Grant

by Ron Chernow

The choices bandied about suggest a literate clan with high expectations for the child. Hannah opted for Albert to honor Thomas Jefferson’s treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, while her father opted for Hiram as a “handsome” biblical name. Hannah’s stepmother evinced “enthusiastic admiration for the ancient commander, Ulysses,” recalled Jesse Grant, and urged “that the babe should be named Ulysses.”1 Some accounts claim the matter was settled by plucking names from a hat. Whatever the case, the family agreed on Hiram Ulysses Grant, which translated into the unfortunate initials H.U.G. The boy would show a decided preference for Ulysses and gradually discard Hiram, especially when other boys “teased him about his initials.”

Hating mean-spirited gossip, she regarded others charitably and shrank from spiteful comments. One day, when women in her church group groused about a drunken husband in the congregation, Hannah chimed in: “Well, Mr. A. was a good fiddler, anyhow.”18 Hannah’s tendency to trust people was a lesson that her innocent son Ulysses would learn almost too well.

When he was only two, Jesse dared a neighbor to fire a pistol near his son, sure he would take it in stride. Instead of erupting in tears, the child seemed to revel in the loud noise. “Fick it again!” he cried. “Fick it again!”32 The incident set a lifelong pattern of Grant appearing impervious to physical danger.

Ulysses exhibited a strict Methodist propriety. No dancing, card playing, or cursing was tolerated in the proper Grant household. “It has been a principle of mine never to swear at any time in my life,” Ulysses attested in future years.38 Even as a raw country boy, he allowed himself no oath stronger than “Thunder and Lightning!” Once, when quarreling with an acquaintance, he was provoked to say “Darn.” During the Civil War, Grant recounted this episode to someone who recalled him saying “that the very sound of the word to his ears bothered him, so that for an entire week it continued to literally haunt him.”39 He spent a lifetime avoiding the coarse jokes and bawdy anecdotes that were commonplace in the military. “He revered women and thought such stories demeaned the female sex,” said a cousin. “I have seen him freeze up a man instantly with a look when a vulgar story was told in his presence.”40

He preferred innocent pastimes, such as swimming, playing marbles, or ice-skating. While he delighted in fishing barefoot in summer, seated by a brook near the tannery, he seldom hunted and derived no pleasure from the casual butchering of animals. “He was unusually sensitive to pain,” said a friend, “and his aversion to taking any form of life was so great that he would not hunt.”42 Such a tame boy inevitably became the butt of mockery, and Grant grew sensitive to public humiliation. Never one to initiate a fight, he refused to back down when bullied. He was roused to fury if sadistic boys tormented an innocent child or a defenseless horse, and smaller boys embraced him as their steadfast protector. On one occasion, Grant saw a big, oafish boy named Slifer picking on a much smaller boy. “Grant stepped forward, rolled up his sleeves, and told Slifer that he shouldn’t fight that little fellow; that if there was any fighting to be done he could fight him,” said a cousin.43 Grant never deviated from this philosophy, which he later applied to his eldest son. “I do not want him to feel afraid to pitch in when boys impose on him but he had better avoid boys who are inclined to quarrel.”

Ulysses conveyed a vivid sense of his father’s insatiable thirst for knowledge. As a boy, he had “read every book he could borrow in the neighborhood where he lived. This scarcity gave him the early habit of studying everything he read, so that when he got through with a book, he knew everything in it.”48

Jesse turned to his son and announced, “Ulysses, I believe you are going to receive the appointment.” “What appointment?” Ulysses asked. “To West Point; I have applied for it.” “But I won’t go,” replied Ulysses. Jesse insisted he would go “and I thought so too, if he did,” as Ulysses recalled his cowed reaction to this paternal edict. The young man had little confidence he could meet the entrance requirements. “I did not believe I possessed them, and could not bear the idea of failing.”

In his haste, he listed the applicant as Ulysses S. Grant. The confusion came about either because Hamer confused Ulysses with his younger brother Simpson or because he assumed Ulysses was his first name and he had taken Hannah’s maiden name for his middle name. (Grant himself blamed Senator Morris for the long-lived error.) The mistaken name, which persisted at West Point and beyond, was the bane of the young man’s life and seemed symbolic of his almost comic passivity under Jesse’s heavy-handed tutelage. As Grant later confessed to his wife in frank exasperation, “You know I have an ‘S’ in my name and don’t know what it stand[s] for.”69

Only the specter of his father’s disapproval kept him firmly stationed on the Hudson. “If I could have escaped West Point without bringing myself into disgrace at home, I would have done so,” he reminisced. “I remember about the time I entered the academy there were debates in Congress over a proposal to abolish West Point. I . . . read the Congress reports with eagerness . . . hoping to hear that the school had been abolished, and that I could go home to my father without being in disgrace.”

