Original subtitles

‐ Rebs!

‐ Rebs! Coming from the woods!

Rebs! In the left!

Rebs!

‐ Hurt bad, private? ‐ It's only a scratch, sir.

‐ So you can fight?

Come on now, boys.

Pitch in. I'm right behind you.

Everyone has his superstitions.

One of my superstitions has always been

when I started to go anywhere or do anything,

never to turn back or stop

until the thing intended was accomplished.

‐ General Grant. ‐ Sherman.

‐ We've had the devil's own day, haven't we?

‐ Lick them tomorrow though.

‐ Very few people really know who Ulysses S. Grant was.

‐ Today there is this sense that he's forgotten.

‐ He's been called so many things over the years.

‐ The greatest general of his time.

‐ A military genius.

‐ A bloody butcher.

‐ A corrupt President.

‐ A belligerent drunk who got lucky.

He didn't get lucky.

‐ Ulysses S. Grant is this perfectly average,

humble individual from a poor, hardscrabble background...

‐ With a lot of hard times and failures in his life.

‐ But he's got this dogged determination

and this bulldog mentality.

‐ This guy comes from nothing,

rises to the highest ranks of the Union army.

‐ Form your lines!

‐ Fights bloody, terrible battles‐‐

‐ With indomitable will‐‐

‐ To save the Union.

‐ To heal his country.

‐ To lead the nation towards justice for everybody.

‐ He's the unheroic hero of our greatest national epic,

the American Civil War.

‐ It's truly an American story,

not only in patriotism to the nation,

but for the values of who we are and who we aspire to be.

‐ My family is American and has been for generations.

At the breaking out of the war of the revolution,

my grandfather went to join the Continental Army.

He was present at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

I was born on the 27th of April, 1822, in Ohio.

While my father carried on the manufacture of leather,

I detested the trade.

‐ Ulys, get in here.

About that colt, offer $20. That's what it's worth.

If old Ralston says no, then you offer 25.

Don't make a mess of it.

‐ There was Mr. Ralston,

living within a few miles of the village,

who owned a colt which I very much wanted.

Well?

‐ Pop says I can offer you $20 for the colt,

but if you won't take that, I can offer you 25.

‐ 25 it is, son.

‐ That transaction caused me much heartburn.

‐ Ulysses. ‐ Ulysses.

More like useless. Useless Grant.

‐ Grant as a kid showed no promise for anything.

The local kids called him Useless Grant

rather than Ulysses Grant.

‐ Grant doesn't have, probably, the best childhood

in terms of an overbearing father.

‐ Ulysses really has nothing

in common with his father.

He does not want to follow in the family business,

does not like the tannery.

He's repulsed by the smell.

He's repulsed by the sight of blood.

He just doesn't like it,

but what he does like is horses.

He becomes an avid horseman at a very young age,

and that's going to be very helpful down the road.

‐ I think his father thought, "What am I gonna do

with Ulysses?" and so his father is able

to get Grant an appointment to West Point,

but he'd applied, apparently, without Grant knowing,

and so when the notice came of the appointment,

his father says to Ulysses that,

"You've got the appointment,"

and Grant's response was, "The appointment to what?"

He goes, "Well, to West Point. You're going to West Point."

‐ And Grant said, "I don't really think so,"

and his father says, "Yes‐‐yes, you are,"

and he ends up going,

but Grant emphatically did not want to be a soldier.

‐ I would have been glad to have had a railroad collision

or any other accident happen by which I might have received

a temporary injury sufficient

to make me ineligible to enter the academy.

Nothing of the kind occurred, and I had to face the music.

‐ Sir, there's been a mistake.

See, this says Ulysses S. Grant.

My name is Ulysses H. Grant.

‐ You've been officially accepted

as Ulysses S. Grant.

‐ Well, they got that wrong.

‐ This is the name that's been submitted.

This is the name you shall have.

‐ Um, yes, sir.

‐ Let me see that.

Ulysses S. Grant.

Longstreet, this man's name is U. S. Grant.

‐ A fine appellation if ever there was one.

‐ Uncle Sam Grant.

Well, Sam, I'm William Tecumseh Sherman.

This here is James Longstreet of South Carolina.

Call him Pete.

‐ Pleasure, sir. ‐ How do you do?

‐ Welcome to West Point.

‐ The initials U. S. Grant are actually a complete accident.

When that name appears,

his fellow cadets immediately start making nicknames.

United States Grant, Uncle Sam Grant,

and it's Sam that sticks with him.

‐ If you attended West Point, you were a very, very prime

specimen in the United States of America at that point.

‐ Almost all of the senior generals

of the Civil War on both sides graduated from West Point.

In the North you had Sherman.

You had McClellan. You had Sheridan and Meade.

In the South you had Stonewall Jackson.

You had Longstreet. You had Jeb Stuart.

You had Robert E. Lee.

Lee was second in his class, one of the very rare cadets

in history to have no demerits.

‐ It was very important at West Point that Grant

met many of the future generals of the Civil War.

His intimate knowledge of their personalities

would fill him with confidence

when he found them on the other side of the battlefield.

‐ He was not a model cadet.

He has plenty of demerits.

‐ He was in the middle of his class.

As he confessed later on, he mostly read novels.

‐ But he was good in math.

He enjoyed the art classes. He enjoyed mapmaking classes.

‐ And he excelled at horsemanship.

He could tame seemingly any horse.

‐ Now unfortunately for Grant, when he graduates,

there were no spots in the U. S. Cavalry,

and so the best equestrian

in that particular graduating class

ended up in the infantry.

‐ I reported for duty at Jefferson barracks, St. Louis.

