Grant

by Ron Chernow

Throughout the summer, Grant, who had once smoked twenty cigars a day, was vexed by a baffling sore throat that never faded.

Seldom, if ever, has a literary masterpiece been composed under such horrific circumstances. Whenever he swallowed anything, Grant was stricken with pain and had to resort to opiates that clouded his brain. As a result, he endured extended periods of thirst and hunger as he labored over his manuscript. The torment of the inflamed throat never ceased.

Although bolstered by analgesics, Grant experienced only partial relief, informing a reporter that “when the suffering was so intense . . . he only wished for the one great relief to all human pain.”

The caricature of Grant as a filthy “butcher” is ironic for a man who couldn’t stomach the sight of blood, studiously refrained from romanticizing warfare, and shied away from a military career. “I never went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm,” he remarked. “I was always glad when a battle was over.”

He has been derided as a plodding, dim-witted commander who enjoyed superior manpower and matériel and whose crude idea of strategy was to launch large, brutal assaults upon the enemy. In fact, close students of the war have shown that the percentage of casualties in Grant’s armies was often lower than those of many Confederate generals. If Grant never shrank from sending masses of soldiers into bloody battles, it had nothing to do with a heartless disregard for human life and everything to do with bringing the war to a speedy conclusion.

The name Ulysses S. Grant was the product of a later bureaucratic error that stuck.

Despite her sterling traits, something was missing in Hannah Grant, a maternal warmth whose absence Ulysses felt keenly. “I never saw my mother cry,” he claimed.19 Deeply repressed, Hannah never bared her emotions or discussed them with her children.

However infuriating Ulysses found his father, he cared deeply about his opinion. With the emotionally arid Hannah, an enigmatic silence lingered and they had a constrained relationship in later years.

by 1830 each American drank, on average, seven gallons of pure alcohol per year—as

“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.”

Jesse Grant committed the common error of willful fathers who try to stimulate their sons and overpower them instead.

Ulysses quietly resented the pressure to succeed, and Jesse was perplexed that his son “never seemed inclined to put himself forward at all; and was modest, retiring, and reticent.”

Even at the end of his life, one of his physicians delivered this judgment on his emotional makeup: “He is the most suppressive man I ever knew. He is not devoid of emotional nature, but his emotions from early life have been diverted from their natural channels of expression . . . What has been called imperturbability in him is simply introversion of his feelings.”

He tamed even the most refractory horses through a fine sensitivity to their nature rather than by his physical prowess. “If people knew how much more they could get out of a horse by gentleness than by harshness,” Grant once observed, “they would save a great deal of trouble both to the horse and the man.”

Unlike many great historical figures, Grant brooded on no vast dreams, harbored no spacious vision for his future, and would have settled for a contented, small-town life.

Inside the dreaded beam room, Jesse soaked hides in vats in a lye solution before they were removed and stripped of hairs by knives. The floor grew slimy with blood and animal fat as giant rats swarmed through the mess. One day, short of help, Jesse commandeered Ulysses for the beam room, and he was revolted by the experience. “Father, this tanning is not the kind of work I like,” Ulysses explained. “I’ll work at it though, if you wish me to, until I am one-and-twenty; but you may depend upon it, I’ll never work a day at it after that.”61 To his credit, instead of pushing his son, Jesse inquired what he would like to do. The boy cited three pretty pedestrian possibilities: become a farmer, become a trader, or get an education. The depth of his disgust with tanning expressed itself in his lifelong insistence on eating meat burned to a crisp and free of blood.

“I did not want to go to West Point,” he maintained. “My appointment was an accident, and my father had to use his authority to make me go.”

he experienced such foreboding about West Point that he daydreamed about a travel accident that would abort the whole trip. “When these places were visited I would have been glad to have had a steamboat or railroad collision . . . by which I might have received a temporary injury sufficient to make me ineligible, for a time, to enter the Academy,” he wrote with dry humor.

“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.”

If Grant thought this way at the time—and some contrary evidence exists—he certainly was not outspoken about it. However wicked the war, he “had not moral courage enough to resign” and felt an overriding duty to serve the flag.

Congress voted for war with Mexico by overwhelming margins. Imbued with a sense of honor, Grant believed it would be unconscionable to leave the army at such a moment fraught with danger, and he jettisoned forever his cramped dream of becoming a math teacher.

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.

Characteristically Grant experienced no schadenfreude as he observed Mexican troops surrender, only infinite pathos for their miserable plight. “My pity was aroused by the sight of the Mexican garrison of Monterrey marching out of town as prisoners . . . Many of the prisoners were cavalry, armed with lances, and mounted on miserable little half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town.”52 Grant praised Taylor’s “humane policy,” but President Polk was furious with the generous surrender terms that failed to divest the Mexicans of their weapons.

At more melancholy moments, he regretted that he had not taken his father’s advice, resigned from the army, and headed into business.

they stopped to visit Grant’s rich cousin, James Hewitt, who entertained them in his opulent home. Grant dropped modest hints that he might resign from the army should an advantageous business opportunity arise, but his cousin turned a deaf ear and Grant stayed in the military.

