On May 24, 1861, Ulysses S. Grant relegated to commanding a unit of Illinois volunteers applied for reinstatement into the regular army. A few weeks before, Robert E. Lee had made his fateful decision by resigning his commission in the army to serve his beloved Virginia...another soldier was trying desperately to get himself back into the army.
The two men, who had met briefly during the war with Mexico, couldn’t have been more different. Lee was courtly, patrician, southern gentleman while Grant, the son of a flinty, tough Ohio tanner and self-made businessman was seen as a crude, sullen drunk. A low grade laborer sort...Grant had been an abject failure at almost everything he tried, including his early army career, except when it came to making modern war.
Born in Ohio on April 27, 1822, the future general and president was the first child of Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant. The Grants named their son Hiram Ulysses and moved soon after his birth to Georgetown, Ohio where the boy spent the first sixteen years of his life.
Jesse Grant, whose own father had been unable to support his children, had been apprenticed to a tradesman at the age of eleven, and a hard pioneer childhood had made him mean-spirited as well as ambitious. Always disappointed with Ulysses, Jesse Grant never failed to let his son know that he showed so little potential. To escape his father’s belittling and the tanning business, Grant worked on the farm owned by his father.
After a year at a Kentucky boarding school, the seventeen-year old Grant was sent to West Point. When he arrived at “the Point,” Grant stood at five foot one and weighed 120 pounds. In a momentous twist of fate his name was changed forever. Grant discovered that he had been preregistered and his middle name Hiram had been changed for his mother’s maiden name of Simpson. Unable to correct the error, Grant took the new name as his own...which it really was.
If it hadn’t been for the Civil War, Grant might have been relegated to history’s dung heap. Though he had served in Mexico, his postwar army career in the depressing northwest frontier had been clouded by his resignation under a charge of drunkenness.
After that, his every business venture, every investment as a civilian, even a small farm, all failed. Grant was back working as a clerk in his father’s tannery in galena, Illinois...a humiliating personal defeat when the war broke out and rescued him. He immediately saw a return to service as the only road to his future.
Grant also tried the personal approach, going to the Cincinnati headquarters of George B. McClellan who had been named a general of the Ohio volunteers. McClellan had recollections of Grant’s reputation and of Grant being on a drinking spree when their paths crossed at Fort Vancouver in 1853. The general avoided an interview with Grant, and Grant settled for the command of a group of Illinois volunteers.
As in Lee’s first Civil War battle, Grant’s first encounter was also less than glorious. Early in the morning of November 7, 1861, some three thousand Union troops under Grant were transported by boat from their camp at Cairo, Illinois, and met the Confederate forces under the command of the inept General Gideon Pillow, one of Jefferson Davis’s worst political appointments. Though the Confederates fought stubbornly, they were pushed back to their camp at Belmont, Missouri on the banks of the Mississippi.
Grants troops were celebrating and looting the Confederate camp when they suddenly came under heavy fire from cannons on a high bluff across the river. These troops were commanded by General Leonidas Polk (1806-1864), another friend of Davis. A west Pointer, Polk had traded his sword for the robes of an Episcopal bishop but then returned to the Confederate army. Now he ferried twenty-seven hundred Confederate troops across the river and attacked Grant.
“General Grant...” and aide cried out in horror and surprise... “We are surrounded by the enemy.”
General Grant seated beside his command tent, took a cigar stub from his pocket and calmly lit it before responding to the young officer, “Well we must cut our way out as we cut our way in.”
Forced to leave behind his wounded and the captured Confederate materials from the “Pillow fight,” Grant was fortunate to escape with his command intact and his life. From his bluff position, General Polk could see Grant clearly at his encampment, and invited soldiers to “try your marksmanship on him if you please.” Fortunate for Grant and the Union he was out of range of the marksmen. Grant later called the action a “raid” and said he had won but his claim was disputed by Polk who called it a “battle” that he had clearly won with Grant and the Union in retreat.
Polk and the Confederacy, later realized the significance of the opportunity lost to eliminate a brilliant foe on that battlefield at Belmont, Missouri. As we shall see later, Grant will utilize the Anaconda Plan originated by the aging General Winfield Scott to move his troops systematically down the Mississippi, establishing security post along the way and cutting off the commerce of the south including the gunrunners. The fat old General with the Gout, whom all made fun of including the press and the President and the drunk... squeezing the life slowly from a Confederacy, locked resolutely in the ever tightening hold of the giant (Grant) boa.
This tactical error on the part of the Confederacy had been followed by perhaps the most glaring military error of the entire war...a mistake in judgment at the very top of the Command...by Jefferson Davis himself occurred on July 21, 1861 at the Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas). Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who had ordered and led the attack on Fort Sumter, took command of a Confederate army guarding a strategic train junction at Manassas, Virginia, about thirty miles southwest of Washington , D.C.. Being in short supply of forces, Beauregard issued a proclamation to the locals asking them to rouse to defend their state against the “reckless and unprincipled tyrant invading your soil.”
Beauregard’s troops were responsible for blocking the federal approach to the Confederate capital, which had been moved to Richmond, Virginia from Montgomery, Alabama when Virginia seceded. He was also ordered to hold the railroad junction at Manassas where Beauregard had deployed his troops along a small river called Bull Run.
Some fifty miles away, at the northern end of Virginia’s rich Shenandoah Valley, two more armies faced each other. The Union troops were under general Robert Patterson, and aging army veteran; the Confederates commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston (1807-1891). Patterson’s orders from Washington were to block Johnston so he could not slip south to Manassas to reinforce Beauregard.
Marching from Alexandria, Virginia on July 16, the Union army, commanded by fellow West Pointer General Irvin McDowell (1818-1885) began to move into Confederate territory. McDowell had problems as well...many of his men were three month volunteers with a rapidly approaching discharge date. To add to the problem McDowell had been pressured to heed the Union press and politicians to take Richmond. With this strong political pressure behind him, McDowell, an aging hulk of a man who was said to eat a whole watermelon for dessert, was one of the few regular army commanders who had remained loyal to the Union...continued unabated without maps but with great pomp and circumstance into the greatest battle of the war.
The regimental band played “Dixie” as these green recruits marched in ragtag manner, they sung the tune that caused lumps to grow in the throats of their opponents...they had no idea what lay ahead except the glory of the Union and the victory that was soon to come.
Adding to the pomp and almost festive mood of the crowds of civilians and politicians from Washington accompanying the army in what Lincoln’s private secretary, John G. Nicolay would later describe as a “triumphal march.”
A Confederate observer said the procession included “gay women and strumpets” and said they carried picnic baskets, opera glasses, champagne and tickets that had been printed for a “grand ball in Richmond.”
McDowell ignored the fifty odd reporters and spectators. He was far more concerned about the undisciplined troops, who had no experience, were no familiar with the rigors of a forced march and had little or no experience of combat.