At West Point I had a roommate,

Fred Dent,

whose family resided some five miles west of the barracks.

I soon found my way out to White Haven, the Dent estate.

As I found the family congenial,

my visits became frequent.

‐ The Dents were a slave‐owning family.

They had approximately 30 slaves.

There's no evidence that Grant felt discomfort

with the Dents' slaves at that point.

By his own later admission, he was not an abolitionist.

Marcia: During Grant's time in Missouri,

the entire nation found itself

divided over the issue of slavery.

The United States was engaged in I would say

kind of a fiction that you could maintain national unity

if you created a balance of slave and free states.

‐ Enslaved black people were the largest asset of wealth

that we had in this country, and so many Americans

wanted to maintain the right of enslavement,

and when I say enslavement,

I'm talking about for the right to break up families,

for the right to sell somebody's mother,

somebody's kid away,

for the right to torture people.

‐ So the question of slavery

and the atrocities of the system

was about the direction that the nation would take

economically but also morally.

‐ Grant's dad, Jesse, is a huge anti‐slavery advocate.

He's very vocal about his opinions and his beliefs.

‐ So Grant would have been well aware

of the long‐simmering tensions

between slaveholding and non‐slaveholding states.

At West Point he was friends with slaveholding men,

many who become some of his closest friends.

Grant certainly was part of that tension.

‐ Grant, you haven't yet met my sister Julia.

Julia, this is Sam, that is, Ulysses Grant.

‐ You haven't spoken, Lieutenant Grant.

‐ That's our Grant.

You'll find that he can be silent in several languages.

‐ Grant, far from looking for a girlfriend

or looking for a wife at the time,

was as surprised as anyone that he had fallen in love.

‐ However, Julia Dent is the daughter of a slave owner.

It's gonna create some dilemmas for Grant.

It's gonna cause a lot of friction

because Jesse Grant, anti‐slavery.

Frederick Dent, slave owner.

The families are very much opposed.

‐ So Grant has a secret engagement with Julia,

and they were going to approach

Colonel Dent about it,

but it's put on hold indefinitely

as he's called to the Mexican‐American War.

‐ The thing that led to the Mexican War

was the westward expansion of the United States

into Mexican territory

with an incredibly aggressive foreign policy

to unify the country all the way to California,

which was the crown jewel on the west coast.

Mexico stood in the way, so the army marches in.

Ulysses S. Grant is assigned as a quartermaster‐‐

that is, a supply officer.

Grant is a spectacular quartermaster,

incredibly hands‐on,

but he is itching to get into combat.

He is a 25‐year‐old West Point graduate

who has an opportunity to make a name for himself.

‐ To Colonel Garland,

I respectfully protest against being assigned

the duties of quartermaster...

Boys, load those boxes.

Which removes me from sharing in the dangers

and honors of service with my company at the front.

‐ I need ammunition! ‐ Yes, sir!

‐ Come on, guys, mount! Rush in!

‐ Ammunition! Ammunition!

Ammo, now!

‐ Volunteer! Volunteer!

‐ I volunteer.

‐ Grant, you're the quartermaster.

You don't need to do this. ‐ You asked for a volunteer.

‐ I need ammunition! Come on!

‐ I volunteer.

‐ We're gonna lose this position

unless we get ammunition up here now.

‐ God save you, Grant!

‐ In the Mexican War,

there's a very dramatic incident

where Grant rides on the side of a horse

using the horse as a shield

as he rides a gauntlet of bullets

to keep these men supplied in the middle of a battle.

‐ In the Mexican War Grant learns a very important lesson

about his own emotional makeup.

In moments of extreme danger,

when other people are panicking,

Grant becomes very cool in a crisis.

He discovers nothing ever rattled him in battle.

‐ You want to know

what my feelings were on the field of battle?

I do not know that I felt any peculiar sensation.

War seems much less horrible to persons engaged in it

than to those who read of the battle.

‐ Grant watches people die horrible deaths in battle.

He loses many of his friends, one after the other,

and so I think he has a very clear sense

of the costs of war from the start.

‐ Many West Point‐trained officers

served together during the U. S. war with Mexico.

That's where Grant met Robert E. Lee

for the first time, Grant as a lower‐level officer

but Lee as a major staff officer.

Lee is a hero during the war.

‐ The Mexican War ends in 1848.

We have gotten exactly what we want,

most of the American Southwest,

roughly 500,000 square miles of territory,

all the way to the Pacific Ocean,

and the question of whether that land would be

slave or free, of course,

would raise its ugly head pretty much every year

after that right up to 1861.

In many ways, the completion of the United States

from sea to shining sea leads directly

to the American Civil War.

‐ By the time Grant came back from the Mexican War,

he had matured, and Julia was waiting for him,

but Julia's father, Colonel Dent,

thought she could do better.

He thought that the military life

would be very difficult for her.

‐ Grant eventually won over Dent

and asked to marry Julia.

‐ But Grant came from a strongly abolitionist family

that was horrified that he was marrying into

this Missouri slave‐owning family,

and when Ulysses and Julia get married in 1848,

not a single member of the Grant family is there.

‐ The first years

of that marriage are actually quite difficult.

Grant is posted to the west coast, to Fort Humboldt.

Julia is expecting a child and is thus unable

to go with him to the Pacific Northwest.

‐ When he was separated from his family,

he missed them terribly, especially Julia,

and Fort Humboldt was an isolated,

desolate place to be,

so he really started to suffer significant melancholy.

‐ Dear Julia, the mail came

but brought me nothing from you.

I have only had one letter from you in three months.

My dear wife, how very anxious I am to get home once again.

I sometimes get so anxious

to see you and our little boys,

I'm almost tempted to resign.

