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As Grant offered his services and took command of a regiment in Missouri, Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee, a handsome Virginian patrician married to Martha Washington’s great-granddaughter, the post of commander-in-chief. Lee, who believed that ‘The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa … The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race,’ refused and took command of Confederate forces. Lincoln turned to a young general, George McClellan, who despised him as a ‘well-meaning baboon’, wanted to maintain slavery and harboured Caesaresque ambitions, telling his wife, ‘I seem to have become the power of the land … I almost think that were I to win some small success now, I could become Dictator …’ Lincoln appointed him to command the Army of the Potomac and then as overall commander, but McClellan prevaricated as the Confederates attacked. Lincoln was soon dissatisfied. ‘If General McClellan doesn’t want to use the army,’ he said, ‘I’d like to borrow it for a time.’

The Confederacy controlled Virginia, and its best chance of beating the more populous north was to strike fast. Lee advanced, but not quickly or forcefully enough. The war that followed demonstrated the destructive power of the new technologies on the flesh of men who were deployed as if they were fighting traditional wars of cavalry and courage. Instead, artillery barrages and long-range rifles marked a new era that required new generals: at Antietam, 20,0000 were killed or wounded, the single bloodiest day in American history. Lincoln soon noticed that Grant, fighting in the west, was a winner. Even when he was almost defeated, at Shiloh, he just said, ‘We’ll lick ’em tomorrow.’ Generals needed the nerve to take punishing casualties, but Grant also possessed the sangfroid and strategic foresight to win. ‘I saw an open field,’ he recalled of the aftermath at Shiloh, ‘so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.’

The end of Lee’s offensive empowered Lincoln, on 22 September 1862, to order the emancipation of the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states, effective from 1 January the following year. Frederick Douglass, the once enslaved African-American leader, had wondered if Lincoln would ever deliver: ‘Can any colored man … ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word?’^*

More than 179,000 African-Americans escaped the south and joined Unionist forces. Not all Union generals welcomed them, but Grant did.^*

Lincoln finally demoted McClennan, but Grant was criticized for his bloody battles and alcoholic lapses. ‘I think Grant has hardly a friend left except myself,’ said Lincoln. ‘What I want is generals who fight battles and win victories. Grant’s done this.’ Grant took Vicksburg in Mississippi, while another competent general, deploying the Union’s superiority in men and material, defeated the Confederates in a bloody battle at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. When Lincoln visited the battlefield, he defined the American ideal of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. As he planned his re-election, he feared that Grant would run against him. Once he had checked that Grant had no such ambition, he promoted him to command the Union armies, and the two finally met.

‘Why, here is General Grant,’ said Lincoln at the White House. ‘Well, this a great pleasure, I assure you.’ Grant, laconic, sturdy, intense, admired the gangly, yarn-spinning Lincoln – ‘a very great man’, he said – but loathed the attention, telling Julia, ‘I heartily wish myself back in camp.’ Yet they had much in common: both were underrated, plain-spoken prairie pragmatists who abhorred slavery yet had married into self-important slave-owning families. Both had crosses to bear: for Lincoln, it was depression; for Grant, drink. Lincoln’s operational orders were simple. ‘He wished me to beat Lee,’ said Grant, ‘but how I did it was my own duty.’ Grant and Lee were opposites: Lee a patrician who manoeuvred like a Virginian Napoleon; Grant ‘the quietest little fellow you ever saw’, noted an officer. ‘The only evidence you have that he’s in any place is that he makes things git.’ He soon made things git, advancing in Virginia and Georgia.