The Life of Jefferson Davis

by Frank H. Alfriend

It is not at all necessary to weigh, in detail, the merits of General Grant as a soldier. With the overwhelming argument of results in his favor, there would be little encouragement, even if there could be strict justice, in denying superior ability to Grant. His campaigns have contributed nothing to military science, in its correct sense, and the military student will find in his operations few incidents that illustrate the art or economy of war. In discarding the formulas of the schools, and condemning the theories upon which the best of his predecessors had conducted the war, Grant, by no means, proved that he was not a good soldier. But his independence in this respect did not establish his claim to genius, since his contempt for military rules and theories was not followed by the display of any original features of true generalship. His name was coupled with a great disaster at Shiloh, where he was rescued from absolute destruction by the energy of Buell, and the delay of his adversary. At Donelson, at Vicksburg, and at Missionary Ridge, he had succeeded by mere weight of numbers; and, indeed, in no instance had he exhibited any other quality of worth, than boldness and perseverance. But his success was a sufficient recommendation to the material mind of the North, which did not once pause to consider how far Grant’s victories were due to his military merit.

But whatever the defects of Grant in the higher qualities of generalship, he was preëminently the man for the present emergency. If the Federal Government saw the necessity of vigorous warfare, looking to speedy and final results, General Grant knew how to conduct the campaign upon that idea, provided the Government would give him unlimited means, and the Northern people would consent to the unstinted sacrifice. Grant knew no other than an aggressive system of warfare, and contemplated no other method of destroying the Confederacy, than by the momentum of superior weight—by heavy, simultaneous and continuous blows. The plans of Grant were remarkable for their simplicity, and contemplated merely the employment of the maximum of force against the two main armies of the Confederacy, keeping the entire force of the South in constant and unrelieved strain. By “continuous hammering” he thus hoped eventually to destroy or exhaust it.

General Grant was again fortunate in having the unlimited confidence of his Government, which placed at his disposal a million of soldiers, and was prepared to accede to his every demand. To the most trusted of his lieutenants—Sherman—Grant intrusted the conduct of operations against the centre of the Confederacy, reserving for himself the control of the campaign against Richmond, and Lee’s army. His plan of operation was to destroy, not to defeat, an army which he knew could not be conquered, so long as its vitality remained. The military talent of the North had been already exhausted against Lee, and its largest army too often baffled by the Army of Northern Virginia, to admit the hope of defeating it in battle. To outgeneral Lee, Grant well knew required a greater master of the art of war than himself. To conquer the Army of Northern Virginia, he, not less than his army, knew to be impossible. His calculation was to wear it out by the “attrition” of successive and remorseless blows. This theory was based upon the plain calculation that the North could furnish a greater mass of humanity for the shambles, (as was afterward calculated it could spare a greater mass for the prisons,) than the South, and that thus when the latter should be exhausted, the former would still have left abundant material for an army. Such was Grant’s theory of the war. Whatever may be thought of it as a military conception, the theory was one that must succeed in the end, provided the perseverance of the North should hold out.

General Grant determined upon a direct advance with the Army of the Potomac against Richmond, by the overland route from the Rapidan. The frame-work of his plan, however, embraced coöperating movements in other quarters, which should, at the same time, occupy every man that might be available for the reënforcement of Lee. Grant was embarrassed by no lack of the men who were needed to make each one of these movements formidable. The most important of these was that designed to occupy the southern communications of Richmond, thus at once making the Confederate capital untenable, and cutting off the retreat of Lee. This operation was intrusted to General Butler, who, with thirty thousand men, was to ascend James River, establish himself in a fortified position near City Point, and invest Richmond on its south side. The other auxiliary movements were designed against the westward communications of Richmond, and were to be undertaken by Generals Sigel and Crook—the former, with seven thousand men, moving up the Shenandoah Valley, and the latter, with ten thousand, moving against the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. The force immediately under General Grant was one hundred and forty thousand men of all arms. Thus the grand aggregate of the Federal armies now threatening Richmond reached the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety thousand men. In addition to these was a force at Washington, equal in strength to the whole of Lee’s army.

The Federal Government was hardly less lavish in the distribution of its enormous resources to Sherman than to Grant. Sherman had proven himself an officer of much enterprise. Intellectually he was the superior of Grant, but not less than other Federal commanders he relied upon superior numbers to overcome the skill and valor of the Confederate armies. Physical momentum was needed to overwhelm Johnston, and was amply supplied. Sherman demanded one hundred thousand men to capture Atlanta, and, by the consolidation of the various armies which had hitherto operated independently in the West, his force attained within a few hundreds of that number.

