U.S. Grant American Hero, American Myth by Joan Waugh North Carolina, 384 pp., $30 The bloody war loomed. The next, ominously defining, national election was tick-tocking ever closer. The nation's drive for military victory, which the president had vigorously supported, now seemed increasingly bogged in numb confrontation, seeping toward hemorrhaging attrition. The president--still held in near-ecstatic reverence by his enthusiasts--was vividly losing support among the centrist councils of his party, as well as the minority opposition.
I am momentarily enchanted by parallels of history and contemporary events. It would be trivializing disrespect for the Civil War to equate it to Barack Obama's challenge of Afghanistan. But the politics are there. They were in 1864. Think ahead--145 years from now--how will today, and three years from today, be assessed? Assuming (I'm an optimist) that there's anyone around then reading history in the English language?
In her U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth, Joan Waugh recounts that, in the winter and spring of 1864, wise men of most persuasions believed Abraham Lincoln was not electable to a second term. Despite important federal victories in 1863, up until August 1864 the Union armies were entangled in loggerhead confrontation that was immensely costly in blood and treasure. Amid fast-growing public distaste for the war itself, Gen. George B. McClellan accepted the Democratic nomination in late August, running on the Democratic party antiwar platform, though he promised to carry the conflict to "honorable conclusion."
War opposition was rampant among the Copperhead Democrats, who always, vehemently, had opposed the Union cause. An increasing number of less adamant Democrats and a growing number of members of the Republican, abolitionist party were losing stomach for the federal commitment. Waugh emphasizes that it is easy, and befuddling, to forget that in 1861 the Civil War began with the intent of preserving "the Union as it was"--that is, with slavery intact. It was only in 1863 that emancipation became a federal commitment. That was adamantly rejected by the northern Democrats, who generally stood opposed to emancipation.
Lincoln had brought General Ulysses S. Grant in from his successes on the western front as the apparent standoffs in the East strained loyalties, and his reelection chances. Who was Grant? He had been an on-again-off-again soldier. Born to an Ohio tanner, he was graduated 21st in the 39-member West Point class of 1843. He served as an impressive young officer in the Mexican war, beginning in 1846, that led to the acquisition of Texas, California, New Mexico, and parts of what are now Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and Arizona. At its end, he married Julia Dent, long his fiancée; his best man was James Longstreet, a close friend from West Point. Longstreet and two of Grant's groomsmen, also West Pointers, ultimately became very significant officers in the Confederate Army.
After the Mexican war and marriage, he was assigned to California, and then to the Oregon territory. There, he terribly missed his wife and two children. But it was far too expensive for him to bring them west. He led a miserable life alone and resigned from the Army in 1854. He, Julia, and ultimately four children settled in Missouri, farming. He freed a slave that his father-in-law gave them and refused the offer of labor of other slaves of the family. He was living in Galena, Illinois, working in his father's leather store, when the Civil War began.
Called to lead the Illinois militia and to organize it, Grant was brought back into the Army and became a brigadier general in August 1861. Perhaps his defining accomplishment was the capture of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863--just as Lee's invasion was repelled by Federal forces at Gettysburg. Vicksburg, "the Gibraltar of the West," was the key to the Mississippi River and broke the remaining Confederate armies into more vulnerable eastern and western elements.
Grant's rise to the military top had been further nourished by his securing of Chattanooga, Knoxville, and east Tennessee, leaving the Confederate western command in ruins. Brought east by Lincoln and put in command, Grant sent General William T. Sherman driving south, and crucially, Atlanta fell to him on September 2, 1864. Grant led his forces to a series of other major Union victories. Union morale soared. In November voters gave Lincoln an Electoral College majority of 212 to 21 and 55 percent of the popular vote.
The war continued, but increasingly the Confederate forces eroded. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Grant and Lincoln had agreed that conciliation was vitally necessary to the future of the Republic; Grant's terms for Lee's surrender of the Confederacy and its soldiers were extraordinary in their decency, perceived humaneness, and magnanimity. That contributed hugely to raising Grant's image throughout the country and the world to mythic status, and beyond.
Lincoln was shot on April 14 and died the next day. Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded. Grant resigned from the Army, overwhelmingly the great hero of the Republic and substantially respected in the South for his generosity toward the Confederacy at and after Appomattox and among black freedman for his role in emancipation. He was elected president, as a Republican, in 1868.
U.S. Grant is of four elements: The first is an excellent, tightly concise but full-life biography of Grant. Interwoven with that is a crisp, if necessarily very selective, history of the war. A third section is what Waugh describes, with no false modesty, as "the first scholarly work devoted to Grant's commemoration, adding a unique perspective to the existing literature." Finally--and centrally--this is a learned and provocative exploration of "memory studies," the phenomenon of examining true records of history in contrast to the manipulated, or invented, popular or collective, contemporaneous or retrospective, "memory" of the same events.
