Authors: Michael Korda
Ulysses S. Grant (14 page)
R
UINED AND SADDLED WITH DEBT,
Grant was, in some respects, back where he had started when he was working at the leather shop in Galena. As always in his extraordinary life, however, a chance to rise was once again about to present itself. Once again he would need to go through pain and suffering; once again he would overcome them to win glory. This time the weapon would be the pen, not the sword.
In the aftermath of the failure of Grant & Ward, Grant had rather reluctantly agreed to write an account of Shiloh for
Century Magazine
, for a fee of five hundred dollars; more articles were called for, and it gradually dawned on the editor of the
Century
that a book might eventually come of all this. It also dawned on a former Confederate soldier, Samuel Clemens (more famous under his writing name of Mark Twain), that such a book would sell. Clemens was a publisher as well as a humorist and writer, and owned his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co., having discovered that he could make more money by selling his books door-to-door than
through conventional publishers and booksellers, who even then were thought to be behind the times when it came to marketing their product. Clemens knew the general slightly and dropped in to see him at East Sixty-sixth Street—Clemens was a celebrity, the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of a major talk-show host, as well as a famous writer, and he had the rare gift of being able to make Grant smile, so no doubt he was welcome. He was also a man with a vision, and proposed to secure for Grant at least $25,000 for his war memoirs, against very favorable royalty terms that would make him, once again, a rich man. Grant typically countered with the loyalty that he owed to the
Century
people, but Clemens promised him they would never match his offer or come up with anything like it, and he was proved right. The head of the
Century
—typically of a publisher—declared rather stuffily that he would never guarantee the sale of 25,000 copies of any book ever written, and Clemens, therefore, got Grant’s memoirs, thus making Grant the first in a long line of presidents who would secure their financial future with a book deal, including Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bill Clinton.
Unlike most of them, however, Grant aimed to write his book himself, without the help of a “ghostwriter.” Every word would be his. Clemens was shrewd enough to know that Grant’s prose was one of his greatest strengths. His letters and dispatches, however hastily written, were always models of brevity, clarity, and simplicity—he had only to keep at it steadily to produce a major bestseller.
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But there was one problem. Grant had been suffering for some time from a pain in the throat, accompanied by difficulty in swallowing. He had experienced it shortly after the collapse of Grant & Ward, when his mind had been on other things—disgrace and
ruin—and had paid, at first, little attention to it. It was diagnosed as a cold, but the pain persisted long after the cold should have gone away, and as throat specialists were called in, the diagnosis became clearer and more dire—Grant was suffering from cancer of the throat, an incurable disease in the age before radiation and chemotherapy, in effect a death sentence, and a slow and painful death at that.
Grant took the news stoically, but he was determined to finish his book before he died. The writing was laborious, slow work, and became daily more difficult as Grant’s cancer spread, rendering it impossible for him to swallow and eventually depriving him of his voice. Still he labored on, day after day, convinced by now that it was the only way in which his debts could be settled and Julia and his family provided for.
What fate had in store for Grant was a race against time—a race against death, really—and the struggle wiped away every trace of the man who had twice been president and tried so hard to get a third term without actually asking for it. That Grant, overweight, puffy-faced, overdressed in clothes that didn’t suit him, the Grant who had yearned to be a Wall Street tycoon or a Mexican railways baron, and who had traveled around the world accepting as his due the homage of huge crowds of ordinary people and the company of crowned heads, was now burned away day by day, bit by bit, by pain, suffering, and remorselessly hard work under overwhelming pressure. Photographs taken of Grant in his illness show the flesh pared away, the strong bones reappearing in his face, the eyes once again melancholy but focused with disconcerting concentration on the object of his attention, as they had once been in battle. In these
photographs Grant, the heroic young officer of the Mexican War; Grant, the fledgling colonel of the Illinois Volunteers who surrounded Buckner at Fort Donelson; Grant, the victor of Shiloh, Vicksburg, and the long, bloody struggle against Lee in 1864 and 1865, reappears as if the other Grant had never existed. He was, in fact, at war again, not only in his head, as day by day he reconstructed with phenomenal exactitude and in succinct lapidary prose the history of his wars and his battles, but also in his heart, as he took the measure of the cancer that was killing him; figured out how much pain he could bear and how much morphine he could afford to take before it clouded his mind and stopped his writing; drew on his own strength, courage, and stubborn determination to fight his last battle, in which the only victory would be to complete his book before death took him.
