“Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” Instead of a truly inspired image of our 18th president, my infantile brain popped out that age-old question. Jeez. Even though I read about Grant, the general, in the Lincoln bio, I really don’t know all that much about him. I have a very hazy recollection from American History AP that Grant, due to some scandals, helps fill the ranks of Worst President Ever. Don’t you just love that word? Scandals. Oh my. What could dour, taciturn Grant have gotten into that would catapult his fame from the war right down the hole of oblivion? Let’s find out.
In an effort to discover the truth of these so-called scandals, I delved into Ulysses S. Grant by Josiah Bunting III of the American Presidents Series (New York: Times Books, 2004). There were bigger books on Grant but I have to say that I was just plain worn out—worn out, I tell you—from reading those tomes on Lincoln and Davis. Not to mention, Johnson’s bio was also heftyish, so reading this 180-pager was quite refreshing.
Hiram Ulysses Grant was born on March, 27, 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio. “Hannah and Jesse would have six children, three girls and three boys, but Ulysses—the first—remained the apple of his father’s for the first thirty years of his life, and, after a gap of several years, thereafter” (p. 10). He was the favorite son and so naturally, since he must reflect on his father in a positive way, Grant was given all the rudiments of polite society. “He was taught at the local subscription school; in adolescence he was sent off for one-year terms at two nearby boarding schools, the latter to prepare him for possible attendance at West Point” (p. 10). When he was around 14, he started his own livery service due to an extreme love of horses.
On May 29, 1839, Grant received his appointment to West Point. He was a very quiet young man, around 5’1” and only 117 lbs and it was really no wonder that he did not shine at West Point but was merely a mediocre student. “Minor disciplinary scrapes and misadventures and a manifest indifference to military rigmarole, to drum-and-trumpet militarism, shines, creases, barked commands, and posturing—such things kept him from advancing as a cadet” (p. 17). Upon graduation in 1843, Grant was assigned to the infantry at Jefferson Barracks, MO.
While there, he frequently visited a fellow officer named Frederick Dent, who lived in the area, and slowly found himself falling in love with Fred’s sister, Julia. Julia’s father was not hot about his daughter marrying a military man but he allowed them to get in engaged in 1846 with the understanding that they would marry after the Mexican War.
In 1844, Grant formed part of the Army of Observation under Gen. Zachary Taylor that was sent to Louisiana after Texas was annexed by the United States. “Grant’s service in the Army of Observation gave him much pleasure; he was beginning to find elements of soldiering congenial to his temperament, as certain young men with no expectation of liking it often do” (p. 21). From there they were ordered to Corpus Christi where the Mexicans fired upon them, thus starting the Mexican War. In June, Grant took part in the Battle of Palo Alto, where he temporarily commanded a company before being promoted to quartermaster. “Necessity, Jacob Bronowski wrote, is the mother not of invention but of improvisation, and nothing could more mercilessly and continuously try Grant’s skills at improvisation than the demands of feeding, moving, and supplying an infantry regiment on campaign in a difficult enemy country” (p. 23-24). Grant fought at Monterrey under Taylor and also in Vera Cruz under Scott.
After the war ended, Grant headed straight to Julia Dent and married her on August 22, 1848. After that he was transferred, still as a quartermaster, to Sackets Harbor, NY and from thence he was ordered to Fort Vancouver on the west coast. Since the trip from one coast to the other was fraught with so much peril, Julia stayed home while Grant sailed down to Panama, rode overland to the Pacific and then sailed up to Fort Vancouver. He was desperately unhappy there. He missed his wife and did not have a lot to do which led him to drink heavily. “It is during these days that Grant’s reputation as a man with an alcohol problem was established, and in the tiny peacetime army, in which all officers knew or knew about all others, word of his drinking spread easily” (p. 31). He was promoted to captain but in April 1854, he resigned from the army over an inebriated episode.
Grant then went on to hold a host of random jobs which never seemed to work out for him. He tried farming in Missouri and working at a custom house, then real estate and rent collection, but all for nothing. Finally, beaten, he moved to Galena, IL to work in his father’s leather store (his father was a tanner by trade). Thankfully, for Grant, the Civil War began. He would not enlist outright so he was forced into entering the army again by being appointed colonel of the 21st Regiment of Illinois volunteers in June 1861. Very shortly, he was promoted to brigadier general and sent to the Missouri/Kentucky area where he distinguished himself as a leader. “They had seen their general in action and had faith in him; he was without apparent fear; he was coolly efficient, imperturbable—and resourceful. He knew what to do, and much of what he had done he did where they could see it” (p. 42).
It was under Grant that the first major Union victories were achieved at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in February 1862. It was the victory at Fort Donelson that would eventually give Grant his new nickname, “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. “Yours of this date proposing Armistice and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of Capitulation is just received. No terms except immediate and unconditional surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works. I am, sir, very respectfully, Your obt. svt. U.S. Grant, Brig. Gen.” (p. 44). These victories were followed up by a devastating and dubiously won battle at Shiloh where the casualties were the highest ever. “But if the public was slow to grasp the strategic consequence of Shiloh, it understood the magnitude of Union losses, and, inevitably, it fastened on Grant’s apparent callousness, his prodigal willingness to sacrifice soldiers for no demonstrable purpose” (p. 47). Grant was labeled a “butcher” and almost thrown out of the Army. As it was he was taken away from immediate command and left on the back burner.
Grant was not initially against slavery, per se, but as the war dragged on, he came to believe, like Lincoln, that they needed to fight for something more important than simply secession. Grant told Bismarck, years later, “In the beginning [we fought for the Union] but as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union” (p. 49). It was with renewed vigor that Grant was again put back into command after the Emancipation Proclamation and he moved to take control of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. Vicksburg was the last bastion of Confederate power over the Mississippi and Grant began its siege in April 1863 by going around the back way and hemming the Confederate Army within the gates. On July 4, 1863, the city fell and Grant was promoted to command the entire Western Theater of the war.
