Our host, John Heckman, talks with historian Jennifer M. Murray about how the relationship between Union generals George Meade and Ulysses S. Grant operated during the Army of the Potomac’s pivotal 1864 campaigns against Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.
John Heckman: So as far as this relationship is concerned with Grant and Meade, how do you think that relationship started out with these two guys when Grant comes east?
Jennifer Murray: Well, the relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George Gordon Meade is certainly one of the most important relationships of the Civil War. And it’s a successful one, right? It’s a successful relationship, and I think too often in Civil War memory and public consciousness and certainly Civil War historiography—and maybe we can get into some of the specifics of this, of course, as we go—but Grant’s arrival in March of 1864 subjugates Meade in the minds of many Americans today, and certainly in the minds of Americans in 1864.
But what’s interesting in my research, John, I’m right near the end of 1864, I just wrote a bit on the election of 1864, Lincoln’s reelection. And I knew, once I got to March 1864, and the start of the Overland Campaign, I had to be really careful and pay particular attention to this relationship between Grant and Meade, because it’s one of the most important, as I said, not only of my book, but of the American Civil War.
And what I’ve found, and I hope maybe this could be the big takeaway for your listeners, is that Meade’s role as still army commander in the Army of the Potomac is much more prominent than we are led to believe. Meade is not relegated to a secondary or tertiary role.
He remains actively, actively involved in the details of managing the Army of the Potomac’s operations. He’s active on the different battlefields of the Overland Campaign, also in Petersburg in the summer of 1864. And hopefully, when my book is out, that point will be particularly clear and it could lead to a kind of a discussion or a re-evaluation of the Grant and Meade relationship in the American Civil War, because the primary evidence is abundantly clear that Meade retains a critical role in command of the Army the Potomac.
John Heckman: What were some of those command decisions, or just thoughts on how to go at Robert E. Lee, that Meade is thinking and discussing and sending out to the men of the Army the Potomac?
Jennifer Murray: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I guess I’ll maybe rewind to say that when Grant comes east, after he’s promoted and made lieutenant general, he first meets with George Meade on March the 10th. And Meade is absolutely prepared to let Grant place someone, ideally from the West, is what Meade thinks, someone like Sherman, in command of the Army of the Potomac.
Library of CongressGeorge Meade
So, Meade’s expecting that meeting in early March is one where he’s going to step aside and have someone else come in. And of course, it doesn’t end up working out that way. Grant says that he was incredibly impressed with Meade after that meeting, the victor of Gettysburg. And, similarly, Meade was impressed with Grant.
This is really the first substantive meeting that these two men have had here at Brandy Station in March 1864. And then, as we know, Grant will make his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. But once the Army of the Potomac crosses the Rapidan River, Grant outlines the Overland Campaign. That’s his strategic planning, right? The way to get to Richmond, that’s Grant’s vision. But he always leaves the details to Meade. And you can see this very clearly in the official records. He will correspond with Meade saying that this is his broad vision for a particular plan or a maneuver, and he says, I leave it to you to work out the details of how you want this corps or that unit to march or what units you want to use. That is completely and totally in Meade’s authority.
And a specific example of this is the Battle of Cold Harbor. Early June 1864, kind of the closing salvo of the Overland Campaign. We look at Cold Harbor historically as being Grant’s assault, right? Grant’s reputation as the butcher. Grant writes in his memoirs that that’s the one assault that he wishes he never would have ordered. But that attack against those Confederate entrenchments at Cold Harbor was planned and executed by Meade. Without a doubt, Meade’s fingerprint is in the offensive on June the 3rd at Cold Harbor.
John Heckman: That’s an interesting thing to think about because we are often led astray by previous historiography on this. We have these overarching themes of Grant coming east, Meade being pushed to the side, and now it’s Grant versus Lee, and that’s it. We see that in popular memory. We see that in popular culture. We even saw it in old reenactments. It was Grant versus Lee. It wasn’t Meade versus Lee.
Why do you think that was, where we have this idea that, well, Grant’s in command now, and Grant orders the attack Cold Harbor, and Grant does X, Y, and Z. Do you think that was pushed by a narrative in the newspapers at the time, or what was being just sent out to the public at the time or, what was that?
Jennifer Murray: Yeah, you’re spot on with the newspapers. And I’ll say this as an example, then I’ll make a comment about the newspapers.