Grant began his task late in 1884 and finished it in July 1885—an amazing and Herculean labor. At first he dictated, but then, as his ability to speak deteriorated, he took to writing on lined yellow legal pads with a pencil, in his clear, firm script. He did not have an army of researchers and draft writers, like Winston Churchill for instance. He sat on his porch, if the weather allowed it, and wrote away industriously, often watched by sightseers who had come to see the great man die. The Grants had been obliged to sell their seaside cottage in New Jersey, and took a small house at Mount McGregor, near Saratoga Springs, New York. There Grant can be seen, in numerous photographs, dressed in a dark, frock-coated suit with silk lapels, a black silk top hat on his head and a white napkin or towel wrapped around his throat, resolutely writing.
He knew he was dying, and very shortly the country knew it,
too. Visitors came to pay their last respects, crowds of tourists came up from Saratoga Springs to stand and gawk at Grant; he was, as was so often the case in his life, on public display. In an age when deathbed scenes were popular and apt to be protracted, and when people died at home rather than in a hospital, Grant’s was perhaps the biggest and longest deathbed scene of all, and through it he kept working, surrounded by his family, and receiving occasional visitors.
It was a national drama of unprecedented proportions, and as his health declined and pain began to overwhelm his defenses, his enemies and his detractors fell away, one by one. Those who had thought he was wasteful of his men’s lives in the war, those who had opposed his presidency, those who had lost their life’s savings in the crash and depression that darkened his second term in office, or had unwisely invested their money in Grant & Ward because of his name, came to forgive him—dying made him again what he had once been, a national hero.
He finished the last chapter only a week or so before his death and was still struggling with questions about the maps and the proofs when death was almost ready to take him. On his own terms, and in his own way, he had fought death and won.
Now that it was too late, final honors poured in—Congress passed a bill restoring him to his rank in the army (he had had to resign in order to run for president); encomiums filled the newspapers; people of every rank, from all over the world, sent letters and cards; but Grant was past all that. He had finished his book, and now he was ready, perhaps even impatient, to die.
He would never know it, of course, but the book would indeed
save the Grants—it would earn more than $450,000 in royalties, an immense sum for the day, but one that would have to be multiplied by twenty or more to give an idea of it in comparable modern terms. Sold door to door in several different editions, it became the biggest bestseller in American history, excluding the Bible.
All over the United States in the late nineteenth century, in the simplest of homes and farmhouses, one could always count on finding two books, the Bible and Grant’s
Memoirs
, side by side, on a shelf or on the mantelpiece, its penultimate words, “Let us have peace,” representing, so very clearly, the deepest feelings of America’s most successful general.
T
HERE ARE MANY BIOGRAPHIES
of Grant, so many that it seems to be something of a minor industry; some of them, like William S. McFeely’s
Grant
, are works of literature, many others more humdrum or narrowly military in interest. But from time to time it is necessary to remind Americans about Grant, first of all because his is a kind of real-life Horatio Alger story, exactly the one that foreigners have always wanted to believe about American life (hence the immense crowds that greeted Grant on his world tour), and that Americans want to believe about themselves. He came from a humble background; he had a harsh childhood; success eluded him at every turn no matter how hard he worked; then, all of a sudden, he rose to fame, to command, to power, to victory; then managed as few other people could have done (perhaps only Lincoln) to end the Civil War on a note of grace; served two terms as president; and ended his life by writing the most successful book in American literature. He was, in his lifetime, living proof of a substantial element of the American dream, and after his death continued to be for many years.
