The order had gone out in the spring of 1864, and now the Army of the Potomac was moving again, heading into the Virginia wilderness it knew so well. This campaign was different from all the others. Ulysses S. Grant, the man who had taken Vicksburg and fought at Chattanooga, had come east to make his headquarters with the army, and though Major General George Gordon Meade remained its technical commander, no one doubted who was calling the shots.

Through the spring and summer and into the fall, and finally at Appomattox, Grant would be the one in charge. But in that spring of 1864, Grant was new to the Eastern Theater, and the Army of Northern Virginia did not quite know what to make of him. Very few people, in fact, actually knew who he was. One of Robert E.

Lee’s subordinates, Brigadier General Evander M. Law, was struck by how little his peers and his superiors understood about the man now standing against them—even the officers from what Law called the old army, that solid group of West Pointers who had been through so much together before the war, seemed to know almost nothing about Grant’s past. What they did know, they were generally unimpressed by. Law shared his recollections of how Lee’s army viewed Grant in an article he wrote in 1884, twenty years after the Overland Campaign.

Titled “From the Wilderness to Cold Harbor,” it appeared in the Battles and Leaders of the Civil War series published by The Century Magazine. In it, Law put down in his own words the views of the Army of Northern Virginia about the Union’s new commander. “When General Grant was appointed to the command of the Union armies and established his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac,” Law wrote, “we of the Army of Northern Virginia knew very little about his character and capacity as a commander. Even old army officers, who are supposed to know all about anyone who had ever been in the Army before the war, seemed to know as little as anybody else.

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What little they did know did not frighten them. The opinion was freely expressed, Law recorded, that Grant’s “western morals would wither in the climate of Virginia. ” His name was associated with Shiloh, where it was believed he had been outgeneraled and badly beaten by Albert Sidney Johnston, saved only by the arrival of Don Carlos Buell. The capture of Vicksburg and the Battle of Chattanooga, the victories that had given Grant a brilliant reputation in the North, were believed by the Confederates to be due more to the weakness of the forces opposed to him and the bad generalship of their commanders than to any great ability on Grant’s part.

That he was bold and aggressive, they all knew. But they believed it was the boldness and aggressiveness that arises from the consciousness of strength, since he had generally managed to fight his battles with the advantage of largely superior numbers. That this policy of force would be pursued when he took command in Virginia, they had no doubt. What they were not prepared for was the unparalleled stubbornness and tenacity with which he persisted in his attacks under the fearful losses his army sustained at the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania.

General Grant’s method of conducting the campaign was frequently discussed among the Confederates, Law wrote, and the universal verdict was that he was no strategist and that he relied almost entirely upon the brute force of numbers for success. Such a policy, in their judgment, was not characteristic of a high order of generalship and seldom wins unless the odds are overwhelmingly on the side of the assailant. It failed in this instance, as shown by the result at Cold Harbor, which necessitated an entire change in the plan of campaign. What at least part of his own men thought about General Grant’s methods was shown by the fact that many of the prisoners taken during the campaign complained bitterly of the useless butchery to which they were subjected, some going so far as to prophesy the destruction of their army.

“He fights” was the pithy reply of President Lincoln to a deputation of influential politicians who urged Grant’s removal from the command of the army. These two words, Law believed, embodied perfectly the Confederate idea of General Grant at that time. He fights. That was how Brigadier General Evander M.

Law of the Army of Northern Virginia characterized the overall feeling of the men he was talking about in Lee’s army regarding Grant and his fighting abilities. It was, of course, a characterization of Grant as a useless butcher, a description handed down through the years, repeated so often by students of the Civil War that it has become almost a given: that Grant was a butcher, that he used his overwhelming numbers of men against the Confederates in attack after attack. Cold Harbor, of course, lost so many men, and Cold Harbor is well known—where Grant later regretted having made the additional attacks, and where he should have stopped and learned his lesson after the initial failure. But Grant learned, and Grant eventually did win the day.

That was the commentary of Brigadier General Evander M. Law, a Confederate officer reflecting on what the generals and other men of the Army of Northern Virginia thought of Grant when he entered the Eastern Theater in the spring of 1864. His words, written twenty years after the campaign, offer a rare glimpse into the minds of the men who faced the Union’s new commander—men who underestimated him at the start, who dismissed his western victories as accidents of weak opposition, who believed his boldness was merely the confidence of superior numbers. They were convinced they knew exactly what Grant was.

Then the Wilderness came, and Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, and the Army of the Potomac kept moving forward, and the Army of Northern Virginia learned, battle by bloody battle, that the man from the west was not what they had thought at all. He fights. In those two words, Lincoln had captured everything the Confederates came to understand about Grant. And in the end, it was not the brute force of numbers alone that won the campaign, but the stubborn, tenacious refusal to stop pressing forward—a quality the Army of Northern Virginia had not expected and could not match.

Law’s verdict, written in 1884, stands as a testimony to how profoundly Grant surprised his enemies, and how his relentless method, whatever its cost, carried the Union army through the Wilderness, through Spotsylvania, through Cold Harbor, and ultimately to Appomattox.