...Late Captain, U.S.A. and Brigadier-General of Volunteers, Killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg, Dec. 1862. 

New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1874.

Small 8vo.; green cloth stamped in gilt; beveled edges.

First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed, “With the respects of  S.J.B. February 18-74,” on the front free endpaper; with Jesse R. Grant’s library stamp on the front pastedown.

Grant would have liked George Bayard: he was a horseman and taught the cavalry course at West Point. Bayard survived a poison arrow in the face fighting against Indians in the 1850s, but he did not survive the wholesale carnage at Fredericksburg, where 12,700 Union troops were killed or wounded, against 5,300 Confederate casualties. General Burnside’s ill-fated decision to charge the Confederate position head-on at Marye’s Heights created one of the ghastliest spectacles of the war. The ground in front of the stone wall at the top of the hill was completely covered with corpses, and a soldier with the unfortunate duty of collecting the bodies came upon one grisly scene after another: bodies “swollen to twice their natural size, black as negroes in most cases; here lay “one without a head, there one without legs, yonder a head and legs without a trunk…with fragments of shell sticking in oozing brain, with bullet holes all over the puffed limbs.”

Catastrophes like Fredericksburg were demoralizing the troops in the field, as well as the civilians back home. “My loyalty is growing weak,” one soldier wrote home after the battle. “I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us….All think Virginia is not worth such a loss of life….Why not confess we are worsted, and come to an agreement?” Harper’s Weekly raged that Northerners “have borne, silently and grimly, imbecility, treachery, failure, privation, loss of friends, but they cannot be expected to suffer that such massacres as this at Fredericksburg shall be repeated.” Lincoln had to agree. “If there is a worse place than Hell,” he said after the battle, “I am in it.” There would, however, be several more Fredericksburgs, and many more brave men like Bayard would have to lose their lives before Lincoln called Grant to Washington and ended the staggering record of failure among the generals of the Army of the Potomac.

Grant’s successes in the West were virtually the only thing keeping Northern morale alive in 1862-63. Having quickly risen to a Colonelcy and then a Brigadier Generalship in the chaotic early months of the war, Grant made his mark fighting the Confederates in Belmont, Missouri, and within another three months he had captured Forts Henry and Donelson, electrifying the nation with his now famous rejoinder to former classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner’s demand for surrender terms: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” These triumphs brought him to the attention of Edwin Stanton and Abraham Lincoln, but it would be some time yet before Lincoln gave him command of all the Union armies.