His presidency was clearly flawed, but what he sought as president—peace, prosperity, the binding together of North and South despite the wounds of four years of civil war, and good relations with foreign powers—was sought after by most Americans then and continues to be today. In domestic politics Grant sought to achieve fairness and failed, certainly in the case of black Americans; in foreign policy he avoided a bullying or a moralistic tone and refrained from the use of military force. Like Winston Churchill he believed that “It is better to jaw, jaw, jaw than to war, war, war,” and his decision to submit American claims against the United Kingdom to international arbitration and not to encourage the annexation of Canada shows a degree of common sense that we might well wish to see repeated in our own day.
As a general Grant defined for all time the American way of winning a war, from which, nearly 150 years later, we deviate at our own risk. Grant understood better than anyone that, first of all, any American war must be firmly based on the support of the American people and have an essentially moral base, and that the best way for the United States to win a war was to use to the full its great industrial strength and its reserves of manpower—and to apply them both unhesitatingly on the battlefield.
Grant was not a showy general. No admirer of Napoleon, he nevertheless had to some degree what Napoleon called “
le coup d’oeil de génie
,” the quick glance of genius, by which Napoleon meant the ability to see at once on the battlefield where the enemy’s weakness lay and how to exploit it with one unexpected blow. Grant, like Napoleon himself, didn’t rise to that level every time—at Shiloh he was caught off guard and fumbled his way through the first day of
the battle, to be saved by Johnston’s death on the battlefield and Buell’s arrival at the last minute with fresh troops—but usually his keen grasp of the enemy’s position and its potential weaknesses was remarkable.
Lee had that quality, too, of course, though it failed him at Gettysburg, where he allowed the battle to become a “pounding match,” in Wellington’s phrase, which, given the enemy’s position on high ground with interior lines and Lee’s own inferiority in numbers, he could only lose, even though Lee was a better general than Meade. Both Grant and Lee were masters of the quick, surprising movement, the sudden change of plans that, for example, brought Grant’s army from north of Richmond to southeast of it, and led to the siege of Petersburg and, eventually, the end of the war.
The war they fought is studied all over the world in staff colleges, still today—indeed German tank commanders like Rommel, Guderian, Manteuffel, and Manstein (and their Soviet equivalents) learned Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign by heart, so that for them Winchester, Harrisonburg, New Market, Harpers Ferry, Port Republic, and Cross Keys were as familiar as German place names, and the landscape of the Shenandoah Valley was as firmly planted in their minds as that of the Rhine or the Elbe or eastern France. Similarly, in every imaginable language, in military academies all over the world, Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, his pursuit of Lee from the Wilderness to Appomattox, and his swift, implacable movements to the left to isolate the Army of Northern Virginia and force Lee’s surrender are taught and studied down to the last detail. The machine gun, the tank, the aircraft, the computer and “smart”
weaponry have changed the way wars are fought, but not the way they are won. Grant understood topography, the importance of supply lines, the instant judgment of the balance between his own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses, and above all the need to keep his armies moving forward, despite casualties, even when things have gone wrong—that and the simple importance of inflicting greater losses on the enemy than he can sustain, day after day, until he breaks. Grant the boy never retraced his steps. Grant the man did not retreat—he advanced. Generals who do that win wars.
When the United States has succeeded in war, it has been by following Grant’s example.
When asked who France’s greatest poet was, the nineteenth-century French literary critic Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve replied, “
Victor Hugo, hélas
.” If I were asked who America’s greatest general was, I should have to echo Saint-Beuve: Ulysses S. Grant, alas.
Perhaps fortunately for the United States, the nation has never produced an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon. Washington was a commander of great dignity and fortitude, but retreated his way to victory, abandoning, at one point or another, almost all of America’s major cities. Lee was as fierce as Grant, when his blood was up, and one of those rare generals who was as good at defense as attack, and his formidable dignity still impresses Americans 140 years after his surrender at Appomattox. Still we should remember that it was Grant who finally beat him. Of Lee’s commanders Longstreet was a kind of Southern Omar Bradley, competent, reliable, a bit cautious, while Jackson was more like a Patton, a master of swift-moving war.
On the Union side Meade was a solid and reliable general, rather like Field Marshal Harold Alexander on the British side in World War II, but hampered by his irascible temper and poor sense of public relations. Both he and Hancock deserved more than they got, from the country and from Grant. In World War II, MacArthur can be thought of as a latter-day McClellan, vain, arrogant, good at public relations, contemptuous of the president, and with one eye fixed on the White House, but Grant is the best of them—Grant and Ike.
