Grant: A Novel (31 page)

T
HE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS BEGAN IN THE EARLY
spring of 1864, shortly after Lincoln summoned Grant to the east, intending, as the whole country knew, to present him, first, with a third star for his shoulders, lieutenant general, a rank unprecedented since George Washington and Winfield Scott; and, second, with supreme command of all the scattered Union armies, east and west, five hundred thousand men.

Grant’s modesty, of course, was already legend by then, and his trip to Washington did nothing to diminish it. When he travelled up from Tennessee for the official ceremony of his promotion, the general-in-chief-elect simply took a cab from the train to Willard’s Hotel, entered unannounced through a side door, and strolled up to the desk with no other escort than his twelve-year-old son Fred.

“Help you?” the clerk said, picking his teeth with a pencil stub. Grant had on a tattered blue private’s coat with two stars, badly faded, sewn on one stooped shoulder only; a black felt hat with a scruffy gold braid; down-at-the-heel muddy boots. Two-star generals were a dime a dozen in Washington, of course. The clerk at Willard’s could have thrown his pencil into the bar and hit one, any hour of the day.

“We’d like a room,” Grant said, “for the two of us.”

The clerk yawned. “Hotel’s full. Nothing left but a little upstairs loft, one bed, no window. And you’ll have to wait till four for that.”

“Then that’s what I’ll have to do,” Grant replied. The clerk shoved the registration book across the desk, and Grant picked up a pen and wrote his name in his usual scrawl:
U. S. Grant & Son, Galena, Illinois
.

He pushed the book back across the desk, and the clerk turned it around to read. Without the slightest change of expression, he said, “You’ll have the Presidential Suite, General Grant. We’ll take you up right now.”

When Simon Cameron came by that night to escort him to the White House, Grant objected that he didn’t have an invitation, and Cameron had to assure him that it was just the Lincolns’ weekly reception and anybody at all could attend. They walked together from Willard’s and went inside to the Blue Room. Cameron said he thought Grant could go straight over to the President, Grant said, “No,” that was all, and took his place in the reception line to wait his turn. But Secretary of State Seward saw him first and started shouting, “Here is General Grant! Grant is here!” And instantly there was such a rush of people from every corner just to look at him and shake his hand that wily old Seward made him climb up on top of a sofa, and stand there, so people could have a better view. By the time he finally was rescued by Lincoln, he was sweating profusely and looking as unhappy as a cornered cat, and his very first words to the President were, “For God’s sake, get me out of this show business!”

Not long after that, he vanished from Washington into the bivouac headquarters of the Army of the Potomac. Then he quite literally vanished into the forty-square-mile barrier of gloomy scrub oak and pine and undergrowth and trackless vegetative anarchy that lay between Richmond and Washington and that, in fact, was called simply “The Wilderness” by locals. On the other side of it, swinging toward him like a fist, was Bobby Lee’s army.

The Battle of the Wilderness took place from May 5 to May 7, 1864. It was a victory of a kind for Lee—though he lost at least 7,000 men—because Grant’s losses for the same two days were somewhere in excess of
17,500
men, and after both sides had pulled back slightly to catch their breaths Grant was still bogged down in the smoking, splintered nightmare forest, exactly where
McClellan and Burnside and Joe Hooker had been stopped in years before. North and South, in the field and in Washington as well, everybody who could read or hear expected Grant to turn tail just like the others—just like Joe Hooker one year ago to the day—and skulk back to Washington in defeat.

But for several months, ever since Grant had taken command, the Army of the Potomac had been feeling a change in its nature. Discipline was tighter. Organization was clearer. After three long years of inept and horrible leadership, men said, business was beginning to be meant.

About midnight May 12 the Union soldiers in General Warren’s V Corps were trudging along in unspeakable weariness on a crowded, smoky road, part charred forest, under a pale, drooping moon. Suddenly their officers began to clatter their scabbards and shout: “Give way to the right, move to the right!” And then going past them at a quick, jingling trot came a few staff officers bending forward in their saddles to keep up with the big black horse in the lead, and on it, recognizable everywhere by the stars on his old blue coat and his eternal cigar, rode Grant, and, almost at the same moment they saw Grant, the troops likewise saw that he was going, not north in retreat, but
south
, at the head of the column, to fight again. For once the Army of the Potomac broke into spontaneous cheer, so loud and long that Grant’s big horse reared and pranced and the little stoop-shouldered rider had to wrestle it around and down, and then he quickly issued orders that there was to be no noise in case the Rebels heard, and he put his spurs to work again and disappeared.

That much Trist remembered well, because he had only just been transferred to Warren’s V Corps two weeks before, and as he stood on a pleasant windswept knoll a little south of Chancellorsville twenty years later he could almost point out the very spot to Clover Adams and the rest of her assembled party.

He hadn’t intended at all for the day to turn into a lecture tour. Clover, Elizabeth Cameron, the Beales, two or three couples whose names he never quite got had gone the afternoon before to the Shenandoah Valley to see the Luray Caverns (“lighted, Mr. Trist, with electric lamps,” Clover said happily, the truest apostle of technology among them). From there they had taken the train to Fredericksburg, hired a team of carriages, and despite a lowering sky and a feel of cold, hard weather in the air, had come on to
meet him at Little Brock Hill. To the right, halfway down the slope, his photographer was still struggling with a cartload of equipment, helped and hindered in about equal measure by the two Negro boys from town he had hired as assistants.