Waugh's reexamination--perhaps rehabilitation is the better term--of Grant's record is startling, and very engaging. But I found even greater fascination in her pursuit of the phenomenon of both spontaneous and contrived revision of events over time: perspectives, prisms, proportions. In one chapter entitled "A Baby Politician" (a Henry Adams excoriation of Grant's presidency), Waugh does a deft juggling of the interpretations of Grant as a post-Appomattox politician and then, on his acceptance of the 1868 Republican nomination, of his campaign and two-term presidency.
Most scholarly, journalistic, even poetic interpretations of that period cast Grant as hopelessly naïve, appallingly corrupt, and something approaching despicable. Waugh sets about to argue an entirely different assessment. She accepts that, since late in the 1920s, "in the long run, the image of the brutal general and inept president lingers most powerfully." But she demonstrates that in many, or even most, contemporary minds, "Grant was every bit the equal of Washington and Lincoln, and this linkage was made in countless newspaper articles, eulogies, and speeches just before and after Grant's death. . . . Americans honored Washington the Father, Lincoln the Martyr, and Grant the Savior."
Waugh brings a perspective to Grant's life and accomplishments that has been largely lost. She is unswerving in her depiction--indeed, her celebration--of Grant's greatness, while not dismissing his limitations and failings, but recording them as far less serious than detractors would have them. Grant has been portrayed, in many stereotypes, as a drunk; Waugh, drawing on all accessible biographical material, concludes that's a bum rap. He was a drinker--though often abstemious for weeks and months. He was susceptible to alcohol and appeared to show its effects quite easily after a drink or two, she reports. But there is no evidence that it affected his performance as a soldier, politician, general, or president.
Grant's presidency was, Waugh concedes, often inept. He was not an experienced politician, and seems to have detested the practice of politics. He appointed cronies, and some were of doubtful talent, experience, or probity. There was enormous and growing resistance to Grant's aggressive Reconstruction policies, carrying on from those of Andrew Johnson. But his renomination in 1872 was immensely popular, at least among Republicans.
Called by many in his time the most famous living American, after his presidency Grant took a round-the-world tour during 1877-79. Though many historians trivialize it today, at the time the adventure was spectacularly popular and triumphant, with parades, crowds of thousands, visits with royalty and government leaders. It was prominently covered by the foreign and American press.
A movement to nominate him for a third term in 1880 failed, and the James Garfield-Chester Arthur ticket was nominated and elected. Grant turned to generally unsuccessful business enterprises and began writing an autobiography, which he completed only very shortly before he died on July 23, 1885, from cancer of the throat and tongue. He was never baptized until hours before his death, and spent his life (in his son's description) as "pure agnostic." Waugh maintains that the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant "stands alone as the best presidential autobiography ever published."
Grant's funeral was one of the largest public outpouring of population in the history of the nation. Memorial services swept up millions of Americans in virtually every city and town in the North, and many in the old Confederacy. There were hundreds of public processions lasting, typically, several hours and ending in churches and public buildings, even in the South where, Waugh records, because of the generosity and firmness of Grant's terms of surrender, there was considerable reconciliation, despite remaining tensions and resentment.
Grant was, in death, celebrated as one of the most powerful, devoted, and beloved leaders in American history, alongside Washington--and of course, Lincoln, at least in the North. Waugh concludes that "a majority of his contempor- aries knew in their hearts that Grant, more than anyone besides Lincoln, made sure that the United States defeated the rebellion and prevailed in April 1865, preserving the country for a greater glory." And yet, she records, "Grant's legacy disappeared from popular memory with shocking rapidity." She records in eloquent, intricate detail the origins and erection of the Grant Monument, commonly called "Grant's tomb," and its fall from grace. Built entirely with private donations, it was opened on the West Side of upper Manhattan on the 75th anniversary of Grant's birth, April 27, 1897. It prevailed for more than three decades as a hugely popular and venerated venue. Presidents and visiting dignitaries gave speeches there; it vastly outdrew the Statue of Liberty as New York's most visited monument. A decline began in the 1930s, and today it has been polished up, but not before having deteriorated into a graffiti-smeared, decaying pile.
Grant's funeral, writes Waugh,
demonstrated the creative tension that exists between the past and the present, in which a familiar history is reworked to accommodate new meanings. This is especially true of the American Civil War, where individual memory was linked with the collective historical memory in powerfully evocative ways.
Waugh, professor of history at UCLA, has taken a flamboyant story--a writhing intricacy of often conflicting -stories--and woven them into a breathtakingly exciting exploration. This is not, as she says, traditional history, or revisionist history, but rather an exquisite act of recounting and balancing those and other perspectives while drawing them all toward a greater understanding. I am not a historian. I am a journalist. But I am not innocent to the reading--and, perhaps more, the witnessing--of history at the lowest and highest levels. Seldom has a book provoked and invigorated me more than U.S. Grant.
Michael Pakenham, a former newspaper editor, writes from rural Pennsylvania.