I was just down in Petersburg last week. I’m trying to tromp around some of the Hatcher’s Run, Globe Tavern, Reams Station sorts of places. I stopped at different park service visitor centers at Petersburg and up at Chancellorsville and at Fredericksburg and even in the Park Service. And I’m an absolute fan of the Park Service for personal, professional reasons. Their exhibits say “Grant’s army.” “Grant’s army” is fighting here at Spotsylvania in 1864. So, once you see it, it’s everywhere, like you can’t unsee it.
But you’re spot on about the newspapers, and partly this is Meade’s own doing in some ways because he has a very famous incident with a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Meade’s hometown newspaper. One correspondent named Edward Crapsey—that’ll be a name all your listeners will forever remember because it’s wonderful. It is Crapsey, C-R-A-P-S-E-Y, Edward Crapsey. Meade perceives it to be a pretty critical evaluation of his leadership at the Battle of the Wilderness in the days following the Battle of the Wilderness. And Crapsey suggests in his reporting that Meade wanted to take the Army of the Potomac back across the Rapidan and break contact.
And Meade takes offense at this, rightfully so, because he never once uttered that or felt that way. So, when he sees this review, he asks for Edward Crapsey to be brought to army headquarters. And he shows up, and Meade will offer him an opportunity basically to recant what he said in this article, and Crapsey will not do it.
So, in typical Meade fashion, he will have Edward Crapsey publicly drummed out of the army. And the army’s provost marshal, Messina Patrick, who is a West Point buddy of Meade’s back in the day and very much a stern disciplinarian, will put together this very public humiliation of Crapsey. He’s put on a mule backwards and he has a sign draped around his neck that says ‘libeler of the press.’ And some regimental bands will play basically a funeral dirge and units are ordered to come out and see Crapsey be drummed out of the camp the Army of the Potomac.
So, imagine that scene and then imagine Crapsey’s reaction to it. And what he will do, and this is documented, they will get together, Crapsey, the Philadelphia Inquirer, some other prominent correspondents—Sylvanus Cadwallader is one, New York Herald—and they basically will embargo Meade. They’ll blacklist him. And they will make deliberate efforts not to write about George Meade for the rest of the summer and fall of 1864. And you can see it. Newspaper database, you know, pop in the Overland Campaign, the headlines are going to be “Grant’s army.” “Grant’s army.” And Meade is basically eradicated from the newspapers and any kind of public contemporary conversation about the fighting in Virginia.
So, in the fall of 1864, just to close the loop on that, Sylvanus Cadwallader will feel like, eh, this has gone far enough, and Crapsey’s sort of gotten over his row with Meade, and Cadwallader will go to Meade’s headquarters and say, you know, I’m sort of sorry that you’ve been treated this way by the press.
Meade accepts the apology. He admits that he went too far with the Crapsey punishment. They basically patch things over. But a lot has happened in that intervening late summer and early fall of 1864 that it might be too little, too late. So, you’re spot on, John, in the way in which Meade in his own lifetime is ignored or dismissed by the northern media and the ramifications of that he felt, and we live with to this day: It’s Grant’s army, the Army of the Potomac. And Meade learned an important lesson in his treatment of Edward Crapsey. And he actually said to one of his aides, Theodore Lyman, that he knew sort of at that moment that he would live to regret that treatment of Crapsey. And he did.
John Heckman: We know that Meade is not too worried about Washington in a way, as far as the politics are concerned. He’s kind of like Grant in that way. But are politics influencing what’s going on with tactics in the Army of the Potomac in 1864?
Library of CongressUlysses S. Grant
Jennifer Murray: I would say Grant’s arrival east provides a comfortable layer of distance between Meade and Washington, D.C. And I’ll say that in the wake of the Gettysburg Campaign, the fall of 1863—and, historically, we often move from Gettysburg to the Overland Campaign, right? We don’t bother looking at those intervening months in the fall and winter of ’63—Meade’s relationship with Abraham Lincoln and Henry Halleck will reach its nadir.
Meade will offer to resign several times, and he really struggles to establish good and productive relationships with Washington. Civil-military relations, we would say today. So, Grant’s arrival provides a nice buffer for Meade, and it doesn’t necessitate him being intimately involved with planning and with Washington, D.C. That’s now Grant’s job, which is good for Meade. I mean, Meade is certainly not a political man. He’s not particularly politically savvy. So having Grant be the one that has to go up and deal with Lincoln and Washington politics and the like is actually a positive for Meade.
