Authors: Michael Korda
Ulysses S. Grant
The Unlikely Hero
For Margaret, with love—
and for Christopher Lord, Roger Cooper, and Russell Taylor,
in memory of Budapest, October–November 1956
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.
—
Henry V
,
ACT
4,
SCENE
3
IN THE SUMMER OF 2003 Ulysses S. Grant made news…
GRANT’S VIRTUES—his reserve, his quiet determination, his courage in the…
IN ENGLAND THERE WAS a vast social gulf between cavalry…
GRANT HAD WAITED a long time to marry Julia, and…
GRANT MAY HAVE BEEN a colonel, but he still had…
NO SOONER DID GRANT have what he wanted—or appeared to…
GRANT ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON on March 8, 1864—the last time…
MANY BIOGRAPHERS of Grant have suggested that his career after…
IN 1877 RETIRING PRESIDENTS did not have the benefits that…
RUINED AND SADDLED WITH DEBT, Grant was, in some respects,…
I read but few lives of great men because biographers do not, as a rule, tell enough about the formative period of life. What I want to know is what a man did as a boy.
—U
LYSSES
S. G
RANT
Eminent Lives, brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures, joins a long tradition in this lively form, from Plutarch’s
Lives
to Vasari’s
Lives of the Painters,
Dr. Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
to Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
. Pairing great subjects with writers known for their strong sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view, the Eminent Lives are ideal introductions designed to appeal to the general reader, the student, and the scholar. “To preserve a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant,” wrote Strachey: “That, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.”
Norman F. Cantor
on
Alexander the Great
Robert Gottlieb
on
George Balanchine
Paul Johnson
on
George Washington
Christopher Hitchens
on
Thomas Jefferson
Edmund Morris
on
Ludwig van Beethoven
Francine Prose
on
Caravaggio
Joseph Epstein
on
Alexis de Tocqueville
Peter Kramer
on
Sigmund Freud
Karen Armstrong
on
Muhammad
Bill Bryson
on
William Shakespeare
GENERAL EDITOR: JAMES ATLAS
I
N THE SUMMER OF
2003 Ulysses S. Grant made news all across the country that he had, in his lifetime, done so much to reunite: Some of his descendants, a good part of the more serious press, and the Grant Monument Association objected strongly to pop diva Beyoncé Knowles, accompanied by a “troupe of barely clad dancers,” using his tomb in New York City’s Riverside Park as the background for a raucous, “lascivious,” nationally televised July Fourth concert.
1
Beyoncé and her fans hardly seemed aware of who Grant was, or why such a fuss should be made about the presence of loud music, suggestive dancing, partial nudity, and a huge, boisterous crowd in front of his tomb, which, as the
New York Times
pointed out, had once been a bigger tourist attraction than the Statue of Liberty. In fact, except for a few members of the Grant family who had been trying for years to get the bodies of General Grant and his wife, Julia, removed from the tomb on the grounds that it had been allowed to fall into a disgraceful state of repair and decay, the level of
public indignation was low. The
Times
even felt compelled to comment rather sniffily that the general was “no longer the immensely famous figure he once was.” Grant’s great-grandson Chapman Foster Grant, fifty-eight, however, took a different view of Beyoncé’s concert, commenting, “Who knows? If the old guy were alive, he might have liked it.”
Knowing as much as we do about the general’s relationship with Mrs. Grant—like President Lincoln, whom he much admired, Grant was notoriously devoted to a wife who felt herself and her family to be vastly socially superior to his and was not shy about letting her opinion on the subject be known; and, like Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Grant’s physical charms, such as they may have been, were lost on everybody but her dutiful husband—it seems unlikely that Grant would have allowed himself to appreciate Beyoncé’s presence at his tomb. Mrs. Grant, it was generally felt, kept her husband on a pretty tight leash when it came to pretty girls, barely clothed or not.
As for Grant himself, while he had his problems with liquor—his reputation as a drinker is perhaps the one thing that most Americans still remember about him, that and the fact that his portrait, with a glum, seedy, withdrawn, and slightly guilty expression, like that of a man with a bad hangover, is on the fifty-dollar bill—no allegation of any sexual indiscretion blots his record. He reminds one, in fact, of Byron’s famous lines about George III:
He had that household virtue, most uncommon,
Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman.