Ike was, like Grant, a slow starter whose military career limped along in low gear for years. He missed the fighting in World War I, to his great disappointment, and only got to Europe after it was over as part of the war graves commission. He chafed miserably as General MacArthur’s aide in the Philippines, and in the end was promoted to lieutenant colonel only because Gen. George C. Marshall remembered him, from years of inspecting dreary peacetime army bases, as the best bridge player in the U.S. Army. Like Grant, Ike was no keen student of strategy, and he fumbled the ball badly in North Africa, but he had the rare ability to keep a coalition together, he was a good listener, he understood that the president was more important than any general (a lesson never learned by MacArthur), and above all he knew the importance of bringing overwhelming force against the enemy at his weakest point. Like Grant, too, may not have read Napoleon at West Point, but he had certainly read Grant’s memoirs.
Once Ike landed in France, he had to contend with two showier and more flamboyant generals, both prima donnas who believed that the war could be won with one brilliant strategic stroke.
George S. Patton wanted to strike southeast deep into Germany, then turn north to cut off Berlin, while Bernard Montgomery was determined to advance to the northeast across Holland, cross the Rhine and occupy the Ruhr, cutting the German army off from its industrial base. Ike, like Grant, was always suspicious of panaceas. In the end he reluctantly turned Patton loose, but kept a tight rein on him (which Patton never forgave), and gave Montgomery a chance to prove his point with the airborne assault on the bridges at Nijmegen and Arnhem (Operation Market-Garden), followed by an armored attack that was supposed to roll over the bridges captured by the airborne troops until Montgomery’s army was across the Rhine. Market-Garden failed, and Patton’s deep slice into Germany was thwarted by the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German attack in the west. In the end Ike did what he had always planned to do, and just what Grant would have done—he used his superiority in numbers to advance on a broad front, from the Swiss border to Holland, day by day, with no showy tactics or sideshows, inexorably pressing the Germans back and inflicting on them losses they could not afford. It was the Wilderness and the advance on Richmond on a larger scale, and it worked, just as it had for Grant. The German army was better trained, better led, vastly more experienced, and equipped with better weapons, particularly in tanks, but none of it mattered; Ike had the men, and he could replace his weapons thanks to America’s industrial might—all he had to do to win the war was to keep moving forward, never retreat, and kill Germans in numbers they could not replace, and eventually they would collapse. And so they did.
Grant would have approved. He would have approved of the
fact too that as president Ike was notably unwilling to fight another war. He had seen one, and that was enough for him.
Grant had seen two, and had no nostalgia for the experience. His memoirs are factual, precise, and about as objective as it is possible to be, but there is in them no attempt to portray war as glamorous, or glorious. Glory did not interest Grant. He would have hated Douglas MacArthur’s memoirs, and admired Ike’s for their modesty and calm tone. Grant would not have loved, like the Air Cav colonel played by Robert Duvall in
Apocalypse Now
, the smell of napalm in the morning (or at any other time). He hated war; the sight of a battlefield gave him no pleasure, and if he fought hard it was to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. “Next to a battle lost, there is no spectacle more melancholy than a battle won,” Wellington said, and Grant would have been the first to agree with him.
I imagine that Grant would have agreed with the “Powell Doctrine” too, which is (or was) that the American armed forces ought to be used only when there is strong civilian support in favor of their use, and then used in overwhelming numbers, bringing America’s vast industrial resources and strength to bear on the enemy for a quick, crushing, and complete victory, and then bringing the troops home again as soon as possible. The difficulties of Reconstruction in the South taught Grant—not that he needed teaching—that armies of occupation are no substitute for political thought, and that generals are not necessarily the right people to institute basic political reforms or to reconstruct societies.
Whenever we think about the uses of American power, we
would do well to remember Ulysses S. Grant—and to reread his memoirs, which, along with the victory that he won, are his greatest and most lasting legacy to us.
Above all, any politician contemplating the use of force should read Grant before doing so.