Everybody noted the perfect harmony that united man and animal when Grant sat erect in the saddle. “In horsemanship . . . he was noted as the most proficient in the Academy,” said Longstreet. “In fact, rider and horse held together like the fabled centaur.”

he had campaigned heartily in 1840 for William Henry Harrison, whose slogan in the presidential race was “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.”

Ulysses S. Grant who returned to Bethel by stagecoach had the upright carriage of a cadet instead of his familiar boyhood slouch. Training had made him lean and muscular. When he encountered his mother, she didn’t shower him with tears or hugs, but inspected him closely instead. “Ulysses, you have grown much straighter,” she commented, and he shot back, “Yes, that was the first thing they taught me.”25

Looking back on his life, Grant declared that his happiest day was his last as president—with the possible exception of graduation day at West Point.34 For all

“He was always a very mild-spoken man, he spoke like a lady almost,” recalled J. D. Elderkin, a drum major. “He was about as nice a man as you ever saw . . . He had a very heavy beard all through Mexico and his whiskers were of a reddish-brown color . . . His general character was of a quiet, inoffensive man. He spoke but few words to anybody but he loved to ride on horseback.”22

Mexican city of Matamoros,

Even though the Mexicans were outmatched, they gave Grant his first unforgettable taste of the horrors of combat. When the first barrage of Mexican cannonballs bounced toward American lines, soldiers sidestepped them easily. Then a cannonball streaked through the air near Grant, missing him but shattering the skull of an enlisted man, spattering his blood and brains on surrounding soldiers. The sudden blast inflicted a disfiguring wound on a Captain Page in Grant’s regiment. “The under jaw is gone to the wind pipe and the tongue hangs down upon the throat,” Grant wrote. “He will never be able to speak or to eat.”

During his maiden battle, Grant discovered something curious about his own metabolism: he was tranquil in warfare, as if temporarily anesthetized, preternaturally cool under fire. The night of the Palo Alto battle he fell into a deep, dreamless slumber on the battlefield. The next day, as he surveyed the terrain, he was powerfully affected by the carnage around him, including sixty American casualties. He told Julia it was a “terrible sight” to see the ground “strewed with the bodies of dead men and horses.”33 To the youthful Grant, “the engagement assumed a magnitude in my eyes which was positively startling.” Years later, hardened by the unspeakable casualties he had seen in the Civil War, he mused, “Now, such an affair would scarcely be deemed important enough to report to headquarters.”

The night after the battle, he came upon young Virginia lieutenant George Pickett shivering in the cold. When Grant asked why he trembled, Pickett replied, “I shall fr-fr-freeze to d-death.” “Oh no you won’t,” said Grant, who found a piece of roasted red chili pepper, blew away the ashes, then handed it to the West Point graduate. “Here, Pickett, you eat that and it will be as good as a stove inside of you.”

Popocatépetl.

Veracruz

Taylor’s presidential tenure proved remarkably short-lived. In 1850, after attending July Fourth orations on a torrid day, he consumed an enormous quantity of possibly tainted cherries and iced milk and died mysteriously five days later. When Grant and his bride arrived in Detroit on November 17,

The ship that transported the regiment up the coast, the Columbia, had a turbulent voyage, encountering three days of gale-force winds that made Grant and other passengers seasick.

The only rumor of philandering that ever trailed Grant concerned a Native American woman, named either Moumerto or Maria, who later claimed she gave birth to a daughter fathered by Grant. Grant’s fellow soldiers tended to discount the story, which remains vague and wholly unsubstantiated.83 What is certain is that Grant showed striking sympathy for Indians whom his regiment had come to police. “It is really my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites,” he told Julia.84 He saw firsthand the fraud and abuse practiced upon Native Americans by corrupt white agents who swindled them on goods, not to mention the devastating effects of smallpox and measles communicated by white settlers.

Grant admitted he was “by no means a ‘Lincoln man’ in that contest; but I recognized then his great ability.”119 He thought it “a nice question to say who got the best of the argument” in the debates.120 Even though Lincoln lost the election, the debates elevated him to a figure of national stature, while Republicans scored stunning triumphs in New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana that fall.

