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.
Notes
A Note on Sources
The list is too long to include in full, but two books I have relied upon, though they are very different in their point of view, have been Grant by William S. McFeely (Newtown, Conn.: American Political Biography Press, 1997), and Meet General Grant by W. E. Woodward (1928; reprint, New York: Norton, 1965). Indispensable are The West Point Atlas of American Wars: Volume I, 1689–1900, edited by Brig. Gen. Vincent J. Esposito (West Point, N.Y., 1995) and The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, edited by John Y. Simon (Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–). Reference must also be made to The Civil War Battlefield Guide, 2nd ed., edited by Frances H. Kennedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), Grant: A Military Commander, by Sir James Marshall-Cornwall (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996), and, of course, Grant’s Memoirs and Selected Letters in the Library of America edition (New York, 1990).
Chapter One
1. New York Daily News, July 9, 2003; Associated Press, July 12, 2003.
2. Information on Grant’s tomb is taken mostly from “Grant’s Tomb: An Overview” (available at http://www.grantstomb.org/oview1.html), “The Grant Monument Association Update on Grant’s Tomb,” March 19, 2003 (http://www.morningside-heights.net); and CNN Interactive U.S. News, April 27, 1997.
3. “Men Grant Disliked,” Ulysses S. Grant home page, http://www.mscomm.com/~ulysses/page140.html
Chapter Two
1. William S. McFeely, Grant.
2. W. E. Woodward, Meet General Grant. I am indebted to Woodward for much of the information about Grant’s childhood. Writing in 1928, Woodward was closer to Grant’s time and had an affinity for his subject’s early years, and also for those of his future wife.
Chapter Three
1. For much of this I have relied on McFeely, who is excellent on the subject of the Dent family.
2. Again, McFeely’s is the best account of Grant’s military career in the Mexican War.
Chapter Four
1. Woodward is an excellent source for Grant’s failure as a farmer.
Chapter Five
1. McFeely is a superb guide to this complex period of Grant’s life.
2. In general, in describing Grant’s battles, I have relied on The West Point Atlas of the American Wars.
3. As quoted in Woodward.
Chapter Six
1. I ha
ve used several sources for Vicksburg, in order to try to condense the long and complicated struggle into a short and comprehensible form.
Chapter Seven
1. There are several differing accounts of Grant’s arrival in Washington, and I have combined what seemed to me the most plausible ones (McFeely and Woodward) into a simple narrative.
2. Again, The West Point Atlas of the American Wars is the basis for this, and for the rest of the chapter up to Appomattox.
Chapter Eight
1. Ulysses S. Grant home page.
2. McFeely’s is the best account of the Santo Domingo fiasco.
Chapter Nine
1. McFeely takes a slightly more serious view of Lord Lytton’s description of Grant’s escapade than I do, but is otherwise excellent on the Grants’ world tour.
Chapter Ten
1. Perhaps the best source for the writing of Grant’s memoirs is General Grant by Matthew Arnold, with a Rejoinder by Mark Twain, edited by John Y. Simon (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995), who is also responsible for the monumental collection of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant and is surely the dean of Grant scholars.
About the Author
MICHAEL KORDA, who served in the British armed forces, is the editor in chief of Simon & Schuster as well as the author of Charmed Lives, Another Life, Horse People, and several bestselling novels. He lives with his wife, Margaret, in upstate New York.
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Copyright
ULYSSES S. GRANT. Copyright © 2004 by Success Research Corporation. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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*Grant, who seldom had anything bad to say about anyone, said about Garfield that “he possessed the backbone of an angleworm.”
*In fact, due to the peculiarities of geography, both of these rivers run northward. I use the word “descend” because Grant would be going southward, but he would be moving against the current.
Ulysses S. Grant Page 14