American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant

by Ronald C. White Jr.

When Grant is remembered, he is too often described as a simple man of action, not of ideas. Pulitzer Prize–winning Grant biographer William S. McFeely declared, “I am convinced that Ulysses Grant had no organic, artistic, or intellectual specialness.” Describing Grant’s midlife crisis: “The only problem was that until he was nearly forty, no job he liked had come his way—and so he became a general and president because he could find nothing better to do.”

No. I believe Grant was an exceptional person and leader. A popular 1870s medallion depicted George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant as the three great leaders of the nation. Lionized as the general who saved the Union, he was celebrated in his lifetime as the “hero of Appomattox,” the warrior who offered magnanimous peace terms to General Robert E. Lee. Elected president twice, he would be the only such leader of the United States to serve two consecutive terms between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. Even with the scandals that tainted his second term, he retained enormous popularity with the American people and probably would have been elected to a third term in 1876 if he had chosen to run. But let’s not get ahead of our story.

At the end of his life, Grant wrote one of the finest memoirs in American letters, which modern presidents invariably refer to when they write their own. In this last piece of the puzzle, one question must be asked: Accomplishing such a literary feat required extraordinary gifts; did we miss something along the way?

Grant was renowned for his ability to ride and gentle horses. But what do horse stories mean to a modern reader? In an earlier era when horses were central to everyday life, people understood that the man whom horses trust is the kind of man who can be trusted.

Yet Grant as president defended the political rights of African Americans, battled against the Ku Klux Klan and voter suppression, reimagined Indian policy, rethought the role of the federal government in a changing America, and foresaw that as the United States would now assume a larger place in world affairs, a durable peace with Great Britain would provide the nation with a major ally.

Brooks Simpson penned two groundbreaking books: Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of Reconstruction (1991) and Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822–1865 (2000). Jean Edward Smith authored the comprehensive Grant (2001). Joan Waugh herself, in U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (2009), offered an adroit reappraisal within the larger story of American memory. Building on what they have done, in particular by utilizing new resources, I want both to place Grant centrally in his tumultuous historical context and to make him immediate to modern audiences. I have benefited immensely from the completion—after forty-nine years—of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Superbly edited by John Y. Simon, and recently by John Marszalek, these thirty-two volumes provide both a wide-angle and a zoom lens on Grant’s ideas, thinking, and action. Multiple visits to the library have unearthed rich resources not included in the printed and online papers.

Military Peace Establishment Act of 1802, creating the United States Military Academy at West Point.

The academy endured an initial fifteen years of mismanagement before President James Monroe, a leader with military experience in the Revolutionary War, named Colonel Sylvanus Thayer to be its new superintendent in 1817. Thayer had graduated first in his class at Dartmouth in 1807 and earned his commission in the Corps of Engineers in 1808 after studying one year at West Point. Following the Napoleonic Wars, Thayer was sent by Secretary of War James Monroe to France to study the curriculum of the École Polytechnique. The French school would become the model for reshaping the academy under Thayer’s leadership.

Thayer would earn the title “Father of the Military Academy.” Destined to serve longer than any other superintendent at West Point—seventeen years—Thayer deserves credit for raising the stature of the academy.

John O’Sullivan, a northern journalist, summed up the national spirit in coining the term Manifest Destiny to justify and celebrate expansion.

The Mexican War would become a defining experience for Grant and the young nation. If grandfathers had fought the Revolutionary War, and fathers battled Great Britain a second time in the War of 1812, the prospect of war with Mexico proved a unique challenge to a new generation of Americans. This war would be the first fought on foreign soil; the first against a non-European army; and the first against a people who spoke a different language.

Americans do not want their heroes to reveal their vulnerabilities, but Grant freely admitted his—with humor.

As the Civil War began, a cry echoed across the North: “We must have the Mississippi.” Grant understood that whoever controlled the Mississippi River would control the emerging heartland of America.

It is not easy for readers in the twenty-first century to grasp the importance of rivers for Americans in the nineteenth century. Rivers became their interstate highways. Whether navigating the Hudson River in New York, piloting the Mississippi River, or traveling the Missouri River to discover the West, explorers, pioneers, and settlers used rivers to reach their destinations. Canoes, keelboats, flatboats, and finally steamers were their primary means of travel. The cities in what was called the Great Valley—from Pittsburgh to St. Louis to New Orleans—and Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, and Memphis in between, all throbbed with commercial activity because of their locations on rivers.

In September 1861, the Confederacy held more than 550 miles of the Mississippi River, from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Colu...