Grant not only led a blameless domestic life, he was the very reverse of flamboyant. Softspoken, given to long silences, taciturn,
easily hurt and embarrassed, he was the most unlikely of military heroes. He did not, like Gen. Ambrose Burnside, for example, who was so soundly defeated by Lee at Fredericksburg, lend his name to a style of swashbuckling full sidewhiskers—“sideburns,” as they came to be known after him. Nor did he lend his name, as the unfortunate Gen. Joseph Hooker (who succeeded Burnside and was defeated by Lee at Chancellorsville) was thought to have done, to label the prostitutes who were said to surround his headquarters, so that even today they are still known as “hookers” by people who have never heard of the general himself. Grant aimed to be the most ordinary appearing and self-effacing of men, and to a very large extent he succeeded.
The fact that Beyoncé is black, as was much of the audience of thousands gathered to listen to her concert, might have shocked the general rather less than her near nudity or the “lascivious choreography” reported by the
Times
. Grant probably did more than anyone except Lincoln to destroy the institution of slavery in North America, but, like Lincoln, he shared the social attitude toward Negroes of his own race and his time. However, his innate good manners, natural courtesy, and a certain broad-minded tolerance always marked his behavior toward them. It was typical of him that while very few other generals in that age would have had a Native American officer on their staffs, Grant did, and as president he deplored the way in which government agents exploited the Indians, seeming to have felt that Custer got what was coming to him at the Little Big Horn.
Grant’s personal and professional opinion of Custer had always been low, and although he made more than his share of political and financial mistakes in the White House and afterward, and his judgment of character when it came to civilians was notoriously opti
mistic, his judgment of generalship was invariably ruthlessly objective and on target. Grant was unsure about a lot of things, but he knew a flashy, incompetent, and reckless general when he saw one, so Custer’s defeat at the hands of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse did not surprise or shock him, unlike the rest of the United States.
What he would have made of the Grant family’s long struggle to extricate him and Mrs. Grant from Grant’s Tomb as it fell into disrepair and decay and move them elsewhere is hard to say. One of the reasons the campaign failed was the question of where to put the Grants if they were removed from their tomb in New York City. With that mournful failure of judgment that was apt to come over Grant off the battlefield, he and Mrs. Grant chose New York City for their resting place, in part out of a dislike for Washington, D.C.—Grant’s two terms as president had not produced in either of them any affection for Washington society, nor, in the end, was there much affection in Washington for them—while Galena, Illinois, which seemed too provincial a backwater in which to bury such a great man, had even fewer happy memories for the Grants than did Washington.
In Galena, having retired—as a captain, under a cloud—from the army in 1854, Grant had nursed a drinking problem that was the talk of the town, and was reduced to working as a clerk in his father’s harness shop—a humiliation he felt keenly. Galena would not therefore have recommended itself to the Grants as the place to bury the most admired American general since Washington, and perhaps the greatest American of the nineteenth century.
Although Grant had been miserable at West Point, which he had never wanted to attend in the first place, he was tempted to
choose it as the location for his tomb, but typically gave up on the idea when he realized that Mrs. Grant could not be buried beside him there. He had never been happy when separated from her for any length of time—hence the occasional drinking bouts—and he was not about to be buried without providing a place for her by his side.
Grant was always a sucker for other people’s financial schemes, so it is hardly surprising that he was easily persuaded of the merits of the Upper West Side of New York, which was being touted in the late nineteenth century as the coming fashionable neighborhood of the city. Real estate developers pointed to the heights overlooking the Hudson River as the natural place for all that was wealthy and glamorous in New York Society to live, and indeed, for a time it seemed as if they were right, and that the Upper West Side would be New York’s equivalent of Paris’s sixteenth
arrondissement
, with the added advantage of a stunning river view. The site above the Hudson in Riverside Park, at Riverside Drive and West 122nd Street, must have seemed like the ideal place for a mausoleum that was intended to rival Napoleon’s, and which to this day remains the second largest in the Western world (the Garfield Memorial—oddly enough, considering that President Garfield’s reputation is far more diminished than Grant’s—is the largest).
*
The “General Grant National Memorial,”
2
as it is officially known, would be built with donations from more than ninety thousand of his grateful fellow citizens, for a total of six hundred
thousand dollars, the most money that had ever been raised for a public monument at the time, and more than a million people gathered to see his body conveyed there, in a procession that stretched for more than seven miles, contained sixty thousand marchers, and included President Grover Cleveland, two ex-presidents, the justices of the United States Supreme Court and countless generals, including former Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston and Simon Bolivar Buckner. No “lascivious choreography” was on display, needless to say.