Dear Julia, I do not feel

as if it is possible to endure this separation much longer.

‐ Grant gets bored easily when there's nothing going on.

He gets lonely, and that is when you start seeing

maybe some problems with the drinking.

‐ Thank you, sir.

‐ When I have nothing to do,

I get blue,

and I have a natural craving for a drink.

‐ Captain Grant.

Grant, you know the rules about drink.

‐ This is where all the stories

of Grant's drinking start.

I think there were some times when he did drink.

It was a story that circulated among army officers,

and then later it became an easy thing

for those who vilified him or wished to to seize on.

It became one of the running themes of his life.

‐ Grant, I'm sorry it's come to this.

You have a choice:

resign or court martial.

‐ Hey, mister, you a soldier?

‐ Uh, n‐no, I'm‐‐

‐ Then why are you wearing that old soldier's coat?

‐ It's a good coat, but I'm not a soldier anymore.

‐ So what are you?

‐ May I ask who you are?

‐ Grant, Fred Grant.

‐ Ulys!

Ulys!

‐ When Grant arrives back at White Haven,

it must have been an absolutely surreal experience.

He hadn't seen his wife, Julia, in two years.

He hadn't seen his young son, Fred, in two years,

and he had never even met his youngest son,

Ulysses Jr.‐‐ his namesake.

‐ Grant is now very much

lorded over by his father‐in‐law,

Colonel Dent, who is convinced

that his daughter has married beneath her.

So there's a slow burn going on in Ulysses Grant.

‐ Grant wants to be independent.

He wants to get out of the main house,

to get away from Colonel Dent, and so he builds Hardscrabble

on the 60 acres given by Colonel Dent to Julia.

He's got to clear the land, clear the wood.

He wants to have his family in their own home.

That is the independent streak in him.

Julia had absolute trust in her husband.

He wasn't looking for fame, fortune.

His ambitions centered on his family.

He would say, "You know my weaknesses,

my horses and my children."

‐ Grant is now faced

with the challenge of making a living.

He tried farming. That doesn't work out so well.

He tries a real estate business in St. Louis,

but he's not really very good at collecting rent.

He tries to get a job as a surveyor,

and he isn't able to get that.

He doesn't really know what to do.

What's staring him in the face is poverty.

‐ I did not want to fly from one thing to another,

but I was compelled to make a living for my family.

If nothing else could be done, I would load a cord of wood

and take it to the city for sale.

‐ Captain Grant? ‐ Whoa, whoa.

‐ I served under you in Mexico, Molino del Rey.

‐ Oh.

‐ Hell of a day, sir. ‐ Yes.

‐ May I ask what you're doing, sir?

‐ Solving the problem of poverty.

‐ Sir.

‐ Many people think that Grant selling firewood

was beneath him,

but the reality was he was willing to do whatever it took

to provide for his family.

I think that's the core of Ulysses S. Grant.

You will encounter hardships.

You will encounter failures,

but you've got to keep pushing.

You've gotta keep persevering.

‐ He also, however, was living

in a kind of divided household.

He's living with the Dent slaves,

and Grant grew up in a home where his own father

was very vocal in his anti‐slavery attitudes.

He is not an abolitionist.

In fact, Grant acquires from Colonel Dent

a slave, William Jones,

but he's criticized by the Dents

and by their neighbors

for working alongside the slaves in the fields.

‐ He actually got ridiculed by some of his neighbors

for being too nice to his wife's slaves,

that he was not whipping them enough.

‐ I don't know why a black skin

may not cover a true heart as well as a white one.

‐ In the late 1850s, Grant obviously

was already wrestling with this slavery issue.

‐ And then this new political party surfaces,

the Republicans,

and they have as their platform

not the abolition of slavery

but to stop slavery from spreading

to new territories of the United States.

‐ Slaveholders don't see it that way,

and they believe that all Republicans want to end slavery

even in the slaveholding South.

Neither side is happy, and things start amping up.

‐ Grant found himself caught in the crossfire

between the abolitionist Grants and the slave‐owning Dents,

but he had enough reservations about slavery

that in March 1859

Grant goes to the circuit court in St. Louis.

‐ Name, age? ‐ Jones, William, 34.

‐ Prices are up.

I've got a friend that'll get you $1,000 for him.

Are you sure you want to let him free

when you can make some money?

‐ Yes.

God protect you, William.

‐ You also, sir.

‐ Grant sets him free.

When you imagine Grant restoring freedom

to an enslaved human,

you have to imagine, like, walking away from your house.

I hate to be that callous about it,

but you have to imagine walking away

from the greatest asset

you could possibly have at a time when you're poor.

You're not gonna sell the house.

You're gonna walk away from it.

Uh, it's a tremendous act of courage.

‐ So finally in 1860, one year before the Civil War,

Grant, in what must have felt like the ultimate humiliation,

goes to his overbearing father and begs his father for a job

as a clerk in his father's leather goods store

in Bologna, Illinois.

He is bored and restless.

He seems destined for a life of complete obscurity.

‐ During that time there's an idealistic visionary

from the west beginning to emerge

with a special kind of speaking ability,

who could translate a sort of folksy,

homespun understanding of American affairs

to the wider public,

and he becomes the Republican Party's

standard bearer in the election of 1860,

and that man was Abraham Lincoln.

‐ I wanted to see Mr. Lincoln elected.

Excitement ran high,

and torch‐led processions enlivened the street.

‐ As the secession movement gained traction,

Grant was like many northerners

and a sizeable number of southerners

who wondered what we could do to keep the Union together.

He didn't want the Union to break up.

He thought that would be a disaster.

