Grant’s Lieutenants: From Chattanooga to Appomattox
Edited by Steven E. Woodworth
(December 2008 Civil War News)

Notes, index, 263 pp., 2008. University Press of Kansas, 2502 Westbrooke Circle, Lawrence, KS 66045, $34.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Carl R. Schenker Jr.
Carl R. Schenker Jr. is a lawyer living in Washington, D.C. His wife, Susan Sherman Richardson, is a great-great-granddaughter of William Tecumseh Sherman. Schenker is the author of “Grant’s Rise from Obscurity” in North & South magazine.

Review:
This is a very engaging collection of nine essays on 11 Union generals who numbered among Ulysses S. Grant’s lieutenants during the second half of the Civil War, while Grant served as commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi and then as general-in-chief. The book follows the similarly conceived 2001 volume entitled Grant’s Lieutenants: From Cairo to Vicksburg

Together, the various essays provide a useful mosaic of the war’s second half, especially in the East, and illuminate generals figuring large, medium and small in the conflict.

This reviewer, with an interest in Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman in particular, learned much about others and is glad to have read the volume (which would have benefited from portraits and maps).

As revealed by the title, the book is not a primer on Grant himself. Rather, its jacket promises a look at Grant’s lieutenants – some of whom he selected and some of whom he inherited – “in terms of both their working relationship with their general-in-chief and their actual performances.”

Naturally, readers will find that some chapters deliver more satisfactorily against that standard than do others.

For this reader, the most satisfying essay is John Marszalek’s chapter on Sherman. Those 18 pages richly detail the warm personal relationship between Grant and Sherman and show convincingly how it influenced the war, particularly in Grant’s deferring to Sherman’s desire to march to the sea.

The other contributions do not quite match that standard, either because the personal relationship is not sketched as evocatively or because (as in the case of Franz Sigel in particular) interpersonal dynamics simply played a less important role. Thus, the other chapters tend to focus more on military performance and turn less on discussion of the other generals’ various relationships with Grant.

Editor Steven Woodworth contributes a chapter on George H. Thomas. Framed by the 1863 Chattanooga Campaign, which brought Grant, Sherman and Thomas together in dramatic circumstances, the essay usefully notes factors that caused Thomas’s relationship with Grant to be less successful than Sherman’s.

Grant’s Virginia campaign, in close field control of George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac, and Meade’s role and reactions to serving so intimately with the general-in-chief, are well chronicled in a chapter by Ethan Rafuse.

The potentially very rich chapter on Phil Sheridan, by graduate student Steven Nash, discusses but does not fully bring to life what appears to have been a very warm and consequential personal relationship with Grant.

Mark Grimsley and Earl Hess, respectively, chronicle the problems created for Grant by two flawed political generals, Benjamin Butler (whose Army of the James participated in Grant’s Virginia campaign) and Franz Sigel (Department of West Virginia).

Benjamin Franklin Cooling discusses Jubal Early’s 1864 raid on Washington and the very imperfect efforts to cope by Grant, David Hunter, Lew Wallace and Horatio Wright.

William Feis contributes a chapter on Edward O.C. Ord, a general whom Grant slotted into several important commands over time, ultimately as Butler’s replacement in command of the Army of the James.

Feis charges that Grant was guilty of “endless – and sometimes myopic – patronage” in repeatedly advancing this “mediocre commander,” but leaves this reader wishing that he would have provided more insight into the dynamics of the “close relationship” that assertedly led Grant astray.

The book concludes with Mark Grimsley’s second offering, a chapter on Henry W. Halleck, “unique” in that he was Grant’s immediate superior in the West and himself general-in-chief before ending up as one of Grant’s lieutenants, in the Washington-bound role of chief of staff.

Grimsley makes the case that Halleck, despite having a low opinion of Grant early in the war, managed to serve his one-time subordinate cheerfully and well.