Most people only know the broad outline. Lincoln needed a general. Grant delivered victories. Lincoln gave him command of everything and the war ended. But Lincoln left something behind that most people haven’t read closely. He left letters, telegrams, notes carefully copied into archives. Diary entries recorded by his secretary John Hay as soon as the ink was dry, capturing what the president said on nights when the war was going badly and politicians were arriving in waves to demand Grant’s removal. Those documents tell a different story. Not a president rewarding a general for results, but a man who understood something about Grant before the results arrived to confirm it. Who defended him when defending him was politically costly. Who put that defense in words precise enough that 160 years later you can still hear exactly what he meant. This is what Abraham Lincoln wrote and said about Ulysses S. Grant.
To understand why Lincoln’s written words about Grant matter, you have to understand what came before them. By the winter of 1861-1862, Abraham Lincoln was in a crisis with no clean solution. The Army of the Potomac, the great Eastern Army that was supposed to march on Richmond and end the rebellion, sat in its camps under George McClellan doing almost nothing.
McClellan was an organizational genius. He created the army, drilled it, equipped it, and inspired almost devotional loyalty in his men. He just would not fight with it. Lincoln’s correspondence from this period reads like a record of a president trying every available lever to move a general who refused to be moved. He visited McClellan personally.
He sent letters urging action. He sat in councils of war. He famously told an aide that if McClellan wasn’t using the army, he would like to borrow it for a while. McClellan, for his part, treated Lincoln with a contempt he barely bothered to conceal. In private letters he referred to the president as the gorilla.
One evening he left Lincoln waiting in his parlor for an hour and then went upstairs to bed without seeing him at all. Lincoln endured it. Not because he liked it, but because he had run out of alternatives. You can feel the patience in his letters and notes from this period.
The patience of a man who understands that blowing up the relationship will not put a different army in the field any sooner. But Lincoln was watching the Western theater more and more closely. And in February 1862, something changed. A general named Ulysses S. Grant attacked Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and took it. Then he moved immediately against Fort Donelson and took that, too.
Demanding and receiving unconditional and immediate surrender from the Confederate commander. Northern newspapers turned that phrase into a nickname within days. Unconditional Surrender Grant. Lincoln had been asking for a general who would fight. Here was a man who had struck twice in 2 weeks and won both times.
He was paying attention now. 2 months later that attention would be tested. Shiloh, April 6th to 7th, 1862. One of the bloodiest engagements of the war’s first year. Confederate forces launched a surprise attack on Grant’s army at Pittsburgh Landing in Tennessee, driving his men back toward the river in brutal chaotic fighting.
Reinforcements arrived in the night. The second day saw Grant counterattack and regain the ground, but the cost was staggering. Roughly 13,000 Union casualties with Confederate losses nearly as high. The Northern press erupted. Grant was incompetent, they said. Reckless, they said. Drunk, they said.
The old rumor from his pre-war years on the Pacific coast resurrected at full volume. Politicians in Washington lined up to demand his removal. Some of his staunchest supporters began to wobble. Lincoln did not. The line that survives from this moment, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” is not from a letter or telegram. It was spoken.
Different witnesses, including William Tecumseh Sherman, recorded slightly different wordings as oral recollections always do. But the substance is the same. When pressed to get rid of Grant, Lincoln refused. He did not say Grant is blameless. He did not say Shiloh went well. He said, “He fights.” Read that in context. By April 1862, Lincoln had spent almost a year dealing with generals who would not fight. McClellan, Halleck, Buell.
Men with impressive resumes and flowing reputations who could always find a reason not to attack, not to move, not to risk the army they were so proud of building. Now, the one general in his command who had taken the war directly to the enemy, who had attacked and kept attacking, was under pressure to be because his attack had been costly. Lincoln refused.
He refused publicly enough that his comments spread and he refused in his own mind in exactly the way the quote captures. “This is the man who fights. Whatever else is true, I cannot afford to do without that.” Those eight words were the first and most important thing Lincoln ever said about Grant.
And he said them before the big victories arrived to make defending Grant safe. Before we begin, I want to tell you that I was looking at our analytics recently and noticed a pretty incredible stat about 98.7% of you watching these videos haven’t actually subscribed yet. Now, if you’re enjoying these deep dives and want to make sure you don’t miss the next chapter in our history, liking our video and hitting that subscribe button is the best way to support what we’re doing.
It’s a small click for you, but it really helps us keep the lights on and the work going. Thank you. All right. Now, let’s get back to the video. A year later the pressure came again. This time it was worse and it came from closer to home. In the winter and spring of 1863, Grant was struggling to solve the Vicksburg problem.