‐ I still had hopes for the extreme pro‐slavery sentiment

to cool down,

but I was mistaken.

‐ The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860

is a direct‐‐ direct assault on the South.

The South is feeling completely under attack,

that the new government is going to come in,

and they're gonna take away all their slaves,

and we're not gonna be a part of a country

that isn't going to help preserve our way of life.

Now we've gone and elected this guy

from out in the middle of Illinois,

this little know‐nothing lawyer...

And it's on.

‐ A few days after Lincoln's election,

South Caroline calls for a secession convention,

and on December the 20th, 1860,

they pull themselves out of the Union.

Mississippi and Florida are the second

and third states to follow.

By February 1861, seven deep Southern states

have left the union to form the Confederate States.

Four additional states will leave after the firing

on Fort Sumter.

‐ When Southern coastal states seceded,

they considered all of the forts property

of the Confederacy.

Obviously the federal government

didn't see it that way,

and Lincoln said he would possess,

hold, and occupy federal property.

The Confederates wanted the Union soldiers to leave.

They would not, and the South opened fire to bombard

Fort Sumter into submission.

‐ The war breaks out,

and the United States government is desperate

for anyone who's had any kind of military experience.

‐ Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers

to suppress the rebellion.

‐ Most people in the North

thought this would be a short event.

The Union would win this war quickly

with its military might,

with its railroads, with its brave soldiers.

‐ Back in Galena, Illinois, Grant has a friend,

John Rawlins, who has received a commission

from the governor to organize a regiment.

‐ It's damn suicide, don't you think?

‐ I'd give them 90 days,

but then again, the South can claim

more than half the officers at West Point,

and I've seen them in Mexico.

Quick on counterattacks,

know the terrain.

Can't underestimate them.

‐ I'm speaking at the courthouse later,

hoping to raise a regiment here.

I'm sure the young men would respect a soldier

with your experience. ‐ Mm.

I'm no speaker.

‐ Oh, hell,

I'm not asking you to speak.

I'm asking you to lead.

‐ The call of the President for 75,000 men

was heard throughout the northern states.

There were but two parties now,

traitors and patriots.

‐ We don't see a lot of expressions of emotion

from Grant until we talk about the South seceding,

rebelling against the United States of America.

This‐‐this grinds at Ulysses S. Grant.

He grows up listening about his relatives

fighting in the revolution,

and so he is very emotional about this idea of traitors.

‐ Dear Father, my inclination is to whip

the rebellion into submission.

‐ When Jefferson Davis is sworn in

as Confederate president,

Grant is so upset by it that he shakes his fist in the air

and says, "Davis and the whole gang of them ought to be hung."

‐ Many people in the United States

thought that this experiment

that the founding fathers had put in place

was in fact still an experiment

and was in jeopardy,

and this notion of fighting for the Union was tied up

in believing that what the founders had created

was in fact worth fighting for and worth saving,

and that's why so many men were willing

to risk their lives to fight for the Union.

‐ Beginning of the war,

we have about 31 million people

in the United States.

About 21 million live in the North.

About 10 million of them live in the South,

but in the South about four million of them are slaves,

so it's really 6 million against 21 million.

The South is 80% agricultural, but what do they grow?

Tobacco, cotton, indigo, rice, corn.

Well, you can only eat two of those.

From people to manufacturing to technology,

the North has all the advantages over the South,

but that doesn't make it a foregone conclusion

about who will win

because ultimately, war is a clash of wills,

and in this clash of wills,

maybe, just maybe the South would win.

‐ After southern secession,

the federal government

was looking for a commander,

this new Union army

that was going to try to restore the republic.

The first name that comes to mind

is Robert E. Lee, a Virginian.

‐ Lee was offered the command of the Union army

and, of course, did some deep thinking

and then decided that his allegiance

was to the South and Virginia.

‐ Ulysses S. Grant, however,

starts the Civil War as a nobody,

but he gets a big break when the governor of Illinois

appoints him as commander of one of the Illinois regiments,

and that will start his military career again.

‐ And so having come from the tannery

and now having this window of opportunity with this war

to get back in the army, to take command,

he recognizes that "I must seize it," and he does.

‐ Grant comes out of a series of failures

in his civilian life.

At one point, he has to literally sell his watch

to buy Christmas presents for his wife and children,

and now all of a sudden he's back in uniform.

‐ Grant comes in with a firm hand.

He whips this regiment into shape,

and people start realizing maybe we've got something here.

‐ In the military, he was home again.

There was something about the way

he unsheathed his sword, the way he gave orders

that people suddenly listened to and obeyed.

‐ Very soon after the war began,

Grant gets orders to take his men into Kentucky,

as much for political reasons as for military reasons.

‐ Kentucky is one of four slaveholding states

that will remain precariously tethered

to the Union throughout the war.

We called those the border states.

‐ Abraham Lincoln was very concerned

about keeping Kentucky in the Union.

He said, "To lose Kentucky is nearly the same

as to lose the whole game."

He thought the other border states

might follow suit as well.

And then a Confederate army marched into Kentucky,

so Grant moves as fast as he can to Paducah, Kentucky.

‐ Dear Julia,

secession flags were flying through Paducah

in anticipation of Southern troops.

Our arrival, therefore, put quite a damper on their hopes.

Come away from the window.

Those are Yankees.

‐ General, it's time. Troops are moving in.

‐ Citizens of Paducah, I have come among you

not as your enemy but as your friend

and fellow citizen, not to injure or annoy you

but to respect the rights and to defend

and enforce the rights of all loyal citizens.

‐ Grant issues a proclamation to try to quell civilian fear,

and Abraham Lincoln takes note.

