American Ulysses

“One takes up each new biography of Grant,” a reviewer observed, “with the sort of interest with which a physician receives a new treatise on cancer. He is a problem, as yet unsolved, which will probably be solved, and each unread attempt may contain the solution.”

That was back in 1917, though it could have been written today. The twentieth century witnessed a dramatic decline in Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation. W. E. Woodward’s 1928 Meet General Grant, the bestselling Grant biography of its time, was symptomatic of the decline (though the book remains most notorious for its negative depiction of blacks). At the height of the New Deal, William B. Hesseltine and Allan Nevins each followed up with a condemnatory study of Grant’s presidency.

Many more studies focused on Grant through the end of the Civil War and chose to go no further. The most highly regarded of such works are Lloyd Lewis and Bruce Catton’s trilogy, Captain Sam Grant (1950), Grant Moves South (1960), and Grant Takes Command (1969). J. F. C. Fuller’s The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929) topped its rivals in assessing Grant’s military performance, but without matching Lewis and Catton’s biographical work. The only definitive studies covering Grant’s entire life are surprisingly recent: William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography (1981) and Geoffrey Perret’s Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President (1997).

With the release of Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822-1865, Brooks D. Simpson now joins this exclusive club: The book is only volume one of a promised two, and by itself, it is almost as long as McFeely’s and Perret’s biographies.

Curiously, British military historians — like Fuller, James Marshall-Cornwall, and John Keegan — have been far better at recognizing Grant as one of history’s great captains than have their American counterparts, who cannot even reach agreement on Grant’s ability relative to other Civil War generals. Though Grant played a central role in perhaps the most important event in American history, his reputation in the United States has undergone the opposite of the lionization one might have expected.

The Myth of the Lost Cause, which deified Confederate generals and downplayed the role of slavery in the war, accompanied an odd change in the image of the Union commander. Grant would come to be seen mostly as a drunk or as a butcher of a general who was aided more by an unfair numerical advantage than by any noteworthy mental endowment.

Yet pieces of contradictory evidence revealing the stranger who is the historical Grant have slowly been seeping up in recent years, and Brooks Simpson’s Grant would be more recognizable to his contemporaries than the figure depicted by most previous biographers. Simpson stands out from his predecessors for having preceded his project with many years of research and publication, including two books and more scholarly articles devoted to Grant.

One conventional exaggeration is that Grant’s life amounts to a Horatio Alger story that began in poverty. The truth is that he was born into a family better described as middle class than poor, and he was one of the few in his time to attend college — at West Point, by his father’s choice. Information on Grant’s early life is not particularly abundant; he seems in youth to have been relatively shy and inconspicuous, but generally agreeable. He was a great horseman from an early age, particularly resourceful with a horse and wagon, and his cargo-hauling feats may reflect something of an engineering prodigy. At West Point, he excelled in mathematics but graduated with the very ordinary class rank of twenty-one out of thirty-nine — an oft-cited nugget that overlooks that the class once numbered seventy-seven.

Between West Point and his next great military training ground, the Mexican War, occurred a courtship with and engagement to Julia Dent, the sister of a West Point roommate. Under no subsequent conditions of war or peace would his devotion to his wife (and later four children) lessen. Woven into Simpson’s narrative of Grant’s career is this enduringly affectionate relationship, the epistolary evidence for which is ample.

Marriage would have to wait for the Mexican War, however. Grant fought in every battle except Buena Vista and learned from his commanding generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, lessons that would come to guide him in later years. He displayed courage on the battlefield and proved himself an able quartermaster, an experience not to be undervalued: This was a time in which disease killed more soldiers than bullets, and understanding the logistics of keeping an army supplied was essential to good generalship — especially for one who would pursue an offensive strategy and have to frequently change supply bases.