1858 Grant’s farming ambitions had foundered forever and he auctioned off his stock, crops, and farming equipment. This capped a four-year period of failure so excruciating that Grant skipped over it altogether in his Memoirs. He now paced the St. Louis streets, searching for work, obscure and invisible to the many people he passed, a bleak, defeated little man with a mysterious aura of solitude. “He walked about like any citizen,” said one woman, “but people made way for him, and he walked through the crowd as though solitary.”121

If Grant had dithered on how best to deal with slavery, secession clarified his thinking on preserving the Union, turning him into an outright militant. He conceded that the Constitution might have allowed one of the original thirteen states to secede, but such a right “was never possessed at all by Florida or the states west of the Mississippi, all of which were purchased by the treasury of the entire nation. Texas and the territory brought into the Union in consequence of annexation, were purchased with both blood and treasure.”

That night soldiers again suffered cruelly from a snowstorm that blanketed their camps, producing a bizarre incident: when rough winds flung icicles from tree branches, the Confederates mistook this for an attack and started firing madly.

At dusk, riding back to headquarters through fields littered with frozen corpses, he came upon a wounded Union lieutenant sprawled next to a Confederate private. Grant dismounted, got a flask of brandy, and impartially gave a swig to each man. He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. “Take this Confederate, too,” he said. “Take them both together; the war is over between them.”25 Grant seemed sickened by the carnage. “Let’s get away from this dreadful place,” he told an officer. “I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.” As Grant watched a parade of bandaged warriors trudging by, one aide heard him softly recite verse from Robert Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man / makes countless thousands mourn.”26 It was uncommon for Grant to quote poetry, especially upon the battlefield.

“There’s something for you to read General.” Buckner requested a formal armistice with commissioners appointed to negotiate terms of surrender. “What answer shall I send to this, General?” Grant inquired of Smith, who answered categorically: “No terms to the damned Rebels!”30 With that, Grant sat down at the kitchen table and composed a classic statement in American military history. In lapidary prose, he wrote: “Sir; Yours of this date proposing Armistice, and appointment of commissioners, to settle terms of capitulation is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”31 When finished, Rawlins said, Grant raised his eyes to his old West Point instructor, gave him the letter, and said drily, “General, I guess this will do.” Smith agreed. “It could not be better.”32 Buckner was taken aback by Grant’s harsh terms, which struck him as ungentlemanly, and he reluctantly replied that “the overwhelming force under your command, compel me . . . to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”33 A modern general, Grant retired outmoded forms of chivalry, showing that gentility had given way to a stark new brand of modern warfare. He did not soften his words in deference to past friendship with Buckner and delivered a powerful military message instead. In conventional warfare, Buckner would have been entitled to the preliminary armistice and negotiation of surrender he reque...

Although Sherman loved southern culture, he deplored secession as a treasonous act and threatened to resign if Louisiana seceded. One professor remembered that when Sherman read of Louisiana’s secession proclamation in a local newspaper, “he cried like a child, exclaiming, ‘My God, you Southern people don’t know what you are doing! . . . There can be no peaceable secession. Secession means war.’”77 Sherman foresaw that northern determination and technical superiority would annihilate the South and he felt duty-bound to resign a position he adored.

In fact, Grant’s imagination had charted the entire arc of the freed slaves from wartime runaways to full voting citizenship. This man who had so recently balked at abolitionism now made a startling leap into America’s future. To Eaton, Grant delineated a lengthy list of useful tasks that “contrabands” could perform, with the men building bridges, roads, and earthworks or chopping wood for Mississippi steamers, while women worked in kitchens and hospitals. But this merely served as prelude to something much bigger. “He then went on to say that when it had been made clear that the Negro, as an independent laborer . . . could do these things well, it would be very easy to put a musket in his hands and make a soldier of him, and if he fought well, eventually to put the ballot in his hand and make him a citizen. Obviously I was dealing with no incompetent, but a man capable of handling large issues. Never before in those early and bewildering days had I heard the problem of the future of the Negro attacked so vigorously and with such humanity combined with practical good sense.”31 This sudden enlargement of Grant’s thinking and concern for the ex-slaves shows how the war had reshaped his views on fundamental issues.

Berating Republicans as “Nigger Worshippers,” Democrats conjured up fantastic “scenes of lust and rapine” in the South and “a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers” in the North as the likely consequences of emancipation.35 Although Republicans retained their hold over Congress, they surrendered twenty-eight House seats to Democrats and lost governorships in New York and New Jersey as well as statehouses in Indiana and Illinois.