Lincoln right away saw that proclamation and recognized,

"Here's a man who understands people and is plain‐spoken,

just like me."

‐ Grant successfully occupied Paducah, Kentucky

without a shot being fired,

and so he gets orders to attack

a Confederate supply link on the Mississippi River

at the small village of Belmont.

Belmont is very important.

It's Grant's first real test of combat in the Civil War.

‐ My dear Julia,

what you are to look out for I cannot tell you,

but your husband will never disgrace you

nor leave a defeated field.

‐ Captain, flush these rebels out now.

Go on. Go.

‐ Yes, sir.

‐ Whoo, let them taste this steel!

‐ Form up! On me!

‐ Find the ammunition, boys!

‐ The Confederates abandoned their camp,

and these Union forces, these are guys who just fought

their first battle, very light casualties,

and so they are euphoric at this point.

‐ Grant has won, seemingly, a significant victory here,

but his troops lose all discipline.

Don't mind if I do!

‐ Show me that blood on your hands!

‐ Hey, boys, look what I found.

‐ Captain, control your men! ‐ Yes, sir!

‐ Now I can hit them Yankees.

‐ Run!

‐ Captain, control your men!

‐ Yes, sir!

‐ At Grant's first engagement at Belmont,

the Confederates counterattacked.

‐ Into the trees!

We cut our way in. We cut our way out.

‐ Keep your head down! ‐ Into the trees!

‐ They organized a fighting retreat

north to the riverboats

that were going to give them their means of escape.

Grant was the last man to get on board ship.

The boat had already untied

and was starting to drift out into the river,

and Grant actually rode his horse

across the gangplank onto the riverboat.

It was an amazing feat of horsemanship,

and Grant, in his typical self‐deprecating style,

he gave all the credit to the horse.

He made some serious mistakes.

He lost control of his men, but he is learning,

and coming out of the Battle of Belmont,

he's looking for the next fight.

‐ In the early years of the war

there are really two distinct theaters.

You have the eastern theater,

where a series of different Union commanders prove

incapable of really putting the pressure on the South

that President Lincoln wants to see,

and then you have the western theater,

which is where Grant is.

‐ In that western theater, the Union's strategy

is going to be

to occupy key transportation facilities in the west,

open up the entire Mississippi if they can,

and it was rather simple to look on a map

where the Confederate strong points were

and see where the dominoes might fall.

Grant could plainly see that the most obvious ones‐‐

the northernmost ones‐‐

were clearly Forts Henry and Donelson.

They commanded key rivers,

and he could use those key rivers

to advance directly into the Confederacy.

‐ Grant wants to get this war moving.

He doesn't believe sitting in garrison is gonna win anything,

so he makes a proposal to his commander,

General Henry Halleck.

‐ General Halleck, it's an honor.

‐ State briefly the nature of your business.

‐ My division is stationed here in Carroll

on the Cumberland River,

where we've been sizing up a naval assault

on two enemy forts, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.

‐ Continue.

‐ Fort Henry is badly sited

and vulnerable from the water.

Fort Donelson is stronger

but commanded by General John Floyd,

and he's no soldier.

I believe if I can take both forts,

we can advance as far as Nashville and Alabama.

‐ A combined naval assault?

‐ The victories would be yours, sir.

‐ Thank you.

But when I wish to consult you on a subject,

I will notify you.

‐ Yes, sir.

‐ They called Halleck "Old Brains."

They don't call him that for nothing.

He wants everything done absolutely by the book,

and Grant is not a by‐the‐book kind of guy.

No limelight, no fanfare,

and forget the pomp and circumstance.

We're just gonna get it done, and so the two clash.

Grant, with his bulldog mentality,

immediately turns to what I call his naval soul mate,

Andrew H. Foote,

the naval commander of the western flotilla

with ironclad gunboats.

‐ So the two of them jointly made a proposal

to General Halleck to move against Fort Henry.

‐ They're begging Halleck, prodding Halleck.

"Please, turn us loose. Let us go,"

and it's only by the slimmest margins

that Halleck allows Grant to attack.

‐ It's very different to be in charge.

Command is an extraordinary privilege

and the weight of responsibility

is very much on your shoulders,

and Grant experiences this as he approaches Fort Henry.

‐ So February the 6th,

Foote's gunboats begin to shell Fort Henry.

‐ The infantry's gonna get behind each fort,

seal in the Confederate defenders

while the navy just pummels Fort Henry into submission.

‐ Most of the Confederates had already evacuated.

Fort Henry surrenders before Grant's men

even get close to the fort.

The capture of Fort Henry was significant,

but Grant is not gonna sit and rest on his laurels.

Fort Donelson was only about 12 miles to the east.

He keeps the ball moving.

‐ Grant's thinking, "All I have to do is say boo,

and they'll‐‐ they'll surrender,"

and, um, it doesn't really happen that way.

‐ Fort Donelson was in a much better position,

much better engineered than Fort Henry.

An artillery duel began between the fort and his gunboats,

and in short, the fort won.

‐ The Confederates came out of the fort to counterattack...

And the first thing Grant does is not panic.

That's a pattern with Grant.

No matter what happens,

no matter how bad it gets, Grant doesn't panic.

‐ In the midst of the battle,

which is truly chaotic,

Grant keeps his wits about him.

He actually thinks.

He can take input. He can change his mind.

‐ At Fort Donelson, Grant will figure out

these Confederates are moving with their knapsacks.

They're not intending on going back.

They're getting out of here.

‐ Bring me that prisoner. Show me his bag.

This looks like two days' rations...

No, three.

‐ Looks like they're settling in

to hold their position.

‐ Looks like that, but it's a retreat.

