ULYSSES
S. GRANT
By Josiah Bunting III
New York:
Times Books
192 pp. $20.00
ULYSSES
S. GRANT:
THE UNLIKELY HERO
By Michael Korda
New York:
Atlas Books
176 pp. $19.95
To me, Ulysses S. Grant has always been the most
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 play the Virginia cavalier ideal in order to compensate
for his improvident father, or to distract us from the perfect
killing machine that he became. It is impossible to imagine Grant,
for instance, standing upon Marye’s Heights, viewing the
awful slaughter of Fredericksburg before him and intoning dramatically,
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 it
is roused. Sam Grant knew that war was terrible, and he never
feared growing too fond of it. Instead, he did what had to be
done. Before Grant took command, Mr. 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 ten months.
Despite considerable shock and revulsion over
his methods, the war made Grant one of our greatest national heroes
almost overnight, and propelled him to two terms as president
that nearly undid his reputation all over again. Grant 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 which have employed
outstanding stylists to write on historical figures. They do not
disappoint. Korda, who is also editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster,
is writing for the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books
(Full disclosure: an imprint of HarperCollins, which is my own
publisher.); and has produced the more impressionistic, personal
portrait. Bunting, a decorated Vietnam veteran and former superintendent
of the Virginia Military Institute, for Times Books’ The
American Presidents collection; has written the better history,
both on the battlefield and in the White House.
While neither book is a substitute for a more in-depth work, such
as William McFeeley’s 1981 biography, or even John Keegan’s
masterful essay in The Mask of Command on just what made
Grant such a formidable general, both serve as vivid, enjoyable,
and well-written introductions, to one of our most enigmatic historical
giants.
Grant’s gifts were not necessarily what
one might first consider martial. He was a superb horseman, and
someone who had almost a preternatural ability to calm and tame
horses. He was courageous in battle from the beginning. 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, seriously
considered becoming a professor of mathematics, and was a clear
and engaging writer throughout his life. He was already writing
very literate letters home by the time he reached West Point at
17, and as a cadet he spent his spare time reading not the lives
of Napoleon or Scipio Africanus, but the serious novels of his
day.
In fact, the ability to write out a clear, concise
order should not be underestimated in the fog of 19th-century
war. Yet above all, Grant possessed the ability to grip, in Lincoln’s
words, to “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
himself wrote in his Memoirs, and that applied whether he was
taking Vicksburg or racing throat cancer in the last nine months
of his life, finishing said, remarkable memoirs 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, Korda makes the significant point
that “there is no indication 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.” They
traced their ancestors back to the earliest Puritans, and thought
themselves equal to any man, even while grubbing out a living
on the Ohio frontier. The Grant story was the essence of American
democracy in action.
Of course circumstances helped, as they must in
the lives of all great men. Without the Civil War, all of Grant’s
famous West Point cohort might have lived out their military lives
in dusty frontier outposts. Grant was sent to the U.S. Military
Academy against his will, but he was all but lost outside the
army, and almost comically inept at any sort of business. Left
without an offensive to pursue, or separated from his family,
he tended to torpor, and bouts of drinking that besmirched his
historical image as much as any presidential scandal.
Bunting and Korda endeavor mightily to show that
Grant’s various reputations for drunkenness, battlefield
butchery, and general seediness are grossly overwrought, but those
reputations have already been considerably ameliorated. Their
defenses of the Grant presidency are more interesting. Both make
the case that the administration’s assorted financial scandals
were usually small beer, in an era of small government. Meanwhile,
Grant—who had early on come to despise slavery, and to love
Mexico while at war there— was usually well ahead of his
time in racial acceptance. He tried to work out a new understanding
with the American Indians, and 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 both peoples back into another long night
of oppression after he left office.
These cases for the Grant presidency are persuasive
enough to get him off that bottom rung with Harding, even if they
are overstated at times. Korda even praises his subject to the
skies for not involving us in a war with the British Empire. One
fears he is overinfluenced by the times; avoiding a disastrous
foreign adventure did not used to be the benchmark for presidential
greatness. And it may be that the exhaustion for great public
enterprises brought on by the end of the Civil War, and the rising
political corruption of the time, would have been too much for
even the best of presidents to overcome. The greater tragedy,
though, is that after Lincoln’s death only Grant had the
standing to at least try to summon the nation to a new era of
understanding and civic devotion. Instead, left without a certain
trumpet, both he and the nation subsided back into a long, political
inertia.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novels Dreamland and Paradise
Alley.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