In painful contrast with this enormous outlay of forces, were the feeble means of the Confederacy. When the season favorable for military operations opened, General Lee confronted Grant upon the Rapidan, and General Johnston faced Sherman near Dalton, in Northern Georgia. Neither of these armies reached fifty thousand men. The undaunted aspect and mien of firm resistance, with which both awaited the perilous onset of the enemy, were, however, assuring of the steady determination which still defended the Confederacy. Critical as was the emergency, the Government and the country yet believed the strength of these two armies equal to the great test of endurance, at least beyond the perils of the present campaign. To hold its own was the primary hope of the Confederacy. If autumn could be reached without decisive victories by the North, and the great Federal sacrifices of spring and summer should then have proven in vain, there was ample ground for hope of those dissensions among the enemy, which, throughout the struggle, constituted so large a share of Confederate expectation.

On the 3d of May, 1864, General Grant initiated the campaign in Virginia, by crossing the Rapidan with his advanced forces; on the 5th, the correspondent movement of Sherman, a thousand miles away, was begun. By the morning of the 5th, one hundred thousand Federal soldiers were across the Rapidan, and on the same day, the first round of the great wrestle occurred. Entertaining no doubt of his capacity to destroy Lee, Grant imagined that his adversary would seek to escape. Having, in advance, proclaimed his contempt for “maneuvres,” he was solicitous only for an opportunity to strike the Confederate army before it should elude his grasp. But Hooker had made the same calculation a year before, and was disappointed, and a like disappointment was now in store for Grant.

Lee had no power either to prevent the Federal crossing of the Rapidan, nor to prevent the turning of his right. Instead of retreating, he immediately assumed the aggressive, and dealt the assailant one of the most effective blows ever aimed by that powerful arm. Three days sufficed to reveal to the Federal commander his miscalculations of his adversary’s designs, and, baffled in all his operations, he already indicated distrust of his system of warfare, and was compelled to attempt by “maneuvre,” what he had failed to effect by brute force. The events of the 5th and 6th of May clearly demonstrated that strategy could not yet be dispensed with in warfare. Indeed, nothing but Lee’s extreme weakness and the untoward wounding of Longstreet, in just such a crisis, and in exactly the same manner as marked the fall of Jackson, prevented the defeat of the Federal campaign in its incipiency. But for these circumstances the Federal Agamemnon would have been completely unhorsed on the 6th of May, and would have added another name to the list of decapitated commanders whom Lee had successively brought to grief. But the luck of Grant did not forsake him, and he still had numbers sufficient to attempt the “hammering” process again. Grant’s first attempt at “maneuvre” was a movement upon Spottsylvania Court-house, a point south-east of the late battle-fields, by which he sought to throw his army between Lee and Richmond. Again he was to be disappointed, and again did the Confederate commander prove himself the master of his antagonist, in every thing that constitutes generalship. The Confederate forces were already at Spottsylvania, when the Federal column reached the neighborhood, and Lee, so cautious in his words, announced to his Government that the enemy had been “repulsed with heavy slaughter.”

But Lee had done far more than foil Grant. He had secured an impregnable position upon the Spottsylvania heights, against which Grant remorselessly, but vainly, dashed his huge columns for twelve days. At the end of that period Lee’s lines were still intact, his mien of resistance still preserved, and the “hammering” generalship of Grant had cost the North nearly fifty thousand veteran soldiers. Men already began to ask the question, to which history will find a ready answer: “What would be the result if the resources of the two commanders were reversed?” Not even the North could fail to see how entirely barren of advantage was all this horrible slaughter. The “shambles of the Wilderness” became the popular phrase descriptive of Grant’s operations, and the Northern public was rapidly reaching the conclusion that the “hammer would itself break on the anvil.”

While the dead-lock at Spottsylvania continued, and Lee held Grant at bay, Richmond was seriously threatened by coöperating movements of the enemy. General Grant had organized a powerful cavalry force under Sheridan, for operations against the Confederate communications. Sheridan struck out boldly in the direction of Richmond, followed closely by the Confederate cavalry. For several days he hovered in the neighborhood of the city, unable to penetrate the line of fortifications, and eventually retired in the direction of James River.