Three days of rations is just enough to get to Nashville.

‐ Sir, we should reinforce the right and wait till nightfall.

‐ If we wait, they'll have time to escape.

We got to attack now, and we can take this victory.

Form your lines.

‐ Sir.

Form your lines!

Form your lines!

‐ Prepare to advance!

‐ They want an armistice and terms for surrender.

We've broken their defenses, surrounded the fort,

and outnumber them almost two to one.

It's checkmate.

‐ Who signed the note? ‐ General Buckner.

‐ Oh, Buckner.

I know him from West Point.

He paid off one of my debts back in New York.

Saved me, really.

Helped me get back to my family.

‐ Then what are your terms?

‐ Immediate and unconditional surrender,

or we fire on their works.

‐ At Fort Donelson, Grant had organized a counterattack.

The Confederates withdrew back into the fort,

and they're trapped.

‐ When Grant got the message,

"Hey, I want to talk about surrender,"

the Confederate command situation at Fort Donelson

had been an absolute comedy of errors.

There had been three general officers inside Fort Donelson,

John Floyd, Gideon Pillow,

and Grant's old friend, Simon Bolivar Buckner.

But when the idea comes to surrender, Floyd says,

"There is nobody in the Confederacy

that they want worse than me,"

and so he says, "I'm not surrendering,"

and he'll get out of Dodge.

The second in command is Gideon Pillow.

He thinks he's the greatest military commander ever,

and Pillow says,

"They want me as well, so I'm not surrendering,"

so he gets out as well, turning the command over

to the third in command, Simon Buckner.

‐ Surrender was the proper thing.

I rode to Buckner's headquarters.

General Buckner.

‐ You would not have taken the fort so easily

if I'd been in command.

‐ You're right.

I would have done it differently.

I assume Floyd and Pillow got away.

‐ Last night, yellow bastards.

Pillow feared you'd want him prisoner.

‐ In my humblest opinion, he's more valuable to me

as a Southern general.

‐ Well, here we are, old friend.

‐ Here we are.

‐ About the terms you sent.

‐ No terms.

Immediate and unconditional surrender...

Old friend.

‐ The first real victory for the United States

occurred at Fort Donelson in February of 1862

courtesy of Ulysses S. Grant.

U.S. Grant.

Useless Grant became Unconditional Surrender Grant,

and that thrilled the northern population.

It was big news because nothing good

had been happening for the Union in the war.

‐ In the eastern theater of the war,

Lincoln is dealing with one whining,

procrastinating general after another,

but here's this Ulysses S. Grant

out west who's winning battle after battle,

and Lincoln is thrilled.

He rushes to sign the order promoting Grant

to major general.

‐ The first significant Northern victory

of the Civil War will launch Grant to national prominence.

During the aftermath of the Battle at Fort Donelson,

a war correspondent painted a picture of Grant

mounted on horseback,

and in his mouth is the stub of a cigar.

As this was the first great Northern victory

of the Civil War, fans‐‐

admirers‐‐ sent him 5,000 cigars,

and so he started smoking these things,

and Grant would smoke upwards of 20 of these a day.

‐ For Grant, the first year goes good.

If there's a rookie of the year for the Union side,

it's Ulysses S. Grant.

Nobody's wining the victories like he is.

‐ He realized again that he had a gift for this.

He was very, very good at battlefield command,

and then beyond that,

at battlefield strategy and tactics.

‐ Grant has captured the first of three armies

that he will capture over the course of the war,

and he has now opened the Cumberland River

so Union naval forces and land forces

can make their way south deep into the Confederacy.

‐ Dear Julia,

soon I hope to move from here,

and when I do, there will probably

be the greatest battle fought of the war.

I have no doubt of the result.

‐ Yah, yah! Ha!

‐ The enemy was in force in Corinth,

the junction of the two most important railroads

in the Mississippi Valley.

If we obtained possession of Corinth,

the enemy would have no railroad

for the transportation of armies or supplies.

‐ Grant is thinking, "How do I stay two steps ahead?

"How do I retain the initiative?

How do I keep the enemy reacting to me?"

The war in the east is going badly,

so everything is under a microscope,

but in the west, with the first big victories

at Forts Henry and Donelson,

now all of a sudden the Tennessee

and Cumberland Rivers are open to invade the South,

and this is what Grant seizes upon.

‐ Knowing that the enemy's fortifying Corinth

and collecting an army there,

I at once put all the troops in motion

for Pittsburg Landing.

‐ Pittsburg Landing is a staging area

to attack at Corinth.

General Halleck warns Grant,

"Don't bring on an engagement. Don't start anything.

Don't pick a fight until everything is ready."

‐ The army had arrived with one of Grant's

core commanders, William Tecumseh Sherman.

Sherman was a friend of Grant's at West Point,

but they had not worked together before,

and many of Grant's men were absolutely green.

Some had just received their weapons a few days earlier.

So Grant's intention is to get his men some training

and wait there for another Union army

under the command of Don Carlos Buell

to get there and then set out to Corinth.

‐ So the idea of fighting a battle

never enters Grant's mind

at Pittsburg Landing, and the scene is set

for what would become this bloodbath of Shiloh.

‐ Sir, do you want the new men digging trenches?

‐ I don't intend to be here long enough.

The men are raw.

They need practice with guns, not with shovels.

Sherman.

‐ Sam. ‐ Activity?

‐ The Rebs stick their noses out,

and we keep slapping them.

Whipped them in a skirmish yesterday.

‐ And General Buell's men? ‐ They're three days out.

‐ We'll move on Corinth when he gets here.

