By Leslie Pratch
To illustrate the power of presence or absence that instrumental coping has on a leader’s functioning and achievement, let us revisit the contrast introduced in Chapter 1 between General Grant and General McClellan as a commanders-in-chief of the Union forces.
Grant and McClellan are famous generals. They are merely one of many pairs of historically important figures who can be compared to give us insight into leadership. The contrast between the military leadership of these two Civil War generals gives a penetrating view of instrumental coping. Grant was singularly effective as a general. McClellan was singularly ineffective. Grant was a master at instrumental coping. McClellan was not. When McClellan’s army was bloodied in battle, he would retreat to safe place, regroup, replenish and retrain until he deemed his army ready. This usually took months until finally an exasperated Lincoln ordered him to move. In marked comparison, when Grant’s army was damaged, he learned from the experience and was thereby able to attack immediately along a new and more productive line. McClellan constantly thought he was outnumbered—which he never remotely was—and always said he didn’t have enough men, fresh horses, or barrels of flour to advance. Grant always believed he could win with whatever he was given.[i]
Grant is often characterized by critics as a drunk. In his earlier life, he had been but this was not a factor in a single Civil War engagement. (Some high up civilians in the government told President Lincoln that rumors were flying about how much whiskey Grant was drinking. Lincoln responded, “Find out which brand and send a barrel to General McClellan.”) He was also said to be a straight-ahead plodder and butcher of men, which was also a mischaracterization. He was, when not constrained by presidential orders or political circumstances, a master of maneuver and one of the architects of the principles of modern war. Grant’s greatest and most creative achievement was the Vicksburg campaign, which is one of the most brilliant, long-running campaigns of maneuver in military history.
Campaigning with Grant is a first-person memoir by Grant’s aide, Horace Porter.[ii] It begins with Grant arriving in Chattanooga in 1864 to take command of a Union army that had just suffered a terrible and surprising defeat at Chickamauga and was almost totally surrounded in difficult terrain by a dangerous and triumphant Confederate force.
Grant was tired from travel, but he sat on a wooden chair in his muddy uniform and listened for an hour as his new subordinates described the apparently hopeless situation. Then he calmly began writing orders—securing the army’s supply line and shifting its defenses toward the eventual offensive that would shatter the Confederate besiegers. It was a brilliant and charismatic performance.
Grant made mistakes during the war. Every general did, and some of Grant’s were big. But he was never disheartened or derailed by failure. A memorable and characteristic moment came at the end of the first day of the Battle of Shiloh (1862), in which the Confederates had taken Grant and his men by surprise and mopped up the field with them. As darkness fell and the weary armies licked their wounds before resuming the fight in the morning, General William T. Sherman, Grant’s subordinate, rode up to him.
“Well, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we, Grant?” Sherman said.
“Yep,” said Grant, chewing on a cigar and quietly surveying the field. “Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”
And he did.[iii]
No leader ever has enough barrels of flour. It’s the readiness to engage that demonstrates instrumental coping.
Grant illustrates instrumental coping in another sense. As an active coper, he had a clear vision of the broad accomplishment to achieve. His logistical planning was always purpose-driven. He “brought every available soldier to the field, sublimating those secondary considerations that so often consumed the attention and resources of weaker generals.”[iv] He assessed the strengths and weaknesses of Confederate generals who opposed him, and, always a risk-taker, he took bolder risks where he sensed indecision or weakness.
Jean Edward Simpson, in his biography of Grant,[v] says that the “whole campaign against Forts Henry and Donelson seemed a marvel of generalship, a superb combination of simplicity and determination—in stark contrast to the dilatory maneuvering of the forces of Major General Don Carlos Buell or the Army of the Potomac under McClellan.”
He goes on to say—and I find this important— “Grant, like few American generals before or since, understood the momentum of warfare. He had a quickness of mind that enabled him to make on-the-spot adjustments. His battles were not elegant set-piece operations—as Scott’s textbook victory at Cerro Gordo had been—but unfolded unpredictably as opportunities developed.” Grant made his quickness of mind actionable.
Failure in a battle never caused Grant to lose sight of the greater objective. He focused on the long term vision. But he took care to make the short term functionally effective. He maintained a balance between maintaining a long term vision and being practically effective. His analysis was typically aggressive, as he said later: “Both sides seemed defeated, and whoever assumed the offensive was sure to win.”[vi]
Grant’s effectiveness went beyond his own determination. As Simpson says, “A general imparts an attitude to an army. It is not simply a matter of issuing orders, but infusing spirit and initiative. An inchoate bond develops between a successful commander and the army. His will becomes theirs.” This non-verbal communication is a manifestation of the importance of the leader’s active coping in engendering group effectiveness.
