known to the world. Before the war he had been living under a cloud. In the autumn of 1862, while his army lay between Corinth and Memphis, the cloud still rested on his reputation. In spite of the glory he had won for a moment at Fort Donelson, large circles were ready to speak of him simply as an "incompetent and disagreeable man." The crowning work of his life was accomplished with terrible bloodshed which was often attributed to callousness and incapacity on his part. The eight years of his Presidency afterwards, which cannot properly be discussed here, added at the best no lustre to his memory. Later still, when he visited Europe as a celebrity the general impression which he created seems to be contained in the words "a rude man." Thus the Grant that we discover in the recollections of a few loyal and loving friends, and in the memoirs which he himself began when late in life he lost his money and which he finished with the pains of death upon him, is a surprising, in some ways pathetic, figure. He had been a shy country boy, ready enough at all the work of a farm and good with horses, but with none of the business aptitude that make a successful farmer, when his father made him go to West Point. Here he showed no great promise and made few friends; his health became delicate, and he wanted to leave the army and become a teacher of mathematics. But the Mexican War, one of the most unjust in all history, as he afterwards said, broke out, and—so he later thought—saved his life from consumption by keeping him in the open air. After that he did retire, failed at farming and other ventures, and at thirty-nine, when the Civil War began, was as has been seen, a shabby-looking, shiftless fellow, pretty far gone in the habit of drink, and more or less occupied about a leather business of his father's. Rough in appearance and in manner he remained—the very opposite of smart, the very opposite of versatile, the very opposite of expansive in speech or social intercourse. Unlike many rough people, he had a really simple character—truthful, modest, and kind; without varied interests, or complicated emotions, or much sense of fun, but thinking intensely on the problems that he did see before him, and in his silent way keenly sensitive on most of the points on which it is well to be sensitive. His friends reckoned up the very few occasions on which he was ever seen to be angry; only one could be recalled on which he was angry on his own account; the cruelty of a driver to animals in his supply train, heartless neglect in carrying out the arrangements he had made for the comfort of the sick and wounded, these were the sort of occasions which broke down Grant's habitual self-possession and good temper. "He was never too anxious," wrote Chaplain Eaton, who, having been set by him in charge of the negro refugees with his army, had excellent means of judging, "never too preoccupied with the great problems that beset him, to take a sincere and humane interest in the welfare of the most subordinate labourer dependent upon him." And he had delicacy of feeling in other ways. Once in the crowd at some hotel, in which he mingled an undistinguished figure, an old officer under him tried on a lecherous story for the entertainment of the General, who did not look the sort of man to resent it; Grant, who did not wish to set down an older man roughly, and had no ready phrases, but had, as it happens, a sensitive skin, was observed to blush to the roots of his hair in exquisite discomfort. It would be easy to multiply little recorded traits of this somewhat unexpected kind, which give grace to the memory of his determination in a duty which became very grim.
The simplicity of character as well as manner which endeared him to a few close associates was probably a very poor equipment for the Presidency, which, from that very simplicity, he afterwards treated as his due; and Grant presented in some ways as great a contrast as can be imagined to the large and complex mind of Lincoln. But he was the man that Lincoln had yearned for. Whatever degree of military skill may be ascribed to him, he had in the fullest measure the moral attributes of a commander. The sense that the war could be put through and must be put through possessed his soul. He was insusceptible to personal danger—at least, so observers said, though he himself told a different story—and he taught himself to keep a quiet mind in the presence of losses, rout in battle, or failure in a campaign. It was said that he never troubled himself with fancies as to what the enemy might be doing, and he confessed to having constantly told himself that the enemy was as much afraid of him as he of the enemy. His military talent was doubled in efficacy by his indomitable constancy. In one sense, moreover, and that a wholly good sense, he was a political general; for he had constantly before his mind the aims of the Government which employed him, perceiving early that there were only two possible ends to the war, the complete subjugation of the South or the complete failure of the Union; perceiving also that there was no danger of exhausting the resources of the North and great danger of discouraging its spirit, while the position of the South was in this respect the precise contrary. He was therefore the better able to serve the State as a soldier, because throughout he measured by a just standard the ulterior good or harm of success or failure in his enterprises.