United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Anecdotes
Then came Meade who won the great battle of Gettysburg and beat back
the only invasion of the North, but who failed to follow up his
advantage and had settled down to the old policy that the North knew so
well of watchful waiting. At last came the Man. He had been fighting in
the West and he had won,--not important battles, but more important,
the confidence of the people and of Abraham Lincoln, the people's
president. For this new man had a new system of generalship. His
tactics were simple enough. He believed that armies were made to use,
not to save. He believed in finding the enemy and hammering and
hammering and hammering away until something broke--and that something
was usually the enemy. His name was Ulysses S. Grant.
"He fights," was all that President Lincoln said about him when a party
of politicians came to ask that he be removed. That was enough. What
the North wanted was a fighter. Other generals would fight when they
had to and were satisfied to stop if they defeated the enemy or broke
even, but Grant was like old Charles Martel, Charles the Hammerer, who
won his name when he saved all Europe from the Saracens on the plains
of Tours by a seven-day battle. The great host of horsemen which had
swept victorious through Asia, Africa and half the circle of the
Mediterranean whirled down on the solid mass of grim Northmen. For six
long days Charles Martel hammered away at that flashing horde of wild
warriors. On the seventh his hammer strokes shattered the might of the
Moslems and they broke and fled, never to cross the Pyrenees again. Now
like Charles, the Hammerer of the Union Army was facing his great test,
the terrible Seven Days in the Wilderness. Between him and the
Confederate capital lay Lee's veteran army entrenched in that wild
stretch of Virginia territory which was well named the Wilderness.
Every foot of the puzzling woods, ravines, thickets and trails were
known to the Confederates and well they ought to know it since they had
already won a great battle on nearly the same field. In this tangled
waste an army that knew the ground had a tremendous advantage. Lee
chose his battle-field, but did not believe that Grant would join
battle. He was to learn to know his great opponent better. Grant would
always fight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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