Another trait Grant showed was an ability to analyze cogently and speak lucidly of past military campaigns and the grave political questions that were leading him to his appointment with destiny. This characteristic is easy to miss in the thicket of other occupations that he pursued to support his family after the Mexican War. During the 1850s, various attempts at farming failed, both while he was in the peace-time army and (with more mixed results) after he resigned in 1854 to rejoin his family near St. Louis. His lack of business sense combined with bad luck, particularly when the Panic of 1857 struck. Grant’s decision to go into the real estate business with his wife’s cousin may have put him even more out of his element. He had always been a trusting and good-natured man, more inclined to repay his loans than to collect from others, and his level of success in a position that included rent and debt collection was what one might expect. The eve of the Civil War found him in another job, working as a clerk in his father’s leather and hardware store in Galena, Illinois.

And what about Grant’s drinking? The only period in which we can surmise (though the evidence is sketchy) that Grant might have regularly drunk too much is during some portion of the under two years he spent on the Pacific Coast before resigning from the army. Even during this period, it is clearer that Grant’s hardships consisted of failure to make money, pain (which alcohol was thought to remedy), and separation from a family that included a son he had never met. As for the Civil War period, Simpson recounts each of the handful of times Grant was alleged to have been drunk, only to show the unreliability of each claim. Simpson does not quite relegate the drinking issue to the status of a footnote in Grant’s story, but he paves the way for future historians to do so.

The unassuming Grant was noted for his aversion to pomp and ceremony, often wearing barely enough of his uniform to indicate his rank. At the outset of the Civil War, an aide to Illinois governor Richard Yates found that Grant’s “features did not indicate any high grade of intellectuality. He was very indifferently dressed, and did not at all look like a military man.” After Grant established himself as the Union’s foremost general and was given command of its armies, Richard Henry Dana, speaking for generations of litterateurs, similarly observed, “He had no gait, no station, no manner.”

Nonetheless, what Grant accomplished was nothing less than phenomenal. Underestimated by just about everyone around him, he faced each problem with coolness and ultimate success, if not perfection. His misgivings about leading troops into a fight had faded by the time he overran a Confederate camp in his first battle at Belmont, Missouri. There, he prevailed in the skirmish, only to lose control of his men as they celebrated, oblivious to approaching Confederate reinforcements who threatened to surround and cut them off. The situation seemed hopeless to some, but not to Grant, who said that as they had cut their way in, they would cut their way out. This they did in a close call that Grant, the last man to leave the battle-field, would not allow to be repeated.

At Fort Donelson, Grant found his right practically shattered by a Confederate attack, but he saw opportunity in the apparent disaster. Upon receiving the news, he barely revealed his displeasure by crumpling papers in his hand and resolutely told his subordinates, “Gentlemen, the position on the right must be retaken.” He realized that his men were “pretty badly demoralized, but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out, but has fallen back: the one who attacks first now will be victorious.” Grant ordered his left to attack, stabilized his right, and pressed forward in all directions. His opponent asked for surrender terms a mere twelve hours after seeming to have the upper hand. The “unconditional surrender” on which Grant insisted closed the Union’s first major victory.

Two months later, Grant was attacked at Shiloh while waiting for another army to join him. On the first day of battle, Grant’s men were driven near the edge of the Tennessee River. Again, Grant understood that both sides were demoralized and that the first to attack would carry the field. To the predictable advice he received from a subordinate, Grant responded, “Retreat? No. I propose to attack them at daylight and whip them.” His troops prevailed the next day and drove the Confederates from the field.

These early battles reflected Grant’s understanding of the value of keeping the initiative, of retaining an awareness of the enemy’s weakness, and of having the courage that is needed to prevent one’s own setbacks from making a bad situation worse. Simpson’s study recognizes that Grant had limitations, especially in his early battles, but that he had the ability to learn from his mistakes. Simpson also places the rise of Grant in the West in the proper context of an active, engaged general yearning to find a way to break the strategic inertia of his superiors.