Vicksburg, Mississippi sat on high bluffs commanding a crucial bend in the Mississippi River. Take Vicksburg and the Union would split the Confederacy in two, regain full control of the river, and sever Texas, Arkansas, and Western Louisiana from the Eastern Confederate states. Lincoln famously called it the key and said, “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.
” Grant’s early approaches to the city failed. Canal projects to bypass the batteries, bayou expeditions through the flooded timber, attempts to come at the city from different angles. One scheme after another bogged down in mud and high water. The Northern press was merciless. That Lincoln could live with, but then something more alarming happened.
Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois, Grant’s most reliable political champion, the man who had discovered him, backed him, and defended him when almost nobody else would, began to send nervous signs that perhaps Grant had lost his way. That maybe someone else should be put in charge. If Washburne was wavering, it meant almost everyone had.
Lincoln’s response recorded later is telling. Speaking of the mood in Washington, he said, “Even Washburne, who has always claimed Grant as his by right of discovery, has deserted him and demands his removal. And I really believe I am the only friend Grant has left. Grant advises me that he will take Vicksburg by the 4th of July and I believe he will do it.
And he shall have the chance.” That is not a pretty line for the history books. It is a president taking inventory out loud of who has abandoned a general and realizing that he may literally be the last senior figure in Washington still backing him. “I really believe I am the only friend Grant has left.
And then, he shall have the chance.” Think about the political pressure around that decision. Spring 1863. Midterm elections on the horizon. War weariness in the north. A congress full of angry men with newspapers amplifying every attack. The easiest thing in the world is to give the crowd what it wants. Remove Grant, appoint someone more palatable, and claim you have responded to public concern. Lincoln would not do it.
He told visitors who came to complain about Grant that he was waiting for results. That he had seen what Grant could do and would not throw that away because a campaign in the mud was going badly. He held that line essentially alone. On July 4th, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered.
In a letter to Congressman Isaac Arnold written even before the surrender, Lincoln had already called Grant’s May campaign the river crossing, the march inland, the string of victories at Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, and Champion Hill one of the most brilliant in the world. After the city fell, Lincoln’s political risk was vindicated completely.
But the vindication is not the point. The point is that months earlier, when even Washburne had turned and the smart move was to cut Grant loose, Lincoln said, “He shall have the chance.” The document at the center of this story is dated April 30th, 1864. By then, Grant had been brought east and promoted to lieutenant general, the first officer since George Washington to hold three-star rank in the US Army.
He was general in chief of all Union armies, but he chose to make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac so he could personally direct operations against Lee. The Overland Campaign, the brutal series of battles from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor, and then on toward Petersburg was about to begin.
Lincoln, who had spent years writing prodding, frustrated, sometimes sharply worded notes to his other generals, sat down to write Grant something different. John Hay recorded in his diary that the president read him the letter before sending it and called it admirable, full of kindness and dignity. It begins quietly. Lincoln tells Grant he is entirely satisfied with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it. So far as I understand it.
In that one clause, Lincoln does something unusual for a civilian commander. He acknowledges a limit. He’s saying, “I am not at your headquarters. I do not see what you see. From where I sit, reading reports and watching results, I am entirely satisfied.” Then he goes further. He admits that during Grant’s campaigns, he had often thought of writing him with suggestions, ideas, cautions, alternative plans.
Any president who studies maps as obsessively as Lincoln did will form opinions. He says in effect, “I thought of sending those suggestions. I now see they would not have helped. In each case you have done what I wished or thought only of doing and with much more ability than I possessed.” Read that slowly.
A president is telling his general in writing that the general’s judgment in the field has been better, with much more ability, than what the president himself could have devised from Washington. This from a man whose mind impressed almost everyone who met him. Lincoln then makes a promise.
He tells Grant he sees the broad plan for the coming campaign and that he will not obtrude his own views. He will not interfere unless Grant asks for help. He will provide all the support he can and otherwise stay out of the way. He closes the letter with a benediction that manages to be both formal and utterly sincere. And now with a brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you.
Eight words at the end from a civilian who knows he is about to ask a general and an army to walk into some of the worst fighting the Western Hemisphere has ever seen. Hay was right. It is admirable. It is kind. It is dignified. It is also something rare. A leader telling another leader as plainly as possible, “You have earned my trust.
I am going to act on that trust.” Grant answered the next day. His letter is short, but it does exactly what it needs to do. He writes that Lincoln’s confidence is acknowledged with pride, not as vanity, but as the reaction of a man aware of the weight that confidence carries. He promises, “It will be my earnest endeavor that you and the country shall not be disappointed.
