…it is not right for a writer to enjoy or not enjoy her characters. A writer writes what she sees.
—Lillian Hellman
WHY GRANT? This question was asked of me many times while I was writing this book. Ulysses Grant is, after all, a curious choice for the subject of a biography if the writer is not an admirer of warfare and is not inordinately fascinated by political corruption. I came to him neither because I had discovered some extraordinary mass of evidence that would enable me to greatly revise accounts of the events of his career nor because I had manufactured an intricate theory that would enable me to claim that I had found a “new” Grant. No amount of revision is going to change the way men died at Cold Harbor, the fact that men in the Whiskey Ring stole money, and the broken hopes of black Americans in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1875.
As the reference to Clinton suggests, one subject of great interest to me that did draw me to Grant was that of race relations. Black people were, in overwhelming numbers, enthusiastic partisans of his, and the immensely popular president went into office with a Supreme Court and a Congress also of his party. The opportunity for Reconstruction would seem to have been immense. I have never been satisfied with existing explanations of why hopes for Negro advancement were so high when Grant moved into the White House, and so low eight years later. In the book considerable attention is given to discussing how it was that the opportunity for Reconstruction was not, in the main, taken; but even the examination of Grant’s role in racial matters, as important as I believe it to be, is not justification for a biography.
What I found compelling about Grant as a subject for a biography was the man himself. I liked the way he looked; the picture of the mild, rather small person slouched comfortably in front of a tent suggested neither the fierce killing warrior nor the bumbling and perhaps crooked politician that I had often read about. Looks can be deceiving, of course, but they are not necessarily so. There is almost no glamour in the figure; despite the attempts of countless eulogists, he cannot be made into a Wellington or a Napoleon. It is significant that Grant himself was nicely crotchety about such comparisons, particularly those to Napoleon, whom he detested. There was in Grant neither the sensuous power of the Corsican nor the force of the Iron Duke. He was a more relentless warrior than either and yet remained the ordinary man seen in his pictures.
What was such a man doing commanding the armies of the Republic and then serving as its president? There are historians who, when asked to contemplate Grant, insist that he must have had some secret greatness, hidden within him, that allowed him to accomplish what he did. They speak of the quality almost as if it were some special organ implanted in the bodies of a particular few. I leave to others the problem of accounting for a Mozart or a Marx, but I am convinced that Ulysses Grant had no organic, artistic, or intellectual specialness. He did have limited though by no means inconsequential talents to apply to whatever truly engaged his attention. The only problem was that until he was nearly forty, no job he liked had come his way—and so he became general and president because he could find nothing better to do.
This seemingly flippant remark is made out of respect for the dilemma posed by Ulysses Grant. He had, all along, ideas and a sense of himself that he could make no one notice. Those who search the past exclusively for greatness are frequently unmindful of the extent to which ideas fill the minds of ordinary people. Those who look at such men and women collectively may be aware of the general needs and aspirations of various groups, but only the best of the social historians and the historians of local politics seem conscious of the complexity of concern of the individuals within the groups and of the attendant frustration when that concern cannot be heard. People assume that had fame not come to them, Ulysses and Julia Grant—being unheard—would have had nothing to say.
The Grants never thought of themselves as ordinary. They endured humiliating personal defeats, and yet they ached to be reckoned with. But neither in St. Louis in the 1850’s nor in Galena in 1860 did it seem at all likely that Grant would find a reprieve from the listlessness that people, if they noticed him at all, saw in his face. To Julia it did seem likely, and by rights this book should be a joint study of both of them. Unfortunately, Grant does not seem to have saved his wife’s letters, and we have information about her life in too disproportionate a share to make a joint study valid. But I hope the importance of Julia in the Grant story is nowhere lost.
It is, finally, a story of the quest of an ordinary American man in the mid-nineteenth century to make his mark. Grant failed as a peacetime army officer, a farmer, a minor businessman, a store clerk—and still he wanted to be taken into account. So he went to war, as did hundreds of thousands of men like him. Luck (his more or less accidentally having gone to West Point), the ruthlessly realistic common sense of someone who never had any patience with theory, and an uneven but remarkable degree of self-confidence enabled Grant to make a very great mark in the terrible American Civil War. The resources, hitherto useless, on which he drew to win the war had been within him all along. What was lacking in Grant—and its absence, paradoxically, may have been what enabled him to be sufficiently ruthless with his soldiers’ lives to achieve the victory—was an ability to speak for the men of his army, who were just as trapped as he had been. Nevertheless, those who had gone off to war with him could see in his success a glimmer of their own hopes. They were celebrating their own dreams when they cheered Grant—and gave him the presidency.
I would not argue that the Civil War was fought so that Grant and his colleagues could have a purposeful activity, but I do think Americans should face the perhaps unattractive fact that whether it was fought to end slavery or to preserve the Union, that war was also an outlet for emotional—animal, if you will—energy, an outlet that the society otherwise failed to provide in sufficient measure. Grant’s story yields a troubling picture of an America, often represented as in a period of boundless opportunity, that offered him and thousands of men like him no chance for fulfillment other than war. If his story gives us a troubling look at society, it also forces us to look at the individual and ask what he himself did and did not bring to his quest, for once Grant gained attention, he dared not go back into the ranks and make common purpose with the men from whom he came. He had been so close to total failure that having moved out front, he could not risk giving up an inch for fear that he might fall all the way back. Once he had become general, he had to go on to be president, and once his time as president was up, he had, again, no idea what to do with himself. But the difference was that he had heard those cheers and he could not do without them.