Under the circumstances, he told Julia in May 1853 that if he could “get together a few thousand dollars,” he might quit the army and rejoin her.

After the farming venture backfired, Grant and a partner bought up chickens and shipped them to San Francisco, only to have most perish en route. Then Grant and Rufus Ingalls learned that ice sold for exorbitant prices in San Francisco. To capitalize on this, they packed one hundred tons aboard a sailing vessel only to have headwinds detain the ship and melt the ice; by the time it arrived in San Francisco, other boats packed with ice had preceded it, leading to a price skid. To top things off, Grant and another officer tried to start a social club and billiard room at the Union Hotel only to have the hired manager abscond with their funds.

He was also congenitally naive in business. Sincere himself, he could never imagine how deviously other people could behave.

His laments betray the earmarks of acute depression, including lethargy and indifference to his environment: “I do nothing here but sit in my room and read and occasionally take a short ride on one of the public horses.”

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.

Those who now encountered him never forgot his hopeless, downcast air. “He greeted me kindly but seemed to be in a very distressed and disconsolate condition,” said George W. Fishback. “I had never before seen him so much depressed. He was shabbily dressed, his beard unshaven, his face anxious and the whole exterior of the man denoting a profound discouragement at the result of his experiment to maintain himself in St. Louis.”

He had spent futile years trying to become a successful breadwinner, free of the twin tyrants who had lorded over him, his father and Colonel Dent. Now he had to shed his pride and capitulate to his father’s will.

John E. Smith, who owned a nearby jewelry shop, observed that Grant refused to function as an ordinary sales clerk, asking customers to wait until the “real” clerk returned. If the customer was in a hurry, Grant “would go behind the counter very reluctantly, and drag down whatever was wanted; but [he] hardly ever knew the price of it, and, in nine cases out of ten, he charged either too much or too little.”11 With his guileless nature, he was easily hoodwinked by customers who suggested lower prices.

Abraham Lincoln emerged as the presidential standard-bearer. While his opposition to extending slavery was well known, he ducked many controversial issues. A comparative unknown, a dark horse who could juggle conflicting constituencies, he became the nominee less because he appealed to the most people than because he offended the fewest.

Suddenly Grant was fired by a mission, a clear sense of purpose, something that had been lacking in the 1850s. He was now wide awake, his pulse quickened by an overriding sense of duty.

many southern officers felt that loyalty to their states outweighed attachment to the federal government. The decision of Robert E. Lee, who rebuffed an offer to command the U.S. Army and rushed to Virginia’s defense, was typical of southern officers who opposed secession but stuck with their native states.

54 Many major figures in history could have succeeded in almost any environment, whereas Grant could only thrive in a narrower set of circumstances.

At this point, it seemed unlikely that Grant might figure significantly in the war, and he later admitted that the zenith of his ambition was command of a cavalry brigade.

After his hard knocks during the prewar period, one might have expected him to be pessimistic, cautious, and self-doubting. Instead he was becoming the most self-confident of Union commanders, perhaps needing to wipe away the stigma of earlier failures in civilian life—failures that had implanted in him a high level of motivation that no other general could quite match.

Despite the varied drinking anecdotes about Grant, they possess one common denominator: Julia Grant was absent when they supposedly happened.

Unlike other Union generals who magnified rebel power to imaginary proportions, Grant’s knowledge of his foes demystified them.

Now admirers flooded him with “boxes of the choicest brands” of cigars “from everywhere in the North. As many as ten thousand were soon received.”48 Before long, Grant smoked eighteen to twenty cigars a day and they became an inescapable part of his persona.

Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war. They were both haunted men, tough and manly on the outside, but hypersensitive to criticism, and they sustained each other at troubled moments.

80 With facetious overstatement, Sherman once remarked, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

When John Rawlins came up from Pittsburg Landing, searching for Grant, he told a fellow officer, “We’ll find him where the firing is heaviest”—which turned out to be the case.32 A bullet that smashed the scabbard of his sword left Grant completely unfazed.

Grant thought Lew Wallace typical of politically well-connected generals who had risen to excessively high positions. This problem bedeviled the North, where there were deep divisions in the electorate, forcing Lincoln to curry favor with opposition politicians by plucking generals from their ranks.

Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined

Grant bristled at the campaign of abuse against him, believing southern generals had the immense advantage of a favorable press while northern generals were hounded by poison-pen reporters.

Antietam represented an important juncture in the war. On the eve of battle, the British and French had seriously entertained recognizing the Confederacy, and an indisputable triumph by Lee might have tilted the scales toward such a decision.

Without referring to McClellan by name, Grant later made a comment that seems to allude to him: “The trouble with many of our generals in the beginning was that they did not believe in the war . . . They had views about slavery, protecting rebel property, State rights—political views that interfered with their judgments.”36 It was Grant’s stalwart faith in Lincoln’s war aims, coupled with his military acumen, that made him the ideal commander.