“I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”
Legendary response by Abraham Lincoln to critics of Grant’s drinking habit
Ulysses S. Grant was the first president (other than my horse guilt with Washington) who upon finishing the biography I felt like I immediately needed to know so much more. This is no disrespect to Josiah Bunting and his American Presidents Series book. His is a thorough (and praising) defense of Grant’s life and legacy. But at decision time life was a little hectic and it was either this concise and critically praised tome or something on the order of 1,000 pages. I took the shorter route. C’est la vie.
I feel like Ulysses S. Grant is a president most people feel like they know something about, but really don’t. Like when you hear a song on the radio (This is my jam!) and start singing out loud just to realize you only know the chorus. Grant hangs around in the periphery of pop culture. He’s on the $50 bill. He’s the one Union general you remember from Social Studies class. His memoirs were published with the help of Mark Twain. And something about scandals?
The Grant I learned about transcended all these fleeting images. I found a warrior with empathy, an Army General who didn’t scream orders, a “man of his time” who was surprisingly enlightened towards those with a different skin tone. A superb writer, Grant was always clear, accurate and lucid in his communications on the battlefield and elsewhere. One aide noted that Grant “wrote nearly all his documents with his own hand, and seldom dictated to anyone even the most important dispatch. His work was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly, but without any marked delay or nervous energy. His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as the ink from his pen; he was never at a loss for an expression.”
Grant’s initial battlefield glory came in a war he didn’t believe in. He called the Mexican-American War “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation…an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies.” However, he felt it is duty as a soldier to proceed. “Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history.” After winning the Mexican War, his unit was not sent straight home and he used the time to travel around Mexico and study the language and culture. He left enamored with the country and its people and quite poignant about the war he’d just help wage and what led up to it. These mixed emotions would carry over into the conflict within his own nation.
Although some generals issued orders to stop blacks fleeing from Rebel lines to freedom, Grant sought to phase them in for several reasons. Returning the slaves made them enemy auxiliaries. Additionally, the new freedmen could help the Union cause substantially and, like Lincoln, Grant continually grew in his appreciation that the war was about ending slavery, not just restoring the Union. As he approached being elected president, Grant believed more and more in the necessity of black suffrage as a keystone to reintegrating the South. In his first inaugural address he stressed the importance of quickly ratifying the 15th Amendment, which had been passed in the House and Senate and was only awaiting ratification by the States.
Ulysses Grant didn’t really want to be president. He told his comrade in arms General Sherman he was, “forced into it in spite of myself. Backing down would leave the election to be contested between mere trading politicians, the elevation of whom, no matter which party won, would lose us, largely, the results of the costly war which we have just gone through.” Despite his reticence, Grant made watershed moves for people of color. In the spring of 1870 he created the Department of Justice, largely established to ensure Southern compliance with federal law. The next April, Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The law was passed to put an end to those using terrorism and violence against blacks in the South (and elsewhere). Largely, this was enforced to ensure blacks could vote in the South without fear for their life. Federal juries indicted over 3,000 Klansmen for violent acts with many convictions. Obviously, it didn’t solve the issue, but it was a great step forward.
While advocating for reintegration, colonization never went away as an idea. As president, Grant even toyed with the temptation of annexing Santo Domingo (today, the Dominican Republic) when that nation’s president said he would willingly present it as a state. Grant felt it was big enough “to sustain the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.” Choose was the operative word, as he supported Lincoln’s version of strictly voluntary departure. “What I desired above all was to secure a retreat for that portion of the laboring classes of our former slave states, who might find themselves under unbelievable pressure.” Having bled in a war over the institution itself, Grant feared blacks and whites could not peacefully live together after the horrors of slavery.
Frederick Douglass praised Grant’s actions and lamented his departure from office. “To Grant more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. In the matter of the protection of the freedman from violence his moral courage surpassed that of his party: his place at its head was given to timid men, and the country was allowed to drift, instead of stemming the current.” Grant himself saw things in a similar vein, saying “Under existing conditions the Negro votes the Republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite…because, generally, he is opposed to Negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the Negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided not on the color line, but on principle.”
Grant would fight for but, like Washington before him, ultimately fail to protect Native Americans from the inertia of a growing nation. He supported policy that would protect the Indians, but inevitable greed, land grabbing and breaking of old treaties led the tribes to resist (imagine that!), which lead to armed conflicts and massacres. Grant’s desire to help the Red Man was proclaimed, but it fell on a country of deaf ears.
Ulysses S. Grant has ebbed and flowed through history as a study in character and contrast. He was a little guy who wound up with the biggest tomb on the continent. He was a man of high personal integrity who filled his administration and inner circle with people who sullied his name with myriad scandals. A drinker who stayed steady on the battlefield, a warrior with a literary gift. He was a marauder to the eyes of the defeated South and a redeeming hero lauded upon the shoulders of the North. No matter how you see the 18th president, his life story is worth reading.
Trivia
- The “S” doesn’t stand for anything. His real first name was Hiram. The Congressman who wrote Grant’s West Point recommendation application put “Ulysses S Grant”, thinking Grant’s middle name was Simpson after his mother’s maiden name. Thus, he gained an S and dropped the Hiram.
- One of two West Point graduates to become president (Eisenhower is the other)
- Only president between Jackson and Wilson to serve two complete, consecutive terms.
- Had a penchant for math to the point where he thought seriously about hanging up the fatigues and being a math professor at West Point.
- Completely implacable and unfazed in battle. He would sit astride a horse with shells bursting around him and not even flinch while men around him shrank. He was also a master horseman from a young age.
- When receiving the surrender at Appomattox to end the Civil War, one of the Confederate generals present was Nathan Longstreet, Grant’s West Point classmate and best man at his wedding 17 years earlier.
- Which may have been why, upon receiving said surrender, he said, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and so valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”
- For you gossip folks, a summary of the main scandals that plagued his administration:
Follow-up Reading
- The Complete Personal Memoirs of General Ulysses S Grant
- Grant by Jean Edward Smith
- Grant by Ron Chernow
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