At a time of rampant anti-Semitism, “Jews” ended up as a shorthand for unscrupulous traders. As Sherman wrote from Memphis, “I found so many Jews & Speculators here trading in cotton . . . that I have felt myself bound to stop it. This Gold has but one use, the purchase of arms & ammunition.”45 Of course, the great majority of those involved in the illicit trade were gentiles, but Jews were much easier to scapegoat.

By early December 1862, Grant had zeroed in on Jewish traders as the source of the trouble. During his southward advance, he issued orders that all traders should stay in the rear of his army, but on December 5 he complained to Sherman that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.”46 In a mood of mounting anger, Grant was not content to chastise Jewish traders: he wanted to banish all Jews. On December 17, he issued the most egregious decision of his career. “General Orders No. 11” stipulated that “the Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department. Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave.”47 It was the most sweeping anti-Semitic action undertaken in American history.

On the same day Grant issued the order, he wrote a letter expressing a conspiratorial view of Jewish traders, endowing them with almost diabolical powers, saying “they come in with their Carpet sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any wood yard or landing on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy Cotton themselves they will act as Agents for someone else who will be at a Military post,...

It was a miserable time for Grant, who also had to cope with the loss of his false teeth. He had dipped them in a washbasin overnight only to find that his servant had tossed them out with the water the next morning. He also suffered cruelly from hemorrhoids.

intended to show the North could surpass it. (Late in life, he argued that Stonewall Jackson stood out only because he had fought inexperienced Union troops early in the war and would have been destroyed by Phil Sheridan later on.)

“The night was pitch dark, and, as we rode side by side, Grant’s horse suddenly gave a nasty stumble. I expected to see the general go over the animal’s head, and I watched intently, not to see if he was hurt, but if he would show any anger. I had been with Grant daily now for three weeks, and I had never seen him ruffled or heard him swear . . . instead of going over the animal’s head, as I imagined he would, he kept his seat. Pulling up his horse, he rode on, and, to my utter amazement, without a word or sign of impatience.”79

Grant returned to Washington, where he spurned an invitation from the president to attend a fancy dinner in his honor, followed by a performance of Edwin Booth in Richard III. Grant explained that he was anxious to set off for the West and put his military plans in motion. “We can’t excuse you,” Lincoln insisted. “Mrs. Lincoln’s dinner without you would be Hamlet with Hamlet left out.” Tactful but firm, Grant reminded Lincoln that time was important and that the dinner would mean a million dollars lost to the country. “And really, Mr. Lincoln, I have had enough of this show business.”63 Lincoln cordially bowed to his decision, perhaps secretly delighted by a general in chief so eager to finish the war.

Lincoln’s one early brush with military service came briefly as a militia captain during the Black Hawk War of 1832, when, he admitted, he fended off more mosquitoes than bullets. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had undertaken a crash course in the art of warfare, borrowing military manuals from the Library of Congress and staying up late to devour them. He also studied reports from the field and quizzed every general and admiral he could find. The miracle was that Lincoln ended up a fine military strategist who was, in many ways, superior to the chief generals who preceded Grant. Not only was he free from West Point dogma but he wasn’t beholden to generals from the old regular army. His military sagacity was a triumph of native intelligence and supreme willpower. Lincoln had developed operating theories that dovetailed perfectly with Grant’s views: that the Union army should destroy Confederate armies, not take cities or territory; that it should exploit its massive resources by simultaneous attacks against the enemy across many fronts; that military decisions were inseparable from political goals; and that only one final, savage, protracted burst of fighting could end the conflict. The Lincoln whom Grant met in March 1864 was a more mature military thinker than the callow, fumbling president of April 1861 and fully prepared for the remorseless warfare patented by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.

never could eat anything that goes on two legs” was a habitual Grant refrain.54 As had been the case since boyhood, Grant would only touch meat burned to a dry crisp: “If blood appeared in any meat which came on the table, the sight of it seemed entirely to destroy his appetite.”55 His eccentric tastes favored oysters and cucumbers, along with corn, pork and beans, and buckwheat cakes. “In fact,” concluded Porter, “he seemed to be particularly fond of only the most indigestible dishes.”