In October 1863 he had arrived in Tennessee. Rosecrans, the Union general, had been beaten by the Confederates at Chickamauga but with Grant and Sherman bringing reinforcements the Union was able to win the Battle of Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain. Grant’s continued successes allowed Lincoln to bring him to Washington to become General-in-Chief of the entire army. He would also focus now on the Eastern Theater of war and how to beat Robert E Lee. “Those who saw him for the first time didn’t exactly know what to make of him—this stumpy, awkward, bashful man—but his triumphs in the West, his reputation as a fighter not a talker, recalled to citizens his modesty and self-possession, his aura of silent abstraction” (p. 54).
“Grant’s mission was to achieve military victory over Southern armies, to inflict defeats that would, first, make it impossible for them to reinforce one another, and second, force their surrender” (p. 56). Grant came up with a plan to end the war. He had Sherman take Atlanta and then move onto the sea, he had Sheridan destroy the Shenandoah Valley, and he took the Army of the Potomac south to Richmond. May through June of 1864 saw some of the bloodiest battles of all time: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, but still Grant moved forward. In April of 1865, the Army of the Potomac surrounded Richmond, forcing the government to flee and forcing Lee to surrender.
On Good Friday, April 15, 1865, the Grants were scheduled to see a play with the Lincolns, but Julia Grant intensely disliked Mary Lincoln and asked Grant to cancel. Instead they were headed to NJ when they found that the president had been killed. In the aftermath, President Johnson asked Grant to take a tour of the South to report on the situation. When he returned Grant set out on a tour of the North with Johnson but he became increasingly disgusted with the way Johnson was acting and absented himself from most events. “What he was seeing in Johnson had begun to stir a resistant strain in him; the president’s wild harangues, his venomous denunciations of radical Republican opponents, his expressed hatred of blacks now outraged Grant’s sense of probity” (p. 78). His relationship with Johnson continued to fail over issues with the Tenure of Office Act, the Freedman’s Bureau and the War Department.
In 1868, Grant was nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency. I have to put Grant’s acceptance speech in here because it’s classic and very indicative of who Grant really was. “Gentlemen, being entirely unaccustomed to public speaking and without the desire to cultivate the power, it is impossible for me to find appropriate language to thank you for the demonstration. All I can say is, that to whatever position I may be called by your will, I shall endeavor to discharge its duties with fidelity and honesty of purpose. Of my rectitude in the performance of public duties you will have to judge for yourselves by the record before you” (p. 82-83). Ulysses S. Grant became the 18th President of the United States.
In the foreign policy arena, Grant needed to deal with Cuba trying to gain independence from Spain, Santo Domingo trying to be annexed by the U.S. and England trying to remain friendly with the United States with the Washington Treaty. However, the domestic issues with Reconstruction were still the prime focus of all political attention in the US at this time. “Reconstruction denotes an unhappy time in American history. It is a label loosely applied to the decade after Appomattox, whose principal political preoccupation was the full reintegration of the states of the former Confederacy into the Union, and, prerequisite and concomitant both, the attainment of full unfettered American citizenship, its privileges and its duties, by black Americans” (p. 107).
Grant also was upset with the way Americans had treated Indians over the years and tried to rectify the situation. “The new ‘policy’ envisaged the domestication of the Indians, through settlements on reservations: as farmers, artisans, educable workers who would themselves serve local Indian communities. Schools would be available to all Indian children; the Christian gospel would be preached. The Indian was to be treated with solicitude and fairness” (p. 119). However, as good as this sounded, gold was soon discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota and when General Custer and his troops were destroyed at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, popular sentiment turned even more firmly away from helping the Indians.
In 1872, Grant was re-elected but this term would be plagued by financial issues and scandals. The Panic of 1873 hit the country due to the failure of Jay Cooke’s banking house in Washington and a severe depression followed. “Over the next two years eighteen thousand businesses failed; a quarter of the country’s railroads went under; unemployment touched 14 percent” (p. 140).
The first scandal that hit the presidency was in 1869 when Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the gold market. These actions shouldn’t have affected Grant in any way except for the fact that Gould and Fisk used Corbin, Grant’s brother-in-law, as a go-between. The plan did not work but it served notice that Grant could be quite lax when it came to some things. But the best known scandal of the Grant regime was definitely the Credit Mobilier scandal where officials from the Union Pacific Railway created a dummy company to construct the railroads so that they could be paid twice. Unfortunately numerous members of both houses of Congress owned stock in the company and were aware of its dubious origins. Then there were the Sandborn contracts scandal, the Back Pay Grab scandal, the Indian trading scandal, and the Whiskey Ring scandal.
Grant refused a third term and instead took a much needed trip around the world with this wife, Julia. “The great trip took the Grants through Europe, the Middle East, India, China, Russia and Japan. They met many of the great personages of the age (Queen Victoria, Otto von Bismarck, the emperor of China), and they moved tirelessly through galleries and museums, cathedrals, shrines, and venues man-made and natural, some of elicited novel, perhaps, sly judgments. Of Venice, for example, General Grant was reported to have said that it was a handsome city, except for the streets, which needed to be drained” (p. 148).
After this tour, Grant was almost nominated for a third term but nothing came of it because people had still not forgotten all the corruption of the Grant administration. Grant ended up losing all his money in a failed scheme of his son’s so in his retirement, he began writing his Memoirs for ready cash. Being also a great fan of cigars, Grant contracted throat cancer and died of it on July 23, 1885 at the age of 63.
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