A History of the American People

in the heat of the Mexican War, fighting at Palo Alto, Resaca, Monterrey, and Mexico City, and
he learned a lot about logistics, later his greatest strength. But he hated and deplored the war,
which he regarded as wholly unjust, fought by a Democratic administration in order to acquire
more slave states, especially Texas. He saw the Civil War as a punishment on the entire country
by God-'Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment
in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.'
Grant was a man with a strong and simple moral sense. He had a first-class mind. He might
have made a brilliant writer-both his letters and his autobiography have the marks of genius. He
made an outstanding soldier. But there were fatal flaws in his system of self-discipline. All his
adult life he fought a battle with alcohol, often losing it. After the Mexican War, in civilian life,
he failed as a farmer, an engineer, a clerk, and a debt-collector. In 1861 he was thirty-nine, with a
wife, four children, a rotten job, and not one cent to his name, in serious danger of becoming the
town drunk. He welcomed the Civil War because he saw it as a crusade for justice. It changed his
life. A neighbor said: I saw new energies in him. He dropped his stoop-shouldered way of walking and set his hat forward on his forehead in a jaunty fashion.' He was immediately commissioned a colonel of volunteers and, shortly after, brigadier-general. He was not impressive to look at. He was a small man on a big horse, with an ill-kept, scrappy beard, a cigar clamped between his teeth, a slouch hat, an ordinary soldier's overcoat. But there was nothing slovenly about his work. He thought hard. He planned. He gave clear orders and saw to it they were obeyed, and followed up. His handling of movements and supplies was always meticulous. His Vicksburg campaign, though daring, was a model of careful planning, beautifully executed. But he was also a killer. A nice man, he gave no mercy in war until the battle was won. Lincoln loved him, and his letters to Grant are marvels of sincerity, sense, brevity, fatherly wisdom, and support. In October 1863 Lincoln gave Grant supreme command in the West, and in March 1864 he put him in charge of the main front, with the title of General-in-Chief of the Union army and the rank of lieutenant-general, held by no one since Washington and specially revived in Grant's favor by a delighted Congress. Nevertheless, the war was not yet won, and it is a tribute to the extraordinary determination of people in the South, and the almost unending courage of its soldiers, that, despite all the South's handicaps, and the North's strength, the war continued into and throughout 1864, more desperate than ever. The two main armies, the Army of the Potomac (North) and the Army of Northern Virginia (South) had faced each other and fought each other for three whole years and, as Grant said,fought more desperate battles than it probably ever before fell to the lot of two armies to
fight, without materially changing the vantage ground of either'-it was, indeed, a murderous
foretaste of the impenetrable Western Front of World War One. What to do, then? Grant, after
much argument with Lincoln, who steered him away from more ambitious alternatives,
determined on a two-pronged strategy. One army under General William T. Sherman (1820-91),
who had taken over from Grant as commander-in-chief in the West, would sweep through
Georgia and destroy the main east-west communications of the Confederacy. Grant's main army
would clear the almost impassable Wilderness Region west of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in
preparation for a final assault on Lee's army. The Battle of the Wilderness began on May 5-6,
1864, while on the 7th Sherman launched his assault on Atlanta and so to the sea.
The Wilderness battle proved indecisive, though horribly costly in men, and three days later
Grant was repulsed at Spotsylvania with equally heavy loss. At the end of the month Grant again
attacked at Cold Harbor, perhaps the most futile slaughter of the entire war. In six weeks Grant
had lost 60,000 men. Lee, too, had lost heavily-20,000 men, which proportionate to his resources