Grant as General-in-Chief

had got permission to write direct to the President. After his defeat, when the privilege was removed, Halleck’s relations with Hooker deteriorated, until the latter was replaced by the more cooperative George C. Meade.
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By the spring of 1864 Halleck was the butt of universal ridicule. When he was reassigned as chief of staff, he continued to do what he had always done. This was an important contribution to the Union war effort, because it allowed
Grant to concentrate on what he did best—and what public opinion expected of him—namely, take an army into the field.
Grant’s power was based on the close coincidence of his strategic views with President Lincolns, and the unprecedented authority he was allowed to issue orders direct to the heads of staff bureaux without reference to the
Secretary of War. This was a power that no previous general-in-chief had ever enjoyed.
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Moreover, as Grant did not have to prove himself as afield commander, he was almost immune from harassment by congressional bodies like the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. He enjoyed amoral authority that previous commanders in the East had lacked.
Yet Grant did not allow himself to be overborne, as McClellan had in
1862. He understood the nature of the latter’s difficulties. Experienced at army command—and, after Chattanooga, at directing three separate forces drawn from three different field armies—he appreciated the difficulties that arise from the movements of disparate forces. Consequently, he decided not to command the Army of the Potomac himself, and left Meade in post.
Nonetheless, he would travel with it as a kind of superior army commander,
and issue orders through Meade. Such a decision threatened to introduce duplication of effort and muddle into what was already a rather slack structure. Yet Grant and Meade cooperated well considering the circumstances. (Rawlins became a great admirer of the latter) Grant’s method was a pragmatic response to peculiarly American conditions, and was based heavily on the personalities involved. Grant was not an army group commander, because he directed the movement of armies far distant. But Grant’s brisk and dynamic presence did something to increase the priority given to operations by Union commanders, rather than logistics and organization.
As his friend Sherman commanded the Military Division of the Mississippi,
Grant could count on a man he could trust.
The staffs were small. Grant’s consisted of fifteen officers. Halleck, when general-in-chief, had twenty-four officers at his disposal. Meade had his own staff, directed by Major General AA. Humphreys. Relations between these bodies were not warm. Yet, despite antagonism, the system worked, although in operational terms it was not efficient, and its success was not as great as Grant had hoped. The great strength of the Union war effort remained in organizing and bringing to bear the greater resources of the North.
Sherman eventually won a number of important victories in the West, but his success was facilitated by John B. Hood’s quixotic decision to vacate the
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theater of operations in Georgia and advance to the Ohio River. As Halleck had struggled, and failed, to coordinate simultaneous advances in Grants personal contribution the following year was substantial. But Grant’s methods failed to rectify widespread misconceptions about war. On the contrary, because Grant behaved like a superior army commander, he tended to reinforce them.
It is thus an error to claim, as T. Harry Williams did, that During the winter months of 1863–64, the United States created a modern command system Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones echo this judgment, claiming that The contemporaneous Prussian general staff closely approximated that of the Union.”
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It did not. Grant did not preside over a general staff responsible to him rather than to their respective commanders. Some commanders like Sherman (and to a lesser extent Meade) enjoyed his confidence, but many did not. Grant could not ensure that his less competent commanders carried out his instructions through the good offices of members of a Prussian-style general staff. In any case, such a body of trained staff officers imbued with a common ethos could not be created until the
United States setup a staff college. Grant had put in place a system that was superior to the Confederate, but it was not modern, and it bore scant resemblance to the Prussian. As many American staff officers were drawn from business, they made excellent logisticians—better than the Prussians—
but they were operationally inferior because they failed to understand the need fora true general staff revolution. Even McClellan, consciously the spokesman for American military professionalism, had failed to think this problem through to its logical conclusion.
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Yet the Union system, for all its imperfections, was much superior to the Confederate. The Confederate command system underwent hardly any modification during the war, except in terms of the generals that tried to direct it. The failure to appoint a figure like Grant to provide some central direction led to a series of rather piecemeal approaches, and an excessive centralization around Jefferson Davis, with a resultant splintering of military effort. As Frank E. Vandiver summarizes, Richmond, to which all looked for guidance, was the nerve center of the Confederacy, but a nerve center lacking the power of coordination The only response of the Davis administration to military catastrophe in the winter of 1864–65 was to make Robert
E. Lee general-in-chief while still remaining commander of the Army of
Northern Virginia. Confederate leaders seemed to learn little from the military setbacks which the Confederacy endured.
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The command system that brought a Union victory relied on three related elements. First, the delegation of duties. Grant gave great latitude to his subordinates. He took the ethos of the old frontier army and made it work under the quite different circumstances of a war of mass involvement and great battles. Second, personal friendship was a vital lubricant for efficiency,
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especially between Grant and Sherman, and between Sherman and Halleck.
Sherman directed his three (rather small) field armies as a superior army commander, as Grant did in Virginia. Third, Grant’s system worked because of the telegraph. While travelling with the Army of the Potomac, his headquarters remained in the rear so that he could communicate with the other commands. But Grant’s direction was minimal. After he had finally given permission to Sherman to undertake his March to the Sea he knew nothing of the details of the operation, nor did he want to know. However, the telegraph could make committing errors easier. Grant had never been an admirer of George H. Thomas, directed by Sherman to guard his rear at
Nashville, Tennessee, as Hood advanced recklessly northwards. In December, Grant lost patience with Thomas’s sluggish movements, especially as John M. Schofield was telegraphing privately that Many officers here are of the opinion that General Thomas is certainly to slow in his movements.”
Fortunately, the final order for Thomas’s dismissal arrived after his stunning victory at the battle of Nashville, 15–16 December.
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