What I remember of Ulysses Grant from my early youth - meaning high school, maybe college is that he was shrugged off as an almost accidental victor - a drinker - but Abraham Lincoln liked him somehow, but his Presidency was stained by scandal. And Reconstruction was a story of "carpetbaggers" - northern do-good interlopers.
With a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant out by the man who helped put Alexander Hamilton back in the center of 21st American popular culture, I’m late to the game to sing Grant’s praises. I have not read Chernow’s book. But I have been rereading Grant’s memoirs. I began writing this post at the end of last year when the valorization of Confederate military leaders was more at the center of our public debate. But these are issues of long standing, going on two centuries. They remain as present and consequential as they’ve ever been and Grant is at the center of that.
Until relatively recently Grant, at least as President, had a poor historical reputation. His strengths as a military leader were also overshadowed in the popular imagination by Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and others. But in both cases, much of Grant’s dim reputation was directly tied to the way national unity was built in the late 19th century on the abandonment of the country’s newly freed African-American citizens and what we might call the Union theory of the war itself. I have always found it notable that the official records of what we call the Civil War, published by the US government are entitled The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.
We’ve noted in other posts how the Confederate statues that dot the South today aren’t actually from the post-Civil War Era. Most date from decades later when they were erected as celebrations of the triumph of Jim Crow and the restoration of ‘home rule’ in the South. In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, perhaps the first American movie blockbuster, portrayed the Reconstruction Era as one in which northern extremists, corrupt politicians and barbarous and sexually aggressive African-Americans tyrannized Southern whites until they were liberated with the help of the Ku Klux Klan. If that was the dominant historical memory of Reconstruction – and it was in the early 20th century – the reputation of the man whose battlefield victories made it possible and who presided over it as President necessarily had to suffer.
But Grant is one of the great actors on the stage of American history: first as a general, second as President, and third as the author of what is likely the only great work of literature ever written by an American President, his Personal Memoirs.
This is all the more remarkable since the Memoirs are Grant’s only piece of public writing (with the exception of a couple short magazine articles he wrote just before the Memoirs) and he wrote most of the second volume in the final weeks of his life as he was dying of cancer. He finished editing the manuscript five days before he died.
From the first page, Grant’s writing is stark and direct. We are reading the words of the North’s great military hero of the Civil War as well as a two-term President eight years after leaving office. In his preface, he tells us that while he had always insisted he would never write his memoirs or anything for publication he has agreed to do so because he is broke and dying. We are on notice from the outset that he is a man with no airs. “I consented for the money it gave me; for at that moment I was living upon borrowed money.” Grant’s basic humility is an element of his personality that is present on almost every page. As is often the case in life, this humility is joined with a deep capacity for empathy. Here it is combined with, perhaps indistinguishable from, an account which is free of conceits or personal myth-making. On hearing hostile gunfire for the first time during the Mexican-American war he tells us: “What General Taylor’s feelings were during this suspense I do not know; but for myself, a young second-lieutenant who had never heard a hostile gun before, I felt sorry that I had enlisted.” The first sentence of the Memoirs marks a central theme in a single sentence of stacked clauses which capture the ordered vigor of Grant’s writing: “My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”
Lee may have glamor and impeccable pedigree. He was a highly skilled general. But he was no innovator. Grant turns out to have been a military genius – something that must have been hard to predict given his solid but unexceptional service in the Army prior to the Civil War. Having retired from the military as a captain in 1854 he hesitates at first to suggest for himself the rank of colonel as Illinois is creating volunteer regiments. In three years he is Lt. General with command of the entire Union Army. Defending Grant from charges of drunkenness (likely unfounded or exaggerated in this case) when he was first gaining attention in the Western theater, Lincoln famously said of him, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”
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