” He goes out of his way to say that he has never had any cause to complain of the administration that everything asked for has been yielded and that if his success is less than I desire and expect, the least that I can say is the fault is not with you. Read the two letters together. On one side, a president saying, “I thought of meddling, but I see now that your judgment has exceeded mine and I will not interfere.
” On the other, a general saying, “I know what it means that you trust me. I will do everything in my power not to fail you or the country and whatever goes wrong will not be your fault.” There is no rhetoric in those lines, no grand phrases for the ages, just plain statements from two men who understood exactly what they were asking of each other.
Two days later, Grant crossed the Rapidan and fought the Battle of the Wilderness. Within weeks, the nation was reading casualty lists that stretched page after page. Within a year, Lincoln would be dead and Grant would be commander of a victorious army. The April 30th exchange is the hinge on which that final year turns. By August 1864, Washington was in something close to panic.
Grant’s Overland Campaign had done what he told Lincoln it would do. It had kept pressing Lee, forcing him back, pinning him inside the Richmond-Petersburg line, and locking the Army of Northern Virginia into a defensive struggle it could not afford. But the cost had been enormous. In 3 months of fighting, he had lost tens of thousands of men.
Newspapers called him a butcher. Lincoln’s prospects for re-election looked bleak. There was serious talk inside his own party of replacing him on the ticket. In that climate, there were proposals to pull troops away from the Petersburg lines to reinforce operations elsewhere, particularly to protect Washington.
The political instinct was to react to every threat, spread forces everywhere, and be seen doing something about each crisis. Grant didn’t want to do that. He understood, as Lincoln did, that the siege around Petersburg was the choke point. If they held their grip there, Lee’s army would slowly be ground down.
Confederate logistics would deteriorate and Richmond would eventually be untenable. Time favored the Union, but only if the grip was not loosened. On August 17th, 1864, Lincoln sent Grant a telegram from Washington. The original is short enough to quote in full. “I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing.
Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible.” Bulldog grip. Chew and choke. This is the same pen that wrote the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. The same man who could reach for phrases like the last full measure of devotion and with malice toward none.
Here, he is writing in Grant’s register, using Grant’s own metaphor of the hold and sharpening it. He is doing that on purpose. He is telling Grant, “I see what you’re doing. I agree with it. I am not going to let political pressure pull you away from it. Stay. Hold. Keep squeezing.” It is a military instruction and a political shield in one sentence.
And again, it is not a safe political choice. If the siege had failed, the bulldog grip line would have been thrown back at Lincoln as evidence of stubbornness. He sent it anyway. Grant later reportedly laughed when he read it and said that the president had more nerve than any of his advisers.
In January 1865, with the end of the war clearly in sight but not yet grasped, Lincoln wrote Grant a different kind of letter. This one about his son. Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest, had not served at the front. He was of military age and Lincoln knew how that looked in a country where hundreds of thousands of other families had sent sons to fight.
He felt the criticism. Robert himself wanted to join the army. Mary Lincoln was desperate not to lose their boy after all they had already lost. The solution Lincoln settled on was to ask Grant to take Robert onto his staff. That would let Robert see the war up close in a real but relatively protected role.
The request letter is striking for its wording. Lincoln tells Grant that Robert wishes to see something of the war before it ends and asks if Grant would permit him to serve as a volunteer aide on your staff for a limited time. He is careful to say that he does not want Robert to be in the way, that he should only be an extra burden when you are entirely willing to receive him.
And then Lincoln adds a line he did not have to add. He effectively says he’s making this not as president, but as a friend. He could have simply ordered it as commander-in-chief. He doesn’t. Lincoln understood exactly what he was saying there. For one thing, he wanted to make it clear there was no pressure.
If Grant genuinely could not accommodate Robert, he should say so. For another, he was telling the truth about what their relationship had become. He was no longer the skeptical civilian writing stern notes to a general he did not quite trust. He was asking another man a personal favor. Grant agreed promptly. Robert joined Grant’s staff at City Point in February 1865.
He would be present when Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. Throughout 1864 and 1865, as casualty lists lengthened and war weariness deepened, politicians and visitors kept coming to the White House to do what they had done since 1861, complain about the general. This time the general was Grant. They wanted Lincoln to intervene, to order changes in campaign plans, to demand explanations, to insist on different movements.
Lincoln’s response, recalled in various forms by several observers, boiled down to one consistent line. “I know not the plans of General Grant and I do not wish to know them.” That is not ignorance, it is discipline. Lincoln had spent years studying war. He read military treatises. He poured over maps. He loved to talk strategy with McClellan and others.
He had sketched out movements, argued for different lines of advance, and sometimes been forced to override their reluctance with direct orders. With Grant, he made a different choice. He read the reports. He watched the results. He sent encouragement and resources. And he consciously stopped short of asking for detailed plans he might be tempted to second-guess. He even deflected criticism with jokes.
