The General

October 25, 2021

While my seatmate on the plane slept, I finished ploughing through the two volumes of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. I set it aside, then read the newspaper headlines, and felt I was with Grant and his generals near Shiloh Church, waiting for the rebels.

Nothing else I’ve read matches its power. No American military or political figure now living matches his stature during his life, nor his achievements.

In 1868, at 46, Grant was elected the then-youngest U.S. president. Although he served two terms, 1869-1877, by May 1884 he was broke, after a business venture failed when a partner embezzled the company funds. In the fall of that year he developed throat cancer. He started writing to earn money to support his wife, Julia, after his death. Grant finished Memoirs in July 1885 and died a few days later. He was 63. More than 1.5 million people crowded into New York for his funeral. Two former Confederate generals, Simon Bolivar Buckner and Joseph Johnston, were among his pallbearers.

Although a West Point graduate, Grant was an accidental general: he served mainly as a quartermaster during the Mexican War, a few years later he left the Army to support his family.  He lived a troubled, near-penniless life. He tried farming on land owned by his wife near St. Louis. He failed as a farmer and later as a real estate agent. At times he sold firewood on city streets.

Grant writes that as the acrimony over slavery grew, he “hoped that the passions would subside … and the catastrophe be averted.” In 1856 he voted for Democrat James Buchanan, who in his single term tried to ignore the slavery question. Settling in Galena, Ill., Grant worked as a clerk in his father’s leather goods store. In 1860 he supported Lincoln but could not vote because he had not yet established residency in Illinois.

He adds that “there is little doubt … that the prevailing sentiment in the South would have been opposed to session in 1860 and 1861 if there had been a fair and calm expression of opinion, unbiased by threats. But there was no calm discussion … . Demagogues denounced the Northerners as cowards, poltroons, negro-worshippers; claimed that one Southern man was equal to five Northern men in battle.” He notes that Jefferson Davis said he would “drink all the blood spilled south of the Mason Dixon line if there should be a war.”

South Carolina seceded in December 1860 after Lincoln’s election, followed by ten other Southern states. Lincoln was sworn in as President March 4, 1861. On April 11 the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.  Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for 90 days of service. Grant writes that he believed the war would be over in 90 days.

The outbreak of war transformed Grant’s life, as it transformed America. He writes that when a company was formed in Galena he said he would serve in some way. He never went back into the leather store. He led the local volunteers in drill. The governor called him “captain,” his old rank. In May 1861 Lincoln called for an additional 300,000 volunteers. The governor appointed Grant a colonel in an Illinois regiment. By August he was brigadier general of volunteers.

In February 1862 Grant beat the rebels at Fort Donelson, Tenn., the first major Union victory, and demanded “unconditional surrender.” Lincoln promoted him to major general. After Shiloh, in April, Grant writes, he “gave up on the idea of saving the Union except by total conquest.” In that bloody battle the Union lost more than 13,000 killed, wounded, and missing, the rebels lost about 10,000. Both sides claimed victory, but their positions on the ground hardly changed.

 In October he took command of the entire District of the Tennessee and launched his multi-pronged attack and siege of Vicksburg, Miss., the western linchpin of the Confederacy. Vicksburg surrendered July 4, 1863. Grant became a major general of the regular Army. In March 1864 Lincoln promoted him to lieutenant general, the first man to hold that rank since George Washington, and commander of all the Union Armies. He led the Army of the Potomac through a series of battles ghastly in bloodletting, grinding down Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and forcing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Va., on April 9, 1865.

Grant reflects on public thinking about the war. He notes that during the war some Northerners spoke of the splendid fight the South had made over four years, with twelve million souls, four million of whom were slaves, against the twenty million of the North. He adds then that “the South had rebelled against the National government. It was not bound by any constitutional restrictions. The South was an armed camp. Conscription was resorted to early and embraced every male from the age of 18 to 45, excluding only those physically unfit to serve in the field.

“The arts of peace were carried on in the North. Towns and cities grew during the war. In the South no opposition was allowed to the government … . The press of the South … were loyal to the Southern cause.

“In the North the press was free up to the point of open treason. … The copperhead disreputable portion of the press magnified rebel successes and belittled Union victories.” He writes that “The North would have been much stronger with a hundred thousand of these men in Confederate ranks and the rest of their kind thoroughly subdued, as the Union sentiment was in the South.”

In July 1866 President Andrew Johnson named Grant to the new rank of General of the Army of the United States. Grant initially supported Johnson to implement Reconstruction, but later broke with him. He used the Army to enforce the Civil Rights Act, passed over Johnson’s veto.

Grant was elected President in 1868 with 214 electoral votes, 53 percent of votes cast. In 1869 he supported the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote cannot be denied by race, it was ratified by Congress a year later. He supported creation of the Justice Department to back up the Enforcement Acts passed to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan.

He won his second term in 1872 with a landslide of 286 electoral votes to 66 for his Liberal-Democratic opponent, Horace Greeley. But support for Reconstruction faded and so-called “Redeemer” groups rose throughout the South to prevent Blacks from voting. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, but it was ruled unconstitutional in 1883. In October 1876 Grant suspended habeus corpus in South Carolina and sent federal troops to crush the Klan.

Grant nearly won the Republican nomination for a third term in 1876. James Garfield was chosen as a compromise candidate. The rest is history.

The Memoirs cover only Grant’s wartime service. On becoming supreme commander he persevered toward total victory—unconditional surrender, his terms at Donelson and Appomattox. He was gracious towards the Confederate officers and troops, sending them home with their horses for spring planting.

He despised slavery and the choice of Southern aristocrats to defend it, writing, “The South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people … one which degraded it, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class… . The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated ‘poor white trash.’”  

The aftermath of that great conflict endures. Today the country struggles with political antagonisms generated by cowardice and corruption that exploded in Washington on January 6, when footsoldiers of the new rebellion stormed the Capitol. Grant tells the story of the monumental nightmare of the war. He leaves hard lessons, but one question: where is our U.S. Grant?