The American archetype, Ulysses S. Grant
Before the death of Ulysses, the reflection.
Grant, famously, wrote his memoirs as throat cancer overtook him to provide for his soon-to-be widow. Mark Twain published a hefty two-volume set, finding many Civil War veterans to sell the memoirs across the country.
A man who found success while on campaign and rarely anywhere else, Grant failed in the firm and the farm. He struggled to find a foothold into his 30s, until the coming of the Civil War shaped him into an American archetype: the man who rises to the occasion.
Some men seem ordained to leave their mark regardless of circumstance. Grant was not.
Without the War, Grant seemed likely to die in obscurity, somewhere along the vast stretch of land from Ohio to Missouri where he spent much of his life, beaten into despair. Nor was he arrogant about the possibility. “‘Man proposes and God disposes.’ There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice,” he began the Memoirs. Throughout his writing, “Providence ruled differently” and similar lines of the same sentiment reoccur, it seems, as more than just rote humility.
Grant restrains himself, for the most part, in taking the opportunity to settle old scores. Nor does he devolve into a polemic. And he philosophizes sparingly.
Instead, he offers a narrative of the Mexican and Civil Wars that tends toward administrative detail with descriptions of battlefields and the land (at times bucolic, at times bloody). He was neither a romantic nor a dullard.
The glimpses of gold-rush-era San Francisco, the plague that ravaged travelers and piled bodies in Panama, and ruminations on what it means to reconstruct a broken country — the Memoirs remind Americans of the perseverance in our past and the staggering costs of a more perfect Union.
Despite war making the man, Grant was not rosy-eyed about the “unholy” events.
The war in Mexico was “a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which a slave state might be formed for the American Union,” Grant wrote. It “was a political war, and the administration conducting it desired to make party capital out of it.”
“I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,” he wrote. “It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”
It also made the way for the Civil War.
“The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war,” he wrote. “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
In a tragic way, Grant saw that his station in life came from what he deeply opposed.
“My life was saved, and my health restored, by exercise and exposure, enforced by an administrative act, and a war, both of which I disapproved,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, the Mexican War foreshadowed the heights many would reach.
Grant notes crossing paths, in one way or another, with future Union Generals George McClellan, George Meade, Z.B. Tower, J.G. Foster, Philip Kearny; and Brigadier Generals George McCall, Isaac Stevens, and C.P. Stone. Rebels were also well-represented: Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee, Richard Ewell, William Hardee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Richard Anderson, George Crittenden, Mansfield Lovell, and G.W. Smith; Lieutenant Generals Theophilus Holmes and S.B. Buckner; and Brigadier General Henry Sibley.
The pillaging of Mexico laid the ground for the Union’s struggle.
The United States during the Mexican War remained a frontier country, and disease reappears throughout Grant’s account. Yellow fever during his time in the New Orleans barracks (the city’s streets only disturbed by a duel); yellow fever in Veracruz; a mysterious eye pain that temporarily blinded Grant and his party near the base of Popocatapetl; cholera when crossing the isthmus of Panama (which killed one-third of the regiment and their families); small-pox devastating Indians along the Columbia River. Nature will not be restrained by the plans of men or modernity.
During the Civil War, Grant led the recapturing of the Mississippi River, kept Kentucky under Union control, prevented invasions north of the Ohio River, and took Tennessee. In an 1864 telegram to Sherman, Grant explained his strategy: “We want to keep the enemy constantly pressed to the end of the war. If we give him no peace whilst the war lasts, the end cannot be distant.”
The South counted on bleeding the wealth of the North until the resolve of the people gave out. What was needed, then, was for the North to show boldness in making and seizing advantages. And, throughout Grant’s account of the war, two themes stand out: 1) The timidity of Northern commanders reluctant to attack, and 2) the tenacity of Gen. William T. Sherman, exceptional in his ability to choose action over idling.
Though the cautiousness of McClelland in the east doesn’t figure into his writings, again and again, readers see Grant’s frustrations with his commanders. Whether it was Gen. Thomas and Gen. Rosecrans dragging their feet, Col. Murphy performing so poorly at Holly Springs that Grant suspected him of “disloyalty” or “gross cowardice,” or McClernand’s reluctance to lead an army to attack the rebels, too often Union soldiers’ advances ended before they began.
Though Grant could be harsh on his commanders, his soldiers rarely felt his disdain.
Reading Grant, the difference between the Union’s suppression of the rebellion in the west and east was the result of promoting leaders who were willing to seize the moment to advance.