Grant noted that Lee could choose his own ground, but he was ready to contest him wherever he found him. Slowly it dawned on the skeptical journalist that Grant wasn’t deterred by the recent slaughter. Quite the contrary, his resolve had been hardened. In his memoirs, Cadwallader recounted that it was “the grandest mental sunburst of my life. I had suddenly emerged from the slough of despond, to the solid bedrock of unwavering faith.”40 Indeed, though shaken to the core, some deep-seated determination took hold of the doughty Grant. When a journalist asked if he had anything to say to higher-ups back in Washington, Grant came back with a succinct response that carried the force of a credo: “If you see the President, tell him, from me, that, whatever happens, there will be no turning back.”

That Grant refused to concede victory to Lee may seem self-serving, but he had sound reasons. “Our victory consisted in having successfully crossed a formidable stream, almost in the face of an enemy, and in getting the army together as a unit,” he maintained.44 He saw the Wilderness as the opening act in a long drama. He thought in terms of the overall war, not individual battles, and he had succeeded in taking the necessary first step to push Lee toward Richmond, paring down his army in the process. He would now initiate a new style of warfare, an uninterrupted stream of battles such as the war had never seen.

General Gordon boasted that there was “no doubt but that Grant is retreating.” “You are mistaken,” Lee corrected him, “quite mistaken. Grant is not retreating; he is not a retreating man.”46 The thought was expressed more poetically by Walt Whitman, who ardently followed the Overland Campaign: “When did [Grant] ever turn back? He was not that sort; he could no more turn back than time! . . . Grant was one of the inevitables; he always arrived; he was invincible as a law: he never bragged—often seemed about to be defeated when he was in fact on the eve of a tremendous victory.”

Grant struck a rueful tone. “We have had hard fighting to-day, and I am sorry to say we have not accomplished much. We have lost a good many men, and I suppose that I shall be blamed for it.” He struggled to augment public confidence without raising unrealistic expectations. “I do not know any way to put down this rebellion and restore the authority of the Government except by fighting, and fighting means that men must be killed. If the people of this country expect that the war can be conducted to a successful issue in any other way than fighting, they must get somebody other than myself to command the army.”81

I] propose to fight it out on this line if it takes me all summer.”83 In an artful piece of editing, Grant struck out the word “me,” which might have sounded vain; that deletion turned him into an impersonal force of nature. Grant didn’t realize the force of his line until it shouted from newspaper headlines several days later. Nothing since the “unconditional surrender” line at Fort Donelson had gripped the public imagination quite so powerfully. Grant’s words created a sensation in Washington. As Noah Brooks wrote, “Washington had broken loose with a tremendous demonstration of joy . . . There was something like delirium in the air. Everybody seemed to think that the war was coming to an end right away.”84 When crowds gathered at the White House, Lincoln uttered the famous line that had now become a watchword, a battle cry. A month later at a Philadelphia fair, he dilated upon Grant’s theme: “Speaking of the present campaign, General Grant is reported to have said, ‘I am going through on this line if it takes all summer.’ I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more.”85 Still, if the words delivered a needed fillip to northern spirits, they also risked fostering euphoric expectations. “The people are too sanguine,” Lincoln lamented to a reporter. “They expect too much at once.”86

Cold Harbor.

Grant needed to take his massive army across a waterway two thousand feet wide and eighty-four feet deep. To Julia, he described the operation as “one of the most perilous movements ever executed by a large army” since it involved “crossing two rivers over which the enemy has bridges and railroads whilst we have bridges to improvise.” Ever the optimist, he shook off the settled gloom of Cold Harbor. “I am in excellent health and feel no doubt about holding the enemy in much greater alarm than I ever felt in my life.”

Grant suggested that Lincoln might want to see the black troops who had behaved gallantly during Baldy Smith’s recent raid on Petersburg. “Oh, yes,” Lincoln replied. “I want to take a look at those boys . . . I was opposed on nearly every side when I first favored the raising of colored regiments; but they have proved their efficiency, and I am glad they have kept pace with the white troops in the recent assaults.”

When Lincoln reached the camp of black soldiers, he witnessed a scene of overpowering emotion. The men who lined up two deep on each side of the road laughed, cried, and cheered, sending up hosannas for their beloved liberator. “They crowded about him and fondled his horse; some of them kissed his hands,” wrote Porter, “while others ran off crying in triumph to their comrades that they had touched his clothes.”88 Badeau told Edwin Booth that the black troops “had never seemed so to realize the reality of their freedom as when they saw this incarnation or representative of it.”89 Lincoln peeled off layers of emotional reserve. Tears stood in his eyes as he bowed to the black soldiers, and his voice broke as he thanked them for their rapturous reception.90