Civil War writer Noah Andre Trudeau, interviewed in “Civil War” magazine, made this wonderful observation: “The way I would characterize (Grant’s) Overland Campaign (in 1864 against Robert E. Lee) is that it was perhaps the first campaign in which the individual battles mattered less than the ultimate result of the campaign. Grant worried less about winning or losing a battle than he did about whether he had been diverted from his ultimate goal.” In this sense, too, Grant’s leadership of the Union army illustrates instrumental coping.
McClellan is one of the most divisive figures in the Civil War. To this day he has his supporters. The fact is that McClellan was masterful at organizing, training and inspiring armies. There was no federal general more popular among his men, even when his campaigns produced one failure after another.
But one could cite innumerable instances of his leadership faults. The prince of over-analysis, he obsessed over his enemies’ movements and strength to the point where he and his armies were frozen to the spot. He always over-estimated his enemies’ strength. Some have said this was to give him an excuse in case of failure, but his biographer, Stephen W. Sears, thinks that McClellan truly believed these wild over-estimates. He simply could not bring himself to pull the trigger, looking for opportunities to take the defensive even when on the strategic offensive. As Sears explains, McClellan had a gift for imagining the worst-case scenario until he believed it, then acting in a way that made it come true.[vii] McClellan’s focus on the worst case is related to a passive coping predilection. From the point of view of analysis within the framework of coping theory this is passive coping. His tendency to focus on the worse primed him to capitulate when pressed, to flee from threats, to give up rather than seize an enemy’s momentary weakness.
One important characteristic that was not unique to McClellan among Civil War generals is that he fought battles one at a time; that is to say, he fought a battle, and afterward, whether he won or lost (mostly he lost), he stopped to reorganize his army, set up supply lines, and rest the horses and men while deciding what to do next.[viii] Grant, and under him Sherman, initiated a new way of warfare that has resonated through even the 20th and 21st century. War for them was continuous, not episodic. If you were tired, so was your enemy, and there was no better time of press him. Grant’s campaigns of 1864 and 1865 consisted of continuous pressure in all theaters of war from Louisiana to Virginia. And the pressure was not only on the enemy’s soldiers but also his means of production and communication.
You may well ask, what does this have to do with coping? The answer is that the capacity to innovate is an aspect of active coping and that is one reason we are examining Grant’s innovations at war. The attentive reader will by not perhaps have concluded that there is a relationship between active coping and innovation and indeed that is the author’s view but as yet we do not have hard evidence.
McClellan had a tin ear for communication. He treated his civilian bosses, President Lincoln, for example (the chairman, if you will, of his board of directors), with open disdain, and despite his popularity he gave his political foes the ammunition they used to finally cashier him.
Grant, conversely, while rumpled and apparently unsophisticated, was, with Robert E. Lee, a consummate political general who always treated his superiors with respect and always got what he needed. Grant was able to negotiate for a reasonable level of resources. He also made do with what he had. While McClellan was continually asking for reinforcements and said he couldn’t win without them, Grant always made the most with the forces at his disposal because he was a highly effective instrumental coper. McClellan who was less effective as an instrumental coper was vastly inferior to Grant as a battlefield commander, however well-regarded, charismatic, and organizationally-skilled McClellan may have been.
[i] These points are applied to a specific situation in James R. Arnold’s Grant Wins the War: Decisions at Vicksburg (NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). Arnold calls Vicksburg “one of the great campaigns in military history” and notes Grant’s employment of rapid forced marches to place his army between two wings of the enemy’s army, which he then defeated one after the other.
[ii] The first chapter of Horace Porter’s memoir, Campaigning with Grant (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) gives the most personal and revealing account of Grant in action: Facing a nearly impossible situation, assuming command of a starving army surrounded and besieged in Chattanooga, he arrives on the scene and in a few hours assesses the situation and issues a few terse orders that set in motion one of the Union’s most crushing and unlikely victories.
[iii] See James M. McPherson’s book, This Mighty Scourge: Perspective on the Civil War (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007). This book, especially pp. 110-115, gives a pretty good sense of Grant’s salient characteristics as a general: His calmness under pressure, his ability to size up a situation quickly, and his decisiveness, his clarity of expression, his physical and moral courage, and his “sense of self.”
[iv] See James R. Arnold’s Grant Wins the War: Decisions at Vicksburg.
[v] Jean Edward Simpson, Grant (NY: Touchstone, 2001).
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] That point is made in Steven W. Sears’ Landscape Turned Red, (NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1983), the authoritative study of the Antietam campaign.
[viii] Civil War writer Noah Andre Trudeau, interviewed in “Civil War” magazine, made this wonderful observation: “The way I would characterize (Grant’s) Overland Campaign (in 1864 against Robert E. Lee) is that it was perhaps the first campaign in which the individual battles mattered less than the ultimate result of the campaign. Grant worried less about winning or losing a battle than he did about whether he had been diverted from his ultimate goal.”
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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. Other posts discussing Grant can be found on the Active Coping site, lesliepratch.com can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.
Tags: U. S. Grant's Leadership