Grant carefully followed the deepening rift slavery caused
in the United States over the 1850s. His friends remember often
finding him in his office or his store lost in thought with a newspaper
in his hand. While he seldom expressed his own opinions on the
issue–as he remained characteristically cold and private in public–his
friends gradually realized that he was "deeply pained" by the troubles. Grant's
own politics stood somewhere in the middle: no longer beholden
to the Democratic in-laws, he briefly adopted his father's Know-
Nothing affiliation before settling as a Whig. He voted for the
first time in the 1856 Presidential election, casting his ballot
for James Buchanan.
When war erupted in the spring of 1861, Grant was able
to predict its course with impressive accuracy. He predicted South
Carolina's secession a week before it occurred, and predicted the secession
of several other states later. Furthermore, his military training
allowed him to guess the war would break out beginning at Fort
Sumter in South Carolina. As President Abraham Lincoln issued a
call for 75,000 troops, Grant became active in enlisting men in
Galena. He refused a chance to be their captain, however, seeing
such a command of volunteers as a demotion for a West Point-trained
Captain. Grant instead offered his services to help train soldiers
at Camp Yates in Illinois, but he was unable to gain the colonelcy
that he so badly desired. He sent a letter to Washington volunteering
his services, but never received an answer–the letter itself was
not located until after the war ended. Even Grant's junior West
Point classmate Major General George B. McClellan refused to meet
with him. Finally, with the help of some local politicians, Grant
succeeded. On June 17, 1861, he wrote to Julia, "You have probably
seen that I have been appointed to a colonelcy?"
Colonel Grant set out for Missouri as commander of the
Twenty-First Illinois Regiment. Missouri was a mess, its loyalties
split between North and South, slave and free. The North considered
the maintenance of Missouri as a free state critical to the Union's
cause, and Grant for the most part stood as the key defender. He
met little organized resistance and gave his volunteers a crash-
course on military discipline, tactics, and training. On July 31,
1861, Lincoln submitted Grant's name to Congress for a promotion
to brigadier general. Among Grant's cheerier moments that summer
was a time when he dropped in on the rent collectors' office in
St. Louis where he had worked in the late 1850s. His former partner
cursed at him and tried to throw him out of the shop, but Grant
now stood as a general of the Army. Meanwhile, Lincoln had already
begun a shift of generals that would continue through the war,
replacing Grant's commander with another unknown. Luckily, Grant
was not "discovered" for several more months, giving him valuable
time to learn his trade. He established a headquarters at Cairo,
Illinois, and went to work. On November 7, 1861, he attacked the
Confederate forces at Belmont, Missouri–an assault that was poorly
planned and executed. Confederate reinforcements compelled Grant
to retreat; he still had much to learn.
After a winter of logistics and politicking, Grant stood
ready to lead the first foray into Confederate territory in the
western theater. On February 3, 1862, General Henry W. Halleck,
Grant's superior, authorized him to move against two forts in northern
Tennessee. These two outposts, Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, were
the two Confederate positions guarding the Cumberland and Tennessee
rivers. With 17,000 men–Grant boasted to his sister that he now
commanded more men than Winfield Scott had in Mexico–and a flotilla of
gunboats, Grant moved on Fort Henry on February 6, 1862. After
two hours of shelling, the Confederate commander sent his 2,500
troops away to Fort Donelson and surrendered the fort's staff of
seventy men. The first battle had been primarily won by the Navy's
ironclads, but the second would be Grant's alone. Two days later,
after horrible bone-chilling weather, he set out for Donelson.
On February 14, 1862, Grant attacked. Confederate guns
rendered the Union ironclads useless, and then Confederate counterattacks
damaged the Union lines. Grant nonetheless asserted command, and
he had a larger army with which to fight. Two days later, the Confederate
commander, Brigadier General Simon B. Buckner–an old friend of
Grant's–asked for a truce and terms of surrender, expecting to
be granted leniency because of his old relationship with the General.
Grant replied tersely: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate
surrender can be accepted." Buckner relented to the "ungenerous
and unchivalrous terms," surrendering more than 12,000 troops.
The capture of Forts Henry and Donelson–the first major
Union victories in the war–opened up Tennessee to the Federal armies, and,
perhaps more important, constituted a major victory for the Union
morale. Ulysses S. Grant overnight became known across the nation
as "Unconditional Surrender" Grant. Lincoln made him Major General
of Volunteers. For once, it seemed that Grant's luck might be turning
around.
For the next month, Grant and Halleck tried to outmaneuver each
other in the political field of battle, as Halleck had become increasingly
jealous of Grant's fame. Halleck had hoped for complete control
of the western theater, but it became clear that in Grant he had
a strong rival. Lincoln put a quick stop to the gamesmanship and
rebuked Halleck, while at the same time giving him the western
command.
In April 1862, Grant faced one of the biggest disasters
of his military career. Confederate forces broke through an unfortified
portion of the Union line early in the morning near the Shiloh meetinghouse
in Tennessee. Confederate General Albert S. Johnson hoped to push
the Union troops into the marshes to the north, where the Union
army would be trapped. It almost worked, as the Union troops were
caught unawares in their tents or at breakfast; it took Grant most
of the day to reorganize a defense. In the area that came to be
known as the "Hornet's Nest," a detachment of troops fought desperately
to prevent a complete rout. At a critical hour, General Don Carlos
Buell arrived with more Union troops and helped to push back the
Confederates. After a sleepless night, Grant ordered his troops
to counterattack at dawn. In horrendously bloody fighting, the
Union troops began to recapture the camps lost the day before.
However, Grant's men lacked the energy to pursue and finish off
the enemy army, as they had lost too many of their own in the battle.
The day's final toll shocked everyone. Two thousand of Buell's
troops fell dead or wounded the second day alone. In fact, more
men died–3,477–in the two-day battle of Shiloh than had died in
any of America's previous wars: the Revolutionary War, the War
of 1812, or the Mexican War.
While the newspapers and Union leadership proclaimed a
huge victory, Grant realized for the first time the true terror
war brings. Halleck moved Grant out of the command of the Army
of Tennessee, instead moving him into the meaningless position
of second-in-command of the western theater. The Union armies slowly
moved through Tennessee through the rest of the summer, and Grant's former
army remained in Memphis. Lincoln, though, reconsidered the decision
to remove Grant as he looked at the state of the war at the end
of the summer of 1862. The Union was largely losing of the war,
while most of the major Union victories had belonged to Grant.
Lincoln had been shuffling generals almost constantly, hoping one
would win the war. He decided Grant should return to the Army of
Tennessee. In Lincoln's words, "I cannot spare this man, he fights."