Though Grant could be harsh on his commanders, his soldiers rarely felt his disdain. Even the panic-stricken stragglers during a battle, he noted, could prove gallant later. A poor leader, though, was “fully capable of developing all there was in his men of recklessness.”
Sherman, in that company of laggards, became Grant’s lynchpin. His “characteristic promptness” and the self-sacrifice of his troops proved invaluable.
At the Battle of Shiloh, though Sherman’s troops were under fire for the first time, “their commander, by his constant presence with them, inspired a confidence in officers and men that enabled them to render services on that bloody battle-field worthy of the best of veterans.”
At one point, Sherman even anticipated Grant’s orders before he could issue them. Each adamantly credited the other with the idea of how to conquer Vicksburg, and Grant explicitly credited Sherman with the plan to march to the sea through Georgia. Grant seemed never to waiver in his trust of Sherman.
“It will be a thousand years before Grant’s character is fully appreciated. Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time,” Sherman said after his passing in 1885. “He fixes in his mind what is the true objective and abandons all minor ones. He dismisses all possibility of defeat. He believes in himself and in victory. If his plans go wrong he is never disconcerted but promptly devises a new one and is sure to win in the end. Grant more nearly impersonated the American character of 1861-65 than any other living man. Therefore he will stand as the typical hero of the great Civil War in America.”
Sherman’s mention of Grant’s planning deserves special notice. Grant spends great time discussing communication improvements (like telegraph lines on the battlefield), adapting tactics to road and river conditions, reworking command structures, connecting supply trains, and living off the land rather than relying on a supply base — his acumen in behaving as the administrator and the general both led to great success, despite Stanton undermining him in the War Department.
Opposite his administrative mind, he also shows great sympathy. His terse descriptions of war hide a horror of bloodshed.
At Shiloh: “I saw an open field, in our possession on the second day, over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before, so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground.”
“The roads were strewn with the debris of broken wagons and the carcasses of thousands of stared mules and horses,” he noted on his way to Chattanooga.
He wrote of Confederate losses in failed assaults being “fearful” and abhorred explosive musket-balls, calling them “barbarous.”
At the Battle of the Wilderness, he described the apocalypse.
“Fighting had continued from five in the morning sometimes along the whole line, at other times only in places,” Grant wrote. “The ground fought over had varied in width, but averaged three-quarters of a mile. The killed, and many of the severely wounded, of both armies, lay within this belt where it was impossible to reach them. The woods were set on fire by the bursting shells, and the conflagration raged. The wounded who had not strength to move themselves were either suffocated or burned to death…the battle still raged, our men firing through the flames until it became too hot to remain longer.”
Grant deeply believed in the American system because he saw with horror the Confederate system. He repeatedly referred to the Confederacy as a military camp. Uprooting it would be a favor done for the South.
The South “was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class,” he wrote.
The North was a republic — the South, an oligarchy.
“In the North the people governed, and could stop hostilities whenever they chose to stop supplies,” Grant wrote. “The South was a military camp, controlled absolutely by the government with soldiers to back it, and the war could have been protracted, no matter to what extent the discontent reached, up to the point of open mutiny of the soldiers themselves.”
Despite his loathing of the Confederacy and its foundation of slavery, Grant chose reconciliation over retribution. He wrote of his hope that “we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate.” Instead of ordering Sherman to see that citizens in Charleston, the “hot-bed of secession,” have “a heavy hand laid upon them,” Grant remained occupied with more strategic targets as the close of the war neared.
Grant’s mercy offers something valuable in contrast to today’s iconoclastic outbursts against the Confederacy as a proxy for one’s commitment to racial equality (and the vacuous revisionism of a genteel antebellum South). Through mercy lies redemption for both parties.
As shallow thinkers speak of a national divorce, dedicating time to dwell on the catastrophe that buried the bones beneath our feet should remind us of the terrible costs an abstract divorce hides. Grant’s memoirs offer Americans time to reflect on the governing structures of our nation — and how to respond when they fail. Retribution gave way to mercy as Americans faced the project of restitching the Union. In a time of heightened tensions, it would do the country well to keep such virtue in mind.
The parched ones once stretched in pain all lie low, hushed at Shiloh.
Anthony Hennen is a reporter for The Center Square news wire service covering Pennsylvania and co-host of Pennsylvania in Focus. He is also a 2023-24 Robert Novak Fellow. Previously, he worked for Philadelphia Weekly and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He is managing editor of Expatalachians, a journalism project focused on the Appalachian region.
