Ulysses S. Grant: Final Report of Military Operations

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Some three months after the end of the war, Grant composed his final report detailing the military operations of 1864–1865. In that report, filled with details about various campaigns and battles, he offers a fairly concise summary of how he approached the strategic problem of defeating the Confederacy. Some of its language, however, would come back to haunt him and damage his historical reputation. Grant explains that while Union forces enjoyed certain advantages, so did the Confederates. True, the Union might be able to draw upon more manpower, but the task confronting the Confederacy was challenging, and only if the Union armies managed to fight in coordinated fashion might they be able to make good use of their advantages while minimizing the impact of the Confederacy's strengths. That, Grant explains, involves targeting enemy resources and morale as well as the enemy's armies, and that is what he set out to do in 1864 by conducting campaigns that were coordinated and continuous.

Unfortunately, in his use of the term “mere attrition,” Grant unwittingly gave support to some of his critics, who claimed that all he did was throw his men into a meat grinder that could not help but eventually erode enemy strength. In retrospect, that is what the Overland campaign of 1864 looked like in eventual outcome: tens of thousands of men killed, wounded, and captured in six weeks of continuous combat as Grant slowly forced Lee back to Richmond and Petersburg. In truth, Grant's original plan of campaign looked to slice apart the Confederate transportation network, damage the enemy's logistics and resources, and force the Confederates to come out and fight or face eventual destruction. However, several subordinates fumbled key aspects of the strategic plan, forcing Grant to adopt the approach he did at a much higher cost than he was hoping to pay. One can see Grant's own misgivings about this approach in the final paragraph quoted here, in which he says that he did the best he could do under the circumstances.