‐ If we go down here‐‐

‐ Yeah. ‐ The whole way down‐‐

‐ To General Halleck, the temper of the rebel troops

is such that there is little doubt that Corinth

will fall much more easily than Fort Donelson did.

‐ Grant's major fault early in the war

is this overconfidence.

He thinks, "If anything happens,

I'm gonna start it," and it comes back to bite him.

‐ Their commander at Corinth,

General Albert Sidney Johnston,

has been doing nothing but retreat.

If he cannot regain the initiative and defeat Grant,

it likely will mean

the Confederacy will lose the Mississippi River.

Johnston really believes that the war itself

may be at stake,

so Johnston decides to organize a counterattack against Grant.

‐ Johnston knows that Grant's army's tucked up

into Pittsburg Landing,

which is a cul‐de‐sac along the Tennessee River

in between two major creeks.

It seems like a good place to camp the army.

There are good springs here.

There are creeks. We can get water.

It's good, level camping ground,

but the Confederate plan is to trap the Union army

in this cul‐de‐sac

and to destroy the Union army with one massive attack.

And so Johnston gambles, and he says,

"We must roll the iron dice of battle.

We must conquer or perish."

‐ Grant's camp at Pittsburg Landing

was right near a small wooden church.

It's one of the only landmarks in the entire vicinity.

It was called Shiloh Church.

Shiloh is translated as "place of peace."

Rebs!

Fire!

‐ Rebs!

We got them from the woods! Rebs!

‐ In the woods!

Rebs in the woods!

‐ Rebs!

They're coming from the woods!

‐ Rebs in the woods! ‐ Rebs!

‐ Wait, wait, what?

‐ Move, move!

‐ Report.

‐ Skirmishes, sir. That's all.

‐ These are not damn skirmishes.

My God, we are attacked. Form a line and hold it.

‐ Ammunition!

‐ Grant is not at Shiloh.

Grant is actually having breakfast 9 miles north

in his quarters at the Cherry Mansion.

‐ Gentlemen...

the ball is in motion.

Fire!

‐ Let's get these boys moving.

Form them into regiments.

I don't care what regiments they used to be in.

Make new ones.

‐ Yes, sir.

‐ Come on, boys, form up!

On me! ‐ Form up, regiment two.

Fall in!

‐ Buell won't get here till nightfall,

and Wallace is still six miles north.

‐ Order Wallace to come here at once with his men.

Sherman? ‐ No news.

‐ On the first day of the Battle of Shiloh,

about 40,000 Confederate soldiers

surprise the Union army and begin pushing forward.

It is the largest attack in American history

up to that time.

‐ When Grant finally got to Pittsburg Landing,

officers didn't know where their men were.

Their men didn't know where the units were.

‐ Grant immediately begins to assess the situation,

and it's almost as if battle clarified his mind,

and he could see the central thing he needed to do,

to remain calm,

to collect soldiers who have straggled back into the area,

and begin to plug this defensive line.

‐ Hurt bad, Private?

‐ It's only a scratch, sir.

‐ So you can fight?

Come on now, boys.

Pitch in. I'm right behind you.

‐ Grant makes his way around the battlefield,

not caught up in the chaos,

thinking, "Where are my commanders?

What's their assessment of the fight and how it's going,

and what can I do to assist them?"

‐ If Pittsburg Landing falls, Grant knows his army is gone.

‐ If the Confederate plan is to trap the Union army

in this cul‐de‐sac along the Tennessee River,

then Grant will utilize this trap perfectly

to fight a delaying action to hold out

until Don Carlos Buell's reinforcements arrive.

He has a whole division under Lew Wallace much nearer,

and as he goes around

and he talks to the different division commanders

throughout the day, he will tell them,

"Hey, Lew Wallace is on the way.

Should be here any moment now."

‐ There's confusion

and incoherence on the battlefield,

but Grant had enormous control of his emotions,

so his physical courage, this quiet competence,

and he was a great horseman in a day and age

when that was a very important skill

to have on the battlefield.

‐ A number of attempts were made by the enemy

to turn our right flank where Sherman was posted.

General Sherman, situation?

‐ General.

The boys bounced, but they didn't break.

I need reinforcements now. Where's Buell?

‐ No Buell.

I've sent for Wallace. Can you hold your position?

‐ Yes, sir, but it'll cost.

‐ At the Battle of Shiloh Sherman and Grant,

while they had never been what you would call good friends,

they will first come into their own

as this wonderful duo who will turn out to be

one of the great working partnerships of the war.

While so many other fragments of that Union army

dissolve in panicked retreat,

Sherman slows the Confederate onslaught.

‐ Nevertheless, Grant knew that he may need

that division of Lew Wallace's to survive this fight,

but there's great confusion with Wallace's division

on how they should get to the battlefield,

and Wallace does not show up.

As the Confederates move forward,

the fighting became more and more constricted.

It becomes a very chaotic, brutal fight,

and Grant recognizes that at points of chaos

when everything is going wrong,

you just simply have to do something to regain control.

‐ Grant is not gonna give up. He's gonna stick and fight.

‐ Lieutenant. ‐ General Grant, sir.

‐ Move your men to the left, Lieutenant.

Do it now. ‐ Yes, sir.

‐ Take cover! There's too many of them!

‐ Contrary to all my experience up to that time,

we were on the defensive.

The endeavor of the enemy

was simply to hurl their men against ours

with a disregard of losses on their own side.

‐ Grant realized he needed to buy time,

or his army was about to be overwhelmed.

‐ Shiloh, the first day doesn't go well,

but in the chaos, noise, the friction that we know

is inherent in a battlefield,

nobody gets it right initially. Nobody.

Grant is able to learn through hard experience,

and he has this vision of how it's gonna turn out

in spite of all that's going bad around him.

