Decided on the Battlefield by David Alan Johnson

Author:David Alan Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

WITH A BULLDOG GRIP

The management of the Express, a newspaper in Buffalo, New York, displayed a large sign outside of its building: “GOD – GRANT – VICTORY.”26 This was a very nice gesture by the owners of the paper, and was probably much appreciated by the patriotic citizens of Buffalo, but nobody knew exactly what it meant—was it a plea for God to grant victory, or did it mean that God plus Grant equaled victory?

Throughout the North, an increasing number of the population would not have seen any meaning in either interpretation. If God had any intention of granting victory to the North, in this increasingly discouraging summer, he certainly had a strange way of going about it. And if God plus Grant was supposed to equal victory, more and more people were wishing that Grant would be left out of the equation. The Express’s sign maker made no mention of Abraham Lincoln, which was probably just as well. The general opinion of Lincoln was even lower than the opinion of Grant.

General Grant’s reputation was probably at its lowest point in those late-summer weeks. He had not destroyed Lee’s army; he had not captured Richmond; he could not seem to extract himself from Petersburg; and everything he had done up to this point, all his failures put together, had resulted in nothing but thousands of dead and wounded. The Democrats were calling him a butcher—“Butcher Grant.” Sometimes he was called a drunken butcher. Even the president’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, said that Grant was a butcher and that she could do a better job of running the army herself.

Actually, Grant was no more of a butcher than many other generals on both sides, including Robert E. Lee. In fact, Lee had a higher rate of casualties, dead and wounded, than Grant. “Lee was more reckless with men’s lives,” a biographer of Grant noted, “yet got away with it.”27 The most pointed example of Lee’s disregard for casualties is Pickett’s Charge, at Gettysburg, which resulted in many more casualties than Grant’s attack at Cold Harbor. Another historian grumbled, “If any general deserved the label ‘butcher,’ it was Lee.”28 But Grant had been called “butcher” too many times in the Northern press, especially by anti-Lincoln papers, and the name stuck.

But General Grant was not about to let this break his stride or change his style. His objective was still the same as it had been since May—the destruction of Lee’s army. He was well on his way to attaining this goal, and he knew it. At this point in time, Robert E. Lee also knew it. Grant had the men and the resources and the determination to keep on grinding Lee and wearing him down until he had no option but to surrender. Maybe the majority of voters in the North did not see this in August 1864, but both Grant and Lee did.

In mid-August, Grant decided to make an advance toward Richmond to distract Lee from reinforcing Jubal Early in the Shenandoah.

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