ULYSSES S. GRANT

By Josiah Bunting III

Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company

180 pages

ULYSSES S. GRANT

The Unlikely Hero

By Michael Korda  

Atlas Books/ HarperCollins Publishers

161 pages

 

To me, Ulysses S. Grant has always been the more compelling and attractive of those two Civil War monoliths, Grant and Robert E. Lee. Lee to this day feels a little too posed—straining too hard to be the cavalier ideal, to compensate for his improvident father, or to distract us from the perfect killing machine he really was. It is impossible to imagine Grant, for instance, standing upon Marye’s Heights, viewing the slaughter of Fredericksburg before him and intoning, as Lee did: “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”

Grant, by contrast, comes off as a primal force, rising out of the American heartland. Serious of purpose, even mysterious; slow to provoke, but awesome and relentless once roused. Sam Grant knew that war was terrible, and he never feared growing too fond of it. He did what had to be done. Before Grant took command, President Lincoln’s Eastern generals had dithered around Virginia for nearly three years, trying to box in Lee. In just over a month of fighting that cost the two armies 65,000 casualties, Grant nailed him once and for all into the trenches around Petersburg, and left the Confederacy to bleed itself out over the next 10 months.

Despite the considerable shock and revulsion people felt over his methods, the war made Grant a national hero almost overnight, and propelled him to two terms as president that nearly undid his reputation all over again. He would still get his due as a general, but for much of the next hundred years his melancholy visage would dwell near the bottom of those presidential ranking charts in social studies classrooms, side by side with poor Warren Harding as the only two “failure” presidents.

Michael Korda and Josiah Bunting III are the latest revisionists to rub some tarnish off the idol. Both men have written widely in different genres, and both have been recruited for series that have employed outstanding stylists to write on historical figures. Korda, who is also editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, is writing for the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books, and has produced the more impressionistic, personal portrait. Bunting, a decorated Vietnam veteran and former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, is writing for Times Books’ American Presidents collection, and has written the better history, both on the battlefield and in the White House. Both works are vivid, enjoyable and well-written introductions to one of our most enigmatic historical giants.

Grant’s gifts were not necessarily what one might at first consider martial. He was a superb horseman and was courageous in battle from the beginning of his career as a professional soldier. Serving as a lieutenant in the Mexican War, he volunteered to ride through enemy fire to fetch more ammunition and accomplished this feat in cinematic fashion, going “full gallop, Indian style, clinging to the side of his horse,” as Korda puts it. Yet he also showed a deft hand at painting and sketching, considered becoming a professor of mathematics and was an engaging writer from an early age. As a cadet at West Point, he spent less time reading the lives of Napoleon or Scipio Africanus than tales by Sir Walter Scott and Washington Irving.

The ability to write out a clear, concise order should not be underestimated in the fog of 19th-century war; commanding generals throughout the Civil War were frustrated by their inability to execute coordinated maneuvers across sprawling battlefields. Yet above all, Grant possessed the ability, in Lincoln’s words, to seize the enemy, “hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew & choke.”

“One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere, or do anything, not to have to turn back until the thing intended was accomplished,” Grant wrote in his justly celebrated memoirs, and that applied whether he was taking Vicksburg or racing against throat cancer in the last nine months of his life, finishing his remarkable book in order to provide his beloved wife with a legacy.

Could these virtues really have been enough? No other American has made such a dramatic leap from middle-aged obscurity to national icon save for that other heartland general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ike was always a much shrewder man, in and out of khaki. But then, as Korda points out, there is no evidence that Grant ever thought of himself “as ordinary at all, or that the Grant family had ever considered themselves to be in the least ordinary.” Grant traced his ancestors back to the earliest Puritans, and most likely thought himself the social equal of any man, even though his father had grubbed out a living on the Ohio frontier. The Grant story was the essence of American democracy in action.

Of course circumstances helped, as they inevitably do in the lives of great men. Without the Civil War, all of Grant’s famous West Point generation might have lived out their military lives in dusty outposts. Grant was sent to West Point against his will, but he was all but lost outside the Army, and had proved almost comically inept at any sort of business. He failed at any number of endeavors: running a general store, cutting and selling ice, raising potatoes. Mustered out of the Army for seven miserable years, he failed at farming so badly that he was reduced to selling firewood on the streets of St. Louis and pawning his gold watch to buy his family Christmas presents. Left without an offensive to pursue, or separated from his family, he tended to fall into torpor, and bouts of drinking that would besmirch his image no less than the scandals that beset his presidency.

Bunting and Korda try mightily to show that Grant’s various reputations for drunkenness, battlefield butchery and general seediness are overwrought — though that record has already largely been corrected. Their defenses of the Grant presidency are more interesting. Both make the case that the administration’s assorted financial scandals were in most cases small beer, in an era of small government. Meanwhile, Grant had many virtues as a head of state. He attempted to work out a new understanding with the American Indians, and he used the Army to suppress the Klan and uphold African-American rights in the un-Reconstructed South. It was not his fault that the racism and indifference of his white countrymen would plunge the United States into another long night of oppression after he left office.

The case for the Grant presidency, made by both these books, is persuasive enough to get him off that bottom rung with Harding, even if both authors at times overstate it. Korda even praises Grant for not involving us in a war with the British Empire. He is overinfluenced by the times, perhaps; avoiding a disastrous foreign adventure did not use to be the bench mark for presidential greatness. And it may be that the exhaustion for ambitious public enterprises brought on by the end of the Civil War, and the rising political corruption, would have been too much for even the best of presidents to overcome. The larger tragedy, though, is that after Lincoln’s death only Grant had the national standing to try to summon the nation to a new era of understanding and civic devotion. Instead, both he and the nation subsided back into a long political inertia.