‐ Grant is already thinking to fall back gradually,

holding successive lines of defense,

basically trading space for time to hold out

until our reinforcements arrive.

‐ And so orders went out to all his division commanders

to hold their positions, as Grant put it,

"at all hazards."

‐ What is it?

‐ General Prentiss surrendered.

2,000 soldiers.

‐ Move the artillery to the high ground.

Start the barrage at nightfall.

Have the navy chip in from the river.

‐ I'll telegraph Porter.

‐ Grant on the battlefield does not appear

to let the demons of failure enter.

He's already been there. He's a fighter.

That's one of the things he brought to any army

he was in command of, was that sense of endurance,

the sense that this isn't going to be easy.

"I'm not looking to win it in a day."

‐ Grant has been falling back throughout the day,

and the Confederate commander, Albert Sidney Johnston,

wades into the battle himself

because he's gotta conquer or perish,

and all of a sudden Johnston is hit in the back of the leg,

and he bleeds to death.

He doesn't conquer. He perishes.

‐ Johnston's second in command,

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard,

took over, and Beauregard believed

they had the Union army right where they wanted them,

but Grant used the terrain extraordinarily well.

His men constructed this defensive line

along this deep ravine.

The Confederates have to go down into this ravine.

They make one charge up out of the ravine

into this whirlwind of Union artillery and musket fire.

They are driven back by this intense fire.

Orders start to echo down the Confederate line

that we're done. Stop the attack.

Beauregard stopped the fight.

"We'll finish this up in the morning."

Grant, sitting on horseback

watching as the Confederates fell back into the ravine,

said, "Not beaten yet by a damn sight."

‐ Grant, with this dogged determination,

he thinks that nobody can beat him.

‐ By the time darkness falls, yes,

it's been a bad day for the Union army,

but they haven't been pushed off Pittsburg Landing.

They're still holding on to that strip of ground,

and what's more, across the river

Don Carlos Buell is finally starting to arrive

and there are federal gunboats out on the river whose shells

are keeping the Confederates at bay in the darkness.

‐ But there were a number of Union officers coming to Grant

that night saying, "Let's get out of here."

‐ Grant is almost defeated on the first day,

almost driven back into the river,

and this is where you see Grant at his most indomitable,

in a sense‐‐most determined, most imperturbable.

He is under a tree.

He can hear the cries of the wounded,

and Sherman comes out of the dark.

‐ General Grant. ‐ Sherman.

‐ Well, Sam, we've had the devil's own day,

haven't we?

‐ Lick them tomorrow though.

‐ When Wallace and Buell turn up?

‐ They asked me my plan to retreat.

I'll fire the first gun in the morning.

‐ On the second day of battle,

I gathered out parts

of regiments from troops nearby

and marched them forward.

‐ Grant knew his army was disorganized.

They had spent a full day

carrying out this brutal fight,

but he also suspected the Confederates

were in the same condition,

and so he believed whoever seizes the initiative

in the morning will indeed be the victor.

So orders went out to all his division commanders

at first light, "begin the attack.

Wherever you are with whoever you have, begin the attack."

‐ Find another commander at Shiloh

that's gonna attack on day two.

Everybody else is thinking,

"Oh, my goodness, there's no way."

I think that Grant looks at this equation

differently than everyone else.

Grant, who's failed and had to look at the dark side

of how to be resilient,

I think it gives him an extra source of strength

that most other commanders

don't have the ability to tap into.

‐ He had the gift of being able

to take in a landscape, a map,

and know almost at once what needed to be defended,

what couldn't be defended,

and what Grant had seen at Shiloh

was that the Confederates

had exhausted their last energy

just in getting as far as they had.

Grant had seen that if in the night Buell's troops

could be ferried over

and Grant's army could be rallied

and somehow reorganized and put back into position

for a counterattack the next morning,

then the Confederate army itself would collapse.

‐ Grant was determined to stay and fight.

Everything he's learned came into play

in making that decision.

That's the point where Grant becomes Grant.

‐ This day everything is favorable for the Union side.

We have now become the attacking party.

‐ Move along!

‐ Advance along!

‐ The enemy was driven back all day,

as we had been the day before.

‐ It was another brutal day

of fighting over much of the same ground,

but by 2:00 in the afternoon

Confederate commander Beauregard

ordered a withdrawal back to Corinth.

‐ The battle is over, and it is,

technically speaking, a victory for the Union army.

It's a victory which has been won at terrible prices.

‐ Huge casualties.

25,000 killed, wounded, and missing.

This was the first time in American history

that we've seen this.

The armies in the revolution and the War of 1812

are smaller than the casualty count at Shiloh.

‐ I saw an open field on the second day

so covered with the dead

that it would have been possible

to walk across the clearing stepping on dead bodies

without a foot touching the ground.

‐ Shiloh itself means "place of peace."

Shiloh, for two days,

was anything but a place of peace.

Shiloh is incredibly important as the place where our country

woke up to the reality of what it had signed up for.

It was as if from the battlefield

a metaphorical postcard went home to America,

and it said, with a picture of the dead,

"This is what you've signed up for."

It forced us to wake up.

It forced us to grow up.

It forced us to realize that this was going

to be much harder than anybody had imagined.

‐ Up to the Battle of Shiloh, I believed that the rebellion

would collapse suddenly and soon...

But after Shiloh I gave up all idea of saving the Union

except by complete conquest.

After Shiloh, I was no longer boss.

Lincoln was right. Vicksburg is the key.

The art of war is simple enough.

Find out where your enemy is...

Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

‐ You'll go after Lee.

You'll go after him until he's finished.

‐ It all depends on you.