Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

After his strategically critical victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Ulysses S. Grant was indisputably the Union’s most successful general. By early 1864, it was clear to many observers that the commander of Northern forces in the Western theater would, and should, rise even further in acclaim and power – and they began to plan accordingly, without bothering to ask the brilliant, mercurial leader whether he was even interested.

Even before Chattanooga, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton floated the idea of giving Grant command of the Army of the Potomac, a force that would put him in the spotlight of the Virginia theater. When he heard this, Grant immediately begged friends in Washington to help quash the idea. The last thing Grant wanted was to give up an army he liked and knew how to use for one whose officer corps was riven by jealousy and suspicion, especially of “outsiders” like himself.

Others tried to enmesh Grant in politics. His friend William Tecumseh Sherman proved prophetic when he said that Grant’s battlefield successes meant “partisans will maneuver for your influence.” Indeed, factions within both political parties tried to draw Grant into their respective folds, with the aim of making him a challenger to Abraham Lincoln in the coming 1864 election.

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All such talk of his running against Lincoln flummoxed Grant. “The question astonishes me,” he wrote in reply to a request from one War Democrat to nominate him. “I do not know of anything I have ever done or said which would indicate that I could be a candidate for any office whatever within the gift of the people.” Chatter about pursuing the presidency eventually died down by late autumn 1863, which was fortunate for Grant, since, as he wrote in the same letter, “nothing likely to happen would pain me so much as to see my name used in connection with a political office.”

But another troubling development appeared late in 1863. That December, Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, who had secured Grant’s commission early in the war, introduced a bill to re-establish the rank of lieutenant general in the army – essentially the country’s supreme military commander. The first American to hold the rank was George Washington in 1798. (Winfield Scott had also held it for a short period in a temporary appointment.) It was common knowledge in both political and military circles that the bill would easily pass and that Grant would be promoted to the position.

But those who had served closely with Grant knew how uneasily he considered this prospect, which most men in his position would have eagerly reached for as a crowning honor. Lt. Col. John A. Rawlins, his intensely dedicated and occasionally scolding chief of staff, wrote Washburne directly to say that Grant would not welcome any position that took him out of the field. Rear Adm. David D. Porter, who had led naval operations during the Vicksburg campaign, expressed a similar sentiment in a January 1864 letter to Secretary of Navy Gustavus Fox. Grant “don’t like anything but fighting and smoking, and hates politics the way the devel [sic] does holy water — he don’t want even to be Lieut. General until the war is over.”

A few days after the bill was introduced, Grant himself wrote Washburne to say he didn’t deserve “anything more in the shape of honors or promotion.” Defeating the enemy is what he wanted more than anything, Grant went on, and he desired “to hold such influence over those under my command as to enable me to use them to secure this end.” Grant believed he could best help win the war by leading his men in the fight, not directing battles from the rear, in the politically stifling confines of the nation’s capital.

In early March 1864 the unwelcome news that the bill had passed arrived at Grant’s Nashville headquarters, in the form of a telegraph from General in Chief Henry W. Halleck. After the war Grant would tell Washburne that “nothing ever fell on me like a wet blanket so much as my promotion to the lieutenant-generalcy.” By that time Grant had resolved to accept the new position only on terms acceptable to him; above all, he would have to be able to stay out of Washington. In fact, he had declared in a personal letter to Sherman on the eve of departing for the capital, “I shall state very distinctly on my arrival there that I accept no appointment which will require me to make that city my headquarters.”

On this point Grant would get his wish. His orders from Lincoln said his headquarters would be wherever he was, and that he was entirely free to decide where that would be. Initially Grant thought he would return to the West and join the Union forces gathering in Chattanooga in preparation for the campaign against Atlanta. However, while in Washington Grant made the astute decision to remain in the East and move in coordination with the Army of the Potomac.

Grant changed his mind for several reasons. First, he could use the influence of his position to bar political meddling with the army’s operations. In addition, he could tamp down at least some of the infighting that notoriously plagued its officer corps.

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Further, Grant decided he wanted to keep Maj. Gen. George Meade in place as the Army of Potomac’s commander. The prevailing wisdom was that Meade was ill suited for this role, but on March 10 Grant met with him and quickly reached a different conclusion. Meade offered to resign if Grant so wished; in his memoirs Grant would write that Meade’s sincerity and humility “gave me an even more favorable opinion of Meade than did his great victory at Gettysburg.” Over the course of the meeting both men realized they could work easily and well with each other.

On March 17 Grant was back in Nashville, discussing the coming spring campaigns with Sherman and other trusted subordinates. By March 19 Grant and Sherman had moved to Cincinnati, where they continued to refine their plans. They would lead a coordinated offensive by the armies under Sherman’s control in the West, aimed at Confederate forces led by Joseph Johnston, and the Army of the Potomac against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Soon after Grant returned to Washington on March 23, he explained the logic of his strategy to Lincoln. He intended to “employ all the force of all the armies continuously and concurrently,” a staff officer later recalled, “so that there should be no recuperation on the part of the rebels, no rest from attack.” This approach, relying on the Union’s virtual two-to-one advantage in soldiers and even greater superiority in materiel, would grind down the enemy’s armies and keep them from exploiting their interior lines of defense to reinforce one another. “Oh yes, I see that!” Lincoln delightedly replied. “As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while someone else does.”

Grant then turned his attention to honing Union forces for the bloody work ahead. He secured Lincoln’s support for seizing de facto control of quasi-independent departments like ordnance, commissary and quartermaster, which until that point had mulishly resisted directives from field commanders, creating needless delay and confusion in supply efforts. Grant also sharply cut the army’s logistical forces, transferring tens of thousands of soldiers to frontline duty.

Most important, he consolidated the activities of the heretofore independent military field departments, whose diffuse movements had weakened the federal war effort. “My general plan was to concentrate all the force possible against the main Confederate armies in the field,” Grant explained in his memoirs, “and to arrange a simultaneous movement all along the line.”

Throughout April Grant kept to himself his specific plans for the upcoming attack against Lee. Instead, a blizzard of logistical orders came from the small, cigar smoke-filled tent in Culpeper, Va., that served as headquarters for the entire Army of the United States. A member of Meade’s staff observed that Grant’s headquarters was “the center of a pervasive quiet.”

Not even Lincoln knew in any detail what Grant planned to do. “He hasn’t told me what his plans are,” Lincoln explained to one of his secretaries. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.” A Wisconsin veteran in the Army of the Potomac had a similar feeling about Grant: “He looks as if he means it.”

Grant very much meant it. And exactly what he meant would become devastatingly clear to soldiers and citizens on both sides very soon after May 4, when he directed Meade to take the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan River, passing by what he thought was Robert E. Lee’s settled right flank, and deep into a tangled expanse of pine barrens and scrub oaks known as the Wilderness.

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Sources: Bruce Catton, “Grant Takes Command”; Charles Bracelen Flood, “Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War”; Ulysses S. Grant, “Personal Memoirs”; Jean Edward Smith, “Grant”; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” Vol. 32, Pt. 3.

Thom Bassett is writing a novel about William Tecumseh Sherman. He lives in Providence, R.I., and teaches at Bryant University.