John Heckman: This is also a huge army at this time. What is the logistical situation that Meade and Grant have to deal with, with this large Army of the Potomac?
Jennifer Murray: Yeah. When the Army of the Potomac crosses the Rapidan, they’re just short of 100,000 men. And then at the start of the Overland Campaign, Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps is going to be basically attached to the Army the Potomac. So that pushes the number to about 120,000. So, these are gigantic armies that are operating on this trajectory to Richmond. But the question is—and this was the same question in 1862 for McClellan—how do you get to Richmond?
And Grant is going to do it over land through a series of incredibly bloody campaigns and battles, starting with the Wilderness and then to Spotsylvania. Then ultimately across the North Anna River, back across the North Anna River, and then to Cold Harbor.
What strikes me about the Overland Campaign is how fundamentally different the Army of the Potomac is. The Army of the Potomac is reconsolidated and reorganized in March of 1864. And they’re going to be, because of the high casualty rates and attrition during the Overland Campaign, that army that crosses the Rapidan is not the same army, the officer corps particularly, that will cross the James in mid-June 1864.
You’re going to lose John Sedgwick, and Winfield Scott Hancock never really fights as well as he did at Gettysburg because he’s constantly in pain from his wound, takes leave of absence. You have Burnside with the IX Corps. Now you have the introduction of Phil Sheridan. So, the high command in the army really changes in the summer of 1864. And Meade’s relationship with many of these officers is kind of volatile, actually, through the summer of ’64. With Gouverneur K. Warren. Ambrose Burnside. I mean, it’s an incredibly volatile officer corps in the summer. And some of that responsibility actually falls to Meade.
Library of CongressThis photo by Timothy O’Sullivan shows the Army of the Potomac crossing the Rapidan River at the start of the Overland Campaign in 1864.
John Heckman: Where does that volatility come from? What causes that volatility between those officers?
Jennifer Murray: Well, the Burnside issue is interesting. So, as I said, initially the IX Corps is attached to the Army of the Potomac. But then Grant realizes that that’s kind of awkward.
Burnside is senior in rank to Meade. So, you have that dynamic. But then Grant is going to decide to fold the IX Corps into the Army of the Potomac, so it’s more like a seamless sort of command structure. And during the fight at Petersburg, the Third Offensive, which is the Battle of the Crater, led by the IX Corps, the IX Corps makes that frontal assault. Those guys dig the mine, those Pennsylvania soldiers. Meade gets absolutely furious with Burnside there in July of 1864, and he doesn’t think that Burnside is really managing the offensive at the Crater all that well, and isn’t communicating back to headquarters as Meade sees appropriate. And Meade will have Burnside cashiered from the army.
And there’s a big court of inquiry surrounding Burnside’s performance at the Crater. And Burnside’s interesting because in Fredericksburg, in the Mud March in 1862 and 1863, Meade actually defended him. So, their relationship is one that really sours, reaching its culmination with Burnside being relieved, as I mentioned, in late July – early August 1864. So, he has an issue with Burnside. And then Warren, who all Gettysburg people like love, right? The hero of Little Round Top, savior of Little Round Top. Meade has an incredibly volatile relationship with Warren. Sometimes justified. He thinks that Warren’s maybe a little lethargic, maybe a little slow at different places in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania. And Meade will draw up papers to have Warren cashiered from the army in June of 1864. He doesn’t follow through with that. We don’t see Warren dismissed like we did Burnside, but he writes an eight-page exposé on why Warren should be relieved of command.
He sits on it, so he doesn’t get rid of Warren. But he has a bad relationship with Phil Sheridan. Very famously, got off to a bad start with Sheridan. So where does all that come from? Meade’s command dynamic here in 1864 is not always harmonious, and some of it is, I think, a product of Meade’s—although, you know, Sheridan and Warren are certainly known as hotheads too, right? They’re similarly short tempered. But it’s an often-unproductive command dynamic in the Army of the Potomac.
John Heckman: Does that volatility roll downhill, basically, to the morale of the troops? Or is there a buffer between the troops and this volatility going on at the top?
Library of CongressGouverneur K. Warren
Jennifer Murray: That’s a good question, and I think about that too. Like, how does the row with Warren, for instance, impact the V Corps, or how does it impact army operations? How does the big explosion with Sheridan manifest itself in other ways? And I think that’s kind of speculative. We could sort of say that it does radiate out. But for sure soldiers will comment on it.
