A History of the American People

again capable of winning the war. It has been a sad day for us,' said Lee at one o'clock the next morning,almost too tired to dismount.' I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett's division ... And if they had been supported as they were to have been-but for some reason not yet fully explained to me, were not-we would have held the position and the day would have been ours.' Then he paused, and saidin a loud voice': Too bad! Too bad! OH! TOO BAD!'' General Meade was criticized for not following up Lee's retreating forces immediately and with energy, but that was easier said than done-his own men had been terribly mauled. But he was a reliable general and with him in charge of the main front on the Atlantic coast Lincoln could be satisfied. Meanwhile, the war in the West was at last going in the Union's favor. Lincoln's strategy was to neutralize as much of the South as he could, divide it and cut it into pieces, then subdue each separately. The naval war, despite the North's huge preponderance in ships, did not always go its way. The South equipped commercial raiders who altogether took or sank 350 Northern merchant ships, but this was no more than minor attrition. When the Union forces abandoned the naval yard at Portsmouth, Virginia, at the beginning of the war, they scuttled a new frigate Merrimac. The Confederates raised it, renamed it Virginia, and clad it in iron. It met the Union ironclad Monitor in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862 in an inconclusive five-hour duel, the first battle of iron ships in history. But the Confederates were not able to get the Virginia into the Mexican Gulf, where it might have served a strategic purpose. They stationed more troops guarding its base than it was worth. The South could run the blockade but they never came near breaking it, and the brilliant campaign of Commodore David Farragut in the Gulf finally sealed the mouth of the Mississippi. To the north, and in the Western theater, General Grant achieved the first substantial Union successes on land when he took Forts Henry and Donelson; and after Shiloh he commanded the Mississippi as far south as Vicksburg. The North now controlled the Tennessee River and the Cumberland and it took New Orleans and Memphis. But the South still controlled zoo miles of the Mississippi between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana. Vicksburg was strongly fortified and protected by natural defenses. Attempts to take it, in May-June 1862 and again in December January 1863 failed. In May 1863 Grant made a third attempt, and after a fierce siege in which each side lost 10,000, he forced it to surrender the day after Meade won Gettysburg (July 4). Five days later Port Hudson fell, the entire Mississippi was in Union hands, and the Confederacy was split in two. In Grant Lincoln at last found a war-winning general, and a man he could trust and esteem. Unlike the others, Grant asked for nothing and did not expect the President to approve his plans in advance and so take the blame if things went wrong.' Grant was an unprepossessing general. Lincoln said:He is the quietest little man you ever saw. He makes the least fuss of any man I
ever knew. I believe on several occasions he has been in [the Oval Office] a minute or so before I
knew he was there. The only evidence you have that he's in any particular place is that he makes
things move.' Grant was born in 1822 at Point Pleasant, Ohio. His father was a tanner. In his day
West Point was, as he put it, a place for clever, hard-working boys from families that were trying to gain advancement in position or to prevent slippage from a precarious place.' Lee, an aristocrat of sorts, was unusual. In Grant's class of43 were Longstreet, McClellan,
and Sherman, among other Civil War generals-all of them meritocrats. The chief instructor in
Grant's day, Dents Hart Mahan-father of the outstanding naval strategist-taught them that
`carrying the war into the heart of the assailant's country is the surest way of making him share
its burdens and foil his plans.' Lee was never able to do this-Grant and Sherman did. Grant was