“And from there,” Clover said, “you pushed down this other road to the Bloody Angle.”

“Spotsylvania Court House,” Trist agreed. “May ninth to May twelfth.” For the excursion today Clover had come equipped with a set of enormous old leather military binoculars that had belonged, she said, to her father, and these she now used to scan the thick forest below. Some fifty or sixty yards away, where the ruined shell of the Little Brock Hill farmhouse served as a kind of tourist battlefield headquarters, General Beale and his wife had set up folding chairs for themselves and Emily. Other guests wandered among the rusting cannons and caissons and assorted old wagon frames and wheels and shell casings local residents had halfheartedly gathered together. Nobody else had been curious enough to climb up to the exposed summit of the knoll, except Elizabeth Cameron, who now stood next to Clover, holding her bonnet down with one hand and her skirt with the other, carefully avoiding, Trist thought, his eyes.

“Well, it was Grant’s ‘war of attrition,’ ” Clover said. She nodded decisively, so that her own black bonnet flapped like a pair of crow’s wings in the wind. “Butcher Grant, wearing down the South by sheer force of numbers. Appalling way to wage a war.”

Trist started to object, then simply nodded. He led her a few steps farther around the path and indicated a line of swaying willows off in the distance that marked where Warren’s troops had ended up next morning, after Grant had turned them south. It was a generally accepted fact that in the Wilderness campaign Grant had indeed proceeded with all the finesse of a muscle-bound giant, straight ahead, mulishly, against the foxlike intelligence of Lee, and that his only strategy had been to overpower Lee by superior resources, not by generalship. It was amazing, Trist thought, how much they had talked in those days about the mystery of Grant, how he ate a breakfast of cucumbers and bread, how he had his staff aide present him every morning with twenty-four fresh cigars, how he used a flint-and-steel lighter with a long wick to light those cigars in the wind—no detail was too trivial, too uninteresting about the man who was leading them, as the newspapers
invariably put it, into the Shadow of Death. And of course everybody from the newspapers right up to Lincoln and Clover Adams had got it wrong—Grant never meant to wear Lee down by attrition. His whole strategy was to bring Lee out from behind his defenses into the open to fight, and Lee’s whole strategy was to dodge and deny, but Grant had prevented that by the most brilliant series of flanking movements in modern history, and Lee was forced to engage and the two giants fell locked together through the long spring and summer of ’64, crashing and rolling southward toward Richmond. Whatever else you wanted to say about him, thirteen months after Grant was put in charge the war was over.

“You tell a vivid story, Mr. Trist,” said Elizabeth Cameron, standing quite close beside him now. Down the side of the hill the others were beginning to pack up their parasols and chairs and look around for the carriages. “But it’s not very personal, is it? Not much about you.”

“Editor friend of mine said the same thing.”

“You left Yale College to enlist, I think.” Clover lowered her binoculars and frowned at the sky. “Rain.”

“And did you ever see General Grant again,” Elizabeth asked, “in the war?” Clover put away her giant binoculars and turned to leave. Trist buttoned the collar of his coat.

“I saw your uncle and Grant once, outside a tent. And a few days after Spotsylvania Court House we were marching past a railroad siding and Grant was sitting by himself on a flatcar, gnawing a piece of ham bone. The company ahead of us gave a cheer and he just waved the bone and kept right on eating.”

Elizabeth laughed and then looked around, startled, as a flash of lightning cut across the northern horizon. A moment later thunder rolled and grumbled over them.

“God’s artillery, Mr. Trist!” Clover called gaily from far down the path. At the bottom of the hill the hired carriages were already lined up and people were hurriedly climbing in. Lightning crackled again. The photographer hauled his cart around a bend in the road and vanished.

“My dress,” said Elizabeth, and she bent to pull the bottom half of her skirt free from a low patch of briars. Trist knelt on the edge of the path beside her. The skirt was a heavy cotton fabric, thoroughly tangled. He tugged gently, working the briars free one by one, but before he could get to his feet again the first rain had
reached the knoll and the wind was blowing it into their faces in a blinding veil.

“This way!” Elizabeth bunched her skirt in her fists and started to the left. Trist glanced the other way, saw the last of the carriages backing, turning. A clap of thunder broke directly over their heads: the whole hilltop seemed to whirl and dip and the full roaring force of the storm came up.

The red clay paths that crisscrossed the knoll turned instantly to mud. Elizabeth slipped and cried out. Trist caught her hand. She staggered ahead, bearing left and downhill. Overhead the sky was literally, everywhere, black. In front of them the forest, colors running like a soaked painting, offered the only possible shelter—they cut directly down across the grass, through another patch of briars and tall weeds, and two minutes later, panting and shaking, stumbled into a grove of windswept oaks.

“Not much here!” Elizabeth’s voice could barely be heard over the lash of the rain. Her hair was flattened onto her cheeks and neck, her heavy dress sagged and clung. Trist stepped from under their tree to look for the carriages, but all he could see was a blur of rain and wind, not a carriage or a horse in sight. He splashed back to the oak and wiped his face. “This way,” Elizabeth said.

At the bottom of yet another little hill they came to a wide, swollen creek, thirty feet across at least and spilling rapidly out beyond its banks.

“Did you bring a canoe, Mr. Trist?”

“In my other coat.”

“The road’s probably just past those trees. But I think everybody’s gone by now. They won’t even miss us till they reach the station.” She made a face and shook her hands out as if to dry them, then drew them back and shivered.

“I see a barn over there,” Trist said.