On a recent visit to New Orleans I drove around what was once was called Lee Circle and noted the pedestal on which the statue of Robert E. Lee stood for 133 years before succumbing to the recent trend of removing Confederate memorials from public view.
A few days later I finished reading Ron Chernow’s voluminous biography of Lee’s Civil War nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant.
Growing up in the South, the great-grandson of a Civil War veteran, I was repeatedly told that the Confederates had the best generals, that Lee was smarter than Grant and that the reason the South lost was because the North had more manpower and manufacturing facilities.
Or, as an infantry captain from Georgia who taught a basic ROTC course in military history at Ole Miss in the mid-1950s put it: “Before the Civil War started some in the South said, ‘We can whip the Yankees with corn stalks.’ The problem was the Yankees wouldn’t fight with corn stalks.”
After three months of off-and-on reading of the 959 pages of the Chernow book (counting acknowledgements and footnotes it’s 1,074), I appreciate Grant more than I used to.
He was a good man with high principles, loyal to his friends to a fault.
Chernow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, doesn’t sugarcoat Grant’s struggles with alcohol, scandals involving his presidency and his lack of business acumen that caused him to get ripped off in business deals.
But there is so much to like about Grant, who came from humble beginnings to become the top general in the U.S. Army and serve two terms as president.
As a military strategist he was superb. In the introduction to the book, Chernow quotes military historian John Keegan as concluding that Grant, with his methods of mobilizing railroads and telegraphs to set his armies in motion, “was the greatest general of the war, one who would have excelled at any time in any army.”
Chernow, noting that Grant had a stellar record of winning battles, including Vicksburg, before taking charge of all Union forces in early 1864. He said Grant “adopted a comprehensive policy for all theaters of war, treating them as an interrelated whole. However brilliant Lee was as a tactician, Grant surpassed him in grand strategy, creating the plan that defeated the Confederacy.”
A West Point graduate, Grant was at his best at soldiering. He was not so good at business and farming between his military service in the Mexican War and the Civil War.
As president, his administration was scandal ridden, but Grant himself was scrupulously honest. Not so for some of his appointees. As president, he was a champion of African-American rights, and, as Chernow puts it, “was an adept politician, the only president to serve two full consecutive terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.”
A chain smoker of cigars, Grant died of painful mouth and throat cancer at age 63 just after completing his memoirs with the publishing help of Mark Twain. Income from the book sustained the Grant family, which had fallen victim to a Ponzi scheme masterminded by a crook Grant considered a friend.
In reading about the Civil War and its main characters, I am sometimes amazed at the dichotomies involving the characters in that conflict.
Most of the top military leaders on both sides were West Point graduates and served together in the Mexican War.
James Longstreet, later to become one of the foremost Confederate generals and the principal subordinate to Lee, was the best man at Grant’s wedding.
Grant’s wife’s family owned slaves, as did the family of Abraham Lincoln’s wife.
Four of Mary Lincoln’s brothers fought for the Confederacy. One died at Shiloh and another at Vicksburg.
Grant was born in Ohio, lived for a while in Illinois and also resided in New York where he is entombed. Before he died and at his funeral among those paying tributes were former Confederate soldiers.
Among the many places Grant spent time during his military service was right here in Mississippi where, with the exception of the slaves, he was unwelcomed in the 1860s.
But now, somewhat ironically it seems to me, many of his papers and artifacts are housed at the new Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University.