Perhaps the best evidence of his innovation and energy is the Vicksburg campaign. When Grant began this campaign in the fall of 1862, Vicksburg, Mississippi, on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, was considered a virtually impenetrable fortress and the largest obstacle to Union control of the river. During the early phases of the campaign, Grant, realizing that the winter rains elevated the Mississippi’s tributaries and precluded effective movement on the part of his troops, had his men engage in a series of efforts that he expected to fail to reach Vicksburg from the north — and then swung the bulk of his men south during the spring amid several diversionary movements that left his opponent’s army bewildered.

His troops crossed the Mississippi from Bruinsburg, a considerable distance south of Vicksburg. Defying many expectations, they broke off from their own supply line and proceeded first in a northeasterly direction at lightning speed to the state capital at Jackson before turning west and marching directly toward Vicksburg. In the process, Grant won five battles in seventeen days — four of those victories occurring within six days — and kept two major Confederate armies from uniting against him. The campaign ended in a six-week siege that led to the fall of Vicksburg, and ultimately, full Union control of the Mississippi, which divided the Confederacy in half. Grant’s western campaigns ended with the Chattanooga campaign in eastern Tennessee, which seemed a tactical miracle in its own right.

Simpson surpasses previous scholars in exploring Grant’s relationships with other generals and politicians, an important issue in appraising any general operating in a representative democracy. Legend suggests that Lincoln and Grant formed an unbreakable bond the first time the president heard the general’s name, but the president’s initial support of Grant was actually tentative and equivocal. It truly was not until his success at Vicksburg that Grant had earned Lincoln’s full confidence. Throughout the war, Grant had to tolerate incompetent political generals appointed to placate the various factions Lincoln had to keep together in his fragile political coalition. Grant’s understanding of the relation between war and politics helped make him the first of the world’s truly modern generals, and it would especially serve him during the last year of the war, when he was appointed supreme commander of the Union armies and finally faced Robert E. Lee in the East.

As general in chief, Grant coordinated the movements of Union troops in different theaters to a degree never before attempted. He understood the connection between his work, Lincoln’s political coalition, and public opinion as military and political objectives met during Lincoln’s reelection campaign. On another level, he realized that to succeed, he would have to target Confederate armies rather than cities, which would fall in due course. He also appreciated the need to undermine the enemy’s warmaking ability by striking economic as well as military targets. He pursued this goal relentlessly and on an unprecedented level in Virginia, and he supported General William T. Sherman’s parallel efforts in his own theater. Keeping Lee pinned by constantly engaging him enabled the success of Sherman’s campaign and a decline in Confederate morale in time for Lincoln’s reelection.

Grant was spread thin in his capacity as general-in-chief and as de facto commander of the Army of the Potomac (George G. Meade remained its nominal commander), and he had to struggle against not only the Confederate army, but also his own army’s fear of Lee. Grant’s lack of such fear and his understanding of his foe would be infused into his army, but with bumps along the way. The road to victory would include its share of tactical awkwardness, but in a war in which tactics were subordinated to strategy, it is curious that Grant would earn a reputation as an unskilled butcher.

If a detached observer were told that the Union’s eastern command fell short of its goal under six commanders, only to succeed under the seventh, that seventh commander’s success would appear anything but the inevitable result of a numerical superiority that his predecessors had also enjoyed. Grant began his campaign in Virginia by crossing the Rapidan River on May 4, 1864, and fighting a brutal battle in the Wilderness initiated by Lee, with heavy losses on both sides. Although a tactical stalemate, the three-day battle failed to halt Grant’s progress south-ward and was a strategic victory for the Union. Within three days, the Union initiative in the East had reached greater heights under Grant than it had under his predecessors during the preceding three years.

Following the Wilderness, Grant moved south, and another bloody battle at Spotsylvania, while tactically indecisive, destroyed Lee’s initiative as the Confederate army lost more troops than it could afford by attempting to hold a position that later became known as the Bloody Angle. With Grant’s next flank movement, Lee could move only defensively, but he placed his men in formidable works south of the North Anna River that had been built the previous winter. Contrary to the image of a rash, overaggressive general, Grant showed restraint by declining to attack here and maneuvering past the Pamunkey River instead. Still, he was not immune to error even at this phase of the war, and he ordered an all-out frontal assault at Cold Harbor that led to heavy casualties — a move he would always regret. Once again, though, Grant would be able to turn a setback around when he maneuvered his entire army, undetected by Lee, across the James River between June 15 and 17. His subsequent movement on Petersburg, the breadbasket of Richmond, was ordered with his customary energy and speed, but the lack of compliance with his orders by subordinates (for neither the first nor the last time) made the capture of Petersburg a matter of a ten-month siege.