The Grants can be forgiven for not being able to foresee the failure of the Upper West Side to deliver on its promise—after all, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who was far shrewder, made the same mistake when he put Riverside Church there, as did William Randolph Hearst when he built an enormous penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson—but there is a certain irony to the fact that but for their own resistance to the idea, Grant’s Tomb could have been in Washington, D.C., close by the memorials to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
There, because of its high visibility, Grant’s giant memorial, with its orderly rows of Doric columns, would no doubt have been lovingly preserved, pristine and gleaming, by the U.S. National Park Service, and lines of schoolchildren and tourists would be waiting to visit it even today. Instead it overlooks the West Side Highway, has been incongruously surrounded by a bright red serpentine wall—a hideous “community project”—and stands right smack in the middle of a neighborhood many New Yorkers still avoid as much as possible, given its reputation for drug dealing, gang warfare, racial tension, and muggings.
In memorials, as in every other aspect of real estate, location is
everything, and the Grants were as unlucky in their choice of real estate as they were in their personal finances. A recent cleaning and rebuilding of Grant’s Tomb (at a cost of nearly two million dollars) has at least gotten rid of most of the grime—and the vagrants who used it as a nesting place and a toilet. While some of the monument’s more glaring structural problems have been solved, it still remains a rather shabby-looking place, well off the beaten track for the memorial to one of the most admired Americans of his day and the man who, of all American military commanders, best understood how to put the nation’s overwhelming resources to work on the battlefield.
The fact that Grant gave the amount of thought that he did to his memorial is surprising, given his reputation for being unassuming, slovenly in personal appearance, modest, and easily put upon—modern biographers love to contrast Lee in his dress uniform, sash, and ornate sword at Appomattox with Grant, riding up late, mud-spattered and swordless in his “private’s uniform,” with only the shoulder bars bearing his three stars to distinguish him from an ordinary soldier—but like so much about Grant, this is a misleading image. Contemporary photographs of Grant certainly make it clear that he was not a “dressy” general, but he seldom wore a private’s uniform. He seems to have favored a kind of dark blue suit, with a long coat and a waistcoat, bearing the gilt buttons of the U.S. Army and the regulation shoulder boards—a uniform, in fact, not unlike the one Lee generally wore except on ceremonial occasions, except that Lee’s was gray. Certainly Grant did not usually wear a sword, but neither did Lee, who wore his at Appomattox only because he thought it would be his obligation to hand it over to Grant as a token of surrender.
This is, in fact, part of a widespread failure to understand
Grant’s character, which was admittedly complex and always, to some degree, secretive. With Lee what you saw was what you got—he was a proud, patrician officer, a
beau sabreur
, a born commander who expected to be obeyed. With Grant what you saw was what he wanted you to see—a plain, ordinary man with no pretensions to gentility or military glamour. But in truth Grant never saw himself as “plain” or “ordinary,” and was always intensely conscious of his rank, his social position, and his gifts as a commander. Grant’s black slouch hat, his omnipresent cigar, and his muddy boots are not so much a pose, like Ike’s not wearing his medal ribbons on his uniform jacket, or Monty’s affecting a beret, baggy corduroy trousers, and a sweater even as a field marshal, but rather a simple lack of interest in military niceties, a fierce concentration on the
business
of war—which is winning—rather than the display of war, which seemed to him a waste of time and energy.
It is no surprise that Grant suffered from that most unwarlike of maladies, migraine headaches—he worried about every detail, nothing he did as a general was casual, everything was meticulously calculated and thought out to bring about victory. Like the Duke of Wellington, Grant did not share his plans with his subordinates (or even with the president); he concentrated on a plan, worked it out in his head, fretted over the smallest details of supply and logistics, then waited (he would not be pushed, pressured, or hurried) for the right moment to put it into effect. As for Grant’s taste for plain uniforms, it is worth remembering that although Wellington was an aristocrat and had himself painted innumerable times in the full uniform of a British field marshal with all his orders and decorations, he wore a plain dark frock coat and black cocked hat at
Waterloo, with no gold lace or decorations. Grant was far from the only great general in history who had more on his mind than his appearance.
All the same, one of the qualities that comes across loud and clear in any account of Grant’s life is his
touchiness
. It was not a question of vanity or personal pride so much as the fear on the part of a man who had always been underestimated as a boy and looked down on by people who assumed they were better than he was.
Grant, for all his slouchiness and apparent good nature, was not a man who forgave slights easily, if at all. Though he and Winfield Scott Hancock (the future Union general who would hold Cemetery Ridge against Pickett’s Charge on the third day of Gettysburg) were roommates at West Point and had fought together as young officers in the Mexican War, Grant took Hancock’s perceived failure to salute him properly in 1866 as “a personal snub.” Afterward he maintained an attitude of harsh and prickly animosity toward Hancock until Grant’s dying day, when Grant finally confessed that he regretted the pain he had caused Hancock.