In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Washington to receive his commission as lieutenant general and command of all Union armies. Abraham Lincoln had finally found the man he believed could defeat Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and end the Civil War.
It was a stunning choice for anyone who had known Grant a decade earlier. In April 1854, Captain Grant had resigned his commission under mysterious circumstances, drifting through a series of failed civilian careers. The military career he had always hated, as his biographer Bruce Catton noted, turned out to be the calling designed precisely for him. Grant’s predecessors had been far more learned in military science.
Winfield Scott had commanded armies since the War of 1812. George B. McClellan had studied the Crimean War firsthand and organized the Army of the Potomac into a disciplined fighting force. Henry W.
Halleck had written books on military theory. Yet both McClellan and Halleck proved indecisive in the field. After the Battle of Shiloh, it took Halleck nearly a month to advance twenty miles against the vital Confederate railroad junction at Corinth, Mississippi. Lincoln grew so frustrated with McClellan’s inactivity that he responded to the general’s October 1862 request for more horses with a sarcastic telegram asking what the army’s horses had done since Antietam to exhaust themselves.
Grant never claimed to be a student of military classics. Even the loyal William T. Sherman privately doubted Grant’s knowledge of grand strategy, though he conceded that Grant won through plain common sense and an unshakable belief in victory. That confidence rested on a combination of qualities that made Grant one of the most exceptional commanders in American history.
Grant brought an unrelenting offensive approach to warfare. He preferred constant activity and forward movement. Even in victory, he grew frustrated when subordinates failed to pursue retreating enemies. In his memoirs, he recorded an incident revealing his philosophy.
In 1863, Union General William Rosecrans refused to advance against an enemy force while Grant besieged Vicksburg, claiming it violated the military rule against fighting two decisive battles at once. Grant was unimpressed. If the rule meant anything, he observed, it hardly applied here. It would be bad to be beaten in two decisive battles on the same day, but it would not be bad to win them.
When Grant reported in the summer of 1864 that he refused to disengage from Lee to suppress draft resistance in the North, Lincoln replied with language that captured Grant’s tenacity. Hold on with a bulldog grip, the president wrote, and chew and choke as much as possible. Sherman once told a fellow officer that he was far smarter than Grant, knew more about war, history, strategy, and tactics. But he acknowledged where Grant surpassed him.
Grant did not care what the enemy did out of his sight, whereas that frightened Sherman terribly. Grant’s refusal to be paralyzed by imagining enemy movements traced back to an early war moment when he commanded a regiment pursuing Confederate Colonel Thomas Harris in Missouri. As he approached the hill where he expected to find Harris’s camp, his heart pounded so hard he felt it in his throat. When he found the camp abandoned, his heart returned to its place.
He learned that his opponent had feared him just as much as he had feared the opponent. From that moment until the end of the war, Grant wrote, he never felt fear when facing an enemy, though he always felt some anxiety. At the bloody two-day Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, Grant did not share his colleagues’ grim outlook. Sherman, disheartened by the first day’s fighting, advised Don Carlos Buell, who arrived with reinforcements mid-battle, to withdraw.
Grant refused. The rear of an army fighting a battle, he insisted, was not the place to judge what was happening at the front. By the next day, he wrote, they had become the attacking party, pushing the enemy back until he was forced into a hasty retreat. In May 1864, after a costly stalemate in his first battle against Robert E.
Lee in the Virginia Wilderness, Grant surprised and delighted the Army of the Potomac by not retreating. Most assumed they would cross the river again the next day, as they had done so many times under previous commanders. But when orders came to march toward the left flank, the men understood that Grant was different and that they would keep fighting. Sherman praised the decision.
When Grant cried forward after the Wilderness, Sherman said it was the greatest act of his life. He wrote to Grant that this bold move showed the mettle of which he was made, and from that moment Sherman felt the rebellion would be crushed. Sherman called it Grant’s simple faith in success, and it proved contagious. Grant’s confidence and determination made others believe in themselves.
Sherman wrote that when Grant completed his preparations, he entered battle without hesitation, doubt, or reserve, and that this confidence allowed his subordinates to act boldly, knowing Grant would move to their aid if they got into trouble. Grant was neither mystic nor reckless. His confidence was rooted in a firm sense of purpose, a calm unshakable nature, and the ability to delegate rather than micromanage. During the Mexican War, he studied two commanders in action.
Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor embodied contrasting styles. From Taylor, who always expressed his intent with absolute clarity, Grant learned the importance of direct communication. Serving as a regimental quartermaster yet participating in as many battles as possible, Grant absorbed the unromantic realities of war: the logistics of feeding and supplying an army, the dangers of poor camp sanitation, the value of varied expertise, and the unmistakable brutality of combat. In the final year of the Civil War, as casualties mounted and the horrors of trench warfare accumulated at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, Grant remained fixed on his objective of destroying Lee’s army.
Grant was a gifted writer and, at his best, a superb listener. When he arrived at besieged Chattanooga in late 1863, facing an unfamiliar situation, he sat silent as a sphinx while officers presented their reports. After a barrage of questions, he wrote a series of military orders demonstrating a thorough understanding of the entire western theater. From disconnected reports, he formed a coherent picture of terrain he had never seen and of the wide, turbulent lines of men who contested it.
His memory for terrain was photographic. After one close look at a map, he could trace its features without consulting it again. He possessed an almost intuitive grasp of topography and never lost track of compass directions. This gift was complemented by exceptional horsemanship, allowing Grant to see as much of the battlefield as possible himself.
In the eastern theater, which he had studied for only eight weeks, Grant displayed a complete grasp of the strategic situation. He left executive command of the Army of the Potomac to George Meade, freeing himself to manage a theater stretching from New England to New Mexico. While occupying Lee’s army, Grant unleashed Philip Sheridan’s cavalry into the Shenandoah Valley, the Confederacy’s breadbasket, and freed Sherman to march through the South, destroying railroads, supplies, and morale. None of this would have been possible without Grant’s understanding of the broader political context of the war.
As administration goals expanded from preserving the Union to emancipating enslaved people under the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Grant’s policies and vision evolved accordingly. His conduct of war and securing of peace showed a firm grasp of the political risks, especially the reality that the South’s best hope for victory lay in exhausting Northern political will through a prolonged war. For Grant, who had fought in the Mexican War as a young man, a conflict he did not believe in, the Civil War was a war of principle. In the closing lines of his memoirs, he described the Confederate cause as one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one of the least justified.
Grant was more than a general. His ability to lead under pressure, to press forward despite setbacks, and to inspire those around him made him a legend in American military history. His victories were built on resilience, vision, and an unshakable belief in success. Without him, the fate of the Union might have been very different.
His leadership lessons continue to echo far beyond the battlefield.