When someone pressed him about rumors that Grant drank too much, he is supposed to have said that if he knew what brand of whiskey Grant drank, he’d send a barrel of it to his other generals. The line circulated widely. Whether Lincoln said it exactly that way is less important than the fact that people believed he would.
The joke is funny. It is also a statement of priorities. Lincoln was saying, “I do not care about the gossip. I care about the fact that this man fights and wins and doesn’t stop because it’s hard. Everything else is noise.” This story cannot really be told from one side. 20 years later, writing his personal memoirs, while dying of throat cancer at Mount McGregor, Grant looked back on the war and on the man he had served under.
In those pages, he gave his own written judgment on Abraham Lincoln. He called Lincoln incontestably the greatest man I have ever known. Not the greatest president or the greatest statesman, the greatest man. Grant knew what that meant. He had served under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott in Mexico. He had fought against Robert E. Lee.
He had worked with William Tecumseh Sherman. After the war, he had traveled the world and met emperors, kings, and prime ministers. Out of all of them, he wrote, “Lincoln stood alone.” He wrote that Lincoln had never pressed him to divulge details of his plans, even though Lincoln had every right to do so.
That this restraint, this choice by a civilian commander not to interfere, was one of the greatest gifts a general could receive. He knew how rare it was. He knew what it had cost a man of Lincoln’s temperament to hold back. And he wrote that Lincoln’s assassination, just days after Appomattox, was the darkest day of my life. Not Shiloh. Not Cold Harbor.
The darkest day was the day the man who had said, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.” The man who had been the only friend Grant has left during the Vicksburg campaign, who had promised not to obtrude his own judgment, who had told him to hold on with a bulldog grip, was killed when the war they had won together was barely over. Grant knew exactly what he had lost. He wrote it down.
He wanted that on the record. If you read Lincoln’s words about Grant in order, you see a pattern. First, you see that Lincoln’s support was not conditional on success. He defended Grant at Shiloh before Vicksburg. He stood essentially alone when even Washburne had turned against him. He reached a judgment about the kind of man Grant was, about the way he fought, the way he held on, the way he refused to be rattled.
And he stuck to that judgment when sticking to it was politically dangerous. Second, you see that Lincoln’s trust was active, not passive. The April 30th, 1864 letter is not a note from a president who’s simply tired of meddling. It is the letter of a man who has watched a general’s performance closely, compared what happened to what he had privately thought should happen, and concluded with rare intellectual honesty that the general’s judgment has been better than his own would have been.
He does not step back. He explains why he is stepping back. Third, you see that the relationship becomes personal. Not as president, but as a friend. That is how he frames the request to bring Robert onto Grant’s staff. He does not use that word lightly. Lincoln was careful with language.
When he called a man friend in writing, he meant it. And finally, you see from Grant’s side what that trust did for him. Before the war, Grant had been a failure by most conventional measures, out of the army, struggling in civilian life, working in his father’s store. The war gave him a field where his particular qualities mattered.
Even then, he was nearly undone by rumor, press attacks, and political maneuvering more than once. Lincoln was the constant who refused to let those things remove him. When Grant wrote that Lincoln was the greatest man he had ever known, he was not trying to add another layer of marble to the Lincoln monument. He was acknowledging a debt, one professional and one deeply personal.
He was saying, “This man saw me clearly, early, and held his judgment when it cost him something to do it.” Lincoln left a written record, and the record is specific. He left, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” He left, “I really believe I am the only friend Grant has left. He shall have the chance.
” He left the April 30th letter with its admission that Grant’s judgment had exceeded his and its promise not to obtrude his own views. He left, “Hold on with a bulldog grip and chew and choke as much as possible.” He left, not as president, but as a friend. Those are not the words of a manager checking boxes on a performance review.
They are the words of one man recognizing something in another man and being willing to say it plainly in letters, in telegrams, in conversations other people wrote down. Lincoln’s greatness with language is usually located in the set piece speeches, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural, words written to move a nation and to echo across generations.
But there is something in the letters and telegrams that the speeches can’t quite carry because the speeches were for the country. The letters were for Grant. In those lines, you see a president telling a general what he actually thought in the moment when it cost him something to think it, and a general years later writing down exactly what that had meant.
That record has been sitting in published collections for more than a century. It is worth reading. If you have a view on Lincoln and Grant, on whether Lincoln’s judgment about Grant was obvious or extraordinary, prescient or just lucky, drop it in the comments. The relationship between a president and his general is one of the most complicated dynamics in any war, and this one is worth arguing about.
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