Existing comment:
Butcher?
Newspaper accounts labeled Grant a "Butcher" following some of the war's bloodiest battles. Grant refused to defend himself publicly but privately told a friend, "They call me a butcher, but do you know I sometimes could hardly bring myself to give an order of battle. When I contemplated the death and misery that were sure to follow, I stood appalled."
The label stuck with Southern whites' promotion of the Lost Cause ideology: Confederate loss, in part, resulted from the North's (and especially Grant's) willingness to use its overwhelming manpower, regardless of the cost in human lives.
Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, wrote in his diary in June, 1864, following the Battle of Cold Harbor: "Great confidence is felt in Brant, but the immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all... Grant has not great regard for human life."
The Civil War resulted in over 620,000 lives lost. No commander escaped having many soldiers wounded or killed in battle: General Grant lost 14,200 men at The Wilderness; General McClellan lost 11,657 troops in a single day at Antietam; General Burnside, at Fredericksburg, lost 10,900 soldiers; General Lee lost 16,914 troops at Gettysburg; and General Bragg lost 16,986 soldiers at Chickamauga.
"One of the harder questions about Grant, so often called the butcher, was whether he secretly enjoyed war too much. In fact.. while he took terrible losses in such deafening stride.... he often stayed away from the battlefield itself so that his compassion would not sap his resolve."
-- Jay Winik, "April 1865: The Month That Saved America" |