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Lee & Grant: Leadership in Bondage

by Maj. Charles R. Bowery, Jr.

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If you work in a senior leadership position, you probably employ negotiation almost every day to get your point across to others. In a given situation, perhaps in the formulation of a company strategic vision or in the development of a sales strategy, you may agree with other executives about the general approach but differ on important strategic points. Using your authority in an autocratic way, a "my way or the highway" approach, might be within your prerogative but would do more harm than good in the long run. A great example of Grant the Negotiator occurred even before he assumed command. When the Lincoln administration began considering Grant for the position of general-in-chief, they asked him his opinion on the best way to solve the problem of Lee's continual success in the eastern theater. Grant stated his opinion of the best course of action in a typically straightforward letter to Chief of Staff Henry Halleck, written in January 1864.

Instead of lunging directly at Lee along the same line of operations as in all previous Union offensives, Grant proposed a more indirect approach. He wanted to concentrate all available forces to make a newer, bigger army of the Potomac, move that force via the Chesapeake Bay and southeastern Virginia to North Carolina, and slice into the Confederate interior, "an abandonment of all previously attempted lines to Richmond." His intermediate target would be Raleigh, North Carolina, and by capturing this he would deprive Lee of the area from which he received most of his supplies and much of his manpower. In Grant's thinking, this offensive "would virtually force an evacuation of Virginia and indirectly of East Tennessee" and "would throw our armies into new fields, where they could partially live upon the country and would reduce the stores of the enemy." George McClellan had attempted a less bold version of this maneuver with his 1862 Peninsula Campaign.

This plan made tremendous sense given the futility of Union efforts in Virginia since 1861, but it was destined for disapproval on the desk of Abraham Lincoln. Grant perceived one strategic imperative: A focus on the enemy's armies through maneuver and offensive action. Lincoln agreed with Grant in this respect, but he also operated under a second strategic imperative. Right or wrong, Lincoln demanded the continued security of Washington, D.C., and he demanded that this be achieved by maintaining a large force between that city and Lee's army. Grant's proposal to strip the capital of its defenses in order to form a large expeditionary force was simply anathema to the Lincoln administration. It did not matter that by 1864 Washington was the most heavily fortified city on Earth, and that Lee saw perfectly clearly the impossibility of capturing it.

Faced with this opposition, Grant used dialogue and negotiation to get his essential point across where his predecessors had failed. Earlier eastern commanders such as McClellan, Pope, and Hooker were inflexible to a fault; as professional soldiers, they took a dim view of Lincoln, who in all fairness to them often meddled in military policy. But the strategic conferences they held with Lincoln usually ended in dissatisfaction for one or both parties.

They went beyond disagreement with Lincoln into open and acrimonious arguments that were inappropriate for all concerned. Their negotiations usually took the form of distributive, or zero-sum bargaining -- that is, one side was bound to win (by the Union's adopting his strategy) and one side was bound to lose (by having his approach rejected or his feelings hurt). Distributive bargaining may be necessary in some situations, such as a discussion of prices with a customer, but in Grant's case, it was important for him and the Union cause that he and Lincoln come to an agreement that satisfied all concerned.

Grant did this by employing integrative, or collaborative, bargaining, an approach that uses shared interests and cooperation to arrive at a satisfactory outcome. Grant and Lincoln agreed on the end result they desired, and they really did agree on the overall approach -- just not on the specific question of a line of operation. Grant was able to convince Lincoln of the soundness of his overall plan, and as a result, he got much of it implemented.

Grant was at his best as a strategic leader because he communicated a solid vision while exhibiting good followership and negotiating skills, as seen earlier. In contrast to his predecessors, Grant never criticized his boss in public, even though he must have chafed under the restrictions placed on him. Even though strategic leaders exercise control at the highest levels, they cannot forget the vital importance of followership.

Grant's relationship with his three subordinate generals were a case in point. Nathanial P. Banks in Louisiana and Franz Sigel and Benjamin Butler in Virginia were so-called political generals. They had gained their positions of authority early in the war, when the difficulty of raising a mass citizen army meant that Abraham Lincoln often had to rely on men with political clout but little military ability, because of their influence with large portions of the citizenry of their states. Like it or not, you probably have to work with senior executives who owe their positions to political clout, and there is nothing you can do about it. Just as Grant did, however, you can use even these subordinates to get where you need to go.

Political influence became more, not less, important as the war went on, and it came to a head in 1864 as the presidential election approached. Banks and Butler were prominent Republicans, and thus were viewed as politically acceptable by the administration and by Congress. Sigel was a german immigrant who was immensely popular with the Northeast's German-American population. Grant, and by extension, Lincoln, did not have the option of replacing these men, and in any case, generals of proven ability in commanding armies were scarce. As a strategic leader, Grant had to make the best of the generals provided to him.

You may be placed in the same situation with your senior staff. If you cannot remove those who are in positions of responsibility, you must find a way to maximize your team's performance in spite of them. Grant did this through the application of a coherent vision of victory and by "stacking" with other proven generals when and where he could.

Grant knew that Sigel and Butler were liabilities, so he sought to place proven soldiers in division command positions immediately below them, in the hope that the political generals would in some cases defer to the professionals -- a long shot, yes, but better than nothing. Sigel's official position was commander of the Department of West Virginia; Grant's intention for the campaign was to have two trusted subordinates, Edward O.C. Ord and George Crook use the department's 10,000 troops as one striking force, aimed at severing Virginia's rail link with Eastern Tennessee and moving northward into the Shenandoah Valley. It became clear to Ord that Sigel had no intention of letting him carry out Grant's plan, though, and so Ord resigned on April 19.

Ord was correct in his supposition. Sigel disregarded Grant's intent and divided his force into three smaller elements, two operating in southwestern Virginia under Crook and William W. Averell, and the largest (of course), under his personal command, moving southward up the valley to link up with them. Sigel's blatant insubordination should not obscure the leadership that Grant attempted to employ, however.

In the end, the Shenandoah Valley expedition made some small gains only because of the general-in-chief's personnel decisions. Sigel ensured that the offensive failed to coordinate with Grant's overall strategy. Crook's was the most successful of the three columns, defeating a small Confederate force at Cloyd's Mountain, Virginia, on May 9. Averell's force also had limited success, but it was too small to do any significant damage and was not able to move into a position to support Crook, and so by mid-May the two were back in West Virginia. Aside from a small amount of damage to the Virginia and Tennessee railroad, this phase of the offensive achieved nothing.

This withdrawal allowed the Confederate commander in the Shenandoah Valley, former U.S. Vice President John C. Breckinridge, now a Confederate major general, to concentrate his forces against Sigel at New Market, thirty miles north of Staunton on the Valley Turnpike (the present day U.S. 11/Interstate 81 corridor). On May 15, Breckenridge's 5,300 rebels squared off against Sigel's 9,000 Unionists and defeated them soundly. The most noteworthy moment in the battle occurred when 227 teenaged cadets of the Virginia Military Institute charged to plug a gap in the Confederate line, suffering ten killed and forty-five wounded but capturing a Union Canon and ensuring victory for Breckenridge's little army. Sigel tamely retreated northward, and by May 19, Breckenridge and 2,500 infantrymen were on board trains enrooted to reinforce Lee and the Army of North Virginia.