Ulysses S. Grant: An Album
By William S. McFeely
Norton, 144 pages, $32.50
Writing biographies of Ulysses S. Grant has grown over the years into something of an American cottage industry. Hardly a publishing season goes by without producing at least one or two–not to speak of Southern Illinois University Press’ ongoing publication of Grant’s papers, 26 substantial volumes of which are piled on the floor of my study, with more on the way. (I am myself writing a biography of–You guessed it!–Grant.)
Grant miscellany thrives and proliferates on the Internet. If you want to know the number (and size) of the columns on the U.S. Grant Memorial on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, or a list of the men he disliked (Jefferson Davis, Winfield Scott Hancock and George A. Custer), it’s all there, together with the visiting hours to his many homes and the menus of state dinners at the Grant White House.
This is in part because Grant’s apotheosis from glum wrapper of parcels at his father’s leather and harness store in Galena, Ill., to victorious commander of the U.S. Army in the Civil War and two-term president seems to many Americans (including such unlikely ones as F. Scott Fitzgerald) to be the ultimate Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story. It is also in part because Americans like to discern a larger meaning in Grant’s remarkable career, and to paint the contrast between the badly dressed, shabby Grant–a kind of “people’s general,” arriving late and disheveled in his mud-stained uniform without a sword–and the splendidly dressed and proudly aristocratic Robert E. Lee–resplendent in a new uniform with sword and sash–when the two men finally met at the McLean house in Appomattox Court House, Va., to negotiate the terms for the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. This scene–though slightly misleading, because Grant had at least as high an opinion of his family roots as Lee did and was in no way a country bumpkin–is firmly enshrined as one of the great moments in American history, though unfortunately no photograph of it exists.
In the tidal wave of Grant biographies, William S. McFeely’s “Grant” (1981), which received a Pulitzer Prize, stands out as one of the more interesting and certainly the best written. Like many modern biographers, he stresses Grant’s ordinariness (as compared, say, to Lee) rather more than one suspects Grant himself would have done, and finds it hard to understand Grant’s calm acceptance of the mass killing that war entails.
But one look at the photos of the adult Grant in McFeely’s latest book, “Ulysses S. Grant: An Album,” shows a remarkable combination of pain, stubbornness, pride and determination that differentiates the professional soldier, however sensitive, from the civilian. Grant may have had his problems with liquor, and he was certainly a slow starter at West Point and in his Army career, but like the patrician Lee, or, for that matter, the affable, small-town Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, he was first and foremost a professional soldier and considered it part of his job to send men to their deaths–and part of their job to obey orders and, if necessary, die. Nobody, not even Lee, pushed his men harder on the battlefield than Grant, attacked more ferociously, or held ground more stubbornly when almost any other Union general would have retreated. “I cannot spare this man–he fights,” President Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked when told about Grant’s drinking, and Lincoln was right. Whatever else he was, Grant was a soldier.
Any collection of drawings and photos of Grant and his times is somewhat limited because there isn’t much in the way of new material, and McFeely’s “album” is no exception. But what there is, however familiar, is handsomely arranged, and supported, more importantly, by McFeely’s brilliant, concise and immensely readable text. In a mere 144 pages, McFeely conveys so much that someone coming new to the subject of Grant–if such a person exists–could do worse than to begin with this album, which not only conveys Grant’s childhood, years at West Point and in the Army, and, in compressed form, the Civil War, but deals fairly with his presidency and the aftermath, as Grant sank into bankruptcy and illness.
McFeely’s book rightly begins with, and is to some degree dominated by, the image of slavery and the role slavery played as the great, insoluble national stain against which Grant’s life was lived, the skeleton in the cupboard of democracy that made war inevitable and, as Grant came to realize, determined the way it would be fought and its level of ferocity, and the consequences of which, as president, Grant was never quite able to confront or solve.
To know Grant is to understand something about the American character, which perhaps explains the never-ending fascination of writers with the man and the great pleasure even the most knowledgeable students of Grant’s life will derive from McFeely’s album. With brilliant and self-effacing skill, McFeely describes the Grants’ world tour (surely the most ambitious ever undertaken by a former American president and shot through with comic incidents worthy of Evelyn Waugh) and Grant’s long and painful death, during the course of which he wrote the only memoir by an American general or president that belongs among the classics of American literature. McFeely brings his gifts as a historian and writer to bear not only on the man, but on the documents and photos of the era, and he illuminates Grant’s essential dignity, his humanity, his common sense and his awesome skill as a general–a profession he had undertaken reluctantly, unwillingly and without any illusion (unlike Lee) that skill at it involved “glory.”
The Grant whom McFeely presents here is a man for whom war is a job, one for which West Point had trained him, one at which he turned out (to everyone’s surprise but his own) to be very good indeed, but one that never seemed to him as interesting as his relationship with his wife, Julia (theirs, as McFeely makes clear, was one of the great love stories of 19th Century America), or their troublesome children.
Grant is the most human of great generals, and in this album–not a major book, to be sure, but one that everybody interested in the Civil War will want to read and own–McFeely has done much to further humanize Grant, surely the most approachable of our heroes and presidents.