The Wilderness Campaign, oddly cited more than any other campaign by critics who debunk Grant’s generalship, reflects an aggressive commander who in forty-three days moved his men over one hundred miles of difficult terrain, avoided all supply problems, changed his supply base four times, made nine flanking movements, and crossed four rivers in the face of the enemy. He transported four thousand wagons and massive reserve artillery without losing a single gun, wagon, or animal to enemy capture, and ended up south of the James River, just as he had projected before starting. This was as dynamic a campaign as the eastern theater had ever seen — and as modern a campaign as the world had ever seen. It affirms rather than disproves Grant’s flexibility, ability to maneuver, and understanding of the interdependence of campaigns.

Standard textbooks suggest that heavy casualties were the defining characteristic of Grant’s generalship, but his losses during the Virginia campaigns were proportionally less than Lee’s. (Even while he was fighting in the west, Grant lost fewer men, both in absolute numbers and proportionally, than Lee did in the east.) Grant also had a little-remembered preference for taking prisoners when inflicting his losses. And at Appomattox, following a brilliant pursuit of Lee after Petersburg fell, Grant captured the last of three armies that would surrender to him throughout the war — a feat no other Civil War general even approached.

What was his secret? In Grant’s words, “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.” Could that be it? Look carefully at Grant’s other statements on the subject; there’s more: “War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive.” Also, “there are no fixed laws of war which are not subject to the conditions of the country, the climate, and the habits of the people.” A competent Grant biography need not explore all the nuances of the art of war, but it must understand that the general was a true innovator in his field.

Grant’s life was deeply enmeshed with the issue of slavery. Simpson does a good job presenting Grant as one who evolved from a man who was personally close to but uncomfortable with the institution (while falling short of political opposition to it) to one who believed the war should not end without having forever resolved the issue. Grant understood his subordination as general to political officials on the matter of emancipation but used his position to offer opportunities for blacks to function as free laborers and troops, and he took a strong stand against his opponents’ unequal treatment of black and white prisoners of war.

Most fundamentally, of course, his military achievement constituted the execution of the Emancipation Proclamation. Grant’s public career, taking it through his presidency, promoted and witnessed a more sweeping transition in the status of American blacks, from slaves to full equals under the law, than that of any of his peers in American history. For now, that story must wait until Simpson’s second volume. Unfortunately, traditional textbooks, influenced by Confederate apologists, have been less likely to mention Grant’s record on race than to suggest Lee’s opposition to slavery and secession. Also bewildering is the determined resistance by some to the notion that those who abolished slavery actually intended to abolish slavery.

If Grant is indeed an enigma in American biography — what cancer is to the medical profession — it may be less because of the limitations of Grant than the limitations of his historians, whose agendas have impeded objective analysis. The cure in this particular case can come only with a view of Grant’s sixteen-year public career as a continuum. President Grant, far from being a different man from General Grant, made his agenda the full realization of the victory he had forged on the battlefield. Simpson has indicated that his second volume (subtitled “The Fruits of Victory, 1865-1885”) will “treat Grant’s last twenty years as one continuous effort to answer the question of what the war meant — and how Grant attempted to shape that definition.” If Simpson stays true to this goal, he will be well on his way to articulating the essence of Grant’s public career as no biographer has before. In the meantime (though Fuller remains best for strictly military appraisals), Simpson’s first volume is the best educational investment for those seeking an accurate single volume biography of Ulysses S. Grant through the Civil War.

An attorney in New York, Frank J. Scaturro is author of President Grant Reconsidered.