Particularly the exchange with Warren. Warren and Meade must’ve really gotten into it in late May 1864. And some soldiers will write about it in their letters that they heard the exchange between Warren and Meade at headquarters. And then we could speculate on how that might impact morale, to be sure, but that on top of just the general rigors of the Overland Campaign—the constant marching and fighting and maneuvering and attacking entrenched positions, frontal assaults at Spotsylvania. These men are getting worn down by the rigors of the campaign in ways that we as historians can only read about. Not fully ever comprehend. Fifty-five thousand men were casualties since the fighting at the start of the Overland Campaign.
So, this is an incredibly rigorous campaign. And then add some of these personal command relationships and dynamics onto it. Makes it more fascinating for us, but unimaginable for the men in the Army of the Potomac in the summer of ’64.
John Heckman: You’ve done a lot of battlefield tours. You’ve done a lot of conferences and Civil War round table talks. When you are talking about this period of the Army of the Potomac, this period in their history, is there anything that really stands out to you that maybe you get questions or comments on where it harkens back to the old way of thinking about the Army of the Potomac in ’64, as far as the leadership is concerned?
Jennifer Murray: I think that’s it. Gettysburg is a battle and it’s a battlefield that’s loved to excess. We just went through the 161st anniversary and my social media feed is flooded with everybody coming to Gettysburg for the anniversary, which is great. Eighteen thousand books have been written on Gettysburg. It’s obscene. It’s really obscene. And then we forget this army. We just sort of ignore it. Maybe spend a little bit of time in the Overland Campaign and then we’ll pick it up at Appomattox. And the Army of the Potomac at the Overland Campaign, what strikes me compared to Gettysburg too, is just how much it changes. From the officer corps to the common soldiers, those three-year recruits that enlisted in 1861, many of them are going home in the summer of ’64. Some of the guys in the Pennsylvania Reserves, for instance. The unit that Meade first commanded, as a brigade commander, they go home. So, it’s very much an evolving army.
It’s never static. It’s not what it was in 1862. It’s not what it was at Gettysburg. The army that will take Lee’s surrender at Appomattox is not the army—either in the rank-and-file or the officer echelon—that fought and won at Gettysburg. And I think that’s something that we don’t spend enough time talking about, just how evolutionary the army is at all levels of command.
John Heckman: We get to Petersburg and then we get in this fog of war of our own where we can’t really understand that kind of concept of warfare for 1864 because we’re used to the Antietams, we’re used to the Gettysburgs, etc. Do you think that’s something that is out there as well, or maybe even comes from the men who were there at the time, where they’re seeing this is radically different than what they were used to?
Jennifer Murray: I’m so glad we get to talk about this because Petersburg’s definitely on my mind right now. It’s where I’m at with my own Meade work and I’ve just went down there again last week. But Petersburg is a nine-month siege. Nine months. And it’s the longest, most complex operation of the entire Civil War.
And in terms of scholarship, we have surprisingly little written on it. Will Greene, former Park Service Ranger and then moved over to Pamplin, wrote a masterful book called Campaign of Giants, which looks at the campaign from the crossing of the James through the fight at the Crater. It’s volume one of a three-part series, and I just saw Will at the Sacred Trust talk, and he’s submitted the second volume to UNC Press, so listeners be on the lookout for that second volume. And then Richard Sommers has a good book, but it’s short chronologically, called Richmond Redeemed. But beyond that, the scholarship on the Petersburg Campaign is very scant.
Earl Hess has a good book, In the Trenches at Petersburg, which is a nice overview. But, if people are interested, you only have so many good definitive books to get to. And then, visiting the Petersburg battlefield, I’m certainly spoiled by Gettysburg. It’s 6,000 acres at Gettysburg, it’s all intact. You can easily understand the topography, but Petersburg is not like that. The battlefield—and this is true for the Overland Campaign as so much has been lost to modernity and development and, for a variety of reasons, it’s just a little bit more difficult to visit these places, like Hatcher’s Run or Reams Station, and appreciate the complexity of these operations. So, I certainly think that’s a factor. And then, so many of the units that we herald at Gettysburg, or the people that we turn to—oh, Rufus Dawes, that’s a great account of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Where’s Rufus Dawes during the Petersburg siege? So, the people that we study and the units that we’re so fascinated with in the summer of 1863, in many but not all cases, are not with us in Petersburg later on in 1864. So, it makes it harder, I think, to appreciate that campaign for all of those reasons.