The word guerrilla is derived from the Spanish guerrilleros, independent fighters who banded together during Napoleon’s campaign on the Iberian Peninsula. Richmond officials preferred the word partisan, arguing that the fighters were related to the regular army. Guerrillas or partisans, fiercely autonomous warriors, fought across a countryside they knew well.

He also understood that by crossing the Mississippi, leaving most of his supply lines behind, and approaching Vicksburg by its back door, he would be challenging traditional rules of military engagement.

Grant made another crucial decision. Instead of advancing directly north toward Vicksburg—a strategy he knew Pemberton would expect—he decided to strike indirectly to the northeast.

By 1863 Grant had advanced into a superb tactician. His battle plan for Vicksburg would be used 123 years later in 1986 as a case study in an Army Operations Field Manual stating that the characteristics of a modern AirLand Battle should be “surprise, concentration, speed, flexibility, and audacity.” Crediting Grant, the field manual declared, “the same speed, surprise,

maneuver, and decisive action will be required in the campaigns of the future.”

Grant had several habits going for him that Bragg did not. He listened; he asked questions; he did not attempt to micromanage; he seldom engaged in criticism after a battle.

City Point, a small town on a bluff above the confluence of the James and Appomattox rivers

In the months that followed, Grant would transform City Point, a sleepy, out-of-the-way river settlement, into a huge Union port and supply base. Its wharf would stretch more than a mile, welcoming seventy-five sailing ships and one hundred barges on a typical day. Through the efforts of Quartermaster Rufus Ingalls, enormous warehouses were built for the commissary, ordnance, and quartermaster departments, along with smithies and wagon repair shops. The bakery turned out one hundred thousand loaves of bread a day. The sprawling Depot Field Hospital spread over two hundred acres and could serve ten thousand patients. Four steamers a day connected City Point to Washington. Ingalls built a twenty-one-mile railroad joining City Point and Petersburg.

On June 13, the House passed the Senate version of the amendment by a vote of 120 to 32, easily exceeding the necessary two-thirds majority, with every Republican voting for it. The former rebel states were required to ratify the new amendment before being eligible to rejoin the Union.

Johnson immediately declared war against the amendment. He argued that because the southern states were not represented in Congress, it was not legal. His underlying objection: Neither he nor the southern states would ever affirm equal political rights for blacks.

Grant found himself in the middle of a seesaw, with the president pushing down on one end and Congress on the other. At the conclusion of the Civil War, he was committed to supporting the president’s authority as commander in chief. But in the intervening fourteen months, he slowly pivoted toward supporting the authority of Congress. As a soldier who had seen too much bloodshed, he longed for conciliation. As a person who grew from indifference about slavery to advocacy of African American rights, he stood for congressional measures that would give them protection. As general in chief, he was committed to enforcing...

“Loyalty to the nation ALL THE TIME. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.” So judged Samuel Langhorne Clemens,

But Grant had learned to challenge first impressions in his previous travels. In a foreign country, aware of his own limitations to understand a different culture, Grant cultivated this ability to be self-critical of his initial judgments until it became a pattern of engagement.

WHY IS GRANT’S Personal Memoirs so significant? Because as a military memoir, his book stands alone. Grant fulfilled Robert U. Johnson’s dictum to tell his audience “what he planned, thought, saw, said, and did,” with little egoism. He did so by describing each battle in riveting detail, by taking his readers into the immediacy of his command decisions:

One of the most anxious periods of my experience during the rebellion was the last few weeks before Petersburg. I felt that the situation of the Confederate army was such that they would try to make an escape at the earliest practicable moment, and I was afraid, every morning, that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone.

In this remarkable passage, the reader is there. Grant lets his audience understand the contingencies of war and his own uncertainty in decision making.

Underlining the transformation of Grant’s writing was his increased ability to write with verbs. Strong action verbs directed his narrative. It would be a mistake to think this use of verbs was completely new. Grant used verbs in his military orders. In 1863 at Champion Hill, he wrote

Francis Blair, “Move at early dawn toward Black River Bridge. I think you will encounter no enemy on the way. If you do, however, engage them at once.”

In the Personal Memoirs, action verbs drive forceful passages again and again. Thus, after the triumph at Chattanooga, he sent orders to General “Slow-Trot” Thomas: “I ordered Thomas to take Dalton and hold it, if possible; and I directed him to move without de...

A close reading of the Personal Memoirs reveals many other literary qualities that would allow Grant’s work to stand the test of time. Like Lincoln, he preferred strong, one-syllable words, eschewing the use of adjectives and adverbs. In perusing Grant’s edits, one perceives he learned the lesson that less is more.