John Heckman: I’ve been meaning to ask you this question for a while. So, you could sit down and have a coffee with Meade. What are you going to talk about?
Jennifer Murray: Wow, man, I would probably talk about the pursuit from Gettysburg. I think I would do that. And I think that’s the thing about Meade’s leadership that irks me the most in the way in which our understanding is either nonexistent or simply incorrect. Fewer things grind my gears more than people saying Meade did not pursue after Gettysburg.
Yes, he did. He did. He did. So, let’s have a conversation about that. And he pursued. The Army of the Potomac, they followed, they’re there, they’re in position, they skirmish, they march hard after Gettysburg to get into that position. And I think among the things that define Meade’s career, it’s certainly the three-day battle at Gettysburg, but then it’s that subsequent follow-up.
Courtesy of Anthony WaskieMargaretta Meade, George Meade’s wife
Both by Lincoln, with that famous unsent letter—“you don’t appreciate the magnitude of this,” where he sort of admonishes Meade—and then certainly in the public imagination, the public thinking, the days after Gettysburg defined his reputation. And he knows it. So, I would like to talk to him about that.
But then I’d probably pivot a little bit too, and talk about his family life. And Meade has seven children. He and his wife have seven children. So, he’s very much a family man. He writes to his wife in every letter, asks about his kids, how are they doing? One of his sons will die during the war in 1864.
So, that’s a part of him that we often don’t look at. We don’t talk about what Meade’s family situation is like. We look at him as an officer. And just kind of two-dimensional in that way. So, I’d like to hear him talk a little bit more about being a dad or being a husband.
John Heckman: Now, last one. You can have a cigar with Grant. What do you talk about?
Jennifer Murray: Man, Grant would be smoking 20 of them during the day.
John Heckman: I tell ya, he’d have an extra for you.
Jennifer Murray: Maybe. What would I talk about? I’d probably talk about Meade, actually.
His relationship, how he understood his relationship with Meade. Meade writes certainly a lot about Grant, and he will write often favorably about Grant, but then he also writes at times wishing that Grant would be more publicly supportive, like that incident I said with Edward Crapsey and how he’s maligned in the press.
Meade goes to Grant and he wants Grant to publicly say that Meade is doing a good job. He wants Grant to publicly acknowledge he’s still in command of the army and make this declaration. And Grant won’t do it. And that frustrates Meade. But I’d like to hear from Grant a little more about how he valued Meade and understood their command dynamic.
Because Meade gives Grant plenty of opportunities to replace him with someone else. And I would encourage anyone when they think about Meade and, maybe pass over him or slight him in any kind of way: Name another army officer, particularly in the Army of the Potomac, that would have cooperated as productively with General Grant as Meade did. What other officer in the Army of the Potomac would cooperate in that command dynamic with Grant as productively as George Meade did? It wouldn’t be McClellan, right? I can’t imagine Joseph Hooker working productively with Grant. And that’s no small matter.
John Hennessy, who’s written a lot on the army of the Potomac, makes that argument in one of his essays and he says that Meade’ s ability to coexist productively with Grant is no small matter. And I think about that a lot. So, were I to sit and chat with Grant, I would probably turn the conversation to his relationship with Meade. It wins the war.
John Heckman: Yeah, and that’s why sometimes we forget that Meade’s even there. Because that relationship worked so well. There was no real hubbub around it, because if he would have started a fuss they would have been in the papers. We would have heard more about it. But I guess because they worked so well together Meade was sentenced to second fiddle, as we would say. And I’m hoping that Meade gets more cred. I know with your work he will. But as a Pennsylvania boy, I want Meade to get a little bit more credit for what he did.
Jennifer Murray: Yeah, for sure.
It’s a good time to be a Meade scholar. There’s been some important work like Kent Masterson Brown’s book on Meade in the Gettysburg Campaign. It seems like he’s getting more attention than he has historically, so it’s like a, I call it a Meade renaissance. It’s a Meade renaissance. So if my book can play a small role in that re-evaluation, or evaluation, that would be the best thing that I could hope for.
And I hope that it would do justice to an incredibly important individual—Pennsylvanian responsible for victory in the American Civil War.
Jennifer M. Murray is an American military historian at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013 (2014) and is working on a book tentatively titled Meade at War: